Joseph Martin McCabe was born on the 12th November 1867 in Macclesfield, Cheshire to a family of Irish Catholic background. At 15 he entered the Franciscan order and spent a year of preliminary study at Gorton Monastery and then a novitiate year in Killarney before Forest Gate in London for the remainder of his priestly education. In 1890 he was ordained as Father Antony.
McCabe was an outstanding scholar of philosophy, and was sent for a year (1893-1894) to study at the Catholic University of Louvain where he learnt Hebrew and, less successfully, Syriac.
In October 1895 he was put in charge of the newly founded Franciscan college in Buckingham. He had however become plagued with doubts about his faith and was to leave both that post and the priesthood in February 1896.
McCabe wrote a pamphlet on his experiences, 'From Rome to Rationalism', published in 1897, which he then expanded into a book as 'Twelve Years in a Monastery' (1897). By now he was decidedly anti-Catholic and sought to undermine religious faith in general. From 1898 he became secretary of the Leicester Secular Society, and was a founding board member in 1899 of the Rationalist Press Association of Great Britain. During his lifetime he wrote in the order of 250 books and pamphlets on science, religion, politics, history.
In amongst this huge canon are two of his many books on the Roman Empire detailing the lives of the various mistresses and queens in the Western (Rome) and Eastern (Constantinople) Empires.
McCabe was also respected as a speaker and delivered, it is believed, several thousand lectures. A staunch advocate of women's rights he worked with both Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Wolstenholme-Elmy on speeches advocating the right for British women to vote.
As the years aged him he became ever more militant in freethought (an epistemological viewpoint that on positions regarding truth they should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism, rather than authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma).
In his essays 'The Myth of the Resurrection' (1925) and 'Did Jesus Ever Live?' (1926) McCabe slammed Christianity as a direct representation of older Pagan beliefs. Slain saviors and their resurrection myths were celebrated across the ancient world before Christianity began. He saw numerous errors, conflicts, contradictions in the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection and thought them unreliable as they had been fabricated over the years by many different writers. McCabe came to the conclusion that Jesus was an Essenian holy man who was turned into a God over the years by hearsay and oral tradition.
In the late 1940's, McCabe accused the Encyclopædia Britannica of bias towards the Catholic Church and levelled the same a few years later at the Columbia Encyclopedia. He was labelled a "Catholic basher" by his Christian critics. McCabe retorted that "Catholics are no worse, and no better, than others."
In 1920 he publicly debated the writer and believer Arthur Conan Doyle on the claims of Spiritualism in London. McCabe had exposed the tricks of fraud mediums and wrote that Spiritualism has no scientific basis.
Joseph Martin McCabe died on 10th January 1955 at the age of 87.
