ut in 1806 that
these verses were an interpolation, for they do not appear in the best
manuscripts, notably all the Greek manuscripts down to the fifteenth
century. The Roman Church refused to bow to evidence. The Congregation
of the Index, on January 13, 1897, with the approbation of Leo XIII,
forbade any question as to the authenticity of the text relating to the
"three heavenly witnesses." It appeared strange to the Martian that a
god should need the lies of his disciples to be incorporated in a divine
revelation. But his confusion was even greater when he read, "We worship
one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the
Persons nor dividing the substance--and yet, they are not three
Eternals, but One Eternal, not three Almighties, but One Almighty. So,
the Father is God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, and yet they are
not three Gods, but One God.... The Father is made of none, neither
created nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor
created, but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son,
neither made nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.... And in this
Trinity, none is afore or after the other; none is greater or less than
another; but the whole three Persons are coeternal together and
coequal."

He thought this would make a great puzzle, truly an insoluble conundrum,
to take back to bewilder his Martian friends. However, he was able to
comprehend the remarks of Vigilantius, "who returned from a journey in
Italy and the Holy Land disgusted with official Christianity. He
protested vehemently against the idolatrous worship of images, the
legacy of Paganism to the Church, a practice directly opposed to that
of the Mosaic law which Jesus came, not to destroy, but to fulfill. It
was idle to reply that these images were the Scriptures of the
illiterate, that they were not the object of, but the stimulus to,
worship. Experience showed that the majority of the faithful confounded
(as indeed they still do) the sign with the thing signified." (_Salomon
Reinach, "Orpheus."_)

The result of the critical examination of the New Testament by the
Martian is that just as most of the Old Testament books are not only
anonymous but highly composite productions, that as certain writings
traditionally ascribed to Moses, David, Solomon, Daniel, and others are
utterly lacking in the necessary evidences in support of authorship, but
bear unmistakable evidence of having gone th