The following material, compiled by Polo Delsalles, is quoted verbatim from the book A Short History of the Bible, being A Popular Account of the Formation and Development of the Canon by Bronson C. Keeler, New York, 1881. This information comes from Chapter V: "Were the Fathers Competent?"

Since the early Christian Fathers originated the theory that the books of the New Testament are inspired, the question arises, Were they competent to do so? The popular idea is that they were learned, profound, venerable men, worthy of the highest respect; and so vigorously has this been enforced, that one of the charges on which Servetus was burned to death by John Calvin was that he had spoken disrespectfully of the Fathers. The facts are quite the reverse. The early Christian Fathers were extremely ignorant and superstitious; and they were singularly incompetent to deal with the supernatural. The men who laid the foundation of the canon were Irenaeus (200 A.D.), Clement of Alexandria (210 A.D.), and Tertullian (220 A.D.), and of them Prof. Davidson says :

"The three Fathers of whom we are speaking had neither the ability nor inclination to examine the genesis of documents surrounded with an apostolic halo. No analysis of their authenticity and genuineness was seriously attempted. ... The ends which they had in view, their polemic motives, their uncritical, inconsistent assertions, their want of sure dates detract from their testimony. Their decisions were much more the result of pious feeling, biased by the theological speculations of the times, than the conclusions of a sound judgment. The very arguments they use to establish certain conclusions show weakness of perception.

"The infancy of the canon was cradled in an uncritical age, and rocked with traditional ease. Conscientious care was not directed from the first to the well-authenticated testimony of eye-witnesses. Of the three leaders who contributed most to its early growth, Irenaeus was credulous and blundering, Tertullian passionate and one-sided, and Clement of Alexandria, imbued with the treasury of Greek wisdom, was mainly occupied with ecclesiastical ethics. ... [Their] assertions show both ignorance and exaggeration."

Some citations will illustrate their mental characteristics. The reader is familiar with the fable of the phoenix, which was said to renew its life every five hundred years. Clement of Rome (100 A.D.) thought it had an actual existence, and he asserted that it was typical of the resurrections. Tertullian believed the same thing. Celsus, the noted anti-Christian writer, used this fact to illustrate the credulity of the early Christians, and Origen defended the fable rather than accept the just criticism. The writer of the Epistle of Barnabas believed an ancient superstition that the hyena changed its sex every year, being alternately male and female; that a hare had as many young as it was years old, that a weasel conceived with its mouth, that the reason why men should eat only animals with a cloven hoof was because the righteous people lived in this world, but had expectations in the next. Justin Martyr (150 A.D.) believed in demons. He said that they were the offspring of angels who loved the daughters of men, that insane people (demoniacs) were possessed and tortured by the souls of the wicked who had died in their sins; and that this was a proof of the immortality of the soul. He said that the food of angels was manna.

Athenagoras (168 A.D.) declared that the strong belief of Christians was that angels had been distributed by the Logos throughout the universe, and that they were kept busy regulating the whole. Some of the angels loved the daughters of men, and fell, and thus were begotten giants, or demons. These last roamed about the world, performing the evil deeds peculiar to their natures. Theophilus (180 A.D.) said that the pains of women in child-birth and the fact that serpents crawl on their bellies were proofs that the account of the fall, as given in Genesis, was true.

Tertullian believed that the hyena changed its sex, and that the stag renewed its youth by eating poisonous snakes; that eclipses and comets were signs of God's anger and forerunners of national disasters; that volcanoes were openings into hell, and that the volcanic condition was a punishment inflicted on the mountains to serve as a warning to the wicked; that demons sent diseases upon the bodies of men, blighted apples and grain, and produced accidents and untimely death. He said that a corpse in a cemetery once kindly moved to make room for another corpse to be placed beside it. He invited the heathen magistrates to "summon before their tribunal any person possessed with a devil; and if the evil spirit, when exorcised by any Christian whatsoever, did not own himself to be a devil, all truly as in other places he would falsely call himself a god, not daring to tell a lie to a Christian, then they should take the life of that Christian."

Clement of Alexandria (220 A.D.) said that hail storms, tempests and plagues were caused by demons; that credulity was necessary, to render faith easy; and that events in the life of Abraham were typical and prophetical of arithmetic and astronomy. He kindly allowed that the Jews and Gentiles would have the gospel preached to them in hell. Clement's imagination was naturally lascivious. His chapter on the immodesty of Pagan women in the bath betrays the hatred of the canaille for the upper classes and shows that, if a bishop in the Church could use such language, the early Christians of Alexandria must have been from the very lowest grades of society. While thus indignant at the supposed wickedness of the heathen, he wrote a book so unseemly that his English editors did not venture to translate it, and in it he quotes probably more from the Bible than in any other of his books.

Origen (254 A.D.) said the sun, moon and stars were living creatures, endowed with reason and free will, and occasionally inclined to sin; he was not certain whether their souls were created at the same time with their bodies or existed before, nor whether they would be released from their bodies at the end of the world, or not. Their light was from knowledge and wisdom reflected from the eternal light. That they had free will he proved by quoting from Job xxv.5; and that they were rational creatures he inferred frown the fact that they move. "As the stars move with so much order and method," he says, "that under no circumstances whatever does their course seem to be disturbed, is it not the extreme of absurdity to suppose that so much order, so much observance of discipline and method, could be demanded from or fulfilled by irrational beings?" The sun, moon and stars, according to him, were "subject to vanity," and they prayed to God through his only begotten Son. Famine, the blighting of vines and fruit trees, and the destruction of beasts and men, were all the work of demons.

Lactantius (325 A.D.) believed that demons entered men and injured them through the viscera, producing diseases and mental distemper but that the sign of the cross would drive them away. As to the notion that the earth was round, he said :

"About the antipodes also one can neither hear nor speak without laughter. It is asserted as something serious that we should believe that there are men who have their feet opposite to ours. The ravings of Anaxagoras are more tolerable, who said that snow was black.

"How is it with those who imagine that there are antipodes opposite to our footsteps? Do they say anything to the purpose? Or is there anyone so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? Or that the things which with us are in a recumbent position, with them hang in an inverted direction? That crops and trees grow downwards? That the rains and snow and hail fall upwards to the earth? And does any one wonder that [the] hanging gardens [of Semiramis at Babylon] are mentioned among the seven wonders of the world, when philosophers make hanging fields, and seas and cities and mountains? ...

"What steps of argument led them to the idea of the antipodes? They saw the courses of the stars traveling towards the west; they saw that the sun and the moon always set towards the same quarters, and rise from the same. But since they did not perceive what contrivance regulated their courses, nor how they returned from the west to the east, ... they thought that the world is round like a ball, and they fancied ... that the stars and sun, when they have set, by the very rapidity of the motion of the world are borne back to the east, ... it followed therefore, from this rotundity of the heavens, that the earth was enclosed in the midst of its curved surface. But if this were so, the earth also itself must be a globe. ... But if the earth also were round, it must necessarily happen that it should present the same appearance to all parts of the heaven. ... And if this were so, then the last consequence also followed, that there would be no part of the earth uninhabited by men and the other animals. Thus the rotundity of the earth led ... to the invention of those suspended antipodes.

"But if you inquire from those who defend these marvelous fictions, why all things do not fall into the lower part of the heaven, they reply that such is the nature of things, that heavy bodies are borne to the middle, ... but that the bodies which are light, as mist, smoke and fire, are borne away from the middle. I am at a loss what to say respecting those who, when they have once erred, consistently persevere in this folly, and depend one foolish thing by another. But I sometimes imagine that they either discuss philosophy for the sake of a jest, or purposely and knowingly undertake to defend falsehoods, as it to exercise or display their talents on false subjects. But I should be able to prove by many arguments that it is impossible for the heaven to be lower than the earth, were it not that this book must now be concluded, and that some things still remain which are more necessary for the present work."

The work in which this philosophy was taught was curiously enough termed "The Divine Institutes."

Cyril of Jerusalem (386 A.D.) quoted from Clement the story of the phoenix, and declared that God had created the bird expressly to enable men to believe in the resurrection. He said it was a wonderful bird; and yet it was irrational -- it did not sing psalms to God, and it knew nothing of His only begotten Son. St. Chrysostom (407 A.D.) believed the air was peopled with angels. Jerome (420 A.D.) believed it was filled with demons. St. Augustine (430 A.D.) believed in demons. They tried to deceive men by persuading them that they were gods. They were called demons from the Greek daimones on account of their knowledge. (To the early Fathers exact learning was devilish.) There was also a class of satyrs and fauns called Incubi, to whose lascivious attacks women were constantly subject; and demons, termed by the Gauls Dusii, which perpetrated daily the same uncleanness. Of this there was so much trustworthy evidence that to deny it was an impertinence. (So real and so universal was the belief in these lewd spirits that, in 1484, Innocent VIII issued a Papal bull [sic] against them. And Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, expresses his firm belief in them.)

St. Augustine affirms that miracles were still performed in his day. A blind man at Milan had been cured by the relics of two martyrs; a personal friend of his, named Innocent, had been miraculously cured of an ailment, and he had seen it done with his own eyes; a lady had been cured of an incurable cancer; a man in the town of Curubis was miraculously cured of paralysis and hernia by being baptized; on a certain occasion evil spirits, which had afflicted some cattle, were dispelled by prayer; a paralytic was cured by prayer, and by contact with a piece of sacred earth which had been brought from the spot where Jesus was buried and whence he arose; a young man possessed of demons was relieved by the prayers and hymns of some women, but in departing the demons struggled fiercely, so that one, in passing out through the young man's eye, knocked that organ from the socket. It fell on his cheek, and hung there by a vein till one of the women returned it to its place, and by seven days' praying and singing, it was entirely healed. A young girl, possessed of a demon, was cured by the application of oil mixed with the tears of a bishop who was praying for her. The relics [sic] of the martyr Stephen had performed the most astonishing miracles, healing the blind, curing the sick, converting the impenitent, and raising the dead. The eighth chapter of the twenty-second book of his great work The City of God is filled with the narration of these prodigies. Concerning the theory that the world was round, he said :

"But as to the fable that there are antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets on us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other. Hence they say that the part which is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled? For Scripture, which proves the truth of historical statements by the accomplishment of Its prophecies, gives no false information; and it is too absurd to say that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this tide of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man (Adam)."

Cosmas Indicopleustes (535 A.D.) was first a merchant and then a monk. The pagan notion was gaining place rapidly in his day as to the rotundity of the earth. The belief had been that it was flat, and rested on the back of a turtle, the turtle on the back of a snake, and the snake on the back of an elephant. The Greeks had long held the theory of rotundity, and even those Greeks who came over to Christianity brought it with them. The church opposed it, simply because it was Greek. Cosmas had, in his business, traveled over nearly the whole known world. He felt himself peculiarly fitted, therefore, to write on the subject, and the Christians in his time used his name, no doubt, as Christians in modern times have used famous reputations, to intimidate honest unbelief. They would say, "You believe the world to be round! Has not Cosmas gone over it? Has he not been there? Does he not know? Do you set yourself up against that great Christian scholar?"

Let me urge upon the reader never to yield to the pernicious habit of fearing simply a great name. It and scholarship do not, by any means, always go together; and the only way by which enlightenment and civilization can possibly make progress is through the determination of each individual member of society, no matter how humble he may be, to do his own thinking on all subjects where one man's thought is as good as another's and such is the case in theology -- and, when he knows that he is right, to stand by it, though all the world be against him. One reason for the intolerable slowness with which men have escaped from the superstitions of theology is, they have allowed themselves to be overawed with the names of Augustine, Jerome, Calvin, and other supposedly great thinkers, who were, in fact, utterly incompetent to deal with the questions which they handled.

Cosmos, seeing the "wave of infidelity sweeping over the land" concerning the flatness of the earth, wrote a work to counteract it. He called it "Christian Topography" and said it was "intended to denounce the false and heathen doctrine of the rotundity of the earth," and was to be a "Christian description of the universe, established by demonstrations from Divine Scripture, concerning which it is not lawful for a Christian to doubt." According to him, the world is a rectangular plane, twice as long as broad. The heavens come down to the earth on the four sides, like the walls of a room. The earth lies in the center, with the ocean all about it. Beyond the ocean lies the untraversed land, the terrestrial paradise. On the north side of the earth is a mountain behind which the sun sets. (Cosmas lived in Egypt, where the sun seems to set in the north.) The plane of the earth was not exactly horizontal, but inclined slightly from the north, for which reason the Euphrates, the Tigris, and other rivers running southward are rapid, while the Nile and others running northward are slow. People who believed the earth to be round were blasphemers, given up for their sins to belief in that impudent nonsense.

Similar science was taught by Patricius, Diodorus of Tarsus and other Nestorian theologians. The Christian religion staked its all on the flatness of the earth's surface, and when science proved the rotundity, theology was dealt a blow from which it can never recover. Truly is it said, "Theology ever has been, as it ever must be, the barbarian's interpretation of the universe."

Gregory the Great (600 A. D.) believed that volcanoes were the entrances to hell, and he tells a story of Theodoric and Pope John being cast, in chains, through the mouth of one of them, into the lower regions. Two nuns, who had been excommunicate for talking too much, were buried in the earthen floor of the church. When the deacon, in saying mass, commanded all suspended persons to leave the edifice, the two nuns would arise from their graves and depart, to return after the mass was over. Many persons had seen these resurrections, and the nuns continued them till they learned to hold their tongues, when the ban was removed, and they rested peacefully in their tombs. A dead child was once raised to life simply by having a stocking, the relic of a holy man, placed on its bosom. Having no oil, lamps were fed with water, and wicked with paper, and they burned perfectly. A city was on fire, and nothing could stay the ravages till Bishop Marcellinus threw himself against the flames, and they were immediately extinguished. A huge stone, which five hundred yoke of oxen could not stir, was removed a long distance by prayers. A lamp, shattered to fragments, was mended perfectly, and exhausted oil vessels were filled; a certain monk died, and predestination was fulfilled, all in answer to prayer. Gregory's Dialogues are filled with such narrations; and Henry James Coleridge, his biographer, says he was a "great man," a "great saint," and that he "towered above his contemporaries and their immediate predecessors and followers."

St. Thomas Aquinas (1270 A. D) affirmed that diseases and tempests were the direct work of the devil; and Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras, Tatian, Cyprian of Carthage, Tertullian, Origen, Jerome, Lactantius, Eusebius -- in fact, all the early Christians believed in demons. The New Testament writers believed in them. The air was peopled with them and with angels. Every fountain, every tree, every stream, every grove had its sprite. Everything that was done must be done under a miracle. The Almighty had to be invoked to perform the simplest things. Nothing was too great for the credulity of the Fathers, provided only it was improbable; and nothing small enough for belief, if it was at all probable.

The erroneous and grotesque beliefs of the Christian Fathers could be quoted until they filled a large volume, but these few will illustrate the intellectual condition of the ages which originated and transmitted the Bible to us. It will be said that the Fathers were as good as their times. That can not be maintained. They were not even as good. There were men in those days who saw that the world was round. The fact that Augustine, Lactantius, and other Fathers opposed the theory shows that there were men who advocated it. In the quotations given above from Lactantius and Augustine, they recite quite fully the arguments which prove that the world was round. Yet the writers could not see that the arguments were valid, whereas other men could.

In short, the sum of the charge against the Fathers is that they were not competent to tell what was evidence of a fact and what was not. They cited as evidence of a theory things which are not in the slightest degree such, and they would look directly into the face of evidence which established theories they did not endorse, and would still be unable to see that it was evidence. Now, if the Fathers were great scholars, they should not have been so persistently in the wrongs. They should have seen the truth at least as easily as the others did. What has become of the names and memories of the men who in those days stood up for the truths? Are they even yet called great? The Christian Church has been honoring the wrong persons.

Moreover, admitting for the sake of the argument, that these Christian Fathers were as great as their time, we deny that they or their age were competent to form a Bible for this age.

But one apology has ever been made for these remarkable errors of the Fathers, and that is "spiritual insight." Christian defenders say that while the Fathers were ignorant, and even superstitious, they were yet "gifted with great spiritual insight." This term signifies the possibility of perceiving something which does not exist and where it does not exist. It is synonymous with "unlimited credulity."

Not alone in nature, but also in literature, the Fathers were ignorant and unscholarly. Jerome and Origen were the only ones who could read Hebrew, unless we except Dorotheus. Justin Martyr quotes from Jeremiah and calls it Isaiah. Clement of Alexandria quotes scripture passages which are not in the Bible. He quotes as Paul's words which are not in Paul. In quoting from an opponent he would insert -- not with intent to misrepresent, perhaps, but with the same result -- words not in the original, and he even does the same in quoting from the Bible. Tertullian quotes as in Leviticus a passage not in that book; he misquotes history: he cites as in Isaiah a passage not in that book, but in Revelation, and he is frequently inaccurate in quotations.

The Gospel writers committed the same blunders. The man who wrote the Gospel of Matthew attributes to Jeremiah a passage which is in Zechariah; and the writer of the Gospel of Mark attributes to Isaiah a passage which is in Malachi. One curious illustration of this, and of how sacred books are formed, is seen in the excess of the Catholic over the Protestant Bible. The former has quite a number of books which are not in the latter -- such as the two of Maccabees and the song of the Three Children -- which Protestants call the apocryphal Old Testament, but which Catholics consider as much the word of God as any other books. The reader has already seen that the ancient Jews did not consider these authoritative, and the Palestinian Jews did not include them in the sacred collection. The Greek Jews, however, thought more of them, and the Alexandrian Jews placed them in an appendix to the Greek canons at the end of their Bibles, the same as they used to be printed in our old Bibles. The early Christians of Africa could not read Hebrew; they had to use the Greek manuscripts; and as they saw the apocryphal books in the collection, they supposed they were a part of it. The result was that the early Bible-makers in the African church included the apocryphal books because they were not intelligent enough to leave them out. St. Augustine included them because he found them there, and the Catholic Church retained them because St. Augustine did.