Ed Oldenburg

Years ago, I read an article or maybe it was an excerpt from a book or some publication that delineated some or all of the pagan dogma that Constantine inserted into Bible scripture in order to entice pagan interest in Christianity in the middle third century. Some of the things I remember are that pagan priests and nuns were celibate and did not marry, pagans did not eat meat on friday, and all of the pagan gods were women, hence the need to "deify" Mary and claim that she physically ascended into heaven. That is the "key" to Roman Catholic theology today.

Apparently, King James knew about this and eliminated the aforementioned pagan dogma from his rendition of the Bible when he left the Roman Church and formed the Church of England.

There were 20 to 30 items as I remember. If anyone could help me to substantiate this I would appreciate it.

Bede

Utter horseshit, I'm afraid.

B

Toto

This sounds like the sort of line that some rabidly anti-Catholic Prestestant sects take, but I think that you have some details wrong.

Constantine is not usually accused of altering scripture, but of adding some pagan-ish celebrations to the Christian church, such as the celebration of Christmas on Dec 25, which was a pagan celebration.

Celibacy was not instituted by Constantine, and was not required for priests until centuries later. Not all pagan gods were women. Mary did not become a quasi-goddess until much later.

Doctor X

I am also unaware of King James--who, apparently, never actually read the version attributed to him--or the group that formed him expunging "pagan" elements from the texts. If they felt that free, methinks they would have cleaned up a lot of the contradictions as well.

--J.D.

Ed Oldenburg

I don't know whether the articles I read years ago are true or not. I don't even know if said article even exist any more, but if they do, I think it would be interesting to research the sources. That's why I was hoping that someone out there could help me with it.

Ed -

Toto

Here's what you need to do: go to Google advanced search

http://www.google.com/advanced_search

In the box where it says "find all of the words" type in some key words for your search - say "constantine pagan bible mary"

This gives you 9,500 results, the first one of which is

Roman Catholicism: Christian or Pagan?

But you can browse through those, or type in more words.

I am guessing that what you originally read was from Herbert Armstrong of the Worldwide Church of God. But there are scads of offbeat Christians out there and they all have web pages.

Toto

Is this what you read?

http://www.cog7day.org/about/pdf/truereligion.pdf

There's more like that here:

7th Day Church of God

Ed Oldenburg

Thanks Toto, that will give me a lot to look at. What I'm looking for is the "real" history of the Constantine era.

Bede

Ed (and Toto),

Apologies for my earlier dismissive reply. I was provoked by insults on another thread which I should not have carried on to this one. My reply was factually correct as everyone agrees but not terribly helpful.

The true history of the Constantine era is covered in a lot of good and not so good books. A good one to start with would be Henry Chadwick's "The Early Church" published by Penguin and the standard introduction for new students over here in the UK. It's cheap, easy to read and accurate. I suggest you start off by reading that rather than searching the Internet. There is good stuff on the net but you need to have a bit of background in the subject to recognise it.

Yours

Bede

Toto

Bede - you were doing so well until you tried to claim that "utter horseshit" was somehow "factually correct." <sigh>