richard2

I was going to read it, but I read this review on Amazon.com by W. R. Pearse, the operator of the web site tertullian.org:

"Joseph Wheless was not a scholar, but an attorney, and his intention is to put Christianity on trial by proving that the fathers are all deliberate liars. This, to put it mildly, is not the stuff of scholarship! He used a small selection of works, together with older literature such as Robert Taylor's "Diegesis", as sources.

In such an enterprise, accurate citation is everything. Unfortunately, those who verify his quotes come away with a feeling of discomfort.

Firstly, they are often verbally correct. However, it is not uncommon for him to practise the lawyers' trick of deceit by selection. In a number of cases, he stops quoting, just before a sentence which explicitly denies the suggestion he wishes his readers to suppose the father (or whoever) is giving.

An examination of the introduction gives some 25 citations from the fathers or the Catholic Encyclopeda. I looked all of these up, as the CE and the Ante-Nicene fathers are all online these days.

28% of the references are wrong; 28% are inaccurate or otherwise can't be checked from his reference; and only 24% of the quotes correctly represent the author's views! In the latter case, few of these really support his thesis.

He abuses St. Augustine, for instance as credulous -- but has not noticed that the 'quotes' he gives are not by this author, but from a medieval piece of narrative fiction.

If someone writes a book to prove his neighbour a liar, it is an absolute requirement to be 100% accurate himself, and to be give the victim the benefit of any doubt. Otherwise, the work is a piece of hate-literature. But Wheless distorts and misleads, relying on the inaccessibility of the sources he uses, in the pre-internet era, in order to abuse his neighbour.

Most atheists today are aware that Wheless cannot be trusted where facts are concerned. This book highlights the dangers of uncritical acceptance of theories, simply because they are congenial. Avoid, unless you are willing to verify everything yourself."

Is he right or wrong or somewhere in the middle?


thanks,

Richard

richard2

I found this person's more detailed review of the book here: http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/wh...less_intro.htm

And, pardon me if this has been brought up before -- I'm a newbie to this kinda 'stuff'.

Julian

Roger Pearse is a poster here. He might see this thread and comment.

I have read Wheless but don't really know what to think since I read it before I became very critical about such matters. I do know that he used a version of the CE that is now 100 years old. It is possible that the newer version has been cleaned up.

Julian

rlogan

Were only Roger to have the same standard for the Church fathers, let alone the worked-over scribblings of new testament frauds.

Wheless is fun for his bombastic style.

I recall one "quote" he cited from a pope that was actually from a play. It was the first one I looked up because I could not believe a Pope would confess to Christianity being a fraud.

They all know it is, but they also know better than to say that.

So anyway, if you want a good excoriation of Christianity WWF style - Wheless is your man. PILEDRIVER!!!!

Vorkosigan

Forgery in Christianity should be read as a historical document and not as a living and useful text. His other book, Is it God's Word? has some extremely funny moments, though. I especially enjoyed the takedown of Exodus. But it drags when it gets into the gospels.

Vorkosigan

Roger Pearse

I came to look at Wheless through two accidents. Someone posted his statements that Tertullian, in old age, renounced Christianity, somewhere that I could see it. It included also a misrepresentation of a passage from De idololatria. This told me that there are people out there being misled (in good faith) by this book.

The second accident was that I was stuck in front of a PC some years ago with internet access with nothing much to do for a week at the end of a job I was doing. Out of curiosity, I remembered Wheless, and looked at his intro. I saw a whole list of 'quotes', and wondered if they were accurate. With nothing better to do, I looked at one or two at random, and found them more or less bogus. I then realised that he was quoting from two sources -- the online Catholic Encyclopedia, (or an edition very close to it) and the online collection of the fathers at CCEL. Unlike most of his intended audience, it was therefore possible for me to check his quotes relatively easily. And so I ended up looking through the whole intro, and tabulating the real quotes.

I tried to find some way to assess him objectively -- who needs *my* opinions? --, and you can see the results on my page. Obviously there is room for disagreement, and no doubt some people will feel that I marked some passages wrongly. In general I tried to take both what Wheless said, and what those he quoted said, in the best sense the words would allow.

Getting the raw facts wrong doesn't help anyone, in my view. Whatever our views, surely there is an onus on everyone to look things up and represent them fairly?

All the best,

Roger Pearse