@orathaic, I'm reminded of the quote I ran across the other day when looking into the the historical accounts of Judea in the time of Christ... There is a well known quote attributed to Josephus, a historian of the day: "Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day." The problem is that this quote has signs of tampering (does not follow Josephus' style, did not appear until over 200 years after his death even though his other work was well known, and it suggests that Josephus was a believer - which is contradicted about 100 years before by a Christian writer familiar with Josephus' works. Anyway, one claim is that the quote was fabricated by the first author to quote it (Eusebius of Caesarea)... anyway, long story, but this is what I was headed toward... Eusebius was also quoted as saying:

"...it shall be legitimate and appropriate to use lies as a remedy...". (In regards to his other treatments of stories of Christ.)

So - my point? ...oh, just that there is good reason to suspect the motives and morality of early promoters of the Christian Church (as it there should be good reason to be skeptical of any person in a position to gain from acting in a partisan way)... including, I would suggest, the church leaders directly responsible for deciding what books to include in the Bible.

@ dexter

Eusebius was certainly quite a character in Chuch history. If you look further down on the page though it also says that he was suspected of ascribing to the Arian heresy. If he were that influential among the council the Arians probably wouldn't have lost. Bishop Athanasius who actively opposed the Arian heresy was arguably more influential in deciding the canon. It seems that Eusebius was willing to lie to promote Arianism, but rather than becoming part of Christianity it was shot down during the canonization process.

@Crazy Anglican, well, let's hope that the winners of that struggle won not only because they had numbers or more political savvy but because they also held higher moral ground (particularly that they wouldn't sink to lying). Being that they are the ones that got to write the history, I presume, we might have a hard time finding out.

Dexter you are right about the tampering of the work of Josephus. Somebody wrote the other day that over 1 billion people are Christians, Over 6 Billion on the planet, so it is still a minority. Try getting hold of "How to Read The Bible" by James L. Kugel (Crazy Anglican you might like to read it as well). No nut job this person but a Harvard Professor who is a practicing Jew now living in Jerusalem.

dexter i've been telling him that for months and he doesn't seem to take an stock in it.

@ dexter Now who's making a statement without evidence? I willingly admit that I do not usually assume people are lying without evidence to suggest that they are. Okay perhaps otto from time to time, but I think that we've tacitly agreed to harrass one another with no hard feelings (at least I hope so).

The problem with ascribing the tampering of Josephus to Eusebius is that Eusebius also quotes other sections of Josephus which he strongly disagrees with. If he had tampered with the section regarding Jesus, there would not have been anything holding him back from tampering with the section regarding the destruction of Jerusalem (he quotes Josephus as saying that the Jews ascribed their destruction to having put James the Just to , but Eusebius disagrees and says that it was because they put Jesus to .)

More likely is that Eusebius was working from a copy that had previously been tampered by Christian copyists. The copy that Origen was working from (which apparently also mentioned Jesus, but was not as complimentary of him) had probably not been tampered with, particularly since Christians in his time were heavily persecuted and would not have been in a position to tamper with official records. But the fact that Origen's copy apparently mentioned Jesus is strong evidence that the passage was in the original text in some form, even if it was later tampered with.