Fake "history" of Jesus and
Christianity In chapter 10 of A Message of Ancient Days, students find a message of fundamentalist claptrap. In a long section titled "The
Life of Jesus," New Testament stories are presented as if they were
items of history, the Jesus of legend is depicted as a real person,
the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of legend
is rigorously concealed, and historical scholarship is entirely
ignored. The section is a fraud from beginning to end.
Like many other displays of fundamentalist propaganda, Houghton
Mifflin's material contains deceitful claims that have been
contrived to hide the New Testament's internal contradictions and
other absurdities. For example:
- "The story of the life, deeds and teachings of Jesus is told in
the New Testament." That false claim is obviously
intended to make students believe that the New Testament is a
coherent, unitary document from which a single story ("the" story)
of Jesus can be extracted. In truth, the tales of Jesus in the New
Testament can't be fused into a single story because those tales are
laden with conflicting claims.
- "According to the New Testament, an angel appeared to a woman
named Mary in the city of Nazareth about 2,000 years ago. The angel
told her that she would have a child. The angel told Mary to name
the child Jesus." In truth, that story appears only in
the third book of the New Testament, the Gospel of St. Luke: An
angel appears to Mary, tells her that she will be impregnated
supernaturally, predicts that she will bear a son, and instructs her
to call the son Jesus. The first book of the New Testament, the
Gospel of St. Matthew, has a story about an angelic annunciation,
but the story in Matthew is radically different from the one in
Luke. In Matthew, Mary is already pregnant when the angel appears,
and the angel delivers his prediction and his instruction to Mary's
husband, not to Mary herself. The New Testament's two other gospels
-- the Gospel of St. Mark and the Gospel of St. John -- have no
stories whatever about the origin of Jesus or the origin of his
name.
- "Mary and her husband Joseph were Jews, and when Jesus was born
they raised him as a Jew." The casual phrase "when
Jesus was born" is not explained, and three crucial facts are
concealed. The first fact is that no one knows when Jesus was born.
The second is that only two of the New Testament's gospels purport
to tell when Jesus was born. The third is that those two gospels
flatly contradict one another. The Gospel of St. Matthew says that
Jesus was born in Judaea in the days of King Herod, but the Gospel
of St. Luke says that Jesus was born when a Roman governor was
carrying out a "taxing" or census in Judaea. Those claims cannot be
reconciled. The first Roman census in Judaea was conducted in AD 6,
when the Romans made Judaea a province of their empire -- and King
Herod was long gone by then. Herod had died in 5 or 4 BC.
- "The New Testament says that the body of Jesus was placed in a
tomb of solid rock. Three days later, however, a woman returned to
the tomb and found it empty." That is a lie. Here is
the truth: Among the canonical gospels, only the Gospel of St. John
ascribes the discovery of the empty tomb to one person. The other
canonical gospels tell contradictory stories in which the discovery
of the empty tomb is attributed to two persons or more. Further,
the four accounts disagree about the circumstances of that
discovery. In Mark, Luke and John, the various discoverers go to
the tomb and find that the great stone which covered the tomb's door
has been removed. Then they encounter various supernatural figures
who reveal that Jesus is alive again. (In Mark, this revelation is
imparted by a lone man. In Luke, by a pair of men. In John, by an
apparition of Jesus himself.) Now look at the Gospel of St.
Matthew: In Matthew, the great stone is still in place when the
discoverers arrive, but a helpful angel descends from heaven (amid
an earthquake!), rolls the stone away, and declares that Jesus has
risen.
Here is another grossly deceitful item from Houghton Mifflin's
text: "The Gospels say that after his crucifixion Jesus rose from
the dead and appeared to his disciples. This event [sic] is
called the Resurrection. It convinced the disciples that Jesus was
the Son of God." And now here are the essential facts that
students need to know about the resurrection stories in the gospels
of the New Testament: The early Christians had many stories in which Jesus, after his
death, visited people who had been his friends during the last years
of his life. Such stories existed before the New Testament was
assembled. Some Christians took the stories literally, so they
concluded that the dead Jesus had experienced a physical
resurrection and had become a living man again. Other Christians,
however, rejected this literalism and asserted that the resurrection
stories were metaphorical, or were products of illusions, or were
fictions that reflected theological misconceptions. Those
conflicting views engendered a political battle that split the
Christian church apart during the 2nd century. The battle was won,
eventually, by the literalists. The literalists took control of the
church, installed their beliefs as orthodoxies, and proceeded to
canonize certain narratives which stated flatly that Jesus had risen
from the dead and then had appeared to some of his followers. By
the way: The earliest specimens of the Gospel of St. Mark have no
stories in which Jesus makes post mortem appearances. The
canonical Gospel of St. Mark that we read in the New Testament is a
later version, rigged to include episodes in which Jesus makes some
post mortem visitations and issues some instructions and
prophecies.
Students should also learn that narratives pertaining to Jesus's
resurrection appear not only in the four canonical gospels but also
in another unit of the New Testament, St. Paul's first letter to
the Corinthians. And students should know that the resurrection
stories in the canonical gospels are inconsistent with each other
and are grossly different from the claims made in Paul's letter.
The fundamentalist preachers who wrote Houghton Mifflin's section
about "The Life of Jesus" have continually used distortion,
selective omission, weaseling, and outright lying to delude and
indoctrinate students. As I have said, the section is a fraud from
beginning to end.
A Message of Ancient Days Houghton
Mifflin Company 2003
Fake "history" of Jesus and
Christianity In the
2003 version of A Message of Ancient Days, the section
titled "The Life of Jesus" is identical with "The Life of Jesus"
that appeared in the 1999 version. It is the same fraud, word for
word.
Across the Centuries Houghton Mifflin
Company 1994
(This is the second book in a two-book series called Houghton
Mifflin
Social Studies. The series was developed for sale in
California.)
Fake "history" of Muhammad and
Islam Chapter 3 of
Across the Centuries is called "The Roots of Islam." The
chapter's first lesson, which bears the puzzling title "Desert Bloom
-- Caravan Cities," purports to tell about Arabia in AD 500. The
second lesson is called "Muhammad and Islam," and it begins thus:
Each year a Meccan trader named Muhammad would spend
a month in quiet thought while inside a desert cave. In the year
A.D. 610, something extraordinary occurred. The Koran, believed by
Muhammad's followers to be the written record of God's words,
retells that event.
Muhammad was awakened one night by a thunderous voice that seemed to
come from everywhere, . . . .
What Houghton Mifflin's writers are trying to peddle as an "event"
is Muslim woo-woo. The tale of how Muhammad met the angel Gabriel
in a cave is a Muslim myth, not history, and it doesn't appear in
the Koran. These writers haven't looked at the Koran.
As the "Muhammad and Islam" lesson continues, students read more and
more pseudohistorical passages that endorse Muslim religious claims
-- claims which Houghton Mifflin's writers evidently have found in a
handout produced by a Muslim propaganda agency.
Sometimes the writers explicitly present these claims as facts.
Here, for example, is what they say about the origins of the Koran:
Muhammad's revelations [sic!] occurred from 610 until his
death in 632. Although he left no written record of his experiences,
his followers remembered his words. In 633, Muhammad's chief clerk
began to gather the revelations into one collection, the
Koran. Those statements are Muslim fancies. In
truth, the origins of the Koran are unknown. Scholars haven't been
able to establish when the Koran's various parts were written, or
who wrote them, or how many versions were written and rewritten
before the final, canonical Koran was assembled.
In other cases, Houghton Mifflin's writers present religious notions
as things that "Muhammad's followers believe" or that "Muslims
believe" -- but in no case do they tell whether anything that
Muslims believe is or isn't supported by evidence. The writers
consistently refuse to distinguish legends from historical
knowledge, or to segregate empty claims from historical facts, and
it is quite clear that they are seeking to mislead students, to
bamboozle them, and to indoctrinate them.
Across the Centuries Houghton
Mifflin Company 1999
Fake "history" of Muhammad and
Islam Though the
1994 version of Across the Centuries contained a lot of
Muslim religious propaganda, there was nothing to suggest where the
propaganda had originated. The lists of "Authors," "Consultants" and
"Teacher Reviewers" at the front of the book didn't show anyone who
was connected with a Muslim pressure group.
The 1999 version, too, is loaded with Muslim propaganda, but now the
source of the propaganda seems clear. In the 1999 version, the
array of "Consultants" listed on page iv includes: "Shabbir Mansuri,
Founding Director, Council on Islamic Education, Fountain Valley,
California." That item is significant but not surprising. The CIE
is a conspicuous Muslim outfit that evidently specializes in
inducing schoolbook-writers to sanitize and eulogize Islam, to
retail Muslim religious claims as facts, to retail Muslim woo-woo as
history, and to depict Islam as an amicable religion that resembles,
and is compatible with, Judaism and Christianity. I have seen the
CIE's name and Shabbir Mansuri's name in (for example) Prentice
Hall World History: Connections to Today, a high-school text
that brazenly promotes Islam by disseminating falsehoods,
pseudohistorical woo-woo, and gross distortions.
In the 1999 version of Across the Centuries as in the 1994
version, the lesson called "Muhammad and Islam" is a fraud: Again,
pivotal features of Islam are falsified, Muslim myths are put forth
as accounts of history, and Muslim superstitions are depicted as
facts. Even so, some modifications are discernible. The myth of
Muhammad in the cave is again presented as history, but it no longer
is ascribed to the Koran. The fiction about the origins of the
Koran has been revised, so students now read that Muhammad's
utterances were collected before, not after, his death. And most
importantly, some brand-new lumps of woo-woo, disguised as
historical information, have been added to the lesson's text. For
example: Students now learn, as a fact, that angelic "revelations"
showed Muhammad to be the last messenger "sent by God."
All in all, the 1999 "Muhammad and Islam" lesson displays
considerably more falsity and deceit, and delivers more religious
indoctrination, than did the 1994 lesson. These advances, I infer,
can be attributed to Shabbir Mansuri and the CIE.
For a longer, analytical description of the 1999 lesson, see "Houghton Mifflin's Islamic Connection."
Manifestly, the use of Across the Centuries in a public
school would be a violation of the First Amendment to the
Constitution.
Across the Centuries Houghton Mifflin
Company 2003
Fake "history" of Muhammad and
Islam In chapter 3 of the 2003 version of Across the Centuries, the lesson titled
"Muhammad and Islam" is identical with the lesson that appeared in the 1999 version. Every
lie and every distortion has been reprinted, word for word. Houghton Mifflin
continues to mock the Constitution and continues to preach Islam to students.
Making Thirteen Colonies Oxford University
Press 1999
Making Thirteen Colonies is Book 2 of A History of US
-- a series of eleven small books, published by Oxford University
Press, that purport to describe American history. Oxford promotes
and sells them as schoolbooks, for use in the higher
elementary-school grades and in middle schools. In each of the first ten books,
the author shown on the title page is Joy Hakim. The eleventh book
is anonymous.
On pages 9 and 10 of Making Thirteen Colonies, Hakim inflicts
upon students a long passage in which she tells, and depicts as
matters of historical fact, stories that involve Abraham, Moses and
other biblical characters. None of the stories has any historical
respectability or validity, and some of the stories have been
directly discredited by the findings of historians and biblical
scholars.
Hakim's stunt is especially brazen because tales about Abraham and
Moses don't have anything to do with the history of America -- nor
does Hakim try to demonstrate any justification for including such
tales in her book. She has simply decided to use Making Thirteen
Colonies as a platform for promoting her personal religious
beliefs.
Most of the beliefs that she promotes are obviously based on stories
in the Book of Genesis and the Book of Exodus, but she has misread
(or misremembered) some of those stories and has botched them badly.
She also has conflated some of the stories with extrabiblical
inventions -- i.e., with notions that involve biblical figures but
cannot be derived directly from any biblical text.
For a detailed analysis of Hakim's religious preaching, see Earl
Hautala's article "Textbook-Writers Promote Religious Tales as
'History' " in The Textbook Letter, March-April 2000. As
Hautala remarks at the end of his analysis, there is no place for
Making Thirteen Colonies in any public school.
Ancient World McGraw-Hill School Division 1999
Fake "history" of Jesus and
Christianity In chapter 15 of Ancient World, the lesson titled "The Beginnings of
Christianity" is a pseudohistorical hoax: McGraw-Hill's writers falsify the early
history of Christianity, depict the Jesus of the New Testament as a real person, and
falsify the origins, the nature, and the content of Christian scripture. The hoax has
two tiers. One tier consists of religious fictions and religious propaganda derived
from stories in the New Testament's gospels. The second tier comprises fictions which
the McGraw-Hill writers themselves have invented -- fictions which directly contradict
the gospels but (presumably) can help to promote sales of Ancient World. For
example: The writers have spurned all the gospel narratives in which Jesus is arrested,
tried and condemned to death, and they have substituted their own ridiculous account of
Jesus's end. They even have stuck into Jesus's mouth a set of dying words that
(presumably) have more pizazz and more commercial appeal than the dying words that are
ascribed to Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John! As the writers hop back and forth
between promoting gospel tales as history and then scorning the gospels outright, they
remind us that, in the schoolbook industry, nothing is sacred but the almighty buck.
For a detailed analysis, see "Nothing Is Sacred but the Almighty Buck" in The
Textbook Letter, March-April 2000.
This page was updated in
May 2003 to include information about
Holt, Rinehart and Winston's
World History: Continuity and Change.
William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the
California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League,
and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes often about
the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in
schoolbooks.
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