And yes. We know that for a fact. Like QAnon, which is a new secular religion spreading, quite bizarrely, across the globe, I have noticed another strange conspiracy theory gaining popularity and spreading worldwide: the belief that Christianity was invented in the 4th century by agents of Constantine’s government. It’s not new. You can find instantiations of this claim going back decades, escalating to varying degrees of absurdity (years ago one guy tried interrupting a talk I was giving by insisting the entirety of ancient literature was invented in the Renaissance!), but this lesser version is newly raging in popularity. I know because I’ve been arguing lately with a lot of people who keep coming to me insisting on it, and they are coming to me from countries all over the globe, and each has their own “version” of this Constantine myth, and their own talking points, so it does not appear to be coming from any central source. It’s just a metastasizing cancer like every other conspiracy theory these days. It suffers from all the same flaws one should know better than to fall victim to, as covered in my Vital Primer on Media Literacy, and my articles From Lead Codices to Mummy Gospels and Killing Crankery with Bayesian Reasoning.

It fits the mold of all conspiracy theory thinking: a comforting belief that one has caught “the government” lying to them and can now “expose” the lie and thus “take down” the global threat of Christianity by “spreading the gospel.” In this new evangelism, “Christianity” is usually (though not always) framed as The Vatican, in echoes of Protocols of Zion style conspiracy theories against the Jews. And the notion “triggers” all the usual false levers of intuition: it “feels” right, various puzzle pieces can be “fitted together,” and Dunning-Kruger amateurism slips right into the bear trap of thinking “you” know how things like archaeology and history and science work better than literally thousands upon thousands of actual experts. Which is why so many make such an effort to “convert” real experts like me: they need some of us to agree with them, to legitimize their delusion.

But it’s still a delusion. Here’s why.

What This Theory Requires

There is a vast (and I mean vast) pre-4th century Christian literature. Though not all the dates given at the Early Christian Writings website are correct, and some of the items listed there as pre-4th might not be, the vast majority indeed are. Take a look. And that’s just a list by author, not work. Collected in print, the Ante-Nicene Fathers series isn’t even complete, yet consumes ten large volumes (its content is currently digitally available at the Catholic lay site New Advent). For Constantine’s government (or Eusebius, Constantine’s actual agent most of these conspiracy theorists peg as their shooter on the grassy knoll) to “fabricate” a preceding three hundred years of Christian history, they had to literally forge all of this voluminous, diverse literature (fabricating over a hundred different authorial styles, reliably matching dozens of peculiar past historical contexts, and generating interminable schizophrenic arguments with itself) and somehow convince millions of people that this vast body of literature had “always existed” before then. And I mean millions: even if 5% of the Empire was fully literate, that’s three million people; with fully-stocked public libraries in every city (see my discussions of literacy and libraries in Science Education in the Early Roman Empire). This is effectively impossible. Its probability is millions to one against even at our most charitable.

Constantine’s entire rise to power was built, in substantial part, on his strategic opposition to the mass persecution of Christians by his opponent in the civil war, thus securing greater support from his opposition’s own population—since persecuting Christians was actually not all that popular, and Christians were numerous enough by then to be an essential constituency to court for manning positions in government and the military, including opportunities for controlling the populace through church communication and supply systems. So not only did these “forgers” have to invent a vast base of diverse literature and convince everyone all those texts had always existed, but they had to invent a complete version of the reality of the last twenty years and somehow “mind control” now tens of millions of people to falsely “remember” the entire history of their own lives as somehow having involved Christians, which (on this theory) actually never existed and thus were never persecuted and thus never a key political chip in resolving the recent civil war. This is some Philip K. Dick shit—and before any means of altering the reality of tens of millions of people even existed (Constantine didn’t even have television or radio, much less the internet; even less The Matrix). Can’t have happened. This alone is easily billions to one against.

And, somehow, these mysterious super-agents of the Constantine regime had to have also not only fabricated hundreds of pre-4th century papyri as well, mimicking even the correct scribal hand styles for each period they were matched to, but they had to secretly dig to exactly the right layer in burial sites and deposit them (and conceal all evidence of the dig) so that thousands of years later they could trick future archaeologists (which they somehow, through psychic magic, realized they’d also need to fool—for some reason) into mistakenly thinking Christian writings and materials buried in garbage dumps or dropped in random places were “not” surreptitiously placed there by reverse sneak thieves hundreds of years later. And when they did this, they also, again through psychic magic, anticipated future advanced technologies like carbon dating, and thus knew they had to find (and somehow discern the date of) what was to them ancient blank papyrus to use, in each and every case matching the correct century of deposit, with which to produce these peculiar only-to-be-buried-for-future-archaeologists forged documents and shredded texts. All to a probability now of trillions to one against.

And on top of all that (yes, on top of all that), this vast forgery and deception and mind control machine did all that and yet was so fantastically stupid they didn’t think to forge a document history for first and early second century Christianity, or to forge an ideologically consistent set of texts, or even forge backdated inscriptions, which are far more useful and far easier to fake (even to fool those future archaeologists with advanced tools and chemistry this political machine is supposed to have anticipated and cared about—yet no clearly Christian inscriptions prior to the 4th century are extant: see my discussion of the “identification of inscriptions as Christian” in my study of MacCulloch). They didn’t even forge a historically consistent set of texts (for example, see the massive incoherencies I identify in How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?). For we can identify hundreds of forgeries in this body of literature precisely by their failure to know how to convincingly forge texts or cohere them with supporting documentation of the period they are supposed to hail from. And as forgeries they don’t cohere with each other, either. For example, none of the texts set in the second and third centuries know anything about the correspondence between Seneca and Paul that would be forged in the 4th century, thus how we know those were forged; so these mysterious would-be forgers weren’t even talking to each other, apparently. So for both reasons, we have to believe not only was this extraordinarily well-funded-and-staffed forgery machine absolutely brilliant in constructing an enormous base of convincingly fake literature, but it was also, at exactly the same time, wholly incompetent at forging texts or even historically coherent bodies of texts. Of course, this self-contradiction is typical of most conspiracy theories, which require the same people to be simultaneously supernaturally brilliant in covering things up and completely incompetent at accomplishing anything. All of which is millions of trillions to one against.

So we have a starting odds on this theory of no better than 1/1,000,000 x 1/1,000,000,000 x 1/1,000,000,000,000 x 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is /1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000…against. If you think that’s a reasonable theory you are a nutter. I have a personally signed tinfoil hat I’m willing to sell you for $500. Just tender the cash to my PayPal portal, with instructions where to mail it. (Jokers who don’t really believe this stuff are equally welcome to these hats. Manufactured on demand.)

Why That Is Impossible

As if the answer wasn’t already obvious. Here I will address the usual “arguments” tendered to defend this farcical conspiracy theory—apart from what my points above already solidly refute, and all the “what if” arguments that require no rebuttal (e.g. “What if Constantine didn’t just manipulate church organizational politics at Nicea as all evidence indicates, but also commissioned a massive Orwellian campaign to rewrite history in every library and mind alive!”). Important references to consult include The Complete Text of the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts and the Wikipedia page on New Testament Papyri.

• Carbon Dating. No, carbon dating is not “so inaccurate” that it can’t prove pre-4th century Christian manuscripts exist. Carbon dating of objects of that era is typically accurate to within +/-50 years (rarely worse, and often better, even to +/-25 years; for example, see Carbon Dating the Dead Sea Scrolls). That’s more than accurate enough to prove many Christian manuscripts pre-date Constantine. And yes, ancient Christian manuscripts have been carbon dated, and this has even confirmed the accuracy of the more usual method of dating them by scribal hand (more on which below). See Brent Nongbri’s book God’s Library for a full survey of the facts and science of dating ancient Christian manuscripts (see also Larry Hurtado’s summary of Josephine Dru’s work in More on Carbon-14 Dating of Manuscripts).
• Paleographic Dating. Still, the most common method used to date ancient manuscripts is scribal hand. The method has been proved no less accurate than carbon dating (which I should remind you proves the method is accurate—so no one can claim it doesn’t work or is unreliable; we’ve proved otherwise). Because “writing styles” handed down from tutor to student evolve over time (by random walk), they are as datable as the genetic codes of living organisms. It took about one ancient lifetime (c. 50 years) for detectable shifts in style to occur across the whole scribal community. The consistency of these trends is observed across all ancient written materials, not “just” Christian ones; thus we can date hands by the confirmed dates of original literary manuscripts and state and personal and commercial documents, which number in the tens of thousands recovered from the Roman period (for examples of what I’m talking about see There’s No Evidence for Trajan, Hadrian, or Pius?). There is no indication that any ancient or medieval person knew this, however—in other words, though we have discovered this is a datable technique, they do not appear to have had any knowledge of how to match hand styles to periods of history, and no ancient forgeries exhibit such knowledge. It is therefore all but impossible that ancient forgers could be tricking us by faking “the correct hands.”
• In Situ Dating. Though most do indeed arrive on the black market or from antiquary storehouses like monasteries, some Christian manuscripts have been recovered in situ. That’s Latin for “where they were left.” Which means they can be dated by provenance the same way most other archaeological finds are. The most well known example are Christian papyri recovered from just outside the ancient Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus. This is an ancient garbage dump excavated in the 19th century (which, I will remind you, is before carbon dating was invented or even conceived of, lest you think the archaeologists who excavated it “planted” these texts: we’ve disproved that). Everything found there is recovered more or less exactly where it was tossed by the ancient persons discarding it, unmoved in the thousands of years since, and thus can be dated by looking at the actual dates (yes, many documents have actual dates written on them) of the other garbage with, above, and below each item (see “The New Testament Papyri at Oxyrhynchus in their Social and Intellectual Context” in Perspectives on New Testament Textual Criticism). This site is, incidentally, the source of the infamous “not first century” Gospel of Mark (see Bullshit from Day One: The First Century Gospel Is a Third Century Gospel). Needless to say, it is beyond ridiculous to assume Constantine’s government sent agents to every obscure town in the Empire (since they can’t have, by magic psychic powers, predicted we would have and excavate only this one) to conveniently dig through centuries of garbage to “plant” evidence in trash dumps, then carefully replace all the layers of garbage above back in the correct order.
• Contextual Dating. Most Christian literature (texts, not manuscripts; i.e. date of composition rather than date of transcription) is datable by its internal content. And external context of course, e.g. which other documents “know” about a text, or don’t, also clues us in to when a text was written; and some texts outright tell us when they were written. But more important for the forgery thesis are internal clues. For example, whoever wrote the letters of Paul (as also Hebrews and 1 Clement) clearly had no idea the world would still be around a century later, or that it would and at the same time the entire Jewish temple cult would be completely and forever destroyed, and the city of Jerusalem never inhabited again until rebuilt as a pagan city in the reign of Hadrian. We can thus be certain these texts were written before the year 66 (when the Jewish War started). Forgers would not be able to imagine much less construct such ignorance and catastrophic error in anticipating the future. (See my discussions of these texts in On the Historicity of Jesus, esp. in Chs. 7, 8, and 11.) The same can be said of many other texts, which clearly reflect conditions when they were written, and fail to anticipate outcomes and challenges in subsequent generations. Their ignorance is in fact the surest proof those earlier texts were not forged, or not in the 4th century at any rate; forgers are not this ignorant. As Abe says in Looper, “Dude, I’m from the future.” As just one example of what I mean, look at how easily I can prove Jonathan Sheffield wrong in our debate Shouldn’t the Romans Have Refuted the Resurrection of Jesus? I can do that because of one simple, undeniable fact: no one did, because no one could, forge all the evidence Sheffield insists must have existed, so the fact that it doesn’t (and never did) proves no one was doing that. Indeed, as I show in that debate, what texts we do have, prove no such texts were available to cite. No mass forgery initiative could ever be that idiotic.

It should also be noted that Christian manuscripts before the 4th century are substantially less competently constructed, marking a notable chronological distinction between the professionalization of Christian manuscript production after 300 and the more amateur document production we find them engaging in in the previous century and a half (see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts). A forgery enterprise after 300 would not generate this remarkable inconsistency. Similarly, as I already noted, the near total lack of any texts (not just manuscripts) preserved from the century preceding that is likewise evidence the works we have were not forged to fake a Christian history but reflect what was actually organically arising, ad hoc, in the late second and third centuries, as Christianity finally started to grow large enough to leave a detectable literary record. A forged literary history would have produced an even more ample documentary history for Christianity’s first hundred years; not an almost complete absence of it, especially when combined with “later” authors having no knowledge of any documents in that period and thus “forced” to make up stories or proffer unevidenced assertions to redress their demonstrable ignorance, something a forgery campaign would never have to resort to (or even allow).

And we don’t just have New Testament manuscripts from before 300. We also have heretical and other non-canonical Christian works attested in early manuscripts. In fact quite a lot of them (see this Conspectus of Papyri from the Rise of Christianity in Egypt and Hurtado’s List). Why would forgers have contrived all that, and then torn them into pieces, and then buried that trash in the appropriate layer of garbage outside Oxyrhynchus? For example, we have 3rd century manuscript fragments from there of the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, some other Gospel otherwise unknown but based on the Synoptics, the weird Christian book Hermas, a Christian hymn complete with musical notation, and a section of Against Heresies by Irenaeus that happens to be quoting the Gospel of Matthew. We have also recovered a late-3rd-century manuscript of an in-progress Christian apologetics treatise not otherwise attested: P.Oxy. 17.2070 contains a fragment of an unfinished Dialogue between a Christian and Jew with “frequent corrections in the author’s own hand and changes of a sort more substantial than simple copyist’s errors” (Brent Nongbri, “The Limits of Palaeographic Dating of Literary Papyri,” Museum Helveticum 71, p. 14 n. 27). Many of these could even be second century; but no later than third.

Separate finds of 3rd century manuscripts include pieces of the famous non-canonical Egerton Gospel (possibly an earlier or later heretical redaction of the Gospel of John), which also could even date from the 2nd century, and either way is ironically among the oldest known Christian manuscripts of any kind (and yet, not from the canon); a fragment of Tatian’s Diatessaron (whose date is confirmed by the fact that the site it was recovered from was deserted as a ruin in the mid-3rd century—so were these extraordinary forgers dropping astonishingly faked manuscripts even in abandoned ruins?); another fragment of the heretical Gospel of Mary (P.Ryl. 463); and some bits of Origen’s Homilies and Commentaries (P.Bon. 1.1; P.Lond.Christ. 2; Firenze inv. 2101), and an unknown Homily quoting several books in the New Testament (possibly by Clement of Alexandria: P.Mich. 18.764). We also have what may well be a mundane personal letter exchanged by members of a Christian family, lacking all the bells and whistles any forger would surely include. We appear to have more letters like that also from Oxyrhynchus, though dating them before the “early fourth century” is less secure (see Annemarie Luijendijk’s Greetings in the Lord: Christian Identity and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri).

We also have non-Christian attestation to account for.

An excessive skeptic might reject as evidence the scores of recovered “certifications of pagan worship” we have from the Decian persecution of Christianity in the 250s because that purge “must” have had to do with some other religious cause because they don’t “explicitly” mention the target was Christianity; and reject the actual hand-written subpoena we have from 28 February 256 A.D. for a certain Christian named Petosarapis, because the word is misspelled Chrêsianon, so maybe that meant something else (though no contenders are available); and reject the actual state property tax filing by a family of Christians in August of 259 A.D., by “insisting” the state’s misspelling (twice) of Chrêstianôn (plural) “must” mean something else (even though we know Christians complained about exactly this casual misspelling, and the repeated use of the plural makes other meanings unlikely here, in contrast to, for example, this 3rd-century state injunction order where “Dioscoros Chrêstianos” could just be his name…maybe).

One might also try to “insist” (as some have done), against all reasonable probability, that Pliny the Younger’s letter on Christians (and Trajan’s reply) was wholly forged (as we can instead legitimately suspect of single passages in Suetonius, Tacitus, and Josephus: see my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ with Blom on the Testimonium Taciteum and Josephus on Jesus?), and that the anti-Christian treatises of Celsus, Porphyry, Fronto, and Hierocles were all fictionally invented in quotation (!). But we have extant 2nd century mentions of Christianity that are even less plausibly invented than those. Galen mentions Christians quite critically, as did Lucian of Samosata and Epictetus, in texts otherwise unrelated to the subject, and all in ways no forger would likely have allowed, bothered with, or conceived (see Niko Huttunen’s “Imperial Recognition in the Intellectual Sphere: Christians and Philosophers,” in Early Christians Adapting to the Roman Empire; though note that a passing reference to Christians in Marcus Aurelius also often cited is likely a later interpolation). But this all just adds a cherry atop the mountain of evidence we related earlier.

Conclusion

Yes, Christians were shameless liars, and ancient Christian forgery (and document meddling) was rampant (see OHJ, Chapters 7 and 8, and Chapter 5, Element 44; see also the example of The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies), but it extended across three whole centuries, had no coherent agenda, and was demonstrably too incompetent to fool us. That’s why even the New Testament (even more so the rest of Christian literature in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries) is so self-contradictory, representing competing points of view, evolving over time. Indeed, we can prove the usual “culprit” pegged, Eusebius, clearly could not, and thus did not, even know how to forge three centuries of requisite literary history. See for example my article How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity: here is one place we should absolutely see evidence of this “conspiracy” at work, and it’s not only completely absent, but Eusebius bumbles around trying to fabricate history out of bloviation and conjecture instead—and no one subsequently corrected this, so we know no later culprits can be pegged for this either. You really can’t get a more decisive refutation than that. And yet, I’ve already heretofore adduced half a dozen other refutations equally conclusive. The idea that Christianity was “invented” in the 4th century is simply Grade-A Tinfoil Hat, to be shelved with flat earthism, QAnon, Cultural Marxism, Protocols of Zion, lizard people, and aliens building the pyramids.