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Table of Contents | |
Section | Page |
Start of eBook | 1 |
SECTION I.—ITS EVIDENCES UNRELIABLE. | 1 |
INDEX TO SECTION I. OF PART II. | 130 |
INDEX OF BOOKS USED. | 130 |
INDEX OF SUBJECTS. | 132 |
SECTION II.—ITS ORIGIN PAGAN. | 133 |
INDEX TO SECTION II. OF PART II. | 165 |
INDEX OF BOOKS USED. | 165 |
INDEX OF SUBJECTS. | 165 |
SECTION III.—ITS MORALITY FALLIBLE. | 166 |
INDEX TO SECTION III. OF PART II. | 187 |
INDEX OF BOOKS USED. | 187 |
INDEX OF SUBJECTS. | 187 |
SECTION IV.—ITS HISTORY. | 188 |
CENTURY IV. | 193 |
CENTURY V. | 198 |
CENTURY VI. | 202 |
CENTURY VII. | 203 |
CENTURY VIII. | 204 |
CENTURY IX. | 208 |
CENTURY X. | 212 |
CENTURY XI. | 217 |
CENTURY XII. | 224 |
CENTURY XIII. | 225 |
CENTURY XIV. | 227 |
CENTURY XV. | 228 |
INDEX TO SECTION IV. OF PART II. | 233 |
INDEX OF BOOKS USED. | 233 |
INDEX OF SUBJECTS. | 233 |
The origin of all religions, and the ignorance which is the root of the God-idea, having been dealt with in Part I. of this Text-Book, it now becomes our duty to investigate the evidences of the origin and of the growth of Christianity, to examine its morality and its dogmas, to study the history of its supposed founder, to trace out its symbols and its ceremonies; in fine, to show cause for its utter rejection by the Freethinker. The foundation stone of Christianity, laid in Paradise by the Creation and Fall of Man 6,000 years ago, has already been destroyed in the first section of this work; and we may at once, therefore, proceed to Christianity itself. The history of the origin of the creed is naturally the first point to deal with, and this may be divided into two parts: 1. The evidences afforded by profane history as to its origin and early growth. 2. Its story as told by itself in its own documents.
The most remarkable thing in the evidences afforded by profane history is their extreme paucity; the very existence of Jesus cannot be proved from contemporary documents. A child whose birth is heralded by a star which guides foreign sages to Judaea; a massacre of all the infants of a town within the Roman Empire by command of a subject king; a teacher who heals the leper, the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the lame, and who raises the mouldering corpse; a King of the Jews entering Jerusalem in triumphal procession, without opposition from the Roman legions of Caesar; an accused ringleader of sedition arrested by his own countrymen, and handed over to the imperial governor; a rebel adjudged to death by Roman law; a three hours’ darkness over all the land; an earthquake breaking open graves and rending the temple veil; a number of ghosts wandering about Jerusalem; a crucified corpse rising again to life, and appearing to a crowd of above 500 people; a man risen from the dead ascending bodily into heaven without any concealment, and in the broad daylight, from a mountain near Jerusalem; all these marvellous events took place, we are told, and yet they have left no ripple on the current of contemporary history. There is, however, no lack of such history, and an exhaustive account of the country and age in which the hero of the story lived is given by one of his own nation—a most painstaking and laborious historian. “How shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the Church. But the sages of Greece and Rome
If Pagan historians are thus curiously silent, what deduction shall we draw from the similar silence of the great Jewish annalist? Is it credible that Josephus should thus have ignored Jesus Christ, if one tithe of the marvels related in the Gospels really took place? So damning to the story of Christianity has this difficulty been felt, that a passage has been inserted in Josephus (born A.D. 37, died about A.D. 100) relating to Jesus Christ, which runs as follows: “Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works—a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day” ("Antiquities of the Jews,” book xviii., ch. iii., sect. 3). The passage itself proves its own forgery: Christ drew over scarcely any Gentiles, if the Gospel story be true, as he himself said: “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew xv. 24). A Jew
“I do not perceive that we at all want the suspected testimony to Jesus, which was never quoted by any of our Christian ancestors before Eusebius.
“Nor do I recollect that Josephus has any where mentioned the name or word Christ, in any of his works; except the testimony above mentioned, and the passage concerning James, the Lord’s brother.
“It interrupts the narrative.
“The language is quite Christian.
“It is not quoted by Chrysostom, though he often refers to Josephus, and could not have omitted quoting it, had it been then in the text.
“It is not quoted by Photius, though he has three articles concerning Josephus.
“Under the article Justus of Tiberias, this author (Photius) expressly states that historian (Josephus) being a Jew, has not taken the least notice of Christ.
“Neither Justin in his dialogue with Trypho the Jew, nor Clemens Alexandrinus, who made so many extracts from Christian authors, nor Origen against Celsus, have ever mentioned this testimony.
“But, on the contrary, in chapter xxxv. of the first book of that work, Origen openly affirms, that Josephus, who had mentioned John the Baptist, did not acknowledge Christ” (Answer to Dr. Chandler, as quoted in Taylor’s “Diegesis,” pp. 368, 369. Ed. 1844).
Keim thinks that the remarks of Origen caused the forgery; after criticising the passage he winds up: “For all these reasons, the passage cannot be maintained; it has first appeared in this form in the Catholic Church of the Jews and Gentiles, and under the dominion of the Fourth Gospel, and hardly before the third century, probably before Eusebius, and after Origen, whose bitter criticisms of Josephus may have given cause for it” ("Jesus of Nazara,” p. 25, English edition, 1873).
“Those who are best acquainted with the character of Josephus, and the style of his writings, have no hesitation in condemning this passage as a forgery interpolated in the text during the third century by some pious Christian, who was scandalised that so famous a writer as Josephus should have taken no notice of the Gospels, or of Christ their subject. But the zeal of the interpolator has outrun his discretion, for we might as well expect to gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles, as to find this notice of Christ among the Judaising writings of Josephus. It is well known that this author was a zealous Jew, devoted to the laws of Moses and the traditions of his countrymen. How then could he have written that Jesus was the Christ? Such an admission would have proved him to be a Christian himself, in which case the passage under consideration, too long for a Jew, would have been far too short for a believer in the new religion, and thus the passage stands forth, like an ill-set jewel, contrasting most inharmoniously with everything around it. If it had been genuine, we might be sure that Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Chrysostom would have quoted it in their controversies with the Jews, and that Origen or Photius would have mentioned it. But Eusebius, the ecclesiastical historian (i., II), is the first who quotes it, and our reliance on the judgment or even the honesty of this writer is not so great as to allow of our considering everything found in his works as undoubtedly genuine” ("Christian Records,” by Rev. Dr. Giles, p. 30. Ed. 1854).
On the other side the student should consult Hartwell Horne’s “Introduction.” Ed. 1825, vol. i., p. 307-11. Renan observes that the passage—in the authenticity of which he believes—is “in the style of Josephus,” but adds that “it has been retouched by a Christian hand.” The two statements seem scarcely consistent, as such “retouching” would surely alter “the style” ("Vie de Jesus,” Introduction, p. 10. Ed. 1863).
Paley argues that when the multitude of Christians living in the time of Josephus is considered, it cannot “be believed that the religion, and the transaction upon which it was founded, were too obscure to engage the attention of Josephus, or to obtain a place in his history” ("Evid. of Christianity,” p. 73. Ed. 1845). We answer, it is plain, from the fact that Josephus entirely ignores both, that the pretended story of Jesus was not widely known among his contemporaries, and that the early spread of Christianity is much exaggerated. But says Paley: “Be, however, the fact, or the cause of the omission in Josephus, what it may, no other or different history on the subject has been given by him or is pretended to have been given” (Ibid, pp. 73, 74). Our contention being that the supposed occurrences never took place at all, no history of them is to be looked for in the pages of a writer who was relating only facts. Josephus speaks of James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ”
The silence of Jewish writers of this period is not confined to Josephus, and this silence tells with tremendous weight against the Christian story. Judge Strange writes: “Josephus knew nothing of these wonderments, and he wrote up to the year 93, being familiar with all the chief scenes of the alleged Christianity. Nicolaus of Damascus, who preceded him and lived to the time of Herod’s successor Archelaus, and Justus of Tiberias, who was the contemporary and rival of Josephus in Galilee, equally knew nothing of the movement. Philo-Judaeus, who occupied the whole period ascribed to Jesus, and engaged himself deeply in figuring out the Logos, had heard nothing of the being who was realising at Jerusalem the image his fancy was creating” ("Portraiture and Mission of Jesus,” p. 27).
We propose now to go carefully through the alleged testimonies to Christianity, as urged in Paley’s “Evidences of Christianity,” following his presentment of the argument step by step, and offering objections to each point as raised by him.
The next historian who is claimed as a witness to Christianity is Tacitus (born A.D. 54 or 55, died A.D. 134 or 135), who writes, dealing with the reign of Nero, that this Emperor “inflicted the most cruel punishments upon a set of people, who were holden in abhorrence for their crimes, and were commonly called Christians. The founder of that name was Christus, who, in the reign of Tiberius, was punished as a criminal by the procurator, Pontius Pilate. This pernicious superstition, thus checked for awhile, broke out again; and spread not only over Judaea the source of this evil, but reached the city also: whither flow from all quarters all things vile and shameful, and where they find shelter and encouragement. At first, only those were apprehended who confessed themselves of that sect; afterwards, a vast multitude discovered by them; all which were condemned, not so much for the crime of burning the city, as for their hatred of mankind. Their executions were so contrived as to expose them to derision and contempt. Some were covered over with the skins of wild beasts, and torn to pieces by dogs; some were crucified. Others, having been daubed over with combustible materials, were set up as lights in the night-time, and thus
This was probably written, if authentic, about A.D. 107. The reasons against the authenticity of this passage are thus given by Robert Taylor: “This passage, which would have served the purpose of Christian quotation better than any other in all the writings of Tacitus, or of any Pagan writer whatever, is not quoted by any of the Christian Fathers.
“It is not quoted by Tertullian, though he had read and largely quotes the works of Tacitus: and though his argument immediately called for the use of this quotation with so loud a voice, that his omission of it, if it had really existed, amounts to a violent improbability.
“This Father has spoken of Tacitus in a way that it is absolutely impossible that he should have spoken of him had his writings contained such a passage.
“It is not quoted by Clemens Alexandrinus, who set himself entirely to the work of adducing and bringing together all the admissions and recognitions which Pagan authors had made of the existence of Christ or Christians before his time.
“It has nowhere been stumbled on by the laborious and all-seeking Eusebius, who could by no possibility have missed of it....
“There is no vestige nor trace of its existence anywhere in the world before the fifteenth century.
“It rests then entirely upon the fidelity of a single individual. And he, having the ability, the opportunity, and the strongest possible incitement of interest to induce him to introduce the interpolation.
“The passage itself, though unquestionably the work of a master, and entitled to be pronounced the chef d’oeuvre of the art, betrays the penchant of that delight in blood, and in descriptions of bloody horrors, as peculiarly characteristic of the Christian disposition as it was abhorrent to the mild and gentle mind, and highly cultivated taste of Tacitus.
* * * * *
“It is falsified by the ‘Apology of Tertullian,’ and the far more respectable testimony of Melito, Bishop of Sardis, who explicitly states that the Christians, up to his time, the third century, had never been victims of persecution; and that it was in provinces lying beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire, and not in Judaea, that Christianity originated.
“Tacitus has, in no other part of his writings, made the least allusion to Christ or Christians.
“The use of this passage as a part of the ’Evidences of the Christian Religion,’ is absolutely modern” ("Diegesis,” pp. 374—376).
Judge Strange—writing on another point—gives us an argument against the authenticity of this passage: “As Josephus made Rome his place of abode from the year 70 to the end of the century, there inditing his history of all that concerned the Jews, it is apparent that, had there been a sect flourishing in the city who were proclaiming the risen Jesus as the Messiah in his time, the circumstance was one this careful and discerning writer could not have failed to notice and to comment on” ("Portraiture and Mission of Jesus,” p. 15). It is, indeed, passing strange that Josephus, who tells us so much about false Messiahs and their followers, should omit—as he must have done if this passage of Tacitus be authentic—all reference to this additional false Messiah, whose followers in the very city where Josephus was living, underwent such terrible tortures, either during his residence there, or immediately before it. Burning men, used as torches, adherents of a Jewish Messiah, ought surely to have been unusual enough to have attracted his attention. We may add to these arguments that, supposing such a passage were really written by Tacitus, the two lines regarding Christus look much like an interpolation, as the remainder would run more connectedly if they were omitted. But the whole passage is of more than doubtful authenticity, being in itself incredible, if the Acts and the Epistles of the New Testament be true; for this persecution is said to have occurred during the reign of Nero, during which Paul abode in Rome, teaching in peace, “no man forbidding him” (Acts xxviii. 31); during which, also, he wrote to the Romans that they need not be afraid of the government if they did right (Romans xii. 34); clearly, if these passages are true, the account in Tacitus must be false; and as he himself had no reason for composing such a tale, it must have been forged by Christians to glorify their creed.
The extreme ease with which this passage might have been inserted in all editions of Tacitus used in modern times arises from the fact that all such editions are but copies of one single Ms., which was in the possession of one single individual; the solitary owner might make any interpolations he pleased, and there was no second copy by which his accuracy might be tested. “The first publication of any part of the ‘Annals of Tacitus’ was by Johannes de Spire, at Venice, in the year 1468—his imprint being made from a single Ms., in his own power and possession only, and purporting to have been written in the eighth century.... from this all other MSS. and printed copies of the works of Tacitus are derived.” ("Diegesis,” p. 373.)
Suetonius (born about A.D. 65, died in second century) writes: “The Christians, a race of men of a new and mischievous (or magical) superstition, were punished.” In another passage we read of Claudius, who reigned A.D. 41-54: “He drove the Jews, who, at the suggestion of Chrestus, were constantly rioting, out of Rome.” From this we might infer that there was at that time a Jewish leader, named Chrestus, living in Rome, and inciting the Jews to rebellion. His followers would probably take his name, and, expelled from Rome, they would spread this name in all directions. If the passage in Acts xi. 20 and 26 be of any historical value, it would curiously strengthen this hypothesis, since the “disciples were called Christians first in Antioch,” and the missionaries to Antioch, who preached “unto the Jews only,” came from Cyprus and Cyrene, which would naturally lie in the way of fugitives from Rome to Asia Minor. They would bring the name Christian with them, and the date in the Acts synchronises with that in Suetonius. Chrestus would appear to have left a sect behind him in Rome, bearing his name, the members of which were prosecuted by the Government, very likely as traitors and rebels. Keim’s good opinion of Suetonius is much degraded by this Chrestus: “In his ‘Life of Claudius,’ who expelled the Jews from Rome, he has shown his undoubted inferiority to Tacitus as a historian by treating ‘Christ’ as a restless and seditious Jewish agitator, who was still living in the time of Claudius, and, indeed, in Rome” ("Jesus of Nazara,” p. 33).
It is natural that modern Christians should object to a Jewish Chrestus starting up at Rome simultaneously with their Jewish Christus in Judaea, who, according to Luke’s chronology, must have been crucified about A.D. 43. The coincidence is certainly inconvenient; but if they refuse the testimony of Suetonius concerning Chrestus, the leader, why should they accept it concerning the Christians, the followers? Paley, of course, although he quotes Suetonius, omits all reference at this stage to the unlucky Chrestus; his duty was to present evidences of, not against, Christianity. Most dishonestly, however, he inserts a reference to it later on (p. 73), where, in a brief resume of the evidence, he uses it as a link in his chain: “When Suetonius, an historian contemporary with Tacitus, relates that, in the time of Claudius, the Jews were making disturbances at Rome, Christus being their leader.” Why does not Paley explain to us how Jesus came to be leading Jews at Rome during the reign of Claudius, and why he incited them to riot? No such incident is related in the life of Jesus of Nazareth; and if Suetonius be correct, the credit of the Gospels is destroyed. To his shame be it said, that Paley here deliberately refers to a passage, which he has not ventured to quote, simply that he may use the great name of Suetonius to strengthen his lamentably weak argument, by the pretence that Suetonius mentions Jesus of Nazareth, and thus makes him a historical character. Few more disgraceful perversions of evidence can be found, even in the annals of controversy. H. Horne refers to this passage in proof of the existence of Christ (Introduction, vol. i., page 202); but without offering any explanation of the appearance of Christ in Rome some years after he ought to have been dead.
Juvenal is next dragged forward by Paley as a witness, because he mentioned the punishment of some criminals: “I think it sufficiently probable that these [Christian executions] were the executions to which the poet refers” ("Evidences,” p. 29.) Needless to say that there is not a particle of proof that they were anything of the kind; but when evidence is lacking, it is necessary to invent it.
Pliny the Younger (born A.D. 61, died A.D. 115) writes to the Emperor Trajan, about A.D. 107, to ask him how he shall treat the Christians, and as Paley has so grossly misrepresented this letter, it will be well to reproduce the whole of it. It contains no word of Christians dying boldly as Paley pretends, nor, indeed, of the punishment of death being inflicted at all. The word translated “punishment” is supplicium (acc. of supplicium) in the original, and is a term which, like the French supplice, derived from it, may mean the punishment of death, or any other heavy penalty. The translation of the letter runs as follows: “C. Pliny to the Emperor Trajan, Health.—It is customary with me to refer to you, my lord, matters about which I entertain a doubt. For who is better able either to rule my hesitation, or to instruct my ignorance? I have never been present at the inquiries about the Christians, and, therefore, cannot say for what crime, or to what extent, they are usually punished, or what is the nature of the inquiry about them. Nor have I been free from great doubts whether there should not be a distinction between ages, or how far those of a tender frame should be treated differently from the robust; whether those who repent should not be pardoned, so that one who has been a Christian should not derive advantage from having ceased to be one; whether the name itself of being a Christian should be punished, or only crime attendant upon the name? In the meantime I have laid down this rule in dealing with those who were brought before me for being Christians. I asked whether they were Christians; if they confessed, I asked them a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; if they persevered, I ordered them to be led off. For I had no doubt in my mind that, whatever it might be which they acknowledged, obduracy and inflexible obstinacy, at all events should be punished. There were others guilty of like folly, whom I set aside to be sent to Rome, because they were Roman citizens. In the next place, when this crime began, as usual, gradually to spread, it showed itself in a variety of ways. An indictment was set forth without any author, containing the names of many who denied that they were Christians or ever had been; and, when I set the example, they called on the gods, and made offerings of frankincense and wine to your image, which I, for this purpose, had ordered to be brought out, together with the images of the gods. Moreover, they cursed Christ; none of which acts can be extorted from those who are really
It is urged by Christian advocates that this letter at least shows how widely Christianity had spread at this early date; but we shall later have occasion to draw attention to the fact that the name “Christian” was used before the reputed time of Christ to describe some extensively-spread sects, and that the worshippers of the Egyptian Serapis were known by that title. It may be added that the authenticity of this letter is by no means beyond dispute, and that R. Taylor urges some very strong arguments against it. Among others, he suggests: “The undeniable fact that the first Christians were the greatest liars and forgers that had ever been in the whole world, and that they actually stopped at nothing.... The flagrant
Paley boldly states that Martial (born A.D. 43, died about A.D. 100) makes the Christians “the subject of his ridicule,” because he wrote an epigram on the stupidity of admiring any vain-glorious fool who would rush to be tormented for the sake of notoriety. Hard-set must Christians be for evidence, when reduced to rely on such pretended allusions.
Epictetus (flourished first half of second century) is claimed as another witness, because he states that “It is possible a man may arrive at this temper, and become indifferent to these things from madness, or from habit, as the Galileans” (Book iv., chapter 7). The Galileans, i.e., the people of Galilee, appear to have had a bad name, and it is highly probable that Epictetus simply referred to them, just as he might have said as an equivalent phrase for stupidity, “like the Boeotians.” In addition to this, the followers of Judas the Gaulonite were known as Galileans, and were remarkable for the “inflexible constancy which, in defence of their cause, rendered them insensible of death and tortures” ("Decline and Fall,” vol. ii., p. 214).
Marcus Aurelius (born A.D. 121, died A.D. 180) is Paley’s last support, as he urges that fortitude in the face of death should arise from judgment, “and not from obstinacy, like the Christians.” As no one disputes the existence of a sect called Christians when Marcus Aurelius wrote, this testimony is not specially valuable.
Paley, so keen to swoop down on any hint that can be twisted into an allusion to the Christians, entirely omits the interesting letter written by the Emperor Adrian to his brother-in-law Servianus, A.D. 134. The evidence is not of an edifying character, and this accounts for the omission: “The worshippers of Serapis are Christians, and those are consecrated to the god Serapis, who, I find, call themselves the bishops of Christ” (Quoted in “Diegesis,” p. 386).
Such are the whole external evidences of Christianity until after A.D. 160. In a time rich in historians and philosophers one man, Tacitus, in a disputed passage, mentions a Christus punished under Pontius Pilate, and the existence of a sect bearing his name. Suetonius, Pliny, Adrian, possibly Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, casually mention some people called Christians.
The Rev. Dr. Giles thus summarises the proofs of the weakness of early Christian evidences in “profane history:”—
“Though the remains of Grecian and Latin profane literature which belong to the first and second centuries of our era are enough to form a library of themselves, they contain no allusion to the New Testament.... The Latin writers, who lived between the time of Christ’s crucifixion and the year A.D. 200, are Seneca, Lucan, Suetonius, Tacitus, Persius, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny the Elder, Silius Italicus, Statius, Quintilian, and Pliny the Younger, besides numerous others of inferior note. The greater number of these make mention of the Jews, but not of the Christians. In fact, Suetonius, Tacitus, and the younger Pliny, are the only Roman writers who mention the Christian religion or its founder” ("Christian Records,” by Rev. Dr. Giles, P. 36).
“The Greek classic writers, who lived between the time of Christ’s crucifixion and the year 200, are those which follow: Epictetus, Plutarch, AElian, Arrian, Galen, Lucian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ptolemy, Marcus Aurelius (who, though a Roman emperor, wrote in Greek), Pausanias, and many others of less note. The allusions to Christianity found in their works are singularly brief” (Ibid, p. 42).
What does it all, this “evidence,” amount to? One writer, Tacitus, records that a man, called by his followers “Christ”—for no one pretends that Christ is anything more than a title given by his disciples to a certain Jew named Jesus—was put to death by Pontius Pilate. And suppose he were, what then? How is this a proof of the religion called Christianity? Tacitus knows nothing of the miracle-worker, of the risen and ascended man; he is strangely ignorant of all the wonders that had occurred; and, allowing the passage to be genuine, it tells sorely against the marvellous history given by the Christians of their leader, whose fame is supposed to have spread far and wide, and whose fame most certainly must so have spread had he really performed all the wonderful works attributed to him. But no necessity lies upon the Freethinker, when he rejects Christianity, to disprove the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth, although we point to the inadequacy of the evidence even of his existence. The strength of the Freethought position is in no-wise injured by the admission that a young Jew named Joshua (i.e. Jesus) may have wandered up and down Galilee and Judaea in the reign of Tiberius, that he may have been a religious reformer, that he may have been put to death by Pontius Pilate for sedition. All this is perfectly likely, and to allow it in no way endorses the mass of legend and myth encrusted round this tiny nucleus of possible fact. This obscure peasant is not the Christian Jesus, who is—as we shall later urge—only a new presentation of the ancient Sun-God, with unmistakeable family likeness to his elder brothers. The Reverend Robert Taylor very rightly remarks, concerning this small historical possibility: “These are circumstances which fall entirely within the scale
But Paley pleads some indirect evidence on behalf of Christianity, which deserves a word of notice since the direct evidence so lamentably breaks down. He urges that: “there is satisfactory evidence that many, professing to be original witnesses of the Christian miracles, passed their lives in labours, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily under-gone, in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief of those accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same motives, to new rules of conduct.” Nearly 200 pages are devoted to the proof of this proposition, a proposition which it is difficult to characterise with becoming courtesy, when we know the complete and utter absence of any “satisfactory evidence” that the original witnesses did anything of the kind.
It is pleaded that the “original witnesses passed their lives in labours, etc., in attestation of the accounts they delivered.” The evidence of this may be looked for either in Pagan or in Christian writings. Pagan writers know literally nothing about the “original witnesses,” mentioning, at the utmost, but “the Christians;” and these Christians, when put to death, were not so executed in attestation of any accounts delivered by them, but wholly and solely because of the evil deeds and the scandalous practices rightly or wrongly attributed to them. Supposing—what is not true—that they had been executed for their creed, there is no pretence that they were eye-witnesses of the miracles of Christ.
Paley’s first argument is drawn “from the nature of the case”—i.e., that persecution ought to have taken place, whether it did or not, because both Jews and Gentiles would reject the new creed. So far as the Jews are concerned, we hear of no persecution from Josephus. If we interrogate the Christian Acts, we hear but of little, two persons only being killed. We learn also that “many thousands of Jews” belonged to the new sect, and were propitiated by Christian conformity to the law; and that, when the Jews rose against Paul—not as a Christian, but as a breaker of the Mosaic law—he was promptly
This view of the matter is thoroughly corroborated by Lardner: “The disciples of Jesus Christ were under the protection of the Roman law, since the God they worshipped and whose worship they recommended, was the God of the heavens and the earth, the same God whom the Jews worshipped, and the worship of whom was allowed of all over the Roman Empire, and established by special edicts and decrees in most, perhaps in all the places, in which we meet with St. Paul in his travels” ("Credibility,” vol. i., pt. I, pp. 406, 407. Ed. 1727). He also quotes “a remarkable piece of justice done the Jews at Doris, in Syria, by Petronius, President of that province. The fact is this: Some rash young fellows of the place got in and set up a statue of the Emperor in the Jews’ synagogue. Agrippa the Great made complaints to Petronius concerning this injury. Whereupon Petronius issued a very sharp precept to the magistrates of Doris. He terms this action an offence, not against the Jews only, but also against the Emperor; says, it is agreeable to the law of nature that every man should be master of his own places, according to the decree of the Emperor. I have, says he, given directions that they who have dared to do these things contrary to the edict of Augustus, be delivered to the centurion Vitellius Proculus, that they may be brought to me, and answer for their behaviour. And I require the chief men in the magistracy to discover the guilty to the centurion, unless they are willing to have it thought, that this injustice has been done with their consent; and that they see to it, that no sedition or tumult happen upon this occasion, which, I perceive, is what some are aiming at.... I do also require, that for the future, you seek no pretence for sedition or disturbance, but that all men worship [God] according to their own customs” (Ibid, pp. 382, 383). After giving some other facts, Lardner sums up: “These are authentic testimonies in behalf of the equity of the Roman Government in general, and of the impartial administration of justice by the Roman presidents—toward all the people of their provinces, how much soever they differed from each other in matters of religion” (Ibid, p. 401).
The evidence of persecution which consists in quotations from the Christian books ("Evidences,” pages 33-52) cannot be admitted without evidence of the authenticity of the books quoted. The Acts and the Pauline epistles so grossly contradict each other that, having nothing outside themselves with which to compare them, they are mutually destructive. “The epistle to the Romans presents special difficulties to its acceptance as a genuine address to the Church of Rome in the era ascribed to it. The faith of this Church, at this early period, is said to be ‘spoken of throughout the whole world’; and yet when Paul, according to the Acts, at a later time visited Rome, so little had this alleged Church influenced the neighbourhood, that the inquiring Jews of Rome are shown to be totally ignorant of what constituted Christianity, and to have looked to Paul to enlighten them” ("Portraiture and Mission of Jesus,” p. 15). 2 Cor. is of very doubtful authenticity. The passage in James shows no fiery persecution. Hebrews is of later date. 2 Thess. again very doubtful. The “suffering” spoken of by Peter appears, from the context, to refer chiefly to reproaches, and a problematical “if any man suffer as a Christian.” Had those he wrote to been then suffering, surely the apostle would have said: “When any man suffers ... let him not be ashamed.” The whole question of the authenticity of the canonical books will be challenged later, and the weakness of this division of Paley’s evidences will then be more fully apparent. Meanwhile we subjoin Lardner’s view of these passages. He has been arguing that the Romans “protected the many rites of all their provinces;” and he proceeds: “There is, however, one difficulty which, I am aware, may be started by some persons. If the Roman Government, to which all the world was then subject, was so mild and gentle, and protected all men in the profession of their several religious tenets, and the practice of all their peculiar rites, whence comes it to pass that there are in the Epistles so many exhortations to the Christians to patience and constancy, and so many arguments of consolation suggested to them, as a suffering body of men? [Here follow some passages as in Paley.] To this I answer: 1. That the account St. Luke has given in the Acts of the Apostles of the behaviour of the Roman officers out of Judaea, and in it, is confirmed not only by the account I have given of the genius and nature of the Roman Government, but also by the testimony of the most ancient Christian writers. The Romans did afterwards depart from these moderate maxims; but it is certain that they were governed by them as long as the history of the Acts of the Apostles reaches. Tertullian and divers others do affirm that Nero was the first Emperor that persecuted the Christians; nor did he begin to disturb them till after Paul had left Rome the first time he was there (when he was sent thither by Festus), and, therefore, not until
But Paley adduces further the evidence of Clement, Hermas, Polycarp, Ignatius, and a circular letter of the Church of Smyrna, to prove the sufferings of the eye-witnesses ("Evidences,” pages 52-55). When we pass into writings of this description in later times, there is, indeed, plenty of evidence—in fact, a good deal too much, for they testify to such marvellous occurrences, that no trust is possible in anything which they say. Not only was St. Paul’s head cut off, but the worthy Bishop of Rome, Linus, his contemporary (who is supposed to relate his martyrdom), tells us how, “instead of blood, nought but a stream of pure milk flowed from his veins;” and we are further instructed that his severed head took three jumps in “honour of the Trinity, and at each spot on which it jumped there instantly struck up a spring of living water, which retains at this day a plain and distinct taste of milk” ("Diegesis,” pp. 256, 257). Against a mass of absurd stories of this kind, the only evidence of the persecution of Paley’s eye-witnesses, we may set the remarks of Gibbon: “In the time of Tertullian and Clemens of Alexandria the glory of martyrdom was confined to St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. James. It was gradually bestowed on the rest of the Apostles by the more recent Greeks, who prudently selected for the theatre of their preaching and sufferings some remote country beyond the limits of the Roman Empire” ("Decline and Fall,” vol. ii., p. 208, note). Later there was, indeed, more persecution; but even then the martyrdoms afford no evidence of the truth of Christianity. Martyrdom proves the sincerity, but not the truth, of the sufferer’s belief; every creed has had its martyrs, and as the truth of one creed excludes the truth of every other, it follows that the vast majority have died for a delusion, and that, therefore, the number of martyrs it can reckon is no criterion of the truth of a creed, but only of the devotion it inspires. While we allow that the Christians underwent much persecution, there can be no doubt that the number of the sufferers has been grossly exaggerated. One can scarcely
To the credit of Paley’s apostolic evidences (Clement, Hermas, Polycarp, Ignatius, and letter from Smyrna), we may urge the following objections. Clement’s writings are much disputed: “The accounts which remain of his life, actions, and death are, for the most part, uncertain. Two Epistles to the Corinthians, written in Greek, have been attributed to him, of which the second has been looked upon as spurious, and the first as genuine, by many learned writers. But even this latter seems to have been corrupted and interpolated by some ignorant and presumptuous author.... The learned are now unanimous in regarding the other writings which bear the name of Clemens (Clement) ... as spurious productions ascribed by some impostor to this venerable prelate, in order to procure them a high degree of authority” (Ibid, pp. 31, 32).
“The first epistle, bearing the name of Clement, has been preserved to us in a single manuscript only. Though very frequently referred to by ancient Christian writers, it remained unknown to the scholars of Western Europe until happily discovered in the Alexandrian manuscript.... Who the Clement was, to whom these writings are ascribed, cannot with absolute certainty be determined. The general opinion is, that he is the same as the person of that name referred to by St. Paul (Phil. iv. 3). The writings themselves contain no statement as to their author.... Although, as has been said, positive certainty cannot be reached on the subject, we may with great probability conclude that we have in this epistle a composition of that Clement who is known to us from Scripture as having been an associate of the great apostle. The date of this epistle has been the subject of considerable controversy. It is clear from the writing itself that it was composed soon after some persecution (chapter I) which the Roman Church had endured; and the only question is, whether we are to fix upon the persecution under Nero or Domitian. If the former, the date will be about the year 68; if the latter, we must place it towards the close of the first century, or the beginning of the second. We possess no external aid to the settlement of this question. The lists of early Roman bishops are in hopeless confusion, some making Clement the immediate successor of St. Peter, others placing Linus, and others still Linus
The second epistle is rejected on all sides. “It is now generally regarded as one of the many writings which have been falsely ascribed to Clement.... The diversity of style clearly points to a different writer from that of the first epistle” ("Apostolic Fathers,” page 53). “The second epistle ... is not mentioned at all by the earlier Fathers who refer to the first. Eusebius, who is the first writer who mentions it, expresses doubt regarding it, while Jerome and Photius state that it was rejected by the ancients. It is now universally regarded as spurious” ("Supernatural Religion,” pp. 220, 221). “There is a second epistle ascribed to Clement, but we know not that this is as highly approved as the former, and know not that it has been in use with the ancients. There are also other writings reported to be his, verbose and of great length. Lately, and some time ago, those were produced that contain the dialogues of Peter and Apion, of which, however, not a syllable is recorded by the primitive Church” (Eusebius’ “Eccles. Hist.” bk. iii., chap. 38). “The first Greek Epistle alone can be confidently pronounced genuine” (Westcott on the “Canon of the New Testament,” p. 24. Ed. 1875). The first epistle “is the only piece of Clement that can be relied on as genuine” ("Lardner’s Credibility,” pt. ii., vol. i., p. 62. Ed. 1734). “Besides the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians there is a fragment of a piece, called his second epistle, which being doubtful, or rather plainly not Clement’s, I don’t quote as his.” (Ibid, p. 106.)
This very dubious Clement (Paley quotes, be it said, from the first—or least doubtful—of his writings) only says that one of Paley’s original witnesses was martyred, namely Peter; Paul, of course, was not an eye-witness of Christ’s proceedings.
The Vision of Hermas is a simple rhapsody, unworthy of a moment’s consideration, of which Mosheim justly remarks: “The discourse which he puts into the mouths of those celestial beings is more insipid and senseless than what we commonly hear among the meanest of the multitude” ("Eccles. Hist,” p. 32). Its date is very doubtful; the Canon of Muratori puts it in the middle of the second century, saying that it was written by Hermas,
The editors of the “Apostolic Fathers” dispute this assertion, and say: “It is abundantly established by external testimony, and is also supported by the internal evidence” (p. 67). But they add: “The epistle before us is not perfect in any of the Greek MSS. which contain it. But the chapters wanting in Greek are contained in an ancient Latin version. While there is no ground for supposing, as some have done, that the whole epistle is spurious, there seems considerable force in the arguments by which many others have sought to prove chap. xiii. to be an interpolation. The date of the epistle cannot be satisfactorily determined. It depends on the conclusion we reach as to some points, very difficult and obscure, connected with that account of the martyrdom of Polycarp which has come down to us. We shall not, however, be far wrong if we fix it about the middle of the second century” (Ibid, pp. 67, 68). Poor Paley! this weak evidence to the martyrdom of his eye-witnesses comes 150 years after Christ; and even then all that Polycarp may have said, if the epistle chance to be authentic, is that “they suffered,” without any word of their martyrdom!
The authenticity of the letters of Ignatius has long been a matter of dispute. Mosheim, who accepts the seven epistles, says that, “Though I am willing to adopt this opinion as preferable to any other, yet I cannot help looking upon the authenticity of the epistle to Polycarp as extremely dubious, on account of the difference of style; and, indeed, the whole question relating to the epistles of St. Ignatius in general seems to me to labour under much obscurity, and to be embarrassed with many difficulties” ("Eccles. Hist.,” p. 22).
“There are in all fifteen epistles which bear the name of Ignatius. These are the following: One to the Virgin Mary, two to the Apostle John, one to Mary of Cassobelae, one to the Tarsians, one to the Antiochians, one to Hero (a deacon of Antioch), one to the Philippians, one to the Ephesians, one to the Magnesians, one to the Trallians, one to the Romans, one to the Philadelphians, one to the Smyrnians, and one to Polycarp. The first three exist only in Latin; all the rest are extant also in Greek. It is now the universal opinions of critics that the first eight of these professedly Ignatian letters are
“I have carefully compared the two editions, and am very well satisfied upon that comparison that the larger are an interpolation of the smaller, and not the smaller an epitome or abridgment of the larger. I desire no better evidence in a thing of this nature.... But whether the smaller themselves are the genuine writings of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, is a question that has been much disputed, and has employed the pens of the ablest critics. And whatever positiveness some may have shown on either side, I must own I have found it a very difficult question” ("Credibility,” pt. 2, vol. ii., p. 153). The Syriac version was then, of course, unknown. Professor Norton, the learned Christian defender of the Gospels, says: “The seven shorter epistles, the genuineness of which is contended for, come to us in bad company.... There is, as it seems to me, no reasonable doubt that the seven shorter epistles ascribed to Ignatius are equally, with all the rest, fabrications of a date long subsequent to his time.” “I doubt whether any book, in its general tone of sentiment and language, ever betrayed itself as a forgery more clearly than do these pretended epistles of Ignatius” ("Genuineness of the Gospels,” vol. i., pp. 350 and 353, ed. 1847).
“What, then, is the position of the so-called Ignatian epistles? Towards the end of the second century Irenaeus makes a very short quotation from a source unnamed, which Eusebius, in the fourth century, finds in an epistle attributed to Ignatius. Origen, in the third century, quotes a few words, which he ascribes to Ignatius, although without definite reference to any particular epistle; and, in the fourth century, Eusebius mentions seven epistles ascribed to Ignatius. There is no other evidence. There are, however, fifteen epistles extant, all of which are attributed to Ignatius, of all of which, with the exception of three, which are only known in a Latin version, we possess both Greek and Latin versions. Of seven of these epistles—and they are those mentioned by Eusebius—we have two Greek versions, one of which is very much shorter than the other; and, finally, we now possess a Syriac version of three epistles, only in a form still shorter than the shorter Greek version, in which are found all the quotations of the Fathers, without exception, up to the fourth century. Eight of the fifteen epistles are universally rejected as spurious (ante, p. 263). The longer Greek version of the remaining seven epistles is almost unanimously condemned as grossly interpolated; and the great majority of critics recognise that the shorter Greek version is also much interpolated; whilst the Syriac version, which, so far as MSS. are concerned, is by far the most ancient text of any letters which we possess, reduces their number to three, and their contents to a very small compass indeed. It is not surprising that the vast majority of critics have expressed doubt more or less strong regarding the authenticity of all these epistles, and that so large a number have repudiated them altogether. One thing is quite evident—that, amidst such a mass of falsification, interpolation, and fraud, the Ignatian epistles cannot, in any form, be considered evidence on any important point.... In fact, the whole of the Ignatian literature is a mass of falsification and fraud” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. i., pp. 270, 271, 274). The student may judge from this confusion, of fifteen reduced to seven long, and seven long reduced to seven short, and seven short reduced to three, and those three very doubtful, how thoroughly reliable must be Paley’s arguments drawn from this “contemporary of Polycarp.” Our editors of the “Fathers” very frankly remark: “As to the personal history of Ignatius, almost nothing is known” ("Apostolic Fathers,” p. 143). Why, acknowledging this, they call him “celebrated,” it is hard to say. Truly, the ways of Christian commentators are dark!
Paley’s quotation is taken from the epistle to the Smyrnaeans (not one of the Syriac, be it noted), and is from the shorter Greek recension. It occurs in chap. iii., and only says that Peter, and those who were with him, saw Jesus after the resurrection, and believed: “for this cause also they despised death, and were found its conquerors.” Men who believed in a resurrection might naturally despise death; but it is hard to see how this quotation—even were it authentic—shows that the apostles suffered for their belief. What strikes one as most remarkable—if Paley’s contention of the sufferings of the witnesses be true, and these writings authentic—is that so very little mention is made of the apostles, of their labours, toils, and sufferings, and that these epistles are simply a kind of patchwork, chiefly of Old Testament materials, mixed up with exhortations about Christ.
The circular epistle of the Church of Smyrna is a curious document. Paley quotes a terrible account of the tortures inflicted, and one would imagine on reading it that many must have been put to death. We are surprised to learn, from the epistle itself, that Polycarp was only the twelfth martyr between the two towns of Smyrna and Philadelphia! The amount of dependence to be placed on the narrative may be judged by the following:—“As the flame blazed forth in great fury, we, to whom it was given to witness it, beheld a great miracle, and have been preserved that we might report to others what then took place. For the fire, shaping itself into the form of an arch, like the sail of a ship when filled with the wind, encompassed as by a circle the body of the martyr. And he appeared within, not like flesh which is burnt, but as bread that is baked, or as gold and silver glowing in a furnace. Moreover, we perceived such a sweet odour, as if frankincense or some such precious spices had been burning there. At length, when those men perceived that his body could not be consumed by the fire, they commanded an executioner to go near, and pierce him with a dagger. And on his doing this, there came forth a dove, and a great quantity of blood, so that the fire was extinguished” ("Apostolic Fathers,” p. 92). What reliance can be placed on historians(?) who gravely relate that fire does not burn, and that when a man is pierced with a dagger a dove flies out, together with sufficient blood to quench a flaming pile? To make this precious epistle still more valuable, one of its transcribers adds to it:—“I again, Pionius, wrote them (these things) from the previously written copy, having carefully searched into them, and the blessed Polycarp having manifested them to me through a revelation[!] even as I shall show in what follows. I have collected these things, when they had almost faded away through the lapse of time” (Ibid, p. 96). If this is history, then any absurd dream may be taken as the basis of belief. We may add that this epistle does not mention the martyrdoms of the eye-witnesses,
Nor is proof less lacking of submission “from the same motives, to new rules of conduct.” Nowhere is there a sign that Christian morality was enforced by appeal to the miracles of Christ; miracles were, in those days, too common an incident to attract much attention, and, indeed, if they could not win belief in the mission from those Jews before whom they were said to have been performed, what chance would they have had when the story of their working was only repeated by hearsay? Again, the rules of conduct were not “new;” the best parts of the Christian morality had been taught long before Christ (as we shall prove later on by quotations), and were familiar to the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, from the writings of their own philosophers. There would have been nothing remarkable in a new sect growing up among these peoples, accustomed as they were to the schools of the philosophers, with their various groups of disciples distinguished by special names. Why is there anything more wonderful in these Christian societies with a high moral code, than in the severe and stately morality inculcated and practised by the Stoics? For the submission of conduct to the “new rules,” the less said the better. 1 Corinthians does not give us a very lofty idea of the morality current among the Christians there, and the angry reproaches of Jude imply much depravity; the messages to the seven Churches are generally reproving, not to dwell on many scattered passages of the same character. Outsiders, moreover, speak very harshly of the Christian
About 186 B.C., according to Livy (lib. xxxix. c. 8-19), the Roman Government, discovering that certain “Bacchanalian mysteries” were habitually celebrated in Rome, issued stern edicts against the participants in them, and succeeding in, at least partially, suppressing them. The reason given by the Consul Postumius for these edicts was political, not religious. “Could they think,” he asked, “that youths, initiated under such oaths as theirs, were fit to be made soldiers? That wretches brought out of the temple of obscenity could be trusted with arms? That those contaminated with the foul debaucheries of these meetings should be the champions for the chastity of the wives and children of the Roman people?” “Let us now closely examine how far the Eleusinian and Bacchanalian feasts resembled the Christian Agapae—whether the latter, modified and altered a little according to the change which would take place in the taste of the age, originated from the former, or were altogether from a different source. We have seen that the forementioned Pagan feasts were, throughout Italy, in a very flourishing state about 186 years before the Christian era. We have also seen that about this time they were, at least, partially suppressed in Italy, and those who were wont to take part in them dispersed over the world. Being zealously devoted to the religion of which these feasts were part, it is very natural to suppose that, wherever the votaries of this superstition settled, they soon established these feasts, which they were enabled to carry on secretly, and, therefore, for a considerable time, undetected.... Both Pagans and Christians, in ancient times, were particularly careful not to disclose their mysteries; to do so, in violation of their oaths, would cost their lives” ("The Prophet of Nazareth,” by E.P. Meredith, notes, pp. 225, 226). Mr. Meredith then points out how in Rome, in Lyons, in Vienne, “the Christians were actually accused of murdering children and others—of committing adultery, incest, and other flagrant crimes in their secret lovefeasts. The question, therefore,
There can be no doubt that the Christians suffered for these crimes whether or no they were guilty of them: “Three things are alleged against us: Atheism, Thyestean feasts, OEdipodean intercourse,” says Athenagoras ("Apology,” ch. iii). Justin Martyr refers to the same charges ("2nd Apology,” ch. xii). “Monsters of wickedness, we are accused of observing a holy rite, in which we kill a little child and then eat it, in which after the feast we practise incest.... Come, plunge your knife into the babe, enemy of none, accused of none, child of all; or if that is another’s work, simply take your place beside a human being dying before he has really lived, await the departure of the lately-given soul, receive the fresh young blood, saturate your bread with it, freely partake” ("Apology,” Tertullian, secs. 7, 8). Tertullian pleads earnestly that these accusations were false: “if you cannot do it, you ought not to believe it of others. For a Christian is a man as well as you” (Ibid). Yet, when Tertullian became a Montanist, he declared that these very crimes were committed at the Agapae, so that he spoke falsely either in the one case or in the other. “It was sometimes faintly insinuated, and sometimes boldly asserted, that the same bloody sacrifices and the same incestuous festivals, which were so falsely ascribed to the orthodox believers, were in reality celebrated by the Marcionites, by the Carpocratians, and by several other sects of the Gnostics.... Accusations of a similar kind were retorted upon the Church by the schismatics who had departed from its communion; and it was confessed on all sides that the most scandalous
To these strong arguments may be added the acknowledgment in 1. Cor. xi., 17, 22, of disorder and drunkenness at these Agapae; the habit of speaking of the communion feast as “the Christian mysteries,” a habit still kept up in the Anglican prayer-book; the fact that they took place at night, under cover of darkness, a custom for which there was not the smallest reason, unless the service were of a nature so objectionable as to bring it under the ban of the tolerant Roman law; and lastly, the use of the cross, and the sign of the cross, the central Christian emblem, and one that, especially in connection with the mysteries, is of no dubious signification. Thus, in the twilight in which they were veiled in those early days, the Christians appear to us as a sect of very different character to that bestowed upon them by Paley. A little later, when they emerge into historical light, their own writers give us sufficient evidence whereby we may judge them; and we find them superstitious, grossly ignorant, quarrelsome, cruel, divided into ascetics and profligates, between whom it is hard to award the palm for degradation and indecency.
Having “proved”—in the above fashion—that a number of people in the first century advanced “an extraordinary story,” underwent persecution, and altered their manner of life, because of it, Paley thinks it “in the highest degree probable, that the story for which these persons voluntarily exposed themselves to the fatigues and hardships which they endured, was a miraculous story; I mean, that they pretended to miraculous evidence of some kind or other” ("Evidences,” p. 64). That the Christians believed in a miraculous story may freely be acknowledged, but it is evidence of the truth of the story that we want, not evidence of their belief in it. Many ignorant people believe in witchcraft and in fortune-telling now-a-days, but their belief only proves their own ignorance, and not the truth of either superstition. The next step in the argument is that “the story which Christians have now” is “the story which Christians had then” and it is urged
“From its contents it seems unlikely that it was written by a companion of Apostles and a Levite. In addition to this, it is probable that Barnabas died before A.D. 62; and the letter contains not only an allusion to the destruction of the Jewish temple, but also affirms the abnegation of the Sabbath, and the general celebration of the Lord’s Day, which seems to show that it could not have been written before the beginning of the second century” ("Westcott on the Canon,” p. 41). “Nothing certain is known as to the author of the following epistle. The writer’s name is Barnabas; but scarcely any scholars now ascribe it to the illustrious friend and companion of St. Paul.... The internal evidence is now generally regarded as conclusive against this opinion.... The external evidence [ascribing it to Barnabas] is of itself weak, and should not make us hesitate for a moment in refusing to ascribe this writing to Barnabas, the apostle.... The general opinion is, that its date is not later than the middle of the second century, and that it cannot be placed earlier than some twenty or thirty years or so before. In point of style, both as respects thought and expression, a very low place must be assigned it. We know nothing certain of the region in which the author lived, or where the first readers were to be found” ("Apostolic Fathers,” pp. 99, 100). The Epistle is not ascribed to Barnabas at all until the close of the second century. Eusebius marks it as “spurious” ("Eccles. Hist,” bk. iii., chap. xxv). Lardner speaks of it as “probably Barnabas’s, and certainly ancient” ("Credibility,” pt. ii., vol. ii., p. 30). When we see the utter conflict of evidence as to the writings of all these “primitive” authors, we can scarcely wonder at the frank avowal of the Rev. Dr. Giles: “The writings of the Apostolical Fathers labour under a more heavy load of doubt and suspicion than any other ancient compositions, either sacred or profane” ("Christian Records,” p. 53).
Paley, in quoting “Quadratus,” does not tell us that the passage he quotes is the only writing of Quadratus extant, and is only preserved by Eusebius, who says that he takes it from an apology addressed by Quadratus to the Emperor Adrian. Adrian reigned from A.D. 117-138, and the apology must consequently have been presented between these dates. If the apology be genuine, Quadratus makes the extraordinary assertion that some of the people raised from the dead by Jesus were then living. Jesus is only
Paley brings Justin Martyr (born about A.D. 103, died about A.D. 167) as his last authority—as after his time the story may be taken as established—and says: “From Justin’s works, which are still extant, might be collected a tolerably complete account of Christ’s life, in all points agreeing with that which is delivered in our Scriptures; taken, indeed, in a great measure, from those Scriptures, but still proving that this account, and no other, was the account known and extant in that age” ("Evidences,” p. 77). If “no other” account was extant, Justin must have largely drawn on his own imagination when he pretends to be quoting. Jesus, according to Justin, is conceived “of the Word” ("Apol.,” i. 33), not of the Holy Ghost, the third person, the Holy Ghost being said to be identical with the Word; and he is thus conceived by himself. He is born, not in Bethlehem in a stable, but in a “cave near the village,” because Joseph could find no lodging in Bethlehem ("Dial.” 78). The magi come, not from “the East,” but from Arabia ("Dial.” 77). Jesus works as a carpenter, making ploughs and yokes ("Dial.” 88). The story of the baptism is very different ("Dial.” 88). In the trial Jesus is set on the judgment seat, and tauntingly bidden to judge his accusers ("Apol.,” i. 35). All the apostles deny him, and forsake him, after
Before we pass on to the last evidences offered by Paley, which necessitate a closer investigation into the value of the testimony borne by the patristic, to the canonical, writings, it will be well to put broadly the fact, that these Fathers are simply worthless as witnesses to any matter of fact, owing to the absurd and incredible stories which they relate with the most perfect faith. Of critical faculty they have none; the most childish nonsense is accepted by them, with the gravest face; no story is too silly, no falsehood too glaring, for them to believe and to retail, in fullest confidence of its truth. Gross ignorance is one of their characteristics; they are superstitious, credulous, illiterate, to an almost incredible extent. Clement considers that “the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection” by the following “fact,” among others: “Let us consider that wonderful sign which takes place in Eastern lands—that is, in Arabia and the countries round about. There is a certain bird which is called a phoenix. This is the only one of its kind, and lives 500 years. And when the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices, into which, when the time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. But, as the flesh decays, a certain kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird, brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired strength, it takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and, bearing these, it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis. And in open day, flying in the sight of all men, it places them on the altar of the sun, and, having done this, hastens back to its former abode. The priests then inspect the registers of the dates, and find that it has returned exactly as the 500th year was completed” (1st Epistle of Clement, chap. xxv.). Surely the evidence here should satisfy Paley as to the truth of this story: “the open day,” “flying in the sight of all men,” the priests inspecting the registers,
Eusebius tells us of a man, named Sanctus, who was tortured until his body “was one continued wound, mangled and shrivelled, that had entirely lost the form of man;” and, when the tormentors began again on the same day, he “recovered the former shape and habit of his limbs” ("Eccles. Hist,” bk. v., chap. i.). He then was sent to the amphitheatre, passing down the lane of scourgers, was dragged about and lacerated by the wild beast, roasted in an iron chair, and after this was “at last dispatched!” Other accounts, such as that of a man scourged till his bones were “bared of the flesh,” and then slowly tortured, are given as history, as though a man in that condition would not speedily bleed to death. But it is useless to give more of these foolish stories, which weary us as we toil through the writings of the early Church. Well may Mosheim say that the “Apostolic Fathers, and the other writers, who, in the infancy of the Church, employed their pens in the cause of Christianity, were neither remarkable for their learning nor their eloquence” ("Eccles. Hist,” p. 32). Thoroughly unreliable as they are, they are useless as witnesses of supposed miraculous events; and, in relating ordinary occurrences, they should not be depended upon in any matter of importance, unless they be corroborated by more trustworthy historians.
The last point Paley urges in support of his proposition is, that the accounts contained in “the historical Books of the New Testament” are “deserving of credit as histories,” and that such is “the situation of the authors to whom the four Gospels are ascribed that, if any one of the four be genuine, it is sufficient for our purpose.” This brings us, indeed, to the crucial point of our investigation, for, as we can gain so little information from external
The positions which we here lay down are:—
a. That forgeries bearing the names of Christ, and of the apostles, and of the early Fathers, were very common in the primitive Church.
b. That there is nothing to distinguish the canonical from the apocryphal writings.
c. That it is not known where, when, by whom, the canonical writings were selected.
d. That before about A.D. 180 there is no trace of four Gospels among the Christians.
e. That before that date Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not selected as the four evangelists.
f. That there is no evidence that the four Gospels mentioned about that date were the same as those we have now.
g. That there is evidence that two of them were not the same.
h. That there is evidence that the earlier records were not the Gospels now esteemed canonical.
i. That the books themselves show marks of their later origin.
j. That the language in which they are written is presumptive evidence against their authenticity.
k. That they are in themselves utterly unworthy of credit, from (1) the miracles with which they abound, (2) the numerous contradictions of each by the others, (3) the fact that the story of the hero, the doctrines, the miracles, were current long before the supposed dates of the Gospels; so that these Gospels are simply a patchwork composed of older materials.
Paley begins his argument by supposing that the first and fourth Gospels were written by the apostles Matthew and John, “from personal knowledge and recollection” ("Evidences,” p. 87), and that they must therefore be either true, or wilfully false; the latter being most improbable, as they would then be “villains for no end but to teach honesty, and martyrs without the least prospect of honour or advantage” (Ibid, page 88). But supposing that Matthew and John wrote some Gospels, we should need proof that the Gospels which we have, supposing them to be copies of those thus written, have not been much altered since they left the apostles’ hands. We should next ask how Matthew can report from “personal knowledge and recollection” all that comes in his Gospel before he was called from his tax-gathering, as well as many incidents at which he was not present? and whether his reliability as a witness is not terribly weakened by his making no distinction between what was fact within his own knowledge, and what was simple hearsay? Further, we remark that some of the teaching is the reverse of teaching “honesty,” and that such instruction as Matt. v. 39-42 would, if accepted, exactly suit “villains;” that the extreme glorification of the master would naturally be reflected upon “the twelve” who followed him, and the authority of the writers would thereby be much increased and confirmed; that pure moral teaching on some points is no guarantee of the morality of the teacher, for a tyrant, or an ambitious priest, would naturally wish to discourage crime of some kinds in those he desired to rule; that such tyrant or priest could find no better creed to serve his purpose than meek, submissive, non-resisting, heaven-seeking Christianity. Thus we find Mosheim saying of Constantine: “It is, indeed, probable that this prince perceived the admirable tendency of the Christian doctrine and precepts to promote the stability of government, by preserving the citizens in their obedience to the reigning powers, and in the practice of those virtues that render a State happy” ("Eccles. Hist,” p. 87). We discover Charlemagne enforcing Christianity among the Saxons by sword and fire, hoping that it would, among other things, “induce them to submit more tamely to the government of the Franks” (Ibid, p. 170). And we see missionaries among the savages usurping “a despotic dominion over their obsequious proselytes” (Ibid, p. 157); and “St. Boniface,” the “apostle of Germany,” often employing “violence and terror, and sometimes artifice and fraud, in order to multiply the number of Christians” (Ibid, p. 169). Thus do “villains” very often “teach honesty.” Nor is it true that these apostles were “martyrs [their martyrdom being unproved] without the least prospect of honour or advantage;” on the contrary, they desired to know what they would get by following Jesus. “What shall we have, therefore?... Ye which have followed me shall sit upon twelve thrones” (Matt.
A. That forgeries, bearing the names of Christ, of the apostles, and of the early Fathers, were very common in the primitive Church.
“The opinions, or rather the conjectures, of the learned concerning the time when the books of the New Testament were collected into one volume, as also about the authors of that collection, are extremely different. This important question is attended with great and almost insuperable difficulties to us in these latter times” (Mosheim’s “Eccles. Hist.,” p. 31). These difficulties arise, to a great extent, from the large number of forgeries, purporting to be writings of Christ, of the apostles, and of the apostolic Fathers, current in the early Church. “For, not long after Christ’s ascension into heaven, several histories of his life and doctrines, full of pious frauds and fabulous wonders, were composed by persons whose intentions, perhaps, were not bad, but whose writings discovered the greatest superstition and ignorance. Nor was this all; productions appeared which were imposed upon the world by fraudulent men, as the writings of the holy apostles” (Ibid, p. 31). “Another erroneous practice was adopted by them, which, though it was not so universal as the other, was yet extremely pernicious, and proved a source of numberless evils to the Christian Church. The Platonists and Pythagoreans held it as a maxim, that it was not only lawful, but even praiseworthy, to deceive, and even to use the expedient of a lie, in order to advance the cause of truth and piety. The Jews, who lived in Egypt, had learned and received this maxim from them, before the coming of Christ, as appears incontestably from a multitude of ancient records; and the Christians were infected from both these sources with the same pernicious error, as appears from the number of books attributed falsely to great
The following list will give some idea of the number of the apocryphal writings from which the four Gospels, and other books of the New Testament, finally emerge as canonical:—
GOSPELS.
1. Gospel according to the Hebrews. 2.
Gospel written by Judas Iscariot. 3. Gospel of
Truth, made use of by the Valentinians. 4. Gospel
of Peter. 5. Gospel according to the Egyptians.
6. Gospel of Valentinus. 7. Gospel of Marcion.
8. Gospel according to the Twelve Apostles. 9.
Gospel of Basilides. 10. Gospel of Thomas (extant).
11. Gospel of Matthias. 12. Gospel of Tatian.
13. Gospel of Scythianus. 14. Gospel of
Bartholomew. 15. Gospel of Apelles. 16.
Gospels published by Lucianus and Hesychius 17.
Gospel of Perfection. 18. Gospel of Eve. 19.
Gospel of Philip. 20. Gospel of the Nazarenes
(qy. same as first) 21. Gospel of the Ebionites.
22. Gospel of Jude. 23. Gospel of Encratites.
24. Gospel of Cerinthus. 25. Gospel of Merinthus.
26. Gospel of Thaddaeus. 27. Gospel of Barnabas.
28. Gospel of Andrew. 29. Gospel of the
Infancy (extant). 30. Gospel of Nicodemus, or
Acts of Pilate and Descent
of Christ to the Under World
(extant).
31. Gospel of James, or Protevangelium (extant).
32. Gospel of the Nativity of Mary (extant).
33. Arabic Gospel of the Infancy (extant). 34.
Syriac Gospel of the Boyhood of our Lord Jesus (extant).
MISCELLANEOUS.
35. Letter to Agbarus by Christ (extant). 36.
Letter to Leopas by Christ (extant). 37. Epistle
to Peter and Paul by Christ. 38. Epistle by Christ
produced by Manichees. 39. Hymn by Christ (extant).
40. Magical Book by Christ. 41. Prayer by
Christ (extant). 42. Preaching of Peter. 43.
Revelation of Peter. 44. Doctrine of Peter.
45. Acts of Peter. 46. Book of Judgment
by Peter. 47. Book, under the name of Peter,
forged by Lentius. 48. Preaching of Peter and
Paul at Rome. 49. The Vision, or Acts of Paul
and Thecla. 50. Acts of Paul. 51. Preaching
of Paul. 52. Piece under name of Paul, forged
by an “anonymous writer in Cyprian’s
time.”
53. Epistle to the Laodiceans under name of Paul
(extant). 54. Six letters to Seneca under name
of Paul (extant). 55. Anabaticon or Revelation
of Paul. 56. The traditions of Matthias. 57.
Book of James. 58. Book, under name of James,
forged by Ebionites. 59. Acts of Andrew, John,
and Thomas. 60. Acts of John. 61. Book,
under name of John, forged by Ebionites. 62.
Book under name of John. 63. Book, under name
of John, forged by Lentius. 64. Acts of Andrew.
65. Book under name of Andrew. 66. Book,
under name of Andrew, by Naxochristes and Leonides.
67. Book under name of Thomas. 68. Acts
of Thomas. 69. Revelation of Thomas. 70.
Writings of Bartholomew. 71. Book, under name
of Matthew, forged by Ebionites. 72. Acts of
the Apostles by Leuthon, or Seleucus. 73. Acts
of the Apostles used by Ebionites. 74. Acts of
the Apostles by Lenticius. 75. Acts of the Apostles
used by Manichees. 76. History of the Twelve
Apostles by Abdias (extant). 77. Creed of the
Apostles (extant). 78. Constitutions of the Apostles
(extant). 79. Acts, under Apostles’ names,
by Leontius. 80. Acts, under Apostles’
The above are collected from Jones’ On the Canon, Supernatural Religion, Eusebius, Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History, Cowper’s Apocryphal Gospels, Dr. Giles’ Christian Records, and the Apostolic Fathers.
After reading this list, the student will be able to appreciate the value of Paley’s argument, that, “if it had been an easy thing in the early times of the institution to have forged Christian writings, and to have obtained currency and reception to the forgeries, we should have had many appearing in the name of Christ himself” ("Evidences,” p. 106). Paley acknowledges “one attempt of this sort, deserving of the smallest notice;” and, in a note, adds three more of those mentioned above. Let us see what the evidence is of the genuineness of the letter to Agbarus, the “one attempt” in question, as given by Eusebius. Agbarus, the prince of Edessa, reigning “over the nations beyond the Euphrates with great glory,” was afflicted with an incurable disease, and, hearing of Jesus, sent to him to entreat deliverance. The letter of Agbarus is carried to Jesus, “at Jerusalem, by Ananias, the courier,” and the answer of Jesus, also written, is returned by the same hands. The letter of Jesus runs as follows, and is written in Syriac: “Blessed art thou, O Agbarus, who, without seeing me, hast believed in me! For it is written concerning me, that they who have seen me will not believe, that they who have not seen me may believe and live. But in regard to what thou hast written, that I should come to thee, it is necessary that I should fulfil all things here, for which I have been sent. And, after this fulfilment, thus to be received again by Him that sent me.
We have already noticed the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, and pointed out the numerous forgeries circulated under their names, and the consequent haze hanging over all the early Christian writers, until we reach the time of Justin Martyr. Thus we entirely destroy the whole basis of Paley’s argument, that “the historical books of the New Testament ... are quoted, or alluded to, by a series of Christian writers, beginning with those who were contemporary with the Apostles, or who immediately followed them” ("Evidences,” page 111;) for we have no certain writings of any such contemporaries. In dealing with the positions f. and h., we shall seek to prove that in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers—taking
B. “That there is nothing to distinguish the canonical from the apocryphal writings.” “Their pretences are specious and plausible, for the most part going under the name of our Saviour himself, his apostles, their companions, or immediate successors. They are generally thought to be cited by the first Christian writers with the same authority (at least, many of them) as the sacred books we receive. This Mr. Toland labours hard to persuade us; but, what is more to be regarded, men of greater merit and probity have unwarily dropped expressions of the like nature. Everybody knows (says the learned Casaubon against Cardinal Baronius) that Justin Martyr, Clemens Alexandrinus, Tertullian, and the rest of the primitive writers, were wont to approve and cite books which now all men know to be apocryphal. Clemens Alexandrinus (says his learned annotator, Sylburgius) was too much pleased with apocryphal writings. Mr. Dodwell (in his learned dissertation on Irenaeus) tells us that, till Trajan, or, perhaps, Adrian’s time, no canon was fixed; the supposititious pieces of the heretics were received by the faithful, the apostles’ writings bound up with theirs, and indifferently used in the churches. To mention no more, the learned Mr. Spanheim observes, that Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen very often cite apocryphal books under the express name of Scripture.... How much Mr. Whiston has enlarged the Canon of the New Testament, is sufficiently known to the learned among us. For the sake of those who have not perused his truly valuable books I would observe, that he imagines the ‘Constitutions of the Apostles’ to be inspired, and of greater authority than the occasional writings of single Apostles and Evangelists. That the two Epistles of Clemens, the Doctrine of the Apostles, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the second book of Esdras, the Epistles of Ignatius, and the Epistle of Polycarp, are to be reckoned among the sacred authentic books of the New Testament; as also that the Acts of Paul, the Revelation, Preaching, Gospel and Acts of Peter, were sacred books, and, if they were extant, should be of the same authority as any of the rest” (J. Jones, on the “Canon,” p. 4-6). This same learned writer further says: “That many, or most of the books of the New Testament, have been rejected by heretics in the first ages, is also certain. Faustus Manichaeus and his followers are said to have rejected all the New Testament, as
If recognition by the early writers be taken as a proof of the authenticity of the works quoted, many apocryphal documents must stand high. Eusebius, who ranks together the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Revelation of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Institutions of the Apostles, and the Revelation of John (now accounted canonical) says that these were not embodied in the Canon (in his time) “notwithstanding that they are recognised by most ecclesiastical writers” ("Eccles. Hist.,” bk. iii., chap. xxv.). The Canon, in his time, was almost the same as at present, but the canonicity of the epistles of James and Jude, the 2nd of Peter, the 2nd and 3rd of John, and the Revelation, was disputed even as late as when he wrote. Irenaeus ranks the Pastor of Hermas as Scripture; “he not only knew, but also admitted the book called Pastor” (Ibid, bk. v., chap. viii.). “The Pastor of Hermas is another work which very nearly secured permanent canonical rank with the writings of the New Testament. It was quoted as Holy Scripture by the Fathers, and held to be divinely inspired, and it was publicly read in the churches. It has place with the Epistle of Barnabas in the Sinaitic Codex, after the canonical books” ("Supernatural Religion,” vol. i., p. 261).
The two Epistles of Clement are only “preserved to us in the Codex Alexandrinus, a MS. assigned by the most competent judges to the second half of the fifth, or beginning of the sixth century, in which these Epistles follow the books of the New Testament. The second Epistle ... thus shares with the first the honour of a canonical position in one of the most ancient codices of the New Testament” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. i., p. 220). These epistles are, also, amongst those mentioned in the Apostolic Canons. “Until a comparatively late date this [the first of Clement] Epistle was quoted as Holy Scripture” (Ibid, p. 222). Origen quotes the Epistle of Barnabas as Scripture, and calls it a “Catholic Epistle” (Ibid, p. 237), and this same Father regards the Shepherd of Hermas as also divinely inspired. (Norton’s “Genuineness of the Gospels,” vol. i., p. 341). Gospels, other than the four canonical, are quoted as authentic by the earliest Christian writers, as we shall see in establishing position h; thus destroying Paley’s contention ("Evidences,” p. 187) that there are no quotations from apocryphal writings in the Apostolical Fathers, the fact being that such quotations are sown throughout their supposed writings.
It is often urged that the expression, “it is written,” is enough to prove that the quotation following it is of canonical authority.
“Now with regard to the value of the expression, ‘it is written,’ it may be remarked that in no case could its use, in the Epistle of Barnabas, indicate more than individual opinion, and it could not, for reasons to be presently given, be considered to represent the opinion of the Church. In the very same chapter in which the formula is used in connection with the passage we are considering, it is also employed to introduce a quotation from the Book of Enoch, [Greek: peri hou gegraptai hos Henoch legei], and elsewhere (c. xii.) he quotes from another apocryphal book as one of the prophets.... He also quotes (c. vi.) the apocryphal book of Wisdom as Holy Scripture, and in like manner several unknown works. When it is remembered that the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, the Pastor of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas itself, and many other apocryphal works have been quoted by the Fathers as Holy Scripture, the distinctive value of such an expression may be understood” (Ibid, pp. 242, 243). “The first Christian writers ... quote ecclesiastical books from time to time as if they were canonical” (Westcott on “The Canon,” p. 9). “In regard to the use of the word [Greek: gegraptai], introducing the quotation, the same writer [Hilgenfeld] urges reasonably enough that it cannot surprise us at a time when we learn from Justin Martyr that the Gospels were read regularly at public worship [or rather, that the memorials of the Apostles were so read]; it ought not, however, to be pressed too far as involving a claim to special divine inspiration, as the same word is used in the epistle in regard to the apocryphal book of Enoch; and it is clear, also, from Justin, that the Canon of the Gospels was not yet formed, but only forming” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” Rev. W. Sanday, p. 73. Ed. 1876). Yet, in spite of all this, Paley says, “The phrase, ‘it is written,’ was the very form in which the Jews quoted their Scriptures. It is not probable, therefore, that he would have used this phrase, and without qualification, of any books but what had acquired a kind of Scriptural authority” ("Evidences,” p. 113). Tischendorf argues on Paley’s lines and says that “it was natural, therefore, to apply this form of expression to the Apostles’ writings, as soon as they had been placed in the Canon with the books of the Old Testament. When we find, therefore, in ancient ecclesiastical writings, quotations from the Gospels introduced with this formula, ’it is written,’ we must infer that, at the time when the expression was used, the Gospels were certainly treated as of equal authority with the books of the Old Testament” ("When Were Our Gospels Written?” p. 89. Eng. Ed., 1867). Dr. Tischendorf, if he believe in his own argument, must greatly enlarge his Canon of the New Testament.
Paley’s further plea that “these apocryphal writings were not read in the churches of Christians” ("Evidences,” p. 187) is thoroughly false. Eusebius tells us of the Pastor of Hermas: “We know that it has been already in public use in our churches” ("Eccles. Hist.,” bk. iii., ch. 3). Clement’s Epistle “was publicly read in the churches at the Sunday meetings of Christians” ("Sup. Rel,” vol. i., p. 222). Dionysius of Corinth mentions this same early habit of reading any valued writing in the churches: “In this same letter he mentions that of Clement to the Corinthians, showing that it was the practice to read in the churches, even from the earliest times. ‘To-day,’ says he, ’we have passed the Lord’s holy-day, in which we have read your epistle, in reading which we shall always have our minds stored with admonition, as we shall, also, from that written to us before by Clement’” (Eusebius’ “Eccles. Hist.,” bk. iv., ch. 23). So far is “reading in the churches” to be accepted as a proof, even of canonicity, much less of genuineness, that Eusebius remarks that “the disputed writings” were “publicly used by many in most of the churches” (Ibid, bk. iii., ch. 31). Paley then takes as a further mark of distinction, between canonical and uncanonical, that the latter “were not admitted into their volume” and “do not appear in their catalogues,” but we have already seen that the only MS. copy of Clement’s first Epistle is in the Codex Alexandrinus (see ante p. 246), while the Epistle of Barnabas and the Pastor of Hermas find their place in the Sinaitic Codex (see ante p. 246); the second Epistle of Clement is also in the Codex Alexandrinus, and both epistles are in the Apostolic constitutions (see ante p. 247). The Canon of Muratori—worthless as it is, it is used as evidence by Christians—brackets the Apocalypse of John and of Peter ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. ii., p. 241). Canon Westcott says: “‘Apocryphal’ writings were added to manuscripts of the New Testament, and read in churches; and the practice thus begun continued for a long time. The Epistle of Barnabas was still read among the ‘apocryphal Scriptures’ in the time of Jerome; a translation of the Shepherd of Hermas is found in a MS. of the Latin Bible as late as the fifteenth century. The spurious Epistle to the Laodicenes is found very commonly in English copies of the Vulgate from the ninth century downwards, and an important catalogue of the Apocrypha of the New Testament is added to the Canon of Scripture subjoined to the Chronographia of Nicephorus, published in the ninth century” ("On the Canon,” pp. 8, 9). Paley’s fifth distinction, that they “were not noticed by their [heretical] adversaries” is as untrue as the preceding ones, for even the fragments of “the adversaries” preserved in Christian documents bear traces of reference to the apocryphal writings, although, owing to the orthodox custom of destroying unorthodox books, references of any sort by heretics are difficult to find. Again, Paley
But there is another class of evidence relied upon by Christians, wherewith they seek to build up an impassable barrier between their sacred books and the dangerous uncanonical Scriptures, namely, the intrinsic difference between them, the dignity of the one, and the puerility of the other. Of the uncanonical Gospels Dr. Ellicott writes: “Their real demerits, their mendacities, their absurdities, their coarseness, the barbarities of their style, and the inconsequence of their narratives, have never been excused or condoned” ("Cambridge Essays,” for 1856, p. 153, as quoted in introduction of “The Apocryphal Gospels,” by B.H. Cowper, p. x. Ed. 1867). “We know before we read them that they are weak, silly, and profitless—that they are despicable monuments even of religious fiction” (Ibid, p. xlvii). How far are such harsh expressions consonant with fact? It is true that many of the tales related are absurd, but are they more absurd than the tales related in the canonical Gospels? One story, repeated with variations, runs as follows: “This child Jesus, being five years old, was playing at the crossing of a stream, and he collected the running waters into pools, and immediately made them pure, and by his word alone he commanded them. And having made some soft clay, he fashioned out of it twelve sparrows; and it was the Sabbath when he did these things. And there were also many other children playing with him. And a certain Jew, seeing what Jesus did, playing on the Sabbath, went
C. That it is not known where, when, by whom, the canonical writings were selected. Tremendously damaging to the authenticity of the New Testament as this statement is, it is yet practically undisputed by Christian scholars. Canon Westcott says frankly: “It cannot be denied that the Canon was formed gradually. The condition of society and the internal relations of the Church presented obstacles to the immediate and absolute determination of the question, which are disregarded now, only because they have ceased to exist. The tradition which represents St. John as fixing the contents of the New Testament, betrays the spirit of a later age” (Westcott “On the Canon,” p. 4). “The track, however, which we have to follow is often obscure and broken. The evidence of the earliest Christian writers is not only uncritical and casual, but is also fragmentary” (Ibid, p. 11). “From the close of the second century, the history of the Canon is simple, and its proof clear... Before that time there is more or less difficulty in making out the details of the question.... Here, however, we are again beset with peculiar difficulties. The proof of the Canon is embarrassed both by the general characteristics of the age in which it was fixed, and by the particular form of the evidence on which it first depends. The spirit of the ancient world was essentially uncritical” (Ibid, pp. 6-8). In dealing with “the early versions of the New Testament,” Westcott admits that “it is not easy to over-rate the difficulties which beset any inquiry into the early versions of the New Testament” ("On the Canon,” p. 231). He speaks of the “comparatively scanty materials and vague or conflicting traditions” (Ibid). The “original versions of the East and West” are carefully examined by him; the oldest is the “Peshito,” in Syriac—i.e., Aramaean, or Syro-Chaldaic. This must, of course, be only a translation of the Testament, if it be true that the original books were written in Greek. The time when this version was formed is unknown, and Westcott argues that “the very obscurity which hangs over its origin is a proof
D. That before about A.D. 180 there is no trace of FOUR gospels among the Christians. The first step we take in attacking the four canonical gospels, apart from the writings of the New Testament as a whole, is to show that there was no “sacred quaternion” spoken of before about A.D. 180, i.e., the supposed time of Irenaeus. Irenaeus is said to have been a bishop of Lyons towards the close of the second century; we find him mentioned in the letter sent by the Churches of Vienne and Lyons to “brethren in Asia and Phrygia,” as “our brother and companion Irenaeus,” and as a presbyter much esteemed by them ("Eccles. Hist.” bk. v., chs. 1, 4). This letter relates a persecution which occurred in “the 17th year of the reign of the Emperor Antoninus Verus,” i.e., A.D. 177. Paley dates the letter about A.D. 170, but as it relates the persecution of A.D. 177, it is difficult to see how it could be written about seven years before the persecution took place. In that persecution Pothinus, bishop of Lyons, is said to have been slain; he was succeeded by Irenaeus (Ibid bk. v., ch. 5), who, therefore, could not possibly have been bishop before A.D. 177, while he ought probably to be put a year or two later, since time is needed, after the persecution, to send the account of it to Asia by the hands of Irenaeus, and he must be supposed to have returned and to have settled down in Lyons before he
The reasons which compelled Irenaeus to believe that there must be neither less nor more than four Gospels in the Church are so convincing that they deserve to be here put on record. “It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones [sometimes translated ‘corners’ or ‘quarters’] of the world in which we live, and four Catholic spirits, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the pillar and grounding of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh. From which fact it is evident that the Word, the Artificer of all, He that sitteth upon the Cherubim, and contains all things, He who was manifested to men, has given us the Gospel under four aspects, but bound together by one Spirit.... For the Cherubim too were four-faced, and their faces were images of the dispensation of the Son of God.... And, therefore, the Gospels are in accord with these things, among which Christ Jesus is seated” ("Irenaeus,” bk. iii., chap, xi., sec. 8). The Rev. Dr. Giles, writing on Justin Martyr, the great Christian apologist, candidly says: “The very names of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are never mentioned by him—do not occur once in all his works. It is, therefore, childish to say that he has quoted from our existing Gospels, and so proves their existence, as they now are, in his own time.... He has nowhere remarked, like those Fathers of the Church who lived several ages after him, that there are four Gospels of higher importance and estimation than any others.... All this was the creation of a later age, but it is wanting in Justin Martyr, and the defect leads us to the conclusion that our four Gospels had not then emerged from obscurity, but were still, if in being, confounded with a larger mass of Christian traditions which, about this very time, were beginning to be set down in writing” ("Christian Records,” pp. 71, 72).
Had these four Gospels emerged before A.D. 180, we should most certainly find some mention of them in the Mishna. “The Mishna, a collection of Jewish traditions compiled about the year 180, takes no notice of Christianity, though it contains a chapter headed ’De Cultu Peregrino, of strange worship.’ This omission is thought by Dr. Paley to prove nothing, for, says he, ’it cannot be disputed but that Christianity was perfectly well known to the world at this time.’ It cannot, certainly, be disputed that Christianity was beginning to be known to the world, but whether it had yet emerged from the lower classes of persons among whom it originated, may well be doubted. It is a prevailing error, in biblical criticism, to suppose that the whole world was feelingly alive to what was going on in small and obscure parts of it. The existence of Christians was probably known to the compilers of the Mishna in 180, even though they did not deign to notice them, but they could not have had any knowledge of the New Testament, or they would undoubtedly have noticed it; if, at least, we are right in ascribing to it so high a character, attracting (as we know it does) the admiration of every one in every country to which it is carried” (Ibid, p. 35).
There is, however, one alleged proof of the existence of four, and only four, Gospels, put forward by Paley:—Tatian, a follower of Justin Martyr, and who flourished about the year 170, composed a harmony or collection of the Gospels, which he called Diatessaron, of the Four. This title, as well as the work, is remarkable, because it shows, that then, as now, there were four and only four, Gospels in general use with Christians ("Evidences,” pp. 154, 155). Paley does not state, until later, that the “follower of Justin Martyr” turned heretic and joined the Encratites, an ascetic and mystic sect who taught abstinence from marriage, and from meat, etc.; nor does he tell us how doubtful it is what the Diatessaron—now lost—really contained. He blandly assures us that it is a harmony of the four Gospels, although all the evidence is against him. Irenaeus, as quoted by Eusebius, says of Tatian that “having apostatised from the Church, and being elated with the conceit of a teacher, and vainly puffed up as if he surpassed all others,” he invented some new doctrines, and Eusebius further tells us: “Their chief and founder, Tatianus, having formed a certain body and collection of Gospels, I know not how, has given this the title Diatessaron, that is the Gospel by the four, or the Gospel formed of the four” ("Eccles. Hist,” bk. iv., ch. 29). Could Eusebius have written that Tatian formed this, I know not how, if it had been a harmony of the Gospels recognised by the Church when he wrote? and how is it that Paley knows all about it, though Eusebius did not? And still further, after mentioning the Diatessaron, Eusebius says of another of Tatian’s books: “This book, indeed, appears to be the most elegant
E. That, before that date, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are not selected as the four evangelists. This position necessarily follows from the preceding one, since four evangelists could not be selected until four Gospels were recognised. Here, again, Dr. Giles supports the argument we are building up. He says: “Justin Martyr never once mentions by name the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This circumstance is of great importance; for those who assert that our four canonical Gospels are contemporary records of our Saviour’s ministry, ascribe them to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and to no other writers. In this they are, in a certain sense, consistent; for contemporary writings [? histories] are very rarely anonymous. If so, how could they be proved to be contemporary? Justin Martyr, it must be remembered, wrote in 150; but neither he, nor any writer before him, has alluded, in the most remote degree, to four specific Gospels, bearing the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Let those who think differently produce the passages in which such mention is to be found” ("Christian Records,” Rev. Dr. Giles, p. 73). Two of these names had, however, emerged a little earlier, being mentioned as evangelists by Papias, of Hierapolis. His testimony will be fully considered below in establishing position g.
F. That there is no evidence that the four Gospels mentioned about that date were the same as those we have now. This brings us to a most important point in our examination; for we now attack the very key of the Christian position—viz., that, although the Gospels be not mentioned by name previous to Irenaeus, their existence can yet be conclusively proved by quotations from them, to be found in the writings of the Fathers who lived before Irenaeus. Paley says: “The historical books of the New Testament—meaning thereby the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles—are quoted, or alluded to, by a series of Christian writers, beginning with those who were contemporary with the Apostles or who immediately followed them, and proceeding in close and regular succession from their time to the present.” And he urges that “the medium of proof stated in this proposition is, of all others, the most unquestionable, the least liable to any practices of fraud, and is not diminished by the lapse of ages” ("Evidences,” pp. 111, 112). The writers brought in evidence are: Barnabas, Clement, Hermas, Ignatius, Polycarp, Papias, Justin Martyr, Hegesippus, and the epistle from Lyons and Vienne. Before examining the supposed quotations in as great detail as our space will allow, two or three preliminary remarks are needed on the value of this offered evidence as a whole.
In the first place, the greater part of the works brought forward as witnesses are themselves challenged, and their own dates are unknown; their now accepted writings are only the residuum of a mass of forgeries, and Dr. Giles justly says: “The process of elimination, which gradually reduced the so-called writings of the first century from two folio volumes to fifty slender pages, would, in the case of any other profane works, have prepared the inquirer for casting from him, with disgust, the small remnant, even if not fully convicted of spuriousness; for there is no other case in record of so wide a disproportion between what is genuine and what is spurious” ("Christian Records,” p. 67). Their testimony is absolutely worthless until they are themselves substantiated; and from the account given of them above (pp 214-221, and 232-235), the student is in a position to judge of the value of evidence depending on the Apostolic Fathers. Professor Norton remarks: “When we endeavour to strengthen this evidence by appealing to the writings ascribed to Apostolical Fathers, we, in fact, weaken its force. At the very extremity of the chain of evidence, where it ought to be strongest, we are attaching defective links, which will bear no weight” ("Genuineness of the Gospels,” vol. i., p. 357). Again, supposing that we admit these witnesses, their repetition of sayings of Christ, or references to his life, do not—in the absence of quotations specified by them as taken from Gospels written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—prove that, because similar sayings or actions are recorded in the present canonical Gospels, therefore, these latter existed in their days, and were in their hands. Lardner says on this point: “Here is, however, one difficulty, and ’tis a difficulty which may frequently occur, whilst we are considering these very early writers, who were conversant with the Apostles, and others who had seen or heard our Lord; and were, in a manner, as well acquainted with our Saviour’s doctrine and history as the Evangelists themselves, unless their quotations or allusions are very express and clear. The question, then, here is, whether Clement in these places refers to words of Christ, written and recorded, or whether he reminds the Corinthians of words of Christ, which he and they might have heard from the Apostles, or other eye-and-ear-witnesses of our Lord. Le Clerc, in his dissertation on the four Gospels, is of opinion that Clement refers to written words of our Lord, which were in the hands of the Corinthians, and well known to them. On the other hand, I find, Bishop Pearson thought, that Clement speaks of words which he had heard from the Apostles themselves, or their disciples. I certainly make no question but the three first Gospels were writ before this time. And I am well satisfied that Clement might refer to our written Gospels, though he does not exactly agree with them in expression. But whether he does refer to them is not easy to determine
Yet, again, admitting these writers as witnesses, and allowing that they quote from the same Gospels, their quotations only prove that the isolated phrases they use were in the Gospels of their day, and are also in the present ones; and many such cases might occur in spite of great variations in the remainder of the respective Gospels, and would by no means prove that the Gospels they used were identical with ours. If Josephus, for instance, had ever quoted some sentences of Socrates recorded by Plato, that quotation, supposing that Josephus were reliable, would prove that Plato and Socrates both lived before Josephus, and that Plato wrote down some of the sayings of Socrates; but it would not prove that a version of Plato in our hands to-day was identical with that used by Josephus. The scattered and isolated passages woven in by the Fathers in their works would fail to prove the identity of the Gospels of the second century with those of the nineteenth, even were they as like parallel passages in the canonical Gospels as they are unlike them.
It is “important,” says the able anonymous writer of “Supernatural Religion,” “that we should constantly bear in mind that a great number of Gospels existed in the early Church which are no longer extant, and of most of which even the names are lost. We will not here do more than refer, in corroboration of this fact, to the preliminary statement of the author of the third Gospel: ’Forasmuch as many ([Greek: polloi]) have taken in hand to set forth a declaration of those things which are surely believed among us, etc.’ It is, therefore, evident that before our third synoptic was written, many similar works were already in circulation. Looking at the close similarity of the large portions of the three synoptics, it is almost certain that
We will now turn to the witness of Paley’s Apostolic Fathers, bearing always in mind the utter worthlessness of their testimony; worthless as it is, however, it is the only evidence Christians have to bring forward to prove the identity of their Gospels with those [supposed to have been] written in the first century. Let us listen to the opinion given by Bishop Marsh: “From the Epistle of Barnabas, no inference can be deduced that he had read any part of the New Testament. From the genuine epistle, as it is called, of Clement of Rome, it may be inferred that Clement had read the first Epistle to the Corinthians. From the Shepherd of Hermas no inference whatsoever can be drawn. From the Epistles of Ignatius, it may be concluded that he had read St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, and that there existed in his time evangelical writings, though it cannot be shown that he has quoted from them. From Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, it appears that he had heard of St. Paul’s Epistle to that community, and he quotes a passage which is in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, and another which is in the Epistle to the Ephesians; but no positive conclusion can be drawn with respect to any other epistle, or any of
Westcott, while claiming in the Apostolic Fathers a knowledge of most of the epistles, writes very doubtfully as to their knowledge of the Gospels (see above p. 264), and after giving careful citations of all possible quotations, he sums up thus: “1. No evangelic reference in the Apostolic Fathers can be referred certainly to a written record. 2. It appears most probable from the form of the quotations that they were derived from oral tradition. 3. No quotation contains any element which is not substantially preserved in our Gospels. 4. When the text given differs from the text of our Gospels it represents a later form of the evangelic tradition. 5. The text of St. Matthew corresponds more nearly than the other synoptic texts with the quotations and references as a whole” ("On the Canon,” p. 62). There appears to be no proof whatever of conclusions 3 and 4, but we give them all as they stand. But we will take these Apostolic Fathers one by one, in the order used by Paley.
BARNABAS. We have already quoted Bishop Marsh and Dr. Giles as regards him. There is “nothing in this epistle worthy of the name of evidence even of the existence of our Gospels” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. i., p. 260). The quotation sometimes urged, “There are many called, few chosen,” is spoken of by Westcott as a “proverbial phrase,” and phrases similar in meaning and manner may be found in iv. Ezra, viii. 3, ix. 15 ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. i., p. 245); in the latter work the words occur in a relation similar to that in which we find them in Barnabas; in both the judgment is described, and in both the moral drawn is that there are many lost and few saved; it is the more likely that the quotation is taken from the apocryphal work, since many other quotations are drawn from it throughout the epistle. The quotation “Give to every one that asketh thee,” is not found in the supposed oldest MS., the Codex Sinaiticus, and is a later interpolation, clearly written in by some transcriber as appropriate to the passage in Barnabas. The last supposed quotation, that Christ
CLEMENT OF ROME.—“Tischendorf, who is ever ready to claim the slightest resemblance in language as a reference to new Testament writings, admits that although this Epistle is rich in quotations from the Old Testament, and here and there that Clement also makes use of passages from Pauline Epistles, he nowhere refers to the Gospels” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. i. pp. 227, 228). The Christian Evidence Society, through Mr. Sanday, thus criticises Clement: “Now what is the bearing of the Epistle of Clement upon the question of the currency and authority of the Synoptic Gospels? There are two passages of some length which are, without doubt, evangelical quotations, though whether they are derived from the Canonical Gospels or not may be doubted” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” page 61). After balancing the arguments for and against the first of these passages, Mr. Sanday concludes: “Looking at the arguments on both sides, so far as we can give them, I incline, on the whole, to the opinion that Clement is not quoting from our Gospels; but I am quite aware of the insecure ground on which this opinion rests. It is a nice balance of probabilities, and the element of ignorance is so large that the conclusion, whatever it is, must be purely provisional. Anything like confident dogmatism on the subject seems to me entirely out of place. Very much the same is to be said of the second passage” (Ibid, p. 66).
The quotations in Clement, apparently from some other evangelic work, will be noted under head h, and these are those cited in Paley.
HERMAS.—Tischendorf relinquishes this work also as evidence for the Gospels. Lardner writes: “In Hermas are no express citations of any books of the New Testament” ("Credibility,” vol. i. pt. 2, p. 116). He thinks, however, that he can trace “allusions to” “words of Scripture.” Westcott says that “The Shepherd contains no definite quotation from either Old or New Testament” ("On the Canon,” p. 197); but he also thinks that Hermas was “familiar with” some records of “Christ’s teaching.” Westcott, however, does not admit Hermas as an Apostolic Father at all, but places him in the middle of the second century. “As regards the direct historical evidence for the genuineness of the Gospels, it is of no importance. No book is cited in it by name. There are no evident quotations from the Gospels” (Norton’s “Genuineness of the Gospels,” vol. i, pp. 342, 343).
IGNATIUS.—It would be wasted time to trouble about Ignatius at all, after knowing the vicissitudes through which his supposed works have passed (see ante pp. 217-220); and Paley’s references are such vague “quotations” that they may safely be left to the judgment of the reader. Tischendorf, claiming two and three phrases in it, says somewhat confusedly: “Though we do not wish to give to these references a decisive value, and though they do not exclude all doubt as to their applicability to our Gospels, and more particularly to that of St. John, they nevertheless undoubtedly bear traces of such a reference” ("When were our Gospels Written,” p. 61, Eng. ed.). This conclusion refers, in Tischendorf, to Polycarp, as well as to Ignatius. In these Ignatian Epistles, Mr. Sanday only treats the Curetonian Epistles (see ante, p. 218) as genuine, and in these he finds scarcely any coincidences with the Gospels. The parallel to Matthew x. 16, “Be ye, therefore, wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” is doubtful, as it is possible “that Ignatius may be quoting, not directly from our Gospel, but from one of the original documents (such as Ewald’s hypothetical ’Spruch-Sammlung’), out of which our Gospel was composed” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” p. 78). An allusion to the “star” of Bethlehem may have, “as it appears to have, reference to the narrative of Matt, ii... [but see, ante, p. 233, where the account given of the star is widely different from the evangelic notice]. These are (so far as I am aware) the only coincidences to be found in the Curetonian version” (Ibid, pp. 78, 79).
POLYCARP.—This epistle lies under a heavy weight of suspicion, and has besides little worth analysing as possible quotations from the Gospels. Paley quotes, “beseeching the all-seeing God not to lead us into temptation.” Why not finish the passage? Because, if he had done so, the context would have shown that it was not a quotation from a gospel identical with our own—“beseeching the all-seeing God not to lead us into temptation, as the Lord hath said, The spirit, indeed, is willing, but the flesh is weak.” If this be a quotation at all, it is from some lost gospel, as these words are nowhere found thus conjoined in the Synoptics.
Thus briefly may these Apostolic Fathers be dismissed, since their testimony fades away as soon as it is examined, as a mist evaporates before the rays of the rising sun. We will call up Paley’s other witnesses.
PAPIAS.—In the fragment preserved by Eusebius there is no quotation of any kind; the testimony of Papias is to the names of the authors of two of the Gospels, and will be considered under g.
JUSTIN MARTYR.—We now come to the most important of the supposed witnesses, and, although students must study the details of the controversy in larger works, we will endeavour to put briefly before them the main reasons why Freethinkers reject Justin Martyr as bearing evidence to the authenticity of the present Gospels, and in this resume we begin by condensing chapter iii. of “Supernatural Religion”, vol. i., pp. 288-433, so far as it bears on our present position. Justin Martyr is supposed to have died about A.D. 166, having been put to death in the reign of Marcus Aurelius; he was by descent a Greek, but became a convert to Christianity, strongly tinged with Judaism. The longer Apology, and the Dialogue with Trypho, are the works chiefly relied upon to prove the authenticity. The date of the first Apology is probably about A.D. 147; the Dialogue was written later, perhaps between A.D. 150 and 160. In these writings Justin quotes very copiously from the Old Testament, and he also very frequently refers to facts of Christian history, and to sayings of Jesus. Of these references, for instance, some fifty occur in the first Apology, and upwards of seventy in the Dialogue with Trypho; a goodly number, it will be admitted, by means of which to identify the source from which he quotes. Justin himself frequently and distinctly says that his information and quotations are derived from the “Memoirs of the Apostles,” but, except upon one occasion, which we shall hereafter consider, when he indicates Peter, he never mentions an author’s name. Upon examination it is found that, with only one or two brief exceptions, the numerous quotations from these “Memoirs” differ more or less widely from parallel passages in our Synoptic Gospels, and in many cases differ in the same respects as similar quotations found in other writings of the second century, the writers of which are known to have made use of uncanonical Gospels; and further, that these passages are quoted several times, at intervals, by Justin, with the same variations. Moreover, sayings of Jesus are quoted from the “Memoirs” which are not found in our Gospels at all, and facts in the life of Jesus, and circumstances of Christian history, derived from the same source, not only are not found in our Gospels, but are in contradiction with them. Various theories have been put forward by Christian apologists to lessen the force of these objections. It has been suggested that Justin quoted from memory, condensed or combined to suit his immediate purpose; that the “Memoirs” were a harmony of the
Dr. Giles speaks very strongly against Paley’s distortion of Justin Martyr’s testimony, complaining: “The works of Justin Martyr do not fall in the way of one in a hundred thousand of our countrymen. How is it, then, to be deprecated that erroneous statements should be current about him! How is it to be censured that his testimony should be changed, and he should be made to speak a falsehood!” ("Christian Records,” p. 71). Dr. Giles then argues that Justin would have certainly named the books and their authors had they been current and reverenced in his time; that there were numberless Gospels current at that date; that Justin mentions occurrences that are only found related in such apocryphal Gospels. He then compares seventeen passages in Justin Martyr with parallel passages in the Gospels, and concludes that Justin “gives us Christ’s sayings in their traditionary forms, and not in the words which are found in our four Gospels.” We will select two, to show his method of criticising, translating the Greek, instead of giving it, as he does, in the original. In the Apology, ch. xv., Justin writes: “If thy right eye offend thee, cut it out, for it is profitable for thee to enter into the kingdom of heaven with one eye, than having two to be thrust into the everlasting fire.” “This passage is very like Matt. v. 29: ’If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’ But it is also like Matt, xviii. 9: ’And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell-fire.’ And it bears an equal likeness to Mark ix. 47: ’And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out; it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell-fire.’ Yet, strange to say, it is not identical in words with
HEGESIPPUS was a Jewish Christian, who, according to Eusebius, flourished about A.D. 166. Soter is said to have succeeded Anicetus in the bishopric of Rome in that year, and Hegesippus appears to have been in Rome during the episcopacy of both. He travelled about from place to place, and his testimony to the Gospels is that “in every city the doctrine prevails according to what is declared by the law, and the prophets, and the Lord” ("Eccles. Hist,” bk. iv., ch. 22). Further, Eusebius quotes the story of the death of James, the Apostle, written by Hegesippus, and in this James is reported to have said to the Jews: “Why do ye now ask me respecting Jesus, the Son of Man? He is now sitting in the heavens, on the right hand of great power, and is about to come on the clouds of heaven.” And when he is being murdered, he prays, “O Lord God and Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (see “Eccles. Hist.,” bk. ii., ch. 23). The full absurdity of regarding this as a testimony to the Gospels will be seen when it is remembered that it is implied thereby that James, the brother and apostle of Christ, knew nothing of his words until he read them in the Gospels, and that he was murdered before the Gospel of Luke, from which alone he could quote the prayer of Jesus, is thought, by most Christians, to have been written. One other fragment of Hegesippus is preserved by Stephanus
EPISTLE OF THE CHURCHES OF LYONS AND VIENNE.—Paley quietly dates this A.D. 170, although the persecution it describes occurred in A.D. 177 (see ante, pp. 257, 258). The “exact references to the Gospels of Luke and John and to the Acts of the Apostles,” spoken of by Paley ("Evidences,” p. 125), are not easy to find. Westcott says: “It contains no reference by name to any book of the New Testament, but its coincidences of language with the Gospels of St. Luke and St. John, with the Acts of the Apostles, with the Epistles of St. Paul to the Romans, Corinthians (?), Ephesians, Philippians, and the First to Timothy, with the first Catholic Epistles of St. Peter and St. John, and with the Apocalypse, are indisputable” ("On the Canon,” p. 336). Unfortunately, neither Paley nor Dr. Westcott refer us to the passages in question, Paley quoting only one. We will, therefore, give one of these at full length, leaving our readers to judge of it as an “exact reference:” “Vattius Epagathus, one of the brethren who abounded in the fulness of the love of God and man, and whose walk and conversation had been so unexceptionable, though he was only young, shared in the same testimony with the elder Zacharias. He walked in all the commandments and righteousness of the Lord blameless, full of love to God and his neighbour” ("Eusebius,” bk. v., chap. i). This is, it appears, an “exact reference” to Luke i. 6, and we own we should not have known it unless it had been noted in “Supernatural Religion.” Tischendorf, on the other hand, refers the allusion to Zacharias to the Protevangelium of James ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. ii., p. 202).
The second “exact reference” is, that Vattius had “the Spirit more abundantly than Zacharias;” “such an unnecessary and insidious comparison would scarcely have been made had the writer known our Gospel and regarded it as inspired Scripture” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. ii., p. 204). The quotation “that the day would come when everyone that slayeth you will think he is doing God a service,” is one of those isolated sayings referred to Christ which might be found in any account of his works, or might have been handed down by tradition. This epistle is the last witness called by Paley, prior to Irenaeus, and might, indeed, fairly be regarded as contemporary with him.
Although Paley does not allude to the “Clementines,” books falsely ascribed to Clement of Rome, these are sometimes brought to prove the existence of the Gospels in the second century. But they are useless as witnesses, from the fact that the date at which they were themselves written is a matter of dispute. “Critics variously date the composition of the original Recognitions from about the middle of the second century to the end of the third, though the majority are agreed in placing them, at least, in the latter century” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. ii., p. 5). “It is unfortunate that there are not sufficient materials for determining the date of the Clementine Homilies” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” Rev. W. Sanday, p. 161). Part of the Clementines, called the “Recognitions,” is useless as a basis for argument, for these “are only extant in a Latin translation by Rufinus, in which the quotations from the Gospels have evidently been assimilated to the canonical text which Rufinus himself uses” (Ibid). Of the rest, “we are struck at once by the small amount of exact coincidence, which is considerably less than that which is found in the quotations from the Old Testament” (Ibid, p. 168). “In the Homilies there are very numerous quotations of expressions of Jesus, and of Gospel History, which are generally placed in the mouth of Peter, or introduced with such formula as ‘The teacher said,’ ‘Jesus said,’ ’He said,’ ‘The prophet said,’ but in no case does the author name the source from which these sayings and quotations are derived.... De Wette says, ’The quotations of evangelical works and histories in the pseudo-Clementine writings, from their free and unsatisfactory nature, permit only uncertain conclusions as to their written source.’ Critics have maintained very free and conflicting views regarding that source. Apologists, of course, assert that the quotations in the Homilies are taken from our Gospels only. Others ascribe them to our Gospels, with a supplementary apocryphal work, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, or the Gospel according to Peter. Some, whilst admitting a subsidiary use of some of our Gospels, assert that the author of the Homilies employs, in preference, the Gospel according to Peter; whilst others, recognising also the similarity of the phenomena presented by these quotations with those of Justin’s, conclude that the author does not quote our Gospels at all, but makes use of the Gospel according to Peter, or the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Evidence permitting of such divergent conclusions manifestly cannot be of a decided character” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. ii., pp. 6, 7).
On Basilides (teaching c. A.D. 135) and Valentinus (A.D. 140), two of the early Gnostic teachers, we need not delay, for there is scarcely anything left of their writings, and all we know of them is drawn from the writings of their antagonists; it is claimed that they knew and made use of the canonical Gospels, and Canon Westcott urges this view of Basilides, but the writer of “Supernatural Religion” characterises this plea “as unworthy of a scholar, and only calculated to mislead readers who must generally be ignorant of the actual facts of the case” (vol. ii., p. 42). Basilides says that he received his doctrine from Glaucias, the “interpreter of Peter,” and “it is apparent, however, that Basilides, in basing his doctrines on these apocryphal books as inspired, and upon tradition, and in having a special Gospel called after his own name, which, therefore, he clearly adopts as the exponent of his ideas of Christian truth, absolutely ignores the canonical Gospels altogether, and not only does not offer any evidence for their existence, but proves that he did not recognise any such works as of authority. Therefore, there is no ground whatever for Tischendorf’s assumption that the Commentary of Basilides ‘On the Gospel’ was written upon our Gospels, but that idea is, on the contrary, negatived in the strongest way by all the facts of the case” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. ii., pp. 45, 46). Both with this ancient heretic, as with Valentinus, it is impossible to distinguish what is ascribed to him from what is ascribed to his followers, and thus evidence drawn from either of them is weaker even than usual.
Marcion, the greatest heretic of the second century, ought to prove a useful witness to the Christians if the present Gospels had been accepted in his time as canonical. He was the son of the Christian Bishop of Sinope, in Pontus, and taught in Rome for some twenty years, dating from about A.D. 140. Only one Gospel was acknowledged by him, and fierce has been the controversy as to what this Gospel was. It is only known to us through his antagonists, who generally assert that the Gospel used by him was the third Synoptic, changed and adapted to suit his heretical views. Paley says, “This rash and wild controversialist published a recension or chastised edition of St. Luke’s Gospel” ("Evidences,” p. 167), but does not condescend to give us the smallest reason for so broad an assertion. This question has, however, been thoroughly debated among German critics, the one side maintaining that Marcion mutilated Luke’s Gospel, the other that Marcion’s Gospel was earlier than Luke’s, and that Luke’s was made from it; while some, again, maintained that both were versions of an older original. From this controversy we may conclude that there was a strong likeness between Marcion’s Gospel and the third Synoptic, and that it is impossible to know which is the earlier of the two. The resolution of the question is made hopeless by the fact that “the
It is scarcely worth while to refer to the supposed evidence of the “Canon of Muratori,” since the date of this fragment is utterly unknown. In the year 1740 Muratori published this document in a collection of Italian antiquities, stating that he had found it in the Ambrosian library at Milan, and that he believed that the MS. from which he took it had been in existence about 1000 years. It is not known by whom the original was written, and it bears no date: it is but a fragment, commencing: “at which, nevertheless, he was present, and thus he placed it. Third book of the Gospel according to Luke.” Further on it speaks of “the fourth of the Gospels of John.” The value of the evidence of an anonymous fragment of unknown date is simply nil. “It is by some affirmed to be a complete treatise on the books received by the Church, from which fragments have been lost; while others consider it a mere fragment itself. It is written in Latin, which by some is represented as most corrupt, whilst others uphold it as most correct. The text is further rendered almost unintelligible by every possible inaccuracy of orthography and grammar, which is ascribed diversely to the transcriber, to the translator, and to both. Indeed, such is the elastic condition of the text, resulting from errors and obscurity of every imaginable description, that, by means of ingenious conjectures, critics are able to find in it almost any sense they desire. Considerable difference of opinion exists as to the original language of the fragment, the greater number of critics maintaining that the composition is a translation from the Greek, while others assert it to have been originally written in Latin. Its composition is variously attributed to the Church of Africa, and to a member of the Church in Rome” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. ii., pp. 238, 239). On a disputable scrap of this kind no argument can be based; there is no evidence even to show that the thing was in existence at all until Muratori published it; it is never referred to by any early writer, nor is there a scintilla of evidence that it was known to the early Church.
After a full and searching analysis of all the documents, orthodox and heretical, supposed to have been written in the first two centuries after Christ, the author of “Supernatural Religion” thus sums up:—“After having exhausted the literature and the testimony bearing on the point, we have not found a single distinct trace of any one of those Gospels during the first century and a half after the death of Jesus.... Any argument for the mere existence of our Synoptics based upon their supposed rejection by heretical leaders and sects has the inevitable disadvantage, that the very testimony which would show their existence would oppose their authenticity. There is no evidence of their use by heretical leaders, however, and no direct reference to them by any writer, heretical or orthodox, whom we have examined” (vol. ii., pp, 248, 249). Nor is the fact of this blank absence of evidence of identity all that can be brought to bear in support of our proposition, for there is another fact that tells very heavily against the identity of the now accepted Gospels with those that were current in earlier days, namely, the noteworthy charge brought against the Christians that they changed and altered their sacred books; the orthodox accused the unorthodox of varying the Scriptures, and the heretics retorted the charge with equal pertinacity. The Ebionites maintained that the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew was the only authentic Gospel, and regarded the four Greek Gospels as unreliable. The Marcionites admitted only the Gospel resembling that of Luke, and were accused by the orthodox of having altered that to suit themselves. Celsus, writing against Christianity, formulates the charge: “Some believers, like men driven by drunkenness to commit violence on themselves, have altered the Gospel history, since its first composition, three times, four times, and oftener, and have re-fashioned it, so as to be able to deny the objections made against it” ("Origen Cont. Celsus,” bk. ii., chap. 27, as quoted by Norton, p. 63). Origen admits “that there are those who have altered the Gospels,” but pleads that it has been done by heretics, and that this “is no reproach against true Christianity” (Ibid). Only, most reverend Father of the Church, if heretics accuse orthodox, and orthodox accuse heretics, of altering the Gospels, how are we to be sure that they have come down unaltered to us? Clement of Alexandria notes alterations that had been made. Dionysius, of Corinth, complaining of the changes made in his own writings, bears witness to this same fact: “It is not, therefore, matter of wonder if some have also attempted to adulterate the sacred writings of the Lord, since they have attempted the same in other works that are not to be compared with these” ("Eusebius,” bk. iv., ch. 23). Faustus, the Manichaean, the great opponent of Augustine, writes: “For many things have been inserted by your ancestors in the speeches of our Lord, which, though put forth under his name, agree not with his
The truth is, that in those days, when books were only written, the widest door was opened to alterations, additions, and omissions; incidents or remarks written, perhaps, in the margin of the text by one transcriber, were transferred into the text itself by the next copyist, and were thereafter indistinguishable from the original matter. In this way the celebrated text of the three witnesses (1 John, v. 7) is supposed to have crept into the text. Dealing with this, in reference to the New Testament, Eichhorn points out that it was easy to alter a manuscript in transcribing it, and that, as manuscripts were written for individual use, such alterations were considered allowable, and that the altered manuscript, being copied in its turn, such changes passed into circulation unnoticed. Owners of manuscripts added to them incidents of the life of Christ, or any of his sayings, which they had heard of, and which were not recorded in their own copies, and thus the story grew and grew, and additional legends were incorporated with it, until the historical basis became overlaid with myth. The vast number of readings in the New Testament, no less—according to Dr. Angus, one of the present Revision Committee—than 100,000, prove the facility with which variations were introduced into MSS. by those who had charge of them. In heated and angry controversy between different schools of monks appeals were naturally made to the authority of the Scriptures, and what more likely—indeed more certain—than that these monks should introduce variations into their MS. copies favouring the positions for which they were severally contending?
The most likely way in which the Gospels grew into their present forms is, that the various traditions relating to Christ were written down in different places for the instruction of catechumens, and that these, passing from hand to hand, and mouth to mouth, grew into a large mass of disjointed stories, common to many churches. This mass was gradually sifted, arranged, moulded into historical shape, which should fit into the preconceived notions of the Messiah, and thus the four Gospels gradually grew into their present form, and were accepted on all hands as the legacy of the apostolic age. No careful reader can avoid noticing the many coincidences of expression between the three synoptics, and deducing from these
Canon Westcott writes of the three Synoptic Gospels, that “they represent, as is shown by their structure, a common basis, common materials, treated in special ways. They evidently contain only a very small selection from the words and works of Christ, and yet their contents are included broadly in one outline. Their substance is evidently much older than their form.... The only explanation of the narrow and definite limit within which the evangelic history (exclusive of St. John’s Gospel) is confined, seems to be that a collection of representative words and works was made by an authoritative body, such as the Twelve, at a very early date, and that this, which formed the basis of popular teaching, gained exclusive currency, receiving only subordinate additions and modifications. This Apostolic Gospel—the oral basis, as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere, of the Synoptic narratives—dates unquestionably from the very beginning of the Christian society” ("On the Canon,” preface, pp. xxxviii., xxxix). Mr. Sanday speaks of the “original documents out of which our Gospel was composed” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” page 78), and he writes: “Doubtless light would be thrown upon the question if we only knew what was the common original of the two Synoptic texts” (Ibid, p. 65). “The first three Gospels of our Canon are remarkably alike, their writers agree in relating the same thing, not only in the same manner, but likewise in the very words, as must be evident to every common reader who has paid the slightest attention to the subject.... [Here follow a number of parallel passages from the three synoptics.] The agreement between the three evangelists in these extracts is remarkable, and leads to the question how such coincidences could arise between works which, from the first years of Christianity until the beginning of the seventeenth century, were understood to be perfectly independent, and to have had each a separate and independent origin. The answer to this question may at last, after more than a hundred years of discussion, be given with tolerable certainty, if we are allowed to judge of this subject according to the rules of reason and common sense, by which all other such difficulties are resolved. ’The most eminent critics’—we quote from ‘Marsh’s Michaelis,’ vol. iii., part 2, page 170—’are at present decidedly of opinion that one of the two suppositions must necessarily be adopted—either that the three evangelists copied from each other, or that all the three drew from a common source, and that the notion of an absolute independence, in respect to the composition of our three first Gospels, is no longer tenable’.... The alternative between a common source and copying from each other, is now no longer in the same position as in the days of Michaelis or Bishop Marsh. To decide between the two is no longer difficult. No one will now admit that either of the four evangelists has copied from the other three, 1. Because in
Eichhorn’s theory of the growth of the Gospels is one very generally accepted; he considers that the present Gospels were not in common circulation before the end of the second century, and that before that time other Gospels were in common use, differing considerably from each other, but resting on a common foundation of historical fact; all these, he thinks, were versions of an “original Gospel,” a kind of rough outline of Christ’s life and discourses, put together without method or plan, and one of these would be the “Memoirs of the Apostles,” of which Justin Martyr speaks. The Gospels, as we have them, are careful compilations made from these earlier histories, and we notice that, at the end of the second, and the beginning of the third, centuries, the leaders of the Church endeavour to establish the authority of the four more methodically arranged Gospels, so as to check the reception of other Gospels, which were relied upon by heretics in their controversies.
Strauss gives a careful resume of the various theories of the formation of the Gospels held by learned men, and shows how the mythic theory was gradually developed and strengthened; “according to George, mythus is the creation of a fact out of an idea” ("Life of Jesus,” Strauss, vol. i., p. 42; ed. 1846), and the mythic theory supposes that the ideas of the Messiah were already in existence, and that the story of the Gospels grew up by the translation of these ideas into facts: “Many of the legends respecting him [Jesus] had not to be newly invented; they already existed in the popular hope of the Messiah, having been mostly derived, with various modifications, from the Old Testament, and had merely to be transferred to Jesus, and accommodated to his character and doctrines. In no case could it be easier for the person who first added any new feature to the description of Jesus, to believe himself its genuineness, since his argument would be: Such and such things must have happened to the Messiah; Jesus was the Messiah; therefore, such and such things happened to him” (Ibid, pp. 81, 82). “It is not, however, to be imagined that any one individual seated himself at his table to invent them out of his own head, and write them down as he would a poem; on the contrary, these narratives, like all other legends, were fashioned by degrees, by steps which can no longer be traced; gradually acquired consistency, and at length received a fixed form in our written Gospels” (Ibid, p. 35). From the considerations here adduced—the lack of quotations from our Gospels in the earliest Christian writers, both orthodox and heretical; the accusations against each made by the other of introducing chants and modifications in the Gospels; the facility with which MSS. were altered before the introduction of printing; the coincidences between the Gospels, showing that they are drawn from a common source; from all these facts we finally conclude that there is no evidence that the Four Gospels mentioned about that date (A.D. 180) were the same as those we have now.
G. That there is evidence that two of them were not the same. “The testimony of Papias is of great interest and importance in connection with our inquiry, inasmuch as he is the first ecclesiastical writer who mentions the tradition that Matthew and Mark composed written records of the life and teaching of Jesus; but no question has been more continuously contested than that of the identity of the works to which he refers with our actual Canonical Gospels. Papias was Bishop of Hierapolis, in Phrygia, in the first half of the second century, and is said to have suffered martyrdom under Marcus Aurelius about A.D. 164-167. About the middle of the second century he wrote a work in five books, entitled ‘Exposition of the Lord’s Oracles,’ which, with the exception of a few fragments preserved to us chiefly by Eusebius and Irenaeus, is unfortunately no longer extant. This work was less based on written records of the teaching of Jesus than on that which Papias had been able to collect from tradition, which he considered more authentic, for, like his contemporary, Hegesippus, Papias avowedly prefers tradition to any written works with which he was acquainted” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. i., pp. 449, 450). Before giving the testimony attributed to Papias, we must remark two or three points which will influence our judgment concerning him. Paley speaks of him, on the authority of Irenaeus, as “a hearer of John, and companion of Polycarp” ("Evidences,” p. 121); but Paley omits to tell us that Eusebius points out that Irenaeus was mistaken in this statement, and that Papias “by no means asserts that he was a hearer and an eye-witness of the holy Apostles, but informs us that he received the doctrines of faith from their intimate friends” ("Eccles. Hist.”, bk. iii., ch. 39). Eusebius subjoins the passage from Papias, which states that “if I met with any one who had been a follower of the elders anywhere, I made it a point to inquire what were the declarations of the elders: what was said by Andrew, Peter, or Philip; what by Thomas, James, John, Matthew, or any other of the disciples of our Lord; what was said by Aristion, and the Presbyter John, disciples of the Lord” (Ibid). Seeing that Papias died between A.D. 164 and 167, and that the disciples of Jesus were Jesus’ own contemporaries, any disciple that Papias heard, when a boy, would have reached a portentous age, and, between the age of the disciple and the youth of Papias, the reminiscences would probably be of a somewhat hazy character. It is to Papias that we owe the wonderful account of the vines (ante, p. 234) of the kingdom of God, given by Irenaeus, who states that “these things are borne witness to in writing by Papias, the hearer of John, and a companion of Polycarp.... And he says, in addition, ’Now these things are credible to believers.’ And he says that ’when the traitor, Judas, did not give credit to them, and put the question, How then can things about to bring forth so abundantly
Of his earlier theory of translation by Matthew, Davidson justly says: “It is easy to perceive its gratuitous character. It is a clumsy expedient, devised for the purpose of uniting two conflicting opinions—for saving the credit of ancient testimony, which is on the side of a Hebrew original, and of meeting, at the same time, the difficulties supposed to arise from the early circulation of the Greek.... The advocates of the double hypothesis go in the face of ancient testimony. Besides, they believe that Matthew wrote in Hebrew, for the use of Jewish converts. Do they also suppose his Greek Gospel to have been intended for the same class? If so, the latter was plainly unnecessary: one Gospel was sufficient for the same persons. Or do they believe that the second edition of it was designed for Gentile Christians? if so, the notion is contradicted by internal evidence, which proves that it was written specially for Jews. In short, the hypothesis is wholly untenable, and we are surprised that it should have found so many advocates” ("Introduction to the New Testament,” p. 52). The fact is, that no one knows who was the translator—or, rather, the writer—of the Greek Gospel. Jerome honestly says that it is not known who translated it into Greek. Dr. Davidson has the following strange remarks: “The author indeed must ever remain unknown; but whether he were an apostle or not, he must have had the highest sanction in his proceeding. His work was performed with the cognisance, and under the eye of Apostolic men. The reception it met with proved the general belief of his calling, and competency to the task. Divine superintendence was exercised over him” (Ibid, pp. 72, 73). It is difficult to understand how Dr. Davidson knows that divine superintendence was exercised over an unknown individual. Dr. Giles argues against the hypothesis that our Greek Gospel is a translation: “If St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, why has the original perished? The existing Greek text is either a translation of the Hebrew, or it is a separate work. But it cannot be a translation, for many reasons, 1. Because there is not the slightest evidence on record of its being a translation. 2. Because it is unreasonable to believe that an authentic work—written by inspiration—would perish, or be superseded by, an unauthenticated translation—for all translations are less authentic than their originals. 3. Because there are many features in our present Gospel according to St. Matthew, which are common to the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke; which would lead to the inference that the latter are translations also. Besides, there is nothing in the Gospel of St. Matthew, as regards its style or construction, that would lead to the inference of its being a translation, any more than all the other books contained in the New Testament. For these reasons we conclude that the ‘Hebrew Gospel of St. Matthew,’ which perhaps no one has seen since Pantaenus, who
H. That there is evidence that the earlier records were not the Gospels now esteemed Canonical. This position is based on the undisputed fact that the “Evangelical quotations” in early Christian writings differ very widely from sentences of somewhat similar character in the Canonical Gospels, and also from the circumstance that quotations not to be found in the Canonical Gospels are found in the writings referred to. Various theories are put forward, as we have already seen, to account for the differences
MATTHEW. CLEMENT. LUKE.
Especially remembering the word of the Lord Jesus when he spake, teaching gentleness and long-suffering. For this he said: v. 7. Blessed are Pity he, that he may be vi. 36. Be ye, the pitiful, for they pitied: forgive, that it therefore, shall be pitied. may be forgiven unto merciful, as vi. 14. For if ye you. your Father also forgive men their As ye do, so shall it is merciful. trespasses, your heavenly be done unto you; vi. 37. Acquit, Father will as ye give, so shall it and ye shall be also forgive you. be given unto you; as acquitted. vii. 12. All things, ye judge, so shall it vi. 31. And as ye therefore, whatsoever be judged unto you; would that they ye would that as ye are kind, so should do unto men should do unto shall kindness be you, do ye also you, even so do ye shown unto you; with unto them unto them. that measure ye mete, likewise. vii. 2. For with with it shall it be vi. 18. Give, and what judgment ye measured unto you. it shall be given judge, ye shall be unto you. judged, and with vi. 37. And judgePage 89
what measure ye not, and ye shall mete it shall be not be judged. For measured unto you. with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again.
The English, as here given, represents as closely as possible both the resemblances and the differences of the Greek text. What reader, in reading this, can believe that Clement picked out a bit here and a bit there from the Canonical Gospels, and then wove them into one connected whole, which he forthwith represented as said thus by Christ? To the unprejudiced student the hypothesis will, at once, suggest itself—there must have been some other document current in Clement’s time, which contained the sayings of Christ, from which this quotation was made. Only the exigencies of Christian apologetic work forbid the general adoption of so simple and so natural a solution of the question. Mr. Sanday says: “Doubtless light would be thrown upon the question if we only knew what was the common original of the two Synoptic texts ... The differences in these extra-Canonical quotations do not exceed the differences between the Synoptic Gospels themselves; yet by far the larger proportion of critics regard the resemblances in the Synoptics as due to a common written source used either by all three or by two of them” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” p. 65). It is clear that Jesus could not have said these passages in the words given by Matthew, Clement, and Luke, repeating himself in three different forms, now connectedly, now in fragments; two, at least, out of the three must give an imperfect report. Mr. Sanday, by speaking of “the common original of the two Synoptic texts,” clearly shows that he does not regard the Synoptic version as original, and thereby helps to buttress our contention, that the Gospels we have now are not the only ones that were current in the early Church, and that they had no exclusive authority—in fact, that they were not “Canonical.” Further on, Mr. Sanday, referring to Polycarp, says: “I cannot but think that there has been somewhere a written version different from our Gospels to which he and Clement have had access ... It will be observed that all the quotations refer either to the double or treble Synoptics, where we have already proof of the existence of the saying in question in more than a single form, and not to those portions that are peculiar to the individual Evangelists. The author of ‘Supernatural Religion’ is, therefore, not without reason when he says that they may be derived from other collections than our actual Gospels. The possibility cannot be excluded” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” pp. 86, 87). The other passage from Clement is yet more unlike anything in the Canonical Gospels: in chap. xlvi. we read:—
MATTHEW. CLEMENT. LUKE. MARK. xxvi. 24. He said: xvii. 1. xiv. 21. Woe to Woe to that Woe to that man; Woe through that man by whom man by whom well for him whom they the Son of man is the Son of man that he had not (offences) delivered up, well is delivered been born, than come. for him if that up; well for that he should 2. It were man had not been him if that offend one of my advantageous for born. man had not elect; better him that a great ix. 42. And been born. for him a millstone were whosoever shall xviii. 6. But millstone should hanged around offend one of whoso shall be attached (to his neck, and he these little ones offend one of him), and he cast in the sea, which believe in these little should be than that he me, it is well for ones which drowned in the should offend him rather that a believe in me, it sea, than that one of these great millstone were profitable he should offend little ones. were hanged about for him that a one of my little his neck, and he great millstone ones. thrown in the sea. were suspended upon his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
“This quotation is clearly not from our Gospels, but is derived from a different written source.... The slightest comparison of the passage with our Gospels is sufficient to convince any unprejudiced mind that it is neither a combination of texts, nor a quotation from memory. The language throughout is markedly different, and, to present even a superficial parallel, it is necessary to take a fragment of the discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper, regarding the traitor who should deliver him up (Matt. xxvi. 24), and join it to a fragment of his remarks in connection with the little child whom he set in the midst (xviii. 6)” ("Sup. Rel.,” vol. i., pp. 233, 234).
In Polycarp a passage is found much resembling that given from Clement, chap, xiii., but not exactly reproducing it, which is open to the same criticism as that passed on Clement.
If we desire to prove that Gospels other than the Canonical were in use, the proof lies ready to our hands. In chap. xlvi. of Clement we read: “It is written, cleave to the holy, for they who cleave to them shall be made holy.” In chap. xliv.: “And our Apostles knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be contention regarding the office of the episcopate.” The author of “Supernatural Religion” gives us passages somewhat resembling this. He said: “There shall be schisms and heresies,” from Justin Martyr ("Trypho,” chap. xxxv): “There shall be, as the Lord said, false apostles, false prophets, heresies, desires for supremacy,” from the “Clementine Homilies”: “From these came the false Christs, false prophets, false apostles, who divided the unity of the Church,” from Hegesippus (vol. i. p. 236).
In Barnabas we read, chap. vi.: “The Lord saith, He maketh a new creation in the last times. The Lord saith, Behold I make the first as the last.” Chap. vii.: Jesus says: “Those who desire to behold me, and to enter into my kingdom, must, through tribulation and suffering, lay hold upon me.”
In Ignatius we find: Ep. Phil., chap, vii.: “But the Spirit proclaimed, saying these words: Do ye nothing without the Bishop.” “There is, however, one quotation, introduced as such, in this same Epistle, the source of which Eusebius did not know, but which Origen refers to ’the Preaching of Peter,’ and Jerome seems to have found in the Nazarene version of the ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews.’ This phrase is attributed to our Lord when he appeared ’to those about Peter and said to them, Handle me, and see that I am not an incorporeal spirit.’ But for the statement of Origen, that these words occurred in the ’Preaching of Peter,’ they might have been referred without much difficulty to Luke xxiv. 39” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” p. 81). And they most certainly would have been so referred, and dire would have been Christian wrath against those who refused to admit these words as a proof of the canonicity of Luke’s Gospel in the time of Ignatius.
If, turning to Justin Martyr, we take one or two passages resembling other passages to be found in the Canonical, we shall then see the same type of differences as we have already remarked in Clement. In the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the first “Apology” we find a collection of the sayings of Christ, most of which are to be read in the Sermon on the Mount; in giving these Justin mentions no written work from which he quotes. He says: “We consider it right, before giving you the promised explanation, to cite a few precepts given by Christ himself” ("Apology,” chap. xiv). If these had been taken from Gospels written by Apostles, is it conceivable that Justin would not have used their authority to support himself?
MATTHEW. JUSTIN.
v. 46. For if ye should love And of
our love to all, he them which love you, what reward
taught this: If ye love them have ye? do
not even the that love ye, what new things
publicans the same? do ye? for even
fornicators do
this;
but I say unto you: Pray
v. 44. But I say unto you, for your
enemies, and love them love your enemies, bless them
which hate you, and bless them which curse
you, do good to which curse you, and offer
them which hate you, and pray prayer for them
which for them which despitefully use despitefully
use you. you and persecute you.
The corresponding passage in Luke is still further from Justin (Luke vi. 32-35). “It will be observed that here again Justin’s Gospel reverses the order in which the parallel passage is found in our synoptics. It does so indeed, with a clearness of design which, even without the actual peculiarities of diction and construction, would indicate a special and different source. The passage varies throughout from our Gospels, but Justin repeats the same phrases in the same order elsewhere” ("Sup. Rel,” v. i. p. 353, note 2).
MATTHEW. JUSTIN.
v. 42. Give thou to him that
He said: Give ye to every one asketh
thee, and from him that that asketh, and from
him that would borrow of thee turn not desireth
to borrow turn not ye thou away.
away: for if ye lend to them
from whom ye
hope to receive,
Luke vi. 34. And if you lend what new
thing do ye? for even to them from whom ye hope to
the publicans do this. receive, what thank
have ye; for sinners also lend to sinners to
But ye, lay not up for yourselves receive as much
again. upon the earth, where moth and
rust do corrupt,
and robbers
Matt. vi. 19, 20. Lay not up for break
through, but lay up for yourselves treasures upon
earth, yourselves in the heavens, where where
moth and rust doth corrupt, neither moth nor rust
doth and where thieves break corrupt.
through and steal. But lay up for yourselves
treasures in heaven, For what is a man profited,
is he where neither moth nor shall
gain the whole world, but rust doth corrupt, and where
destroy his soul? or what shall he thieves
do not break through give in exchange for
it? Lay up, nor steal.
therefore, in the heavens, where
neither most
nor rust doth corrupt.
xvi. 26. For what shall a
man be profited if he shall gain
the whole world, but lose his
soul? or what shall a man give in
exchange for his soul?
This passage is clearly unbroken in Justin, and forms one connected whole; to parallel it from the Synoptics we must go from Matthew v., 42, to Luke vi., 34, then to Matthew vi., 19, 20, off to Matthew xvi. 26, and back again to Matthew vi. 19; is such a method of quotation likely, especially when we notice that Justin, in quoting passages on a given subject (as at the beginning of chap. xv. on chastity), separates the quotations by an emphatic “And,” marking the quotation taken from another place? These passages will show the student how necessary it is that he should not accept a few words as proof of a quotation from a synoptic, without reading the whole passage in which they occur. The coincidence of half a dozen words is no quotation when the context is different, and there is no break between the context and the words relied upon. “It is absurd and most arbitrary to dissect a passage, quoted by Justin as a consecutive and harmonious whole, and finding parallels more or less approximate to its various phrases scattered up and down distant parts of our Gospels, scarcely one of which is not materially different from the reading of Justin, to assert that he is quoting these Gospels freely from memory, altering, excising, combining, and inter-weaving texts, and introverting their order, but nevertheless making use of them and not of others. It is perfectly obvious that such an assertion is
The best way to show the truth of Paley’s contention—that “from Justin’s works, which are still extant, might be collected a tolerably complete account of Christ’s life, in all points agreeing with that which is delivered in our Scriptures; taken indeed, in a great measure, from those Scriptures, but still proving that this account and no other, was the account known and extant in that age” ("Evidences,” p. 77)—will be to give the story from Justin, mentioning every notice of Christ in his works, which gives anything of his supposed life, only omitting passages relating solely to his teaching, such as those given above. The large majority of these are taken from the “Dialogue with Trypho,” a wearisome production, in which Justin endeavours
Christ was the offspring truly brought forth from the Father, before the creation of anything else, the Word begotten of God, before all his works, and he appeared before his birth, sometimes as a flame of fire, sometimes as an angel, as at Sodom, to Moses, to Joshua. He was called by Solomon, Wisdom; and by the Prophets and by Christians, the King, the Eternal Priest, God, Lord, Angel, Man, the Flower, the Stone, the Cornerstone, the Rod, the Day, the East, the Glory, the Rock, the Sword, Jacob, Israel, the Captain, the Son, the Helper, the Redeemer. He was born into the World by the over-shadowing of God the Holy Ghost, who is none other than the Word himself, and produced without sexual union by a virgin of the seed of Jacob, Judah, Phares, Jesse, and David, his birth being announced by an angel, who told the Virgin to call his name Jesus, for he should save his people from their sins. Joseph, the spouse of Mary, desired to put her away, but was commanded in a vision not to put away his wife, the angel telling him that what was in her womb was of the Holy Ghost. At the first census taken in Judaea, under Cyrenius, the first Roman Procurator, he left Nazareth where he lived, and went to Bethlehem, to which he belonged, his family being of the tribe of Judah, and then was ordered to proceed to Egypt with Mary and the child, and remain there until another revelation warned them to return to Judaea. At Bethlehem Joseph could find no lodging in the village, so took up his quarters in a cave near, where Christ was born and placed in a manger. Here he was found by the Magi from Arabia, who had been to Jerusalem inquiring what king was born there, they having seen a star rise in heaven. They worshipped the child and gave him gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and warned by a revelation, went home without telling Herod where they had found the child. So Herod, when Joseph, Mary, and the child had gone into Egypt, as they were commanded, ordered the whole of the children then in Bethlehem to be massacred. Archelaus succeeded Herod, and was succeeded himself by another Herod. The child grew up like all other men, and was a man without comeliness, and inglorious, working as a carpenter, making ploughs and yokes, and when he was thirty years of age, more or less, he went to Jordan to be baptised by John, who was the herald of his approach. When he stepped into the water a fire was kindled in the Jordan, and when he came out of the waterPage 95
the Holy Ghost lighted on him like a dove, and at the same instant a voice came from the heavens: “Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee.” He was tempted by Satan, and of like passions with men; he was spotless and sinless, and the blameless and righteous man; he made whole the lame, the paralytic, and those born blind, and he raised the dead; he was called, because of his mighty works, a magician, and a deceiver of the people. He stood in the midst of his brethren the Apostles, and when living with them sang praises unto God. He changed the names of the sons of Zebedee to Boanerges, and of another of the Apostles to Peter. He ordered his acquaintance to bring him an ass, and the foal of an ass which stood bound to a vine, and he mounted and rode into Jerusalem. He overthrew the tables of the money-changers in the temple. He gave us bread and wine in remembrance of his taking our flesh and of shedding his blood. He took upon him the curses of all, and by his stripes the human race is healed. On the day in which he was to be crucified (elsewhere called the night before) he took three disciples to the hill called Olivet, and prayed; his sweat fell to the ground like drops, his heart and also his bones trembling; men went to the Mount of Olives to seize him; he was seized on the day of the Passover, and crucified during the Passover; Pilate sent Jesus bound to Herod; before Pilate he kept silence; they set Christ on the judgment seat, and said: “Judge us;” he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; his hands and feet were pierced; they cast lots for his vesture, and divided it; they that saw him crucified, shook their heads and mocked him, saying: “Let him who raised the dead save himself.” “He said he was the Son of God; let him come down; let God save him.” He gave up his spirit to the Father, and after he was crucified all his acquaintance forsook him, having denied him. He rose on the third day; he was crucified on Friday, and rose on “the day of the Sun,” and appeared to the Apostles and taught them to read the prophecies, and they repented of their flight, after they were persuaded by himself that he had beforehand warned them of his sufferings, and that these sufferings were prophesied of. They saw him ascend. The rulers in heaven were commanded to admit the King of Glory, but seeing him uncomely and dishonoured they asked, “Who is this King of Glory?” God will keep Christ in heaven until he has subdued his enemies the devils. He will return in glory, raise the bodies of the dead, clothe the good with immortality, and send the bad, endued with eternal sensibility into everlasting fire. He has the everlasting kingdom.
These references to Jesus are scattered up and down through Justin’s writings, without any chronological order, a phrase here, a phrase there; only in one or two instances are two or three things related even in the same chapter. They are arranged here connectedly, as nearly as possible in the usually accepted order,
If we turn to the Clementines, we find, in the same way, passages not to be found in the Canonical Gospels. “And Peter said: We remember that our Lord and Teacher, as commanding us, said: Keep the mysteries for me, and the sons of my house” ("Hom.” xix. chap. 20). “And Peter said: If, therefore, of the Scriptures some are true and some are false, our Teacher rightly said: ‘Be ye good money-changers,’ as in the Scriptures there are some true sayings and some spurious” ("Hom.” ii. chap. 51; see also iii. chap. 50. and xviii. chap. 20). This saying of Christ is found in many of the Fathers. “To those who think that God tempts, as the Scriptures say he [Jesus] said: ’The tempter is the wicked one, who also tempted himself’” ("Hom.” iii. chap. 55).
Of the Clementine “Homilies” Mr. Sanday remarks, “several apocryphal sayings, and some apocryphal details, are added. Thus the Clementine writer calls John a ‘Hemerobaptist,’ i.e., member of a sect which practised daily baptism. He talks about a rumour which became current in the reign of Tiberius, about the ‘vernal equinox,’ that at the same time a King should arise in Judaea who should work miracles, making the blind to see, the lame to walk, healing every disease, including leprosy, and raising the dead; in the incident of the Canaanite woman (whom, with Mark, he calls a Syrophoenician) he adds her name, ‘Justa,’ and that of her daughter ‘Bernice.’ He also limits the ministry of our Lord to one year” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” pp. 167, 168). But it is needless to multiply such passages; three or four would be enough to prove our position: whence were they drawn, if not from records differing from the Gospels now received? We, therefore, conclude that in the numerous Evangelical passages quoted by the Fathers, which are not in the Canonical Gospels, we find evidence that the earlier records were not the Gospels now esteemed Canonical.
I. That the books themselves show marks of their later origin. We should draw this conclusion from phrases scattered throughout the Gospels, which show that the writers were ignorant of local customs, habits, and laws, and therefore could not have been Jews contemporary with Jesus at the date when he is alleged to have lived. We find a clear instance of this ignorance in the mention made by Luke of the census which is supposed to have brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem immediately before the birth of Jesus. If Jesus was born at the time alleged “the Roman census in question must have been made either under Herod the Great, or at the commencement of the reign of Archelaus. This is in the highest degree improbable, for in those countries which were not reduced in formam provinciae, but were governed by regibus sociis, the taxes were levied by these princes, who paid a tribute to the Romans; and this was the state of things in Judaea prior to the deposition of Archelaus.... The Evangelist relieves us from a further inquiry into this more or less historical or arbitrary combination by adding that this taxing was first made when Cyrenius (Quirinus) was Governor of Syria [Greek: haegemoneuontos taes Surias Kuraeniou] for it is an authenticated point that the assessment of Quirinus did not take place either under Herod or early in the reign of Archelaus, the period at which, according to Luke, Jesus was born. Quirinus was not at that time Governor of Syria, a situation held during the last years of Herod by Lentius Saturninus, and after him by Quintilius Varus; and it was not till long after the death of Herod that Quirinus was appointed Governor of Syria. That Quirinus undertook a census of Judaea we know certainly from Josephus, who, however, remarks that he was sent to execute this measure when Archelaus’ country was laid to the province of Syria (compare “Ant.,” bk. xvii. ch. 13, sec. 5; bk. xviii. ch. 1, sec. 1; “Wars of the Jews,” bk. ii. ch. 8, sec. 1; and ch. 9, sec. 1) thus, about ten years after the time at which, according to Matthew and Luke, Jesus must have been born” (Strauss’s “Life of Jesus,” vol. i., pp. 202-204).
The confusion of dates, as given in Luke, proves that the writer was ignorant of the internal history of Judaea and the neighbouring provinces. The birth of Jesus, according to Luke, must have taken place six months after the birth of John Baptist, and as John was born during the reign of Herod, Jesus must also have been born under the same King, or else at the commencement of the reign of Archelaus. Yet Luke says that he was born during the census in Judaea, which, as we have seen just above, took place ten years later. “The Evangelist, therefore, in order to get a census, must have conceived the condition of things such as they were after the deposition of Archelaus; but in order to get a census extending to Galilee, he must have imagined the kingdom to have continued undivided, as in the time of Herod the Great. [Strauss had explained that the reduction of the kingdom of Archelaus into a Roman province did not affect Galilee, which was still ruled by Herod Antipas as an allied prince, and that a census taken by the Roman Governor would, therefore, not extend to Galilee, and could not affect Joseph, who, living at Nazareth, would be the subject of Herod. See, as illustrative of this, Luke xxiii. 6, 7.] Thus he deals in manifest contradictions; or, rather, he has an exceedingly sorry acquaintance with the political relations of that period; for he extends the census not only to the whole of Palestine, but also (which we must not forget) to the whole Roman world” (Strauss’s “Life of Jesus,” vol. i., p. 206).
After quoting one of the passages of Josephus referred to above, Dr. Giles says: “There can be little doubt that this is the mission of Cyrenius which the Evangelist supposed to be the occasion of the visit of Christ’s parents to Bethlehem. But such an error betrays on the part of the writer a great ignorance of the Jewish history, and of Jewish politics; for, if Christ was born in the reign of Herod the Great, no Roman census or enrolment could have taken place in the dominions of an independent King. If, however, Christ was born in the year of the census, not only Herod the Great, but Archelaus, also, his son, was dead. Nay, by no possibility can the two events be brought together; for even after the death of Archelaus, Judaea alone became a Roman province; Galilee was still governed by Herod Antipas as an independent prince, and Christ’s parents would not have been required to go out of their own country to Jerusalem, for the purpose of a census which did not comprise their own country, Galilee. Besides which, it is notorious that the Roman census was taken from house to house, at the residence of each, and not at the birth-place or family rendezvous of each tribe” ("Christian Records,” pp. 120, 121). Another “striking witness to the late composition of the Gospels is furnished by expressions, denoting ideas that could not have had any being in the time of Christ and his disciples, but must have been developed afterwards, at a time when the Christian religion
J. That the language in which they are written is presumptive evidence against their authenticity. We are here dealing with the supposed history of a Jewish prophet written by Jews, and yet we find it written in Greek, a language not commonly known among the Jews, as we learn from the testimony of Josephus: “I have so completely perfected the work I proposed to myself to do, that no other person, whether he were a Jew or a foreigner, had he ever so great an inclination to it, could so accurately deliver these accounts to the Greeks as is done in these books. For those of my own nation freely acknowledge that I far exceed them in the learning belonging to the Jews. I have also taken a great deal of pains to obtain the learning of the Greeks, and understand the elements of the Greek language, although I have so long accustomed myself to speak our own tongue, that I cannot pronounce Greek with sufficient exactness; for our nation does not encourage those that learn the languages of many nations ... on which account, as there have been many who have done their endeavours with great patience to obtain this learning, there have yet hardly been so many as two or three that have succeeded therein, who were immediately well rewarded for their pains” ("Ant.” bk. xx. ch. 11, sec 2). He further tells us that “I grew weary, and went on slowly, it being a large subject, and a difficult thing to translate our history into a foreign and, to us, unaccustomed language” (Ibid, Preface). The chief reason, perhaps, for this general ignorance of Greek was the barbarous aversion of the Rabbis to foreign literature. “No one will be partaker of eternal life who reads foreign literature. Execrable is he, as the swineherd, execrable alike, who teaches his son the wisdom of the Greeks” (translated from Latin translation of Rabbi Akiba, as given in note in Keim’s “Jesus of Nazara,” vol. i. p, 295). It is noteworthy, also, that the Evangelists quote generally from the Septuagint, and that loyal Jews would have avoided doing so, since “the translation of the Bible into Greek had already been the cause of grief, and even of hatred, in Jerusalem” (Ibid, p. 294). In the face of this we are asked to believe that a Galilean fisherman, by the testimony of Acts iv. 13, unlearned and ignorant, outstripped his whole nation, save the “two or three that have succeeded” in learning Greek, and wrote a philosophical and historical treatise in that language. Also that Matthew, a publican, a member of the most degraded class of the Jews, was equally learned, and published a history in the same tongue. Yet these two marvels of erudition were unknown to Josephus, who expressly states that the two or three who had learned Greek, were “immediately well rewarded for their pains.” The argument does not tell against Mark and Luke, as no one knows anything about these two writers, and they may have been Greeks, for anything we know to the contrary. If Mark, however, is to be identified with John Mark, sister’s
K. That they are in themselves utterly unworthy of credit from (1) the miracles with which they abound. (2) The numerous contradictions of each by the others. (3) The fact that the story of the hero, the doctrines, the miracles, were current long before the supposed dates of the Gospels, so that these Gospels are simply a patchwork composed of older materials.
(1) The miracles with which they abound. Paley asks: “Why should we question the genuineness of these books? Is it for that they contain accounts of supernatural events? I apprehend that this, at the bottom, is the real, though secret cause of our hesitation about them; for, had the writings, inscribed with the names of Matthew and John, related nothing but ordinary history, there would have been
We shall argue as against the miraculous accounts of the Gospels—first, that the evidence is insufficient and far below the amount of evidence brought in support of more modern miracles; secondly, that the power to work miracles has been claimed by the Church all through her history, and is still so claimed, and it is, therefore, impossible to mark any period wherein miracles ceased; and, thirdly, that not only are Christian miracles unproven, but that all miracles are impossible, as well as useless if possible.
Paley, arguing for the truth of Christian miracles, and of these only, endeavours to lay down canons which shall exclude all others. Thus, he excludes: “I. Such accounts of supernatural events as are found only in histories by some ages posterior to the transaction.... II. Accounts published in one country of what passed in a distant country, without any proof that such accounts were known or received at home.... III. Transient rumours.... IV. Naked history (fragments, unconnected with subsequent events dependent on the miracles).... V. In a certain way, and to a certain degree, particularity, in names, dates, places, circumstances, and in the order of events preceding or following.... VI. Stories on which nothing depends, in which no interest is involved, nothing is to be done or changed in consequence of believing them.... VII. Accounts which come merely in affirmance of opinions already formed.... It is not necessary to admit as a miracle, what can be resolved into a false perception (such miracles as healing the blind, lame, etc., cannot be reduced under this head), ... or imposture ... or tentative miracles (where, out of many attempts, one succeeds) ... or doubtful (possibly explainable as coincidence, or effect of imagination) ... or exaggeration” ("Evidences,” pp. 199-218). Paley then criticises some miracles alleged by Hume, and argues against them. He very fairly criticises and disposes of them, but fails to see that the same style of argument would dispose of his Gospel ones. The Cardinal de Retz sees, at a church in Saragossa, a man who lighted the lamps, and the canons told him “that he had been several years at the gate with one leg only. I saw him with two.” Paley urges that “it nowhere appears that he (the Cardinal) either examined the limb, or asked the patient, or indeed any one, a single question about the matter” ("Evidences,”
Not only, then, are the miracles rendered doubtful by the dubious character of the records in which they are found, but there is a clear and reasonable explanation why we should expect to find them in any history of a supposed Messiah. Christian apologists appear to have overlooked the statement in the Gospels that Jesus objected to publicity being given to his supposed miracles; the natural conclusion that sceptics draw from this assertion, is that the miracles never took place at all, and that the supposed modesty of Jesus is invented in order to account for the ignorance of the people concerning the alleged marvels. Judge Strange fairly remarks: “The appeal to miracles is a very questionable resort. Now, as Jesus is repeatedly represented to have exhorted those on whose behalf they were wrought to keep the matter secret to themselves, and as when such signs, upon being asked for, were refused to be accorded by him, and the desire to have them was repressed as sinful, it is to be gathered, in spite of the sayings to the contrary, that the writers were aware that there was no such public sense of the occurrence of these marvels as must have attached to them had they really been enacted, and we are left to the conclusion that there were in fact no such demonstrations” ("The Portraiture and Mission of Jesus,” p. 23). Clearly, miracles are useless, as evidence, unless they are publicly performed, and the secresy used by Jesus suggests fraud rather than miraculous power, and savours of the conjuror rather than of the “God.” But, further, there is far stronger evidence for later Church miracles than for those of Christ, or of the apostles, and if evidence in support of miracles is good for anything, these more modern miracles must command our belief. Eusebius relates the following miracle of Narcissus, the thirtieth Bishop of Jerusalem, A.D. 180, as one among many: “Whilst the deacons were keeping the vigils the oil failed them; upon which all the people being very much dejected, Narcissus commanded the men that managed the lights to draw water from a neighbouring well, and to bring it to him.
None can deny that miraculous powers have been claimed by Christian Churches from the time of Christ down to the present day, and that there is no break which can be pointed to as the date at which these powers ceased. “From the first of the Fathers to the last of the Popes a succession of bishops, of saints, and of martyrs, and of miracles, is continued without interruption; and the progress of superstition was so gradual, and almost imperceptible, that we know not in what particular link we should break the chain of tradition. Every age bears testimony to the wonderful events by which it was distinguished; and its testimony appears no less weighty and respectable than that of the preceding generation, till we are insensibly led on to accuse our own inconsistency, if in the eighth or in the twelfth century we deny to the venerable Bede, or to the holy Bernard, the same degree of confidence which, in the second century, we had so liberally granted to Justin or to Irenaeus. If the truth of any of those miracles is appreciated by their apparent use and propriety, every age had unbelievers to convince, heretics to confute, and idolatrous nations to convert; and sufficient motives might always be produced to justify the interposition of heaven. And yet, since every friend to revelation is persuaded of the reality, and every reasonable man is convinced of the cessation, of miraculous powers, it is evident that there must have been some period in which they were either suddenly or gradually withdrawn from the Christian Church. Whatever era is chosen for that purpose, the death of the Apostles, the conversion of the Roman empire, or the extinction of the Arian heresy, the insensibility of the Christians who lived at that time will equally afford a just matter of surprise. They still supported their pretensions after they had lost their power. Credulity performed
Special objection has often been raised against one class of miracles—common to the Gospels and to all miraculous narratives—which has severely taxed the faith even of the Christians themselves—that class, namely, which consists of the healing of those “possessed with devils.” Exorcism has always been a favourite kind of miracle, but, in these days, very few believe in the possibility of possession, and the language of the Evangelists on the subject has consequently given rise to much trouble of mind. Prebendary Row, in a work on “The Supernatural in the New Testament Possible, Credible, and Historical”—one of the volumes issued by the Christian Evidence Society in answer to “Supernatural Religion”—deals fully with this difficulty; it has been urged that possession was simply a form of mania, and on this Mr. Row say: “Now, on the assumption that possession was simple mania, and nothing more, the following suppositions are the only possible ones. First, that our Lord really distinguished between mania and possession; but that the Evangelists have inaccurately reported his words and actions, through the media of their own subjective impressions, or, in short, have attributed to him language that he did not really utter. Second, that our Lord knew that possession was a form of mania, and adopted the current notions of the time in speaking of it, and that the words were really uttered by him. Third, that with similar knowledge, he adopted the language as part of the curative process. Fourth, that he accepted the validity of the distinction, and that it was a real one during those times” ("Supernatural in the New Testament,” pp. 251, 252). Mr. Row argues that: “If possession be mania, there is nothing in the language which the Evangelists have attributed to our Lord which compromises the truthfulness of his character. If, on the other hand, we assume that possession was an objective fact, there is nothing in our existing scientific knowledge of the human mind which proves that the possessions of the New Testament were impossible” (Ibid). Mr. Row rejects the first alternative, and accepts the accuracy of the Evangelic records. But he considers that if possession were simply mania, Jesus, knowing the nature of the disease, might reasonably use language suited to the delusion, as most likely to effect a cure; he could not argue with a maniac that he was under a delusion, but would rightly use whatever method was best fitted to ensure recovery. If this idea be rejected, and the reality of demoniacal possession maintained as most consonant with the behaviour of Jesus, then Mr. Row argues that there is no reason to consider it impossible that either good or evil spirits should be able to influence man, and that psychological science does not warrant us in a denial of the possibility of such influence.
The utter uselessness of miracles—supposing them to be possible—is worthy of remembrance. They must not be accepted as proofs of a divine mission, for false prophets can work them as well as true (Deut. xiii., 1-5; Matt. xxiv., 24; 2 Thess. ii., 9; Rev. xiii., 13-15, etc.) and it may be that God himself works them to deceive (Deut. xiii., 3). Satan can work miracles to authenticate the false doctrines of his emissaries, and there is no test whereby to distinguish the miracle worked by God from the miracle worked by Satan. Hence a miracle is utterly useless, for the credibility of a teacher rests on the morality that he teaches, and if this is good, it is accepted without a miracle to attest its goodness, so that the attesting miracle is superfluous. If it is bad, it is rejected in spite of a miracle to attest its authority, so that the attesting miracle is deceptive. The only use of a miracle might be to attest a revelation of otherwise unknowable facts, which had nothing to do with any moral teaching; and seeing that such revelation could not be investigated, as it dealt with the unknowable, it would be highly dangerous—and, perhaps, blasphemous—to accept it on the faith of the miracle, for it might quite as likely be a revelation made by Satan to injure, as by God to benefit, mankind. Allowing that God and Satan exist, it would seem likely—judging Christianity by its fruits—that the Christian religion is such a malevolent revelation of the evil one.
The objection we raise is, however, of far wider scope than the assertion of the lack of evidence for the New Testament miracles; it is against all, and not only against Christian, miracles. “As far as the impossibility of supernatural occurrences is concerned, Pantheism and Atheism occupy precisely the same grounds. If either of them propounds a true theory of the universe, any supernatural occurrence, which necessarily implies a supernatural agent to bring it about, is impossible, and the entire controversy as to whether miracles have ever been actually performed is a foregone conclusion. Modern Atheism, while it does not venture in categorical terms to affirm that no God exists, definitely asserts that there is no evidence that there is one. It follows that, if there is no evidence that there is a God, there can be no evidence that a miracle ever has been performed, for the very idea of a miracle implies the idea of a God to work one. If, therefore, Atheism is true, all controversy about miracles is useless. They are simply impossible, and to inquire whether an impossible event has happened is absurd. To such a person the historical inquiry, as far as a miracle is concerned, must be a foregone conclusion. It might have a little interest as a matter of curiosity; but even if the most unequivocal evidence could be adduced that an occurrence such as we call supernatural had taken place, the utmost that it could prove would be that some most extraordinary and abnormal fact
(2). The numerous contradictions of each by the others.—We shall here only present a few of the most glaring contradictions in the Gospels, leaving untouched a mass of minor discrepancies. We find the principal of these when we compare the three synoptics with the Fourth Gospel, but there are some irreconcilable differences even between the three. The contradictory genealogies of Christ given in Matthew and Luke—farther complicated, in part, by a third discordant genealogy in Chronicles—have long been the despair of Christian harmonists. “On comparing these lists, we find that between David and Christ there are only two names which occur in both Matthew and Luke—those of Zorobabel and of Joseph, the reputed father of Jesus. In tracing the list downwards from David there would be less difficulty in explaining this, at least, to a certain point, for Matthew follows the line of Solomon, and Luke that of Nathan—both of whom were sons of David. But even in the downward line, on reaching Salathiel, where the two genealogies again come into contact, we find, to our astonishment, that in Luke he is the son of Neri, whilst in Matthew his father’s name is Jechonias. From Zorobabel downwards, the lists are again divergent, until we reach Joseph, who in St. Luke is placed as the son of Heli, whilst in St. Matthew his father’s name is Jacob” ("Christian Records,” Dr. Giles, p. 101). According to Chronicles, Jotham is the great-great-grandson of Ahaziah; according to Matthew, he is his son (admitting that the Ahaziah of Chronicles is the Ozias of Matthew); according to Chronicles, Jechonias is the grandson of Josiah, according to Matthew, he is his son; according to Chronicles,
“If we compare the genealogies of Matthew and Luke together, we become aware of still more striking discrepancies. Some of these differences indeed are unimportant, as the opposite direction of the two tables.... More important is the considerable difference in the number of generations for equal periods, Luke having forty-one between David and Jesus, whilst Matthew has only twenty-six. The main difficulty, however, lies in this: that in some parts of the genealogy in Luke totally different persons are made the ancestors of Jesus from those in Matthew. It is true, both writers agree in deriving the lineage of Jesus through Joseph from David and Abraham, and that the names of the individual members of the series correspond from Abraham to David, as well as two of the names in the subsequent portion: those of Salathiel and Zorobabel. But the difficulty becomes desperate when we find that, with these two exceptions about midway, the whole of the names from David to the foster father of Jesus are totally different in Matthew and in Luke. In Matthew the father of Joseph is called Jacob; in Luke, Heli. In Matthew the son of David through whom Joseph descended from
The accounts of the several angelic warnings to Mary and to Joseph appear to be mutually exclusive. Most theologians, says Strauss, “maintaining, and justly, that the silence of one Evangelist concerning an event which is narrated by the other, is not a negation of the event, they blend the two accounts together in the following manner: 1, the angel makes known to Mary her approaching pregnancy (Luke); 2, she then journeys to Elizabeth (the same Gospel); 3, after her return, her situation being discovered, Joseph takes offence (Matthew); whereupon, 4, he likewise is visited by an angelic apparition (the same Gospel). But this arrangement of the incidents is, as Schliermacher has already remarked, full of difficulty; and it seems that what is related by one Evangelist is not only pre-supposed, but excluded, by the other. For, in the first place, the conduct of the angel who appears to Joseph is not easily explained, if the same, or another, angel had previously appeared to Mary. The angel (in Matthew) speaks altogether as if his communication were the first in this affair. He neither refers to the message previously received by Mary, nor reproaches Joseph because he had not believed it; but, more than all, the informing Joseph
Strauss gives a curious list, showing the gradual growth of the myth relating to the birth of Jesus (we may remark No. 3 is distinctly out of place when referred to Olshausen: it should be referred to the early Fathers, from whom Olshausen derived it):—
“1. Contemporaries of Jesus and composers of the genealogies: Joseph and Mary man and wife—Jesus the offspring of their marriage.
“2. The age and authors of our histories of the birth of Jesus: Mary and Joseph betrothed only; Joseph having no participation in the conception of the child, and, previous to his birth, no conjugal connection with Mary.
“3. Olshausen and others: subsequent to the birth of Jesus, Joseph, though then the husband of Mary, relinquishes his matrimonial rights.
“4. Epiphanius, Protevangelium, Jacobi, and others: Joseph a decrepit old man, no longer to be thought of as a husband; the children attributed to him are of a former marriage. More especially it is not as a bride and wife that he receives Mary; he takes her merely under his guardianship.
“5. Protevang., Chrysostom, and others: Mary’s virginity was not only not destroyed by any subsequent births of children by Joseph, it was not in the slightest degree impaired by the birth of Jesus.
“6. Jerome: Not Mary only, but Joseph also, observed an absolute virginity, and the pretended brothers of Jesus were not his sons, hut merely cousins to Jesus” ("Life of Jesus,” vol. i., p. 188).
Thus we see how a myth gradually forms itself, bit after bit being added to it, until the story is complete.
The account given by Luke of the meeting of Elizabeth and Mary is clearly mythical, and not historical: “Apart from the intention of the narrator, can it be thought natural that two friends visiting one another should, even in the midst of the most extraordinary occurrences, break forth into long hymns, and that their conversation should entirely lose the character of dialogue, the natural form on such occasions? By a supernatural influence alone could the minds of the two friends be attuned to a state of elevation, so foreign to their every-day life. But if indeed Mary’s hymn is to be understood as the work of the Holy Spirit, it is surprising that a speech emanating immediately from the divine source of inspiration should not be more striking for its originality, but should be so interlarded with reminiscences from the Old Testament, borrowed from the song of praise spoken by the mother of Samuel (1 Sam. ii) under analogous circumstances. Accordingly, we must admit that the compilation of this hymn, consisting of recollections from the Old Testament, was put together in a natural way; but allowing its composition to have been perfectly natural, it cannot be ascribed to the artless Mary, but to him who poetically wrought out the tradition in circulation respecting the scene in question” ("Life of Jesus,” by Strauss, vol. i., pp. 196, 197).
The notes of time given for the birth of Christ are irreconcilable. According to Matthew he is born in the reign of Herod the King: according to Luke, he is born six months after John Baptist, whose birth is referred to the reign of the same monarch; yet in Luke, he is also born at the time of the census, which must have taken place at least ten years later; thus Luke contradicts Matthew, and also contradicts himself. The discrepancies surrounding the birth are not yet complete; passing the curious differences between Matthew and Luke, Matthew knowing nothing about the visit of the shepherds, and Luke nothing of the visit of the Magi, and the consequent slaughter of the babes, we come to a direct conflict between the Evangelists; Matthew informs us that Joseph, Mary, and the child, fled into Egypt from Bethlehem to avoid the wrath of King Herod, and that they were returning to Judaea, when Joseph, hearing that Archelaus was ruling there, turned aside to Galilee, and came and dwelt “in a city called Nazareth.” Luke, on the contrary, says that when the days of Mary’s purification were accomplished they took the child up to Jerusalem, and presented him in the Temple, and then, after this, returned to Galilee, to “their own city, Nazareth.” Moreover, had Herod wanted to find him, he could have taken him at the Temple, where his presentation caused much commotion. In Matthew, the turning into Galilee is clearly a new thing; in Luke, it is returning home; and in Luke there is no space of time wherein the flight into Egypt can by any possibility be inserted. We may add a wonder why Galilee was a safer residence than Judaea, since Antipas, its ruler, was a son of Herod, and would, prima facie, be as dangerous as his brother Archelaus.
The conduct of Herod is incredible if we accept Matthew’s account: “Herod’s first anxious question to the magi is to ascertain the time of the appearance of the star. He ‘inquires diligently’ (ii. 7); and he must have had a motive for so doing. What was this motive? Could he have any other purpose than that of determining the age under which no infants in the neighbourhood of Bethlehem should be allowed to live? But, according to the narrative, Herod never conceived the idea of slaughtering the children till he found that he had been ’mocked of the wise men;’ and the mythical nature of the story is betrayed by this anticipation of motives which, at the time spoken of could have no existence. Yet, further, Herod, who, though in a high degree cruel, unjust, and unscrupulous, is represented as a man of no slight sagacity, clearness of purpose, and strength of will, and who feels a deadly jealousy of an infant whom he knows to have been recently born in Bethlehem, a place only a few miles distant from Jerusalem, is here described not as sending his own emissaries privately to put him to death, or despatching them with the Magi, or detaining the Magi at Jerusalem, until he had ascertained the truth of their tale, and the correctness of the answer of the priests and scribes, but as simply suffering the Magi to go by themselves, at the same time charging them to return with the information for which he had shown himself so feverishly anxious. This strange conduct can be accounted for only on the ground of a judicial blindness; but they who resort to such an explanation must suppose that it was inflicted in order to save the new-born Christ from the death thus threatened; and if they adopt this hypothesis, they must further believe that this arrangement likewise ensured the death of a large number of infants instead of one. A natural reluctance to take up such a notion might prompt the question, Why were the Magi brought to Jerusalem at all? If they knew that the star was the star of Christ (ii. 2), and were by this knowledge conducted to Jerusalem, why did it not suffice to guide them straight to Bethlehem, and thus prevent the slaughter of the innocents? Why did the star desert them after its first appearance, not to be seen again till they issued from Jerusalem? or, if it did not desert them, why did they ask of Herod and the priests the road which they should take, when, by the hypothesis, the star was ready to guide?” ("The English Life of Jesus,” by Thomas Scott, pp. 34, 35; ed. 1872). To these improbabilities must be added the remarkable fact that Josephus, who gives a very detailed history of Herod, entirely omits any hint of this stupendous crime.
The story of the temptation of Jesus is full of contradictions. Matthew iv. 2, 3, implies that the first visit of the tempter was made after the forty days’ fast, while Mark and Luke speak of his being tempted for forty days. According to Matthew, the angels came to him when the Devil left him; but, according to Mark, they ministered to him throughout. According to Matthew, the temptation to cast himself down is the second trial, and the offer of the kingdoms of the world the third: in Luke the order is reversed. In additions to these contradictions, we must note the absurdity of the story. The Devil “set him on a pinnacle of the temple.” Did Jesus and the Devil go flying through the air together, till the Devil put Jesus down? What did the people in the courts below think of the Devil and a man standing on a point of the temple in the full sight of Jerusalem? Did so unusual an occurrence cause no astonishment in the city? Where is the high mountain from which Jesus and the Devil saw all round the globe? Is it true that the Devil gives power to whom he will? If so, why is it said that the powers are “ordained of God”?
Another “discrepancy, concerning the denial of Christ by Peter, furnishes a still stronger proof that these records have not come down to us with the exactness of a contemporary character, much less with the authority of inspiration. The four accounts of Peter’s denial vary considerably. The variations will be more intelligible, exhibited in a tabular form” (Giles’ “Christian Records,” p. 228). We present the table, slightly altered in arrangement, and corrected in some details:—
MATTHEW. MARK.
LUKE. JOHN.
1st. Seated without Beneath in In the
On entering
in the the palace, by midst of the
to the
palace, to a the fire, to a hall where
damsel that
damsel. maid. Jesus
was kept the
being tried,
door.
seated by
the fire, to
a
maid.
2nd. Out in the Out in the Still
in the In the hall,
porch, having
porch, having hall, in standing by
left the
room, left the room, answer to a the fire, in
in answer
to in answer to man. answer to the
a second
a second bystanders.
maid.
maid.
3rd. Out in the Out in the Still
in the Still in the
porch, to
the porch, to the hall, to a man. hall, to a
bystanders.
bystanders. man.
In addition to these discrepancies, we find that Jesus prophesies that Peter shall deny him thrice “before the cock crow,” while in Mark the cock crows immediately after the first denial: in Luke, Jesus and Peter remain throughout the scene of the denial in the same hall, so that the Lord may turn and look upon Peter; while Matthew and Mark place him “beneath” or “without,” and make the third denial take place in the porch outside—a place where Jesus, by the context, certainly could not see him.
How long did the ministry of Jesus last? Luke places his baptism in the fifteenth year of Tiberius (iii. 1), and he might have been crucified under Pontius Pilate at any time within the seven years following. The Synoptics mention but one Passover, and at that Jesus was crucified, thus limiting his ministry to one year, unless he broke the Mosaic law, and disregarded the feast; clearly his triumphal entry into Jerusalem is his first visit there in his manhood, since we find all the city moved and the people asking: “Who is this? And the multitude said, This is Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee” (Matt. xxi. 10, 11). His person would have been well known, had he visited Jerusalem before and worked miracles there. If, however, we turn to the Fourth Gospel, his ministry must extend over at least two years. According to Irenaeus, he “did not want much of being fifty years old” when the Jews disputed with him ("Against Heresies,” bk. ii., ch. 22, sec. 6), and he taught for nearly twenty years. Dr. Giles remarks that “the first three Gospels plainly exhibit the events of only one year; to prove them erroneous or defective in so important a feature as this, would be to detract greatly from their value” ("Christian Records,” p. 112). “According to the first three Gospels, Christ’s public life lasted only one year, at the end of which he went up to Jerusalem and was crucified” (Ibid, p. 11). “Would this questioning [on the triumphal entry] have taken place if Jesus had often made visits to Jerusalem, and been well known there? The multitude who answered the question, and who knew Jesus, consisted of those ’who had come to the feast,’—St. John indicates this [xii. 12]—but the people of Jerusalem knew him not, and, therefore, asked ‘Who is this?’” (Ibid, p. 113). The fact is, that we know nothing certainly as to the birth, life, death, of this supposed Christ. His story is one tissue of contradictions. It is impossible to believe that the Synoptics and the fourth Gospel are even telling the history of the same person. The discourses of Jesus in the Synoptics are simple, although parabolical; in the Fourth they are mystical, and are being continually misunderstood by the people. The historical divergences are marked. The fourth Gospel “tells us (ch. 1) that at the beginning of his ministry Jesus was at Bethabara, a town near the junction of the Jordan with the Dead Sea; here he gains three disciples, Andrew and another, and then Simon Peter: the next day he goes into Galilee and finds Philip and Nathanael, and on the following day—somewhat rapid travelling—he is present, with these disciples, at Cana, where he performs his first miracle, going afterwards with them to Capernaum and Jerusalem. At Jerusalem, whither he goes for ‘the Jews’ passover,’ he drives out the traders from the temple and remarks, ’Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up:’ which remark causes the first of the strange misunderstandings between Jesus and
(3) The fact that the story of the hero, the doctrines, the miracles, were current long before the supposed dates of the Gospels, etc. There are two mythical theories as to the growth of the story of Jesus, which demand our attention; the first, that of which Strauss is the best known exponent, which acknowledges the historical existence of Jesus, but regards him as the figure round which has grown a mythus, moulded by the Messianic expectations of the Jews: the second, which is indifferent to his historical existence, and regards him as a new hero of the ancient sun-worship, the successor of Mithra, Krishna, Osiris, Bacchus, etc. To this school, it matters not whether there was a Jesus of Nazareth or not, just as it matters not whether a Krishna or an Osiris had an historical existence or not; it is Christ, the Sun-god, not Jesus, the Jewish peasant, whom they find worshipped in Christendom, and who is, therefore, the object of their interest.
According to the first theory, whatever was expected of the Messiah has been attributed to Jesus. “When not merely the particular nature and manner of an occurrence is critically suspicious, its external circumstances represented as miraculous and the like; but where likewise the essential substance and groundwork is either inconceivable in itself, or is in striking harmony with some Messianic idea of the Jews of that age, then not the particular alleged course and mode of the transaction only, but the entire occurrence must be regarded as unhistorical” (Strauss’ “Life of Jesus,” vol. i., p. 94). The mythic theory accepts an historical groundwork for many of the stories about Jesus, but it does not seek to explain the miraculous by attenuating it into the natural—as by explaining the story of the transfiguration to have been developed from the fact of Jesus meeting secretly two men, and from the brilliancy of the sunlight dazzling the eyes of the
This theory is much strengthened by a study of the prophecies quoted in the New Testament, since we find that they are very badly “set;” take as a specimen those referred to in Matthew i. and ii. “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold a virgin shall be with child,” etc (i. 22, 23). If we refer to Is. vii., from whence the prophecy is taken, we shall see the wresting of the passage which is necessary to make it into a “Messianic prophecy.” Ahaz, king of Judah, is hard pressed by the kings of Samaria and Syria, and he is promised deliverance by the Lord, before the virgin’s son, Immanuel, should be of an age to discern between good and evil. How Ahaz could be given as a sign of a birth which was not to take place until more than 700 years afterwards, it is hard to say, nor can we believe that Ahaz was not delivered from his enemies until Jesus was old enough to know right from wrong. According to the Gospels, the name “Immanuel” was never given to Jesus, and in the prophecy is bestowed on the child simply as a promise that, “God” being “with us,” Judah should be delivered from its foes. The same child is clearly spoken of as the child of Isaiah and his wife in Is. viii. 3, 4; and in verses 6-8 we find that the two kings of Samaria and Syria are to be conquered by the king of Assyria, who shall fill “thy land, O Immanuel!” thus referring distinctly to the promised child as living in that time. The Hebrew word translated “virgin” does not, as we have already shown, mean “a pure virgin,” as translated in the Septuagint. It is used for a young woman, a marriageable woman, or even to describe a woman who is being embraced by a man. Micah’s supposed prophecy in Matt. ii. 5, 6, is as inapplicable to Christ as that of Isaiah. Turning back to Micah, we find that he “that is to be ruler in Israel” shall be born in Bethlehem, but Jesus was never ruler in Israel, and the description cannot therefore be applied to him; besides, finishing the passage in Micah (v. 5) we read that this same ruler “shall be the peace when the Assyrian shall come into our land,” so that the prophecy has
The second theory, which regards Jesus as a new hero of the ancient sun-worship, is full of intensest interest. Dupuis, in his great work on sun-worship ("Origines de Tous les Cultes”) has drawn out in detail the various sun-myths, and has pointed to their common features. Briefly stated, these points are as follows: the hero is born about Dec. 25th, without sexual intercourse, for the sun, entering the winter solstice, emerges in the sign of Virgo, the heavenly virgin. His mother remains ever-virgin, since the rays of the sun, passing through the zodiacal sign, leave it intact. His infancy is begirt with dangers, because the new-born sun is feeble in the midst of the winter’s fogs and mists, which threaten to devour him; his life is one of toil and peril, culminating at the spring equinox in a final struggle with the powers of darkness. At that period the day and the night are equal, and both fight for the mastery; though the night veil the sun, and he seems dead; though he has descended out of sight, below the earth, yet he rises again triumphant, and he rises in the sign of the Lamb, and is thus the Lamb of God, carrying away the darkness and death of the winter months. Henceforth, he triumphs, growing ever stronger and more brilliant. He ascends into the zenith, and there he glows, “on the right hand of God,” himself God, the very substance of the Father, the brightness of his glory, and the
It may be worth noting that Jesus is said to be born at Bethlehem, a word that Dr. Inman translates as the house “of the hot one” ("Ancient Faiths,” vol. i., p. 358; ed. 1868); Bethlehem is generally translated “house of bread,” and the doubt arises from the Hebrew letters being originally unpointed, and the points—equivalent to vowel sounds—being inserted in later times; this naturally gives rise to great latitude of interpretation, the vowels being inserted whenever the writer or translator thinks they ought to come in, or where the traditionary reading requires them (see Part 1., pp. 13, and 31, 32).
Each point in the story of Jesus may be paralleled in earlier tales; the birth of Krishna was prophesied of; he was born of Devaki, although she was shut up in a tower, and no man was permitted to approach her. His birth was hymned by the Devas—the Hindoo equivalent for angels—and a bright light shone round where he was. He was pursued by the wrath of the tyrant king, Kansa, who feared that Krishna would supplant him in the kingdom. The infants of the district were massacred, but Krishna miraculously escaped. He was brought up among the poor until he reached maturity. He preached a pure morality, and went about doing good. He healed the leper, the sick, the injured, and he raised the dead. His head was anointed by a woman; he washed the feet of the Brahmins; he was persecuted, and finally slain, being crucified. He went down into hell, rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven (see “Asiatic Researches,” vol. i.; on “The Gods of Greece, Italy, and India,” by Sir William Jones, an essay which, though very imperfect, has much in it that is highly instructive). He is pictorially represented as standing on the serpent, the type of evil; his foot crushes its head, while the fang of the serpent pierces his heel; also, with a halo round his head, this halo being always the symbol of the Sun-god; also, with his hands and feet pierced—the sacred stigmata—and with a hole in his side. In fact, some of the representations of him could not be distinguished from the representations of the crucified Jesus.
The name of “Krishna” is by Sir William Jones, and by many others written “Crishna,” and I have seen it spelt “Cristna.” The resemblance it bears, when thus written, to “Christ” is apparent only, there is no etymological similarity. Krishna is derived from the Sanscrit “Krish,” to scrape, to draw, to colour. Krishna means black, or violet-coloured; Christ comes from the Greek [Greek: christos] the anointed. Colonel Vallancy, Sir W. Jones tells us, informed him that “Crishna” in Irish means the Sun ("As. Res.,” p. 262; ed. 1801); and there is no doubt that the Hindu Krishna is a Sun-god; the “violet-coloured” might well be a reference to the deep blue of the summer sky.
If Moses be a type of Christ, must not Bacchus be admitted to the same honour? In the ancient Orphic verses it was said that he was born in Arabia; picked up in a box that floated on the water; was known by the name of Mises, as “drawn from the water;” had a rod which he could change into a serpent, and by means of which he performed miracles; leading his army, he passed the Red Sea dryshod; he divided the rivers Orontes and Hydaspes with his rod; he drew water from a rock; where he passed the land flowed with wine, milk, and honey (see “Diegesis,” pp. 178, 179).
The name Christ Jesus is simply the anointed Saviour, or else Chrestos Jesus, the good Saviour; a title not peculiar to Jesus of Nazareth. We find Hesus, Jesous, Yes or Ies. This last name, [Greek: Iaes], was one of the titles of Bacchus, and the simple termination “us” makes it “Jesus;” from this comes the sacred monogram I.H.S., really the Greek [Greek: UAeS]—IES; the Greek letter [Greek: Ae], which is the capital E, has by ignorance been mistaken for the Latin H, and the ancient name of Bacchus has been thus transformed into the Latin monogram of Jesus. In both cases the letters are surrounded with a halo, the sun-rays, symbolical of the sun-deity to whom they refer. This halo surrounds the heads of gods who typify the sun, and is continually met with in Indian sculptures and paintings.
Hercules, with his twelve labours, is another source of Christian fable. “It is well known that by Hercules, in the physical mythology of the heathens, was meant the Sun, or solar light, and his twelve famous labours have been referred to the sun’s passing through the twelve zodiacal signs; and this, perhaps, not without some foundation. But the labours of Hercules seem to have had a still higher view, and to have been originally designed as emblematic memorials of what the real Son of God and Saviour of the world was to do and suffer for our sakes—[Greek: Noson Theletaeria panta komixon]—’Bringing a cure for all our ills,’ as the Orphic hymn speaks of Hercules” (Parkhurst’s “Hebrew Lexicon,” page 520; ed. 1813). As the story of Hercules came first in time, it must be either a prophecy of Christ, an inadmissible supposition, or else of the sources whence the story of Christ has been drawn.
Aesculapius, the heathen “Good Physician,” and “the good Saviour,” healed the sick and raised the dead. He was the son of God and of Coronis, and was guarded by a goatherd.
Prometheus is another forerunner of Christ, stretched in cruciform position on the rocks, tormented by Jove, the Father, because he brought help to man, and winning for man, by his agony, light and knowledge.
Osiris, the great Egyptian God, has much in common with the Christian Jesus. He was both god and man, and once lived on earth. He was slain by the evil Typhon, but rose again from the dead. After his resurrection he became the Judge of all men. Once a year the Egyptians used to celebrate his death, mourning his slaying by the evil one: “this grief for the death of Osiris did not escape some ridicule; for Xenophanes, the Ionian, wittily remarked to the priests of Memphis, that if they thought Osiris a man they should not worship him, and if they thought him a God they need not talk of his death and suffering.... Of all the gods Osiris alone had a place of birth and a place of burial. His birthplace was Mount Sinai, called by the Egyptians Mount Nyssa. Hence was derived the god’s Greek name Dionysus, which is the same as the Hebrew Jehovah-Nissi” ("Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity,” by Samuel Sharpe, pp. 10, 11; ed. 1863). Various places claimed the honour of his burial. “Serapis” was a god’s name, formed out of “Osiris” and “Apis,” the sacred bull, and we find (see ante, p. 206) that the Emperor Adrian wrote that the “worshippers of Serapis are Christians,” and that bishops of Serapis were bishops of Christ; although the stories differ in detail, as is natural, since the Christian tale is modified by other myths—Osiris, for instance, is married—the general outline is the same. We shall see, in Section II., how thoroughly Pagan is the origin of Christianity.
We find the Early Fathers ready enough to claim these analogies, in order to recommend their religion. Justin Martyr argues: “When we say that the word, who is the first birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that he, Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribe to Jupiter; Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; Aesculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, the Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus” ("First Apology,” ch. xxi.). “If we assert that the Word of God was born of God in a peculiar manner, different from ordinary generation, let this,
We have thus examined, step by step, the alleged evidences of Christianity, both external and internal; we have found it impossible to rely on its external witnesses, while the internal testimony is fatal to its claims; it is, at once, unauthenticated without, and incredible within. After earnest study, and a careful balancing of proofs, we find ourselves forced to assert that THE EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY ARE UNRELIABLE.
* * * * *
APPROXIMATE DATES CLAIMED FOR THE CHIEF CHRISTIAN AND HERETICAL AUTHORITIES.
A.D.
Between 92 and 125 Clement of Rome
Very doubtful
Between 90 and 138 Barnabas
" "
Said to be martyred 107 Ignatius
" "
Between 117 and 138 Quadratus
" "
Possibly 138 Hermas
" "
About 150-170 Papias
" "
About 135-145 Basilides and
" "
Valentinus
About 140-160 Marcion
Said to be martyred 166 Polycarp
Very doubtful
Said to be martyred 166 Justin Martyr
After 166 Hegesippus
About 177 Epistle of Lyons
and
Vienne
Between 150 and 290 Clementines
Real date quite unknown
Between 166 and 176 Dionysius of Corinth
About 176 Athenagoras
Between 170 and 175 Tatian
177 to about 200 Irenaeus
About 193 Tertullian
About 200 Celsus
Very doubtful
205 Clement of Alexandria
succeeded
as head of
School.
About 205 Porphyry
205-249 Origen
THE SO-CALLED TEN PERSECUTIONS.
A.D. 61 under Nero 81 " Domitian 107 " Trajan 166 " Marcus Aurelius 193 " Severus 235 under Maximin 249 " Decius 254 " Valerian 272 " Aurelian 303 " Diocletian
DATES OF ROMAN EMPERORS.
AT ALLEGED BIRTH OF CHRIST.
Augustus Caesar
A.D. 14 Tiberius 33 Caligula 41 Claudius 54 Nero
68 Galba
Otho
69 Vitellius 69 Vespasian 79 Titus 81 Domitian
96 Nerva 98 Trajan associated 117 Hadrian 138 Antoninus
Pius 161 Marcus Aurelius 180 Commodus 192 Pertinax
193 Julian
Severus
211 Caracalla and Geta 217 Macrinus 218 Heliogabalus
222 Alexander Severus 235 Maximin 237 The Gordians
Maximus and Galbinus
238 Maximus, Galbinus, and Gordian 238 Gordian alone
244 Philip 249 Decius 251 Gallus 253 Valerian 260
Gallienus 268 Claudius 270 Aurelian 275 Tacitus
276 Florianus 276 Probus 282 Carus 283 Carinus and
Numerian 285 Diocletian 286 Maximian associated
305 Galerius and Constantius
305 Severus and Maximin
306 Constantine
Licinius
Maxentius
324 Constantine alone
* * * * *
* * * * *
Adrian...206
" quoted by Meredith...225
Agbarus, letter of, in Eusebius...243
Akiba, quoted in Keim...315
Alford, Greek Testament...288
Apostolic Fathers...215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221,
230
Athenagoras, Apology...226
Augustine, Syntagma, quoted in Diegesis...234
Barnabas, Epistle of...233, 302
Besant, According to St. John...337
Butler, Lives of the Fathers, etc...324
Caecilius, quoted in Diegesis...348
Celsus, quoted by Norton...233
Clement, First Epistle...233, 299, 300, 301
Clementine, Homilies...310
" quoted in Supernatural Religion...301
Corpus Ignatianum, quoted in Apostolic Fathers...218
Davidson, Introduction to New Testament...286, 294, 295, 296, 298
Ellicott, quoted in Cowper’s Apocryphal Gospels...250
Epictetus...206
Epiphanius, quoted by Norton...297
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History...216, 230, 231,
234, 243, 246, 248
250,
257, 260, 277, 279, 284, 290
291,
292, 294, 321, 323
" quoted in Apostolic Fathers...217
Faustus, quoted in Diegesis...284
Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire...195,
206, 209, 112
213,
227, 322
Giles, Christian Records...197, 207, 230, 259, 261,
263, 265
267,
276, 288, 293, 297, 313, 328
335,
336
Hegesippus, quoted in Supernatural Religion...302
Home, Introduction to New Testament...197, 203
Ignatius, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans...220
" " Ephesians...233
" " Philippians...302
Inman, Ancient Faiths...344
Irenaeus, Against Heresies...258, 291, 323, 336
" quoted in Keim...234
" quoted in Eusebius...258
Jones, The Canon of the New Testament...240, 245,
257
Jones, Sir W., Asiatic Researches...345
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews...195, 198, 315
" Wars of the Jews...317
" Discourse on Hades...198
Justin Martyr, First Apology...231, 253, 302, 347
" Second Apology...226,
323
" Dialogue with Trypho...231,
275, 302, 310
Juvenal...203
Keim, Jesus of Nazara...197, 202, 315
Lardner, Answer to Dr. Chandler, quoted from
Diegesis...196
" Credibility of the
Gospels...209,
210, 211, 216, 218
230,
263, 269
Livy...222
Marcus Aurelius...206
Marsh, quoted in Norton...267
" quoted in Giles...287
Meredith, Prophet of Nazareth...223
Mosheim, Ecclesiastical
History...214,
216, 217, 235, 237, 238, 239
Muratori, Canon of...282
Nicodemus, Gospel of...253
Norton, Genuineness of the Gospels...215, 216, 219,
247,
263,
269, 295
Origen, quoted in Gibbon...213
" " Diegesis...234
" " Supernatural Religion...323
Paley, Evidences of Christianity...198, 202, 203,
205
208,
209, 210, 212, 228, 229, 231
235,
236, 243, 244, 247, 248, 260
262,
269, 273, 281, 290, 309, 317
319
Papias, quoted by Eusebius...291
" Irenaeus...291
Parkhurst, Hebrew Lexicon...346
Pliny, Epistles...203
Pilate, Acts of...253
Quadratus, quoted by Eusebius...230
Renan, Vie de Jesus...197
Row, The Supernatural in the New Testament...325,
327
Sanday, Gospels in the Second Century...248, 269,
270
279,
287, 298, 300, 302, 305, 311
Scott, English Life of Jesus...334
Sharpe, Egyptian Mythology...347
Smyrna, Circular Epistle of the Church of...221
Strange, Portraiture and Mission of Jesus...198, 201,
210
321,
348
Strauss, Life of Jesus...289, 312, 320, 330, 331,
332
Suetonius...201, 202, 225
Supernatural Religion... 215, 216, 219, 229, 246,
247, 248
249,
260, 261, 266, 268, 269, 271
276,
278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283
290,
292, 293, 295, 301, 302, 303
304,
322, 325
Tacitus, Annals...199, 222, 225
Taylor, Diegesis...196, 200, 201, 205, 206, 208, 212,
346
Tertullian, Apology...226
" De Spectaculis...323
" quoted in Gibbon...213
" " Meredith...225
Thomas, Gospel of...251
Tischendorf, When were our Gospels Written?...248,
270
Westcott, On the Canon of the New Testament...216,
229, 247, 249
256,
268, 270, 274
275,
278, 286
* * * * *
Analogies of Christian doctrines...347
Apocryphal Gospels, specimens of...250
" Books, recognised...245
Authenticity of Apology of Quadratus...230
" Epistle of Barnabas...229
" " Clement...214
" " Ignatius...217
" " Polycarp...216
" " Smyrna...220
" Vision of Hermas...216
Books read in churches...248
" in volume of Scriptures...249
Christian Agapae...223
Christianity advantageous to tyrants...237
Date of birth of Christ...333
Dates of Fathers, etc...349
Dates of Roman Emperors...350
Diatessaron of Tatian...259
Evidence of Adrian...206
" Apostolic Fathers...263,
267
" Barnabas...268
" Basilides and Valentinus...280
" Canon of Muratori...282
" Clement ...269
" Clementines...279
" Hegesippus...277
" Hermas...269
" Ignatius...270
" Josephus...195
" Justin Martyr...271
" Marcion...281
" Marcus Aurelius...206
" Papias...271
" Pliny...203
" Polycarp...270
" Suetonius...201
" Tacitus...199
Forgeries in Early Church...238
" List of...240
Four Gospels: when recognised...257
" why only four...258
Gospels, changes made in...283
" contradictions in...328
" contradictions between
synoptical and fourth...337
" growth of...285, 289
" identity of modern and
ancient unproven...262
" many current...266
" of later origin...311
" of Matthew and Mark not
those of Papias...290
" original, different from
canonical...298
" similarity of canonical
and uncanonical...245
" synoptical...286
" time of selection unknown...256
Genealogies of Jesus...328
Greek not commonly known by Jews...314
Ignorance of Early Fathers...232
Krishna, meaning of...345
Length of Jesus’ Ministry..336
Life of Christ from Justin Martyr...306
Martyrs, small number of...212
Massacre of infants unlikely...333
Matthew, written in Hebrew...394
Miracles...316
Morality of Early Christians...221
Mythical Theory of Jesus...340
Passages in Fathers, not in canonical Gospels...301
Persecution, absence of...209
Phrase “it is written"...247
Positions laid down as to Gospels...236
Position A...238
" B...245
" C...256
" D...257
" E...261
" F...262
" G...290
" H...298
" I...311
" J...314
" K...316
Prophecies, Messianic...342
Silence of Jewish writers...198, 201, 259
" Pagan " ...193,
206
Story of Christ pre-Christian...340
Son-worship and Christ...343
Temptation of Christ...334
Ten Persecutions...350
Types of Christ...345
There are two ancient and widely-spread creeds to which we must chiefly look for the origin of Christianity, namely, Sun-worship and Nature-worship. It is doubtful which of the twain is the elder, and they are closely intertwined, the central idea of each being the same; personally, I am inclined to think that Nature-worship is the older of the two, because it is the simpler and the nearer; the barbarian, slowly
The union of male and female is, then, the foundation of all religions; the heaven marries the earth, as man marries woman, and that union is the first marriage. Saturn is the sky, the male, or active energy; Rhea is the earth, the female, or receptive; and these are the father and the mother of all. The Persians of old called the sky Jupiter, or Jupater, “Ju the Father.” The sun is the agent of the generative power of the sky, and his beams fecundate
One of the most common, and the most universally used, is THE CROSS. Carved at first simply as phallus, it was gradually refined; we meet it as three balls, one above the two; the letter T indicated it, which, by the slightest alteration, became the cross now known as the Latin: thus “Barnabas” says that “the cross was to express the grace by the letter T” (ante, p. 233). We find the cross in India, Egypt, Thibet, Japan, always as the sign of life-giving power; it was worn as an amulet by girls and women, and seems to have been specially worn by the women attached to the temples, as a symbol of what was, to them, a religious calling. The cross is, in fact, nothing but the refined phallus, and in the Christian religion is a significant emblem of its Pagan origin; it was adored, carved in temples, and worn as a sacred emblem by sun and nature worshippers, long before there were any Christians to adore, carve, and wear it. The crowd kneeling before the cross
The CRUCIFIX, or cross with human figure stretched upon it, is also found in ancient times, although not so frequently as the simple cross. The crucifix appears to have arisen from the circle of the horizon being divided into four parts, North, South, East, and West, and the Sun-god, drawn within, or on, the circle, came into contact with each cardinal point, his feet and head touching, or intersecting, two, while his outstretched arms point to the other quarters. Plato says that the “next power to the Supreme God was decussated, or figured in the shape of a cross, on the universe.” Krishna is painted and sculptured on a cross. The Egyptians thus drew Osiris, and sometimes we find a circle drawn with the dividing lines, and in the midst is stretched the dead body of Osiris. Robert Taylor gives another origin for the crucifix: “The ignorant gratitude of a superstitious people, while they adored the river [Nile] on whose inundations the fertility of their provinces depended, could not fail of attaching notions of sanctity and holiness to the posts that were erected along its course, and which, by a transverse beam, indicated the height to which, at the spot where the beam was fixed, the waters might be expected to rise. This cross at once warned the traveller to secure his safety, and formed a standard of the value of land. Other rivers may add to the fertility of the country through which they pass, but the Nile is the absolute cause of that great fertility of the Lower Egypt, which would be all a desert, as bad as the most sandy parts of Africa without this river. It supplies it both with soil and moisture, and was therefore gratefully addressed, not merely as an ordinary river-god, but by its express title of the Egyptian Jupiter. The crosses, therefore, along the banks of the river would naturally share in the honour of the stream, and be the most expressive emblem of good
Very closely joined to the notion of the cross is the idea of the TRINITY IN UNITY, and we need not delay upon it long. It is as universal in Eastern religions as the cross, and comes from the same idea; all life springs from a trinity in unity in man, and, therefore, God is three in one. This trinity is, of course, symbolised by the cross, and especially by the lotus, and any “three in one” leaf; from this has come to Christianity the conventional triple foliage so constantly seen in Church carvings, the fleur-de-lis, the triangle, etc., which are now—as of old—accepted as the emblems of the trinity. The persons of the trinity are found each with his own name; in India, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, and it is Vishnu who becomes incarnate; in Egypt different cities had different trinities, and “we have a hieroglyphical inscription in the British Museum as early as the reign of Sevechus of the eighth century before the Christian era, showing that the doctrine of Trinity in Unity already formed part of their religion, and that in each of the two groups last mentioned the three gods only made one person” ("Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christology,” by S. Sharpe, p. 14). Mr. Sharpe might have gone
These trinities, however, were not complete in themselves, for the female element is needed for the production of life; hence, we find that in most nations a fourth person is joined to the trinity, as Isis, the mother of Horus, in Egypt, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, in Christendom; the Egyptian trinity is often represented as Osiris, Horus, and Isis, but we more generally find the female constituting the fourth element, in addition to the triune, and symbolised by an oval, or circle, typical of the female organ of reproduction; thus the crux ansata of the Egyptians, the “symbol of life” held in the hand by the Egyptian deities, is a cross or oval, i.e., the T with an oval at the top; the circle with the cross inside, symbolises, again, the male and female union; also the six-rayed star, the pentacle, the double triangle, the triangle and circle, the pit with a post in it, the key, the staff with a half-moon, the complicated cross. The same union is imaged out in all androgynous deities, in Elohim, Baalim, Baalath, Arba-il, the bearded Venus, the feminine Jove, the virgin and child. In countries where the Yoni worship was more popular than that of the Phallus, the VIRGIN and CHILD was a favourite deity, and to this we now turn.
Here, as in the history of the cross, we find sun and nature worship intertwined. The female element is sometimes the Earth, and sometimes the individual. The goddesses are as various in names as the gods. Is, Isis, Ishtar, Astarte, Mylitta, Sara, Mrira, Maia, Parvati, Mary, Miriam, Eve, Juno, Venus, Diana, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hera, Rhea, Cybele, Ceres, and others, are the earth under many names; the receptive female, the producer of life, the Yoni. Black is the special colour of female deities, and the black Isis and Horus, the black Mary and Jesus are of peculiar sanctity. Their emblems are: the earth, moon, star of the sea, circle, oval, triangle, pomegranate, door, ark, fish, ship, horseshoe, chasm, cave, hole, celestial virgin, etc. They bore first the titles now worn by Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, and were reverenced as the “queen of heaven.” Ishtar, of Babylonia, was the “Mother of the Gods,” and the “Queen of the Stars.” Isis, of Egypt, was “our Immaculate Lady.” She was figured with a crown of stars, and with the crescent moon. Venus was an ark brooded over
In Comtism we find the latest development of woman-worship, wherein the “emotional sex” becomes the sacred sex, to be guarded, cherished, sustained, adored; and thus in the youngest religion the stamp of the eldest is found.
Thus womanhood has been worshipped in all ages of the world, and maternity has been deified by all creeds: from the savage who bowed before the female symbol of motherhood, to the philosophic Comtist who adores woman “in the past, the present, and the future,” as mother, wife, and daughter, the worship of the female element in nature has run side by side with that of the male; the worship is one and the same in all religions, and runs in an unbroken thread from the barbarous ages to the present time.
The doctrines of the mediation, and the divinity of Christ, and of the immortality of the soul, are as pre-Christian as the symbols which we have examined.
The idea of the Mediator comes to us from Persia, and the title was borne by Mithra before it was ascribed to Christ. Zoroaster taught that there was existence itself, the unknown, the eternal, “Zeruane Akerne,” “time without bounds.” From this issued Ormuzd, the good, the light, the creator of all. Opposite to Ormuzd is Ahriman, the bad, the dark, the deformer of all. Between these two great deities comes Mithra, the Mediator, who is the Reconciler of all things to God, who is one with Ormuzd, although distinct from him. Mithra, as we have seen, is the Sun in the sign of the Bull, exactly parallel to Jesus, the Sun in the sign of the Lamb, both the one and the other being symbolised by that sign of the zodiac in which the sun was at the spring equinox of his supposed date. “Mithras is spiritual light contending with spiritual darkness, and through his labours the kingdom of darkness shall be lit with heaven’s own light; the Eternal will receive all things back into his favour, the world will be redeemed to God. The impure are to be purified, and the evil made good, through the mediation of Mithras, the reconciler of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Mithras is the Good, his name is Love. In relation to the Eternal he is the source of grace, in relation to man he is the life-giver and mediator. He brings the ‘Word,’ as Brahma brings the Vedas, from the mouth of the Eternal. (See Plutarch ’De Isid. et Osirid.;’ also Dr. Hyde’s ‘De Religione Vet. Pers.,’ ch. 22; see also ‘Essay on Pantheism,’ by Rev. J. Hunt.) It was just prior to the return of the Jews from living among the people who were dominated by these ideas, that the splendid chapter of Isaiah (xl.), or indeed the series of chapters which form the closing portion of the book, were written: ’Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.’ And then follows a magnificent description of the greatness and supremacy of God, and this is followed by chapters which tell of a Messiah, or conquering prince, who will redeem the nation from its enemies, and restore them to the light of the divine favour, and which predict a millennium, a golden age of purified and glorified humanity. It is thus manifest that the inspiration of these writings came to the Jewish people from their contact with the religious thought of the Persians, and not from any supernatural source. From this time the Jews began to hold worthier ideas concerning God, and to cherish expectations of a golden age, a kingdom of heaven, which the Messiah, who was to be the sent messenger of God, should inaugurate. And this kingdom was to be a kingdom of righteousness, a day of marvellous light, a rule under which all evil and darkness were to perish” ("Plato, Philo, and Paul,” Rev. J.W. Lake, pp. 15, l6.)
The growth of the philosophical side of the dogma of the Divinity of Christ is as clearly traceable in Pagan and Jewish thought as is the dogma of the incarnation of the Saviour-God in the myths of Krishna, Osiris, etc. Two great teachers of the doctrine of the “Logos,” the “Word,” of God, stand out in pre-Christian times—the Greek Plato and the Jewish Philo. We borrow the following extract from pp. 19, 20, of the pamphlet by Mr. Lake above referred to, as showing the general theological position of Plato; its resemblance to Christian teaching will be at once apparent (it must not be forgotten that Plato lived B.C. 400):—
“The speculative thought and the religious teaching of Plato are diffused throughout his voluminous writings; but the following is a popular summary of them, by Madame Dacier, contained in her introduction to what have been classed as the ’Divine Dialogues:’—
“’That there is but one God, and that we ought to love and serve him, and to endeavour to resemble him in holiness and righteousness; that this God rewards humility and punishes pride.
“’That the true happiness of man consists in being united to God, and his only misery in being separated from him.
“’That the soul is mere darkness, unless it be illuminated by God; that men are incapable even of praying well, unless God teaches them that prayer which alone can be useful to them.
“’That there is nothing solid and substantial but piety; that this is the source of all virtues, and that it is the gift of God.
“’That it is better to die than to sin.
“’That it is better to suffer wrong than to do it.
“’That the “Word” ([Greek: Logos]) formed the world, and rendered it visible; that the knowledge of the Word makes us live very happily here below, and that thereby we obtain felicity after death.
“’That the soul is immortal, that the dead shall rise again, that there shall be a final judgment—both of the righteous and of the wicked, when men shall appear only with their virtues or vices, which shall be the occasion of their eternal happiness or misery.’”
It is this Logos who was “figured in the shape of a cross on the universe” (ante, p. 358). The universe, which is but the materialised thought of God, is made by his Logos, his Word, which is the expression of his thought. In the Christian creed it is the Logos, the Word of God, by whom all things are made (John i. 1-3). The very name, as well as the thought, is the same, whether we turn over the pages of Plato or those of John. Philo, the great Jewish Platonist, living in Alexandria at the close of the last century B.C. and in the first half of the first century after Christ, speaks of the Logos in terms that, to our ears, seem purely Christian. Philo was a man of high position among the Jews in Alexandria, being “a man eminent on all accounts, brother to Alexander the alabarch [governor of the
“Man is fallen.... There is no man who is without sin, and even the perfect man, if he should be born, does not escape from it.... Yet there is a redemption, willed by God himself, and brought to pass by the act of a wise man. Adam’s successors still preserve the types of their relationship to the Father, although in an obscure form, each man possesses the knowledge of good and evil and an incorruptible judgment, subject to reason; his spiritual strength is even now aided by the Divine Logos, the image, copy, and reflection of the blessed nature. Hence it follows that man can discern and see all the stains with which he has wilfully or involuntarily defiled his life, that man by means of his self-knowledge
Identity of the Christ of the New Testament with the Logos of Philo.
Philo, describing the Logos, The New Testament, speaking says:— of Jesus says:—
’The Logos is the Son ‘This is the Son of God.’ of God the Father.’—De John i. 34. Profugis.
‘The first begotten of God.’
’And when he again bringeth
—De Somniis. his first-born
into the
world.’—Heb.
i. 6.
’And the most ancient of ’That he is the first-born all beings.’—De Conf. Ling. of every creature.’—Col. i. 15.
’The Logos is the image ’Christ,
the image of the
and likeness of God.’—De
invisible God.’—Col. i. 15.
Monarch. ’The
brightness of his
(God’s)
glory, and the express
image
of his person.’—Heb.
i.
3.
’The Logos is superior to ’Being
made so much
the angels.’—De Profugis.
better that the angels. Let
all
the angels of God worship
him.’—Heb.
i. 4, 6.
’The Logos is superior to ’Thou hast put all things all beings in the world.’—De in subjection under his feet.’ Leg. Allegor. —Heb. ii. 8.
’The Logos is the instrument
’All things were made by by whom the world
was him (the Word or Logos), made.’—De
Leg. Allegor. and without him was not
anything made that
was
’The divine word by whom made.’—John
i. 3
all things were ordered and
disposed.’—De Mundi Opificio.
’Jesus Christ, by whom
are all things.’—i
Cor. viii. 6.
’By
whom also he made
the worlds.’—Heb.
i. 2.
’The Logos is the light of ’The
Word (Logos) was
the world, and the intellectual the true light.’—John
i. 9.
sun.’—De Somniis.
’The
life and the light of
men.’—John
i. 4.
‘I
am the light of the world.’
—John
viii. 12.
’The Logos only can see ’He
that is of God, he
God.’—De Confus. Ling.
hath seen the Father.’—John
vi.
46.
’No man hath seen God at any time. The only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”—John i. 18.
’He is the most ancient ’Now,
O Father, glorify
of God’s works.’—De Confus
thou me with thine own self
Ling. with the glory which
I had
with
thee before the world
‘And was before all things.’ was.’—John
xvii. 5.
—De Leg. Allegor.
’He
was in the beginning
with
God.’—John i. 2.
’Before
all worlds.’—2
Tim. i. 9.
’The Logos is esteemed ’Christ, who is over all, the same as God.’—De God blessed for evermore.’ Somniis. —Rom. ix. 5.
’Who, being in the form of God. thought it no robbery to be equal with God.’—Phil. ii. 6.
‘The Logos was eternal.’ ’Christ abideth for ever. —De Plant. Noe. —John xii. 34.
’But
to the Son he saith,
Thy throne, O God,
is for
ever and ever.’—Heb.
i. 8.
’The Logos supports the
’Upholding all things by world, is the
connecting the word of his power.’—Heb.
power by which all things i. 3. are united.’—De
Profugis.
‘By him all
things consist.’
’The Logos is nearest to —Col.
i. 17.
God, without any separation;
being, as it were, fixed upon ‘I and my
Father are one.’ the only true existing Deity,
—John x. 30. nothing coming between
to ’That they may be one as disturb
that unity.”—De we are.’—John
i. 18. Profugis.
’The Logos is free from ’The
only begotten Son,
all taint of sin, either who is in the bosom
of the
voluntary or involuntary.’—De
Father.’—John i. 18.
Profugis.
’The
blood of Christ, who
’The Logos the fountain offered himself
without
of life. spot to God.’—Heb.
ix. 14.
’It is of the greatest ’Who did no sin, neither consequence to every person to was guile found in his strive without remission to mouth.’—1 Pet. ii. 22. approach to the divine Logos, the Word of God above, who ’Whosoever shall drink of the is the fountain of all wisdom; water that I shall give him, that by drinking largely shall never thirst, but the of that sacred spring, instead water that I shall give him of death, he may be rewarded shall be in him a well of with everlasting life.’—De water springing up into Profugis. everlasting life,’—John iv. 14.
’The Logos is the shepherd ’The
great shepherd of the of God’s flock.
flock... our Lord Jesus.’—
Heb.
xiii. 20.
’The deity, like a shepherd, and at the same
time ’I am the good shepherd, and
like a monarch, acts with the know my sheep, and
am known most consummate order and of mine.’—John
x. 14. rectitude, and has appointed his First-born,
the upright ’Christ ... the shepherd and
Logos, like the substitute of guardian of your
souls.’— a mighty prince, to take
care 1 Pet. ii. 25. of his sacred flock.’—De
Agricult. ’For Christ
must reign till he
hath
put all his enemies under
The Logos, Philo says, is his feet.’—1
Cor xv. 25. ’The great governor of the
world; he is the creative and ’Christ, above
’The Logos is the physician ’The
spirit of the Lord is
that heals all evil.’—De
upon me, because he hath
Leg. Allegor. anointed me
to heal the
broken-hearted.’—Luke
iv.
18.
The Logos the Seal of God. Christ the Seal of God.
’The Logos, by whom the ’In whom also, after that world was framed, is the seal, ye believed, ye were sealed after the impression of which with the holy seal of promise.’ everything is made, and is —Eph. i. 13 rendered the similitude and ’Jesus, the son of man ... him image of the perfect Word of hath God the Father God.’—De Profugis. sealed.’—John vi. 27.
’The soul of man is an ’Christ, the brightness of impression of a seal, of which his (God’s) glory, and the the prototype and original express image of his person. characteristic is the everlasting —Heb. i. 3. Logos.’—De Plantatione Noe.
The Logos the source of Christ the source of eternal immortal life_. life_.
Philo says ’that when the
’The dead (in Christ) shall soul strives
after its best and be raised incorruptible.’—1
noblest life, then the Logos Cor. xv. 52 frees
it from all corruption, ’Because the creature
itself and confers upon it the gift also shall
be delivered of immortality.’—De
C.Q. from the bondage of corruption Erud.
Gratia. into the glorious liberty
of
the children of
God.’—Rom.
vii. 21.
The New Testament
calls
Philo speaks of the Logos Christ the Beloved
Son:—’This not only as the Son of
God is my beloved Son and his first begotten,
but in whom I am well pleased.’ also styles
him ’his beloved —Matt. iii.
17; Luke ix. 35; Son.’—De Leg.
Allegor. 2 Pet. i. 17
’The Son of
his love.’—Col.
i. 13.
Philo says ’that good men
’But ye are come unto mount are admitted
to the assembly Zion, and to the city of the
of the saints above. living God, and to
an
innumerable company
of angels,
’Those who relinquish human and to the
spirits of just men doctrines, and become
made perfect.’—Heb. xii. 22, 23
the well-disposed disciples of God, will be one day
translated ’Giving thanks unto the Father
to an incorruptible and which hath made us
the perfect order of beings.”—De
inheritance of the saints in Sacrifices.
light.’—Col. i. 12.
Philo says ’that the just The New Testament
makes Jesus to man, when he dies is translated say:
to another state by the Logos, by whom the world
’No man can come to me, except was created.
For God by the Father which hath sent me
his said Word (Logos), by draw him; and I will
raise him which he made all things, up on
the last day.’—John vi. 44 will raise
the perfect man from the dregs of this world,
’No man cometh to the Father but and exalt him
near himself. by me.’—John xvi.
6. He will place him near his own person.’—De
Sacrificiis. ’Where I am, there also
shall my
servant
be ... him will my father
Philo says that the Logos honour.’
is the true High Priest, who is without sin and anointed
The New Testament speaks of Jesus by God:—
as the High Priest:
’It is the world, in which ’Seeing
then that we have a great the Logos, God’s First-born,
High Priest that is passed into that great High
Priest, resides. the heavens, Jesus, the Son of And
I assert that this God, let is hold fast
our High Priest is no man, but profession.’—Heb.
iv. 14. the Holy Word of God; who is not capable
of either ’For such an High Priest became
us, voluntary or involuntary sin, who is holy,
harmless, undefiled, and hence his head is anointed
separate from sinners.’—Heb. vii.
26. with oil.’—De Profugis.
The
New Testament says of Christ:
Philo mentions the Logos as the great High Priest
and ’We have such an High Priest, who is
Mediator for the sins of the set on the throne
of the majest in world. Speaking of the rebellion
the heavens, a mediator of a of Korah, he introduces
the better covenant.’—Heb. viii.
1-6. Logos as saying :—
’But
Christ being come an High
’It was I who stood in the Priest ...
entered at once into middle between the Lord and
the holy place, having obtained you.
eternal redemption for us.’—Heb.
ix.
11, 12.
’The sacred Logos pressed with zeal and without
remission The New Testament says of John, the that
he might stand forerunner of Jesus, that
he preached between the dead and the ’the
baptism of repentance for the living.—Quis
Rerum Div. remission of sins.’—Mark
i. 4. Haeres.
Jesus
says:—
The Logos, the Saviour God, who brings salvation
as ’Ye will not come to me, that ye the
reward of repentance and might have life.’—John
v. 40. righteousness.
’Beloved,
we be now the sons of
’If then men have from God; and it
doth not yet appear their very souls a just
what we shall be; but we know that contrition,
and are changed, when he doth appear we shall
Here, then, we get, complete, the idea of Christ as the Word of God, and we see that Christianity is as lacking in originality on these points as in everything else. We may note, also, that this Platonic idea was current among the Jews before Philo, although he gives it to us more thoroughly and fully worked out: in the apocryphal books of the Jews we find the idea of the Logos in many passages in Wisdom, to take but a single case.
The widely-spread existence of this notion is acknowledged by Dean Milman in his “History of Christianity.” He says: “This Being was more or less distinctly impersonated, according to the more popular or more philosophic, the more material or the more abstract, notions of the age or people. This was the doctrine from the Ganges, or even the shores of the Yellow Sea to the Ilissus; it was the fundamental principle of the Indian religion and the Indian philosophy; it was the basis of Zoroastrianism; it was pure Platonism; it was the Platonic Judaism of the Alexandrian school. Many fine passages might be quoted from Philo, on the impossibility that the first self-existing Being should become cognisable to the sense of man; and even in Palestine, no doubt, John the Baptist and our Lord himself spoke no new doctrine, but rather the common sentiment of the more enlightened, when they declared that ’no man had seen God at any time.’ In conformity with this principle, the Jews, in the interpretation of the older Scriptures, instead of direct and sensible communication from the one great Deity, had interposed either one or more intermediate beings as the channels of communication. According to one accredited tradition alluded to by St. Stephen, the law was delivered by the ‘disposition of angels;’ according to another, this office was delegated to a single angel, sometimes called the angel of the Law (see Gal. iii. 19); at others, the Metatron. But the more ordinary representative, as it were, of God, to the sense and mind of man, was the Memra, or the Divine Word; and it is remarkable that the same appellation is found in the Indian, the Persian, the Platonic, and the Alexandrian systems. By the Targumists, the earliest Jewish commentators on the Scriptures, this term had been already applied to the Messiah; nor is it necessary to observe the
The idea of IMMORTALITY was by no means “brought to light” by Christ, as is pretended. The early Jews had clearly no idea of life after death; “for in death there is no remembrance of thee; in the grave who shall give thee thanks?” (Ps. vi. 5). “Like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more.... Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?” (Ps. lxxxviii. 5, 10-12). “The dead praise not the Lord” (Ps. cxv. 17). “I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that man hath no pre-eminence above a beast” (Eccles. iii. 18, 19). “There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom,
To say that Jesus “brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel,” even to the Jews, is to contend for a position against all evidence. If from the Jews we turn to the Pagan thinkers, immortality is proclaimed by them long before the Jews have dreamed about it. The Egyptians, in their funeral ritual, went through the judgment of the soul before Osiris: “The resurrection of the dead to a second life had been a deep-rooted religious opinion among the Egyptians from the earliest times” ("Egyptian Mythology,” Sharpe, p. 52), and they appear to have believed in a transmigration of souls through the lower animals, and an ultimate return to the original body; to this end they preserved the body as a mummy, so that the soul, on its return, might find its original habitation still in existence: any who believe in the resurrection of the body should clearly follow the example of the ancient Egyptians. In later times, the more instructed Egyptians believed in a spiritual resurrection only, but the mass of the people clung to the idea of a bodily resurrection (Ibid, p. 54). “It is to the later times of Egyptian history, perhaps to the five centuries immediately before the Christian era, that the religious opinions contained in the funeral papyri chiefly belong. The roll of papyrus buried with the mummy often describes the funeral, and then goes on to the return of the soul to the body, the resurrection, the various trials and difficulties which the deceased will meet and overcome in the next world, and the garden of paradise in which he awaits the day of judgment, the trial on that day, and it then shows the punishment which would have awaited him if he had been found guilty” (Ibid, p. 64). We have already seen that the immortality of the soul was taught by Plato (ante, p. 364). The Hindus taught that happiness or misery hereafter depended upon the life here. “If duty is performed, a good name will be obtained, as well as happiness, here and after death” ("Mahabharata,” xii., 6,538, in “Religious and Moral Sentiments from Indian Writers,” by J. Muir, p. 22). The “Mahabharata” was written, or rather collected, in the second century before Christ. “Poor King Rantideva bestowed water with a pure mind, and thence ascended to heaven.... King Nriga
“But, at least,” urge the Christians, “we owe the sublime idea of the UNITY OF GOD to revelation, and this is grander than the Polytheism of the Pagan world.” Is it not, however, true, that just as Christians urge that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are but one God, so the thinkers of old believed in one Supreme Being, while the multitudinous gods were but as the angels and saints of Christianity, his messengers, his subordinates, not his rivals? All savages are Polytheists, just as were the Hebrews, whose god “Jehovah” was but their special god, stronger than the gods of the nations around them, gods whose existence they never denied; but as thought grew, the superior minds in each nation rose over the multitude of deities to the idea of one Supreme Being working in many ways, and the loftiest
Turning from these cardinal doctrines to the minor dogmas and ceremonies of Christianity, we shall still discover it to be nothing but a survival of Paganism.
BAPTISM seems to have been practised as a religious rite in all solar creeds, and has naturally, therefore, found its due place in the latest solar faith. “The idea of using water as emblematic of spiritual washing, is too obvious to allow surprise at the antiquity of this rite. Dr. Hyde, in his treatise on the ‘Religion of the Ancient Persians,’ xxxiv. 406, tells us that it prevailed among that people. ’They do not use circumcision for their children, but only baptism or washing for the inward purification of the soul. They bring the child to the priest into the church, and place him in front of the sun and fire, which ceremony being completed, they look
“The Baptismal fonts in our Protestant churches, and we can hardly say more especially the little cisterns at the entrance of our Catholic chapels, are not imitations, but an unbroken and never interrupted continuation of the same aquaminaria, or amula, which the learned Montfaucon, in his ‘Antiquities,’ shows to have been vases of holy water, which were placed by the heathens at the entrance of their temples, to sprinkle themselves with upon entering those sacred edifices” ("Diegesis,” R. Taylor, p. 219). Among the Hindus, to bathe in the Ganges is to be regenerated, and the water is holy because it flows from Brahma’s feet. Tertullian, arguing that water, as being God’s earliest and most favoured creation, and brooded over by the spirit—Vishnu also is called Narayan, “moving on the waters”—was sanctifying in its nature, says: “’Well, but the nations, who are strangers to all understanding of spiritual powers, ascribe to their idols the imbuing of waters with the self-same efficacy.’ So they do, but these cheat themselves with waters which are widowed. For washing is the channel through which they are initiated into some sacred rites of some notorious Isis or Mithra; and the gods themselves likewise they honour by washings.... At the Appollinarian and Eleusinian games they are baptised; and they presume that the effect of their doing that is the regeneration, and the remission of the penalties due to their perjuries.... Which fact, being acknowledged, we recognise here also the zeal of the devil rivalling the things of God, while we find him, too, practising baptism in his subjects” ("On Baptism,” chap. v.). As “the devil” did it first, it seems scarcely fair to accuse him of copying.
Closely allied to baptism is the idea of regeneration, being born again. In baptism the purification is wrought by the male deity, typified in the water flowing from the throne or the feet of the god. In regeneration without water the purification is wrought by the female deity. The earth is the mother of all, and “as at birth the new being emerges from the mother, so it was supposed that emergence from a terrestrial cleft was equivalent to a new birth” (Inman’s “Ancient Faiths,” vol. i., p. 415; ed. 1868). Hence the custom of squeezing through a hole in a rock, or passing through a perforated stone, or between and under stones set up for the purpose; a natural cleft in a rock or in the earth was considered as specially holy, and to some of these long pilgrimages are still made in Eastern lands. On emerging from the hole, the devotee is re-born, and the sins of the past are no longer counted against him.
CONFIRMATION was also a rite employed by the ancient Persians. “Afterwards, in the fifteenth year of his age, when he begins to put on the tunic, the sudra and the girdle, that he may enter upon religion, and is engaged upon the articles of belief, the priest bestows upon him confirmation, that he may from that time be admitted into the number of the faithful, and may be looked upon as a believer himself” (Dr. Hyde on “Religion of the Ancient Persians,” tr. by Dr. Giles in “Christian Records,” pp. 129, 130).
LORD’S SUPPER.—Bread and wine appear to have been a regular offering to the Sun-god, whose beams ripen the corn and the grape, and who may indeed, by a figure, be said to be transubstantiated thus for the food of man. The Persians offered bread and wine to Mithra; the people of Thibet and Tartary did the same. Cakes were made for the Queen of heaven, kneaded of dough, and were offered up to her with incense and drink-libations (Jer. vii. 18, and xliv. 19). Ishtar was worshipped with cakes, or buns, made out of the finest flour, mingled with honey, and the ancient Greeks offered the same: this bread seems to have been sometimes only offered to the deity, sometimes also eaten by the worshippers; in the same way the bread and the wine are offered to God in the Eucharist, and he is prayed to accept “our alms and oblations.” The Easter Cakes presented by the clergyman to his parishioners—an old English custom, now rarely met with—are the cakes of Ishtar, oval in form, symbolising the yoni. We have already dealt fully with the apparent similarity between the Christian Agapae, and the Bacchanalian mysteries (ante, pp. 222-227). The supper of Adoneus, Adonai, literally, the “supper of the Lord,” formed part of these feasts, identical in name with the supper of the Christian mysteries. The Eleusinian mysteries, celebrated at Eleusis, in honour of Ceres, goddess of corn, and Bacchus, god of wine, compel us to think of bread and wine, the very substance of the gods, as it were, there adored. And Mosheim gives us the origin of many of the Christian eucharistic ceremonies. He writes: “The profound respect that was paid to the Greek and Roman mysteries, and the extraordinary sanctity that was attributed to them, was a further circumstance that induced the Christians to give their religion a mystic air, in order to put it upon an equal foot, in point of dignity, with that of the Pagans. For this purpose they gave the name of mysteries to the institutions of the gospel, and decorated particularly the holy Sacrament with that solemn title. They used in that sacred institution, as also in that of baptism, several of the terms employed in the heathen mysteries; and proceeded so far, at length, as even to adopt some of the rites and ceremonies of which these renowned mysteries consisted. This imitation began in the Eastern provinces; but after the time of Adrian, who first introduced the mysteries among the Latins, it was followed by the Christians, who dwelt in the Western parts of the Empire. A great part, therefore, of the service of the church, in this century [A.D. 100-200], had a certain air of the heathen mysteries, and resembled them considerably in many particulars” ("Eccles. Hist.,” 2nd century, p. 56).
The whole system of THE PRIESTHOOD was transplanted into Christianity from Paganism; the Egyptian priesthood, however, was in great part hereditary, and in this differs from the Christian, while resembling the Jewish. The priests of the temple of Dea (Syria) were, on the other hand, celibate, and so were some orders of the Egyptian priests. Some classes of priests closely resembled Christian monks, living in monasteries, and undergoing many austerities; they prayed twice a day, fasted often, spoke little, and lived much apart in their cells in solitary meditation; in the most insignificant matters the same similarity may be traced. “When the Roman Catholic priest shaves the top of his head, it is because the Egyptian priest had done the same before. When the English clergyman—though he preaches his sermon in a silk or woollen robe—may read the Liturgy in no dress but linen, it is because linen was the clothing of the Egyptians. Two thousand years before the Bishop of Rome pretended to hold the keys of heaven and earth, there was an Egyptian priest with the high-sounding title of Appointed keeper of the two doors of heaven, in the city of Thebes” ("Egyptian Mythology,” S. Sharpe, preface, p. xi.). The white robes of modern priests are remnants of the same old faith; the more gorgeous vestments are the ancient garb of the priests officiating in the temple of female deities; the stole is the characteristic of woman’s dress; the pallium is the emblem of the yoni; the alb is the chemise; the oval or circular chasuble is again the yoni; the Christian mitre is the high cap of the Egyptian priests, and its peculiar shape is simply the open mouth of the fish, the female emblem. In old sculptures a fish’s head, with open mouth pointing upwards, is often worn by the priests, and is scarcely distinguishable from the present mitre. The modern crozier is the hooked staff, emblem of the phallus; the oval frame for divine things is the female symbol once more. Thus holy medals are generally oval, and the Virgin is constantly represented in an oval frame, with the child in her arms. In some old missals, in representations of the Annunciation, we see the Virgin standing, with the dove hovering in front above her, and from the dove issues a beam of light, from the end of which, as it touches her stomach, depends an oval containing the infant Jesus.
The tinkling bell—used at the Mass at the moment of consecration—is the symbol of male and female together—the clapper, the male, within the hollow shell, the female—and was used in solar services at the moment of sacrifice. The position of the fingers of the priest in blessing the congregation is the old symbolical position of the fingers of the solar priest. The Latin form, with the two fingers and thumb upraised—copied in Anglican churches—is said rightly by ecclesiastical writers to represent the trinity; but the trinity it represents is the real human trinity: the more elaborate Greek form is intended to represent
“The rites and institutions, by which the Greeks, Romans, and other nations, had formerly testified their religious veneration for fictitious deities, were now adopted, with some slight alterations, by Christian bishops, and employed in the service of the true God. [This is the way a Christian writer accounts for the resemblance his candour forces him to confess; we should put it, that Christianity, growing out of Paganism, naturally preserved many of its customs.].... Hence it happened that in these times the religion of the Greeks and Romans differed very little in its external appearance from that of the Christians. They had both a most pompous and splendid ritual. Gorgeous robes, mitres, tiaras, wax-tapers, crosiers, processions, lustrations, images, gold and silver vases, and many such circumstances of pageantry, were equally to be seen in the heathen temples and the Christian churches” (Mosheim’s “Eccles. Hist.,” fourth century, p. 105). Says Dulaure: “These two Fathers [Justin and Tertullian] are in no fashion embarrassed by this astonishing resemblance; they both say that the devil, knowing beforehand of the establishment of Christianity, and of the ceremonies of this religion, inspired the Pagans to do the same, so as to rival God and injure Christian worship” ("Histoire Abregee de Differens Cultes,” t. i., p. 522; ed. 1825).
The idea of angels and devils has also spread from the far East; the Jews learned it from the Babylonians, and from the Jews and the Egyptians it passed into Christianity. The Persian theology had seven angels of the highest order, who ever surrounded Ormuzd, the good creator; and from this the Jews derived the seven archangels always before the Lord, and the Christians the “seven spirits of God” (Rev. iii. 1), and the “seven angels which stood before God” (Ibid, viii. 2). The Persians had four angels—one at each corner of the world; Revelation has “four angels standing on the four corners of the earth” (vii. 1). The Persians employed them as Mediators with the Supreme; the majority of Christians now do the same, and all Christians did so in earlier times. Origen, Tertullian, Chrysostom, and other Fathers, speak of angels as ruling the earth, the planets, etc. Michael is the angel of the Sun, as was Hercules, and he fights with and conquers the dragon, as Hercules the Python, Horus the monster Typhon, Krishna the serpent. The Persians believed in devils as well as in angels, and they also had their chief, Ahriman, the pattern of Satan. These devils—or dews, or devs—struggled against the good, and in the end would be destroyed, and Ahriman would be chained down in the abyss, as Satan in Rev. xx. Ahriman flew down to earth from heaven as a great dragon (Rev. xii. 3 and 9), the angels arming themselves against him (Ibid, verse 7). Strauss remarks: “Had the belief in celestial beings, occupying a particular station in the court of heaven, and distinguished by particular names, originated from the revealed religion of the Hebrews—had such a belief been established by Moses, or some later prophet—then, according to the views of the supranaturalist, they might—nay, they must—be admitted to be correct. But it is in the Maccabaean Daniel and in the apocryphal Tobit that this doctrine of angels, in its more precise form, first appears; and it is evidently a product of the influence of the Zend religion of the Persians on the Jewish mind. We have the testimony of the Jews themselves that they brought the names of the angels with them from Babylon” ("Life of Jesus,” vol. i., p. 101).
Dr. Kalisch, after having remarked that “the notions [of the Jews] concerning angels fluctuated and changed,” says that “at an early period, the belief in spirits was introduced into Palestine from eastern Asia through the ordinary channels of political and commercial interchange,” and that to the Hebrew “notions heathen mythology offers striking analogies;” “it would be unwarranted,” the learned doctor goes on, “to distinguish between the ‘established belief of the Hebrews’ and ‘popular superstition;’ we have no means of fixing the boundary line between both; we must consider the one to coincide with the other, or we should be obliged to renounce all historical inquiry. The belief in spirits and demons was not a concession made by educated men to the prejudices of the masses,
The whole ideas of the judgment of the dead, the destruction of the world by fire, and the punishment of the wicked, are also purely Pagan. Justin Martyr says truly that as Minos and Rhadamanthus would punish the wicked, “we say that the same thing will be done, but by the hand of Christ” ("Apology” 1, chap. viii). “While we say that there will be a burning up of all, we shall seem to utter the doctrine of the Stoics; and while we affirm that the souls of the wicked, being endowed with sensation even after death, are punished, and that those of the good being delivered from punishment spend a blessed existence, we shall seem to say the same things as the poets and philosophers” (Ibid, chap. xx). In the Egyptian creed Osiris is generally the Judge of the dead, though sometimes Horus is represented in that character; the dead man is accused before the Judge by Typhon, the evil one, as Satan is the “accuser of the brethren;” forty-two assessors declare the innocence of the accused of the crimes
The monastic life comes to us from India and from Egypt; in both countries solitaries and communities are found. Bartholemy St. Hilaire, in his book on Buddha, gives an account of the Buddhist monasteries which is worthy perusal. From Egypt the contagion of asceticism spread over Christendom. “From Philo also we learn that a large body of Egyptian Jews had embraced the monastic rules and the life of self-denial, which we have already noted among the Egyptian priests. They bore the name of Therapeuts. They spent their time in solitary meditation and prayer, and only saw one another on the seventh day. They did not marry; the women lived the same solitary and religious life as the men. Fasting and mortification of the flesh were the foundation of their virtues” ("Egyptian Mythology,” S. Sharpe, p. 79). In these Egyptian deserts grew up those wild and bigoted fanatics—some Jews, some Pagans, and apparently no difference between them—who, appearing later under the name of Christians, formed the original of the Western monasticism. It was these monks who tore Hypatia to pieces in the great church of Alexandria, and who formed the strength of “that savage and illiterate party, who looked upon all sorts of erudition, particularly that of a philosophical kind, as pernicious, and even destructive to true piety and religion” (Mosheim’s “Eccles. Hist,” p. 93). There can be no doubt of the identity of the Christians and the Therapeuts, and this identity is the real key to the spread of “Christianity” in Egypt and the surrounding countries. Eusebius tells us that Mark was said to be the first who preached the Gospel in Egypt, and “so great a multitude of believers, both of men and women, were collected there at the very outset, that in consequence of their extreme philosophical discipline and austerity, Philo has considered their pursuits, their assemblies, and entertainments, as deserving a place in his descriptions” ("Eccles. Hist,” bk. ii., chap. xvi). We will see what Philo found in Egypt, before remarking on the date at which he lived. Eusebius states (we condense bk. ii., chap. xvii) that Philo “comprehends the regulations that are still observed in our churches even to the present time;” that he “describes, with the greatest accuracy, the lives of our ascetics;” these Therapeuts, stated by Eusebius to be Christians, were “everywhere scattered over the world,”
There is also a Jewish sect which we must not overlook, in dealing with the sources of Christianity, that, namely, known as the Essenes. Gibbon regards the Therapeuts and the Essenes as interchangeable terms, but more careful investigation does not bear out this conclusion, although the two sects strongly resemble each other, and have many doctrines in common; he says, however, truly: “The austere life of the Essenians, their fasts and excommunications, the community of goods, the love of celibacy, their zeal for martyrdom, and the warmth, though not the purity of their faith, already offered a lively image of the primitive discipline” ("Decline and Fall,” vol. ii., ch. xv., p. 180). It is to Josephus that we must turn for an account of the Essenes; a brief sketch of them is given in Antiquities of the Jews, bk. xviii., chap. i. He says: “The doctrine of the Essenes is this: That all things are best ascribed to God. They teach the immortality of souls, and esteem that the rewards of righteousness are to be earnestly striven for; and when they send what they have dedicated to God into the temple, they do not offer sacrifices, because they have more pure lustrations of their own; on which account they are excluded from the common court of the temple, but offer their sacrifices themselves; yet is their course of life better than that of other men; and they entirely addict themselves to husbandry.” They had all things in common, did not marry and kept no servants, thus none called any master (Matt. xxiii. 8, 10). In the “Wars of the Jews,” bk. ii., chap, viii., Josephus gives us a fuller account. “There are three philosophical sects among the Jews. The followers of the first of whom are the Pharisees; of the second the Sadducees; and the third sect who pretends to a severer discipline are called Essenes. These last are Jews by birth, and seem to have a greater
The saints who play so great a part in the history of Christianity are, solely and simply, the old Pagan deities under new names. The ancient creeds were intertwined with the daily life of the people, and passed on, practically unchanged, although altered in name. “Ancient errors, in spite of the progress of knowledge, were respected. Civilisation, as it grew, only refined them, embellished them, or hid them under an allegorical veil” ("Histoire Abregee de Differens Cultes,” Dulaure, t. i., p. 20). “A remarkable passage in the life of Gregory, surnamed Thaumaturgus, i.e., the wonder-worker, will illustrate this point in the clearest manner. This passage is as follows [here it is given in Latin]: ’When Gregory perceived that the ignorant multitude persisted in their idolatry, on account of the pleasures and sensual gratifications which they enjoyed at the Pagan festivals, he granted them a permission to indulge themselves in the like pleasures, in celebrating the memory of the holy martyrs, hoping that, in process of time they would return, of their own accord, to a more virtuous and regular course of life.’ There is no sort of doubt that, by this permission, Gregory allowed the Christians to dance, sport, and feast at the tombs of the martyrs upon their respective festivals, and to do everything which the Pagans were accustomed to do in their temples, during the feasts celebrated in honour of their gods” (Mosheim’s “Eccles. Hist.,” 2nd century; note, p. 56). “The virtues that had formerly been ascribed to the heathen temples, to their lustrations, to the statues of their gods and heroes, were now attributed to Christian churches, to water consecrated by certain forms of prayer, and to the images of holy men. And the same privileges that the former enjoyed under the darkness of Paganism, were conferred upon the latter under the light of the Gospel, or, rather, under that cloud of superstition that was obscuring its glory. It is true that, as yet, images were not very common [of this there is no proof]; nor were there any statues at all [equally unproven]. But it is, at the same time, as undoubtedly certain, as it is extravagant and monstrous, that the worship of the martyrs was modelled, by degrees, according to the religious services that were paid to the gods before the coming of Christ” (Ibid, 4th century; p. 98). The fact is, that wherever there was a popular god, he passed into the pantheon of Christendom under a new name, as “Christianity” spread. Dulaure, in his work above-quoted, gives a mass of details—mostly very unsavoury—which leave no doubt upon this point. The essence of the old worship was the worship of Nature, as we have seen, and a favourite deity was Priapus; this god was worshipped under the names of St. Fontin, St. Guerlichon, or Greluchon, St. Remi, St. Gilles, St. Arnaud, SS. Cosmo and Damian, etc., in the various provinces of France, Italy, and other Roman Catholic lands; and his worship, with its distinctive rites of the most indecent character, remained in practice up to, at least, 1740 in France, and 1780 in Italy. (See throughout the above work.) If Christians knew a little more about their creed they would be far less proud of it, and far less devout, than they are at present.
Mr. Glennie, in a pamphlet reprinted from “In the Morning Land,” points out the resemblance between Christianity and “Osirianism,” as he names the religion of Osiris: “‘The peculiar character of Osiris,’ says Sir Gardner Wilkinson, ’his coming upon earth for the benefit of mankind, with the titles of “Manifester of Good” and “Revealer of Truth;” his being put to death by the malice of the Evil One; his burial and resurrection, and his becoming the judge of the dead, are the most interesting features of the Egyptian religion. This was the great mystery; and this myth and his worship were of the earliest times, and universal in Egypt.’ And, with this central doctrine of Osirianism, so perfectly similar to that of Christianism, doctrines are associated precisely analogous to those associated in Christianism with its central doctrine. In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, the Godhead is conceived as a Trinity, yet are the three Gods declared to be only one God. In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, we find the worship of a divine mother and child. In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, there is a doctrine of atonement. In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, we find the vision of a last judgment, and resurrection of the body. And finally, in ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, the sanctions of morality are a lake of fire and tormenting demons on the one hand, and on the other, eternal life in the presence of God. Is it possible, then, that such similarities of doctrines should not raise the most serious questions as to the relation of the beliefs about Christ to those about Osiris; as to the cause of this wonderful similarity of the doctrines of Christianism to those of Osirianism; nay, as to the possibility of the whole doctrinal system of modern orthodoxy being but a transformation of the Osiris-myth?” ("Christ and Osiris,” pp. 13, 14).
Thus we find that the cardinal doctrines and the ceremonies of Christianity are of purely Pagan origin, and that “Christianity” was in existence long ages before Christ. Christianity is only, as we have said, a patchwork composed of old materials; from the later Jews comes the Unity of God; from India and Egypt the Trinity in Unity; from India and Egypt the crucified Redeemer; from India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the virgin mother and the divine son; from Egypt its priests and its ritual; from the Essenes and the Therapeuts its ascetism; from Persia, India, and Egypt, its Sacraments; from Persia and Babylonia its angels and its devils; from Alexandria the blending into one of many lines of thought. There is nothing original in this creed, save its special appeal to the ignorant and to babes; “not many wise men after the flesh” are found among its adherents; it is an appeal to the darkness of the world, not to its light: to superstition, not to knowledge; to faith, not to reason. As its root is, so also are its fruits, and when—after
* * * * *
* * * * *
Cicero, Commonwealth, quoted by Inman...376
Cory, Ancient Fragments, quoted by Inman...377
Dulaure, Histoire Abregee de Differens Cultes...383, 390
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History...386
Gibbon, Decline and Fall...388
Glennie, In the Morning Land...391
Hyde, quoted by Giles...378, 379
Inman, Ancient Faiths...376, 379
Jones, Sir W., Asiatic Researches...356, 377
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews...364, 388
" Wars of the Jews...389
Justin Martyr, First Apology...385
Kalisch, Historical and Critical Commentary...384,
385
Keim, Jesus of Nazara...365
Lake, Plato, Philo, and Paul...363, 364, 367, 374, 388
Mahabharata, quoted by Muir...376
Manu, quoted in Anthology...377
Milman, History of Christianity, quoted by Lake...373
Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History...380, 382, 386, 390,
391
Plato...358
" summarised by Mdme. Dacier...364
Rig Veda, quoted in Anthology...377
Sabaean Litany, quoted in Anthology...377
Sharpe, Egyptian Mythology...360, 375, 381, 385, 386
Strauss, Life of Jesus...383
Taylor, Diegesis...359, 378
Tertullian, On Baptism...379
Zoroaster, quoted by Inman...376
* * * * *
Angels and devils...383
Baptism...378
Confirmation...379
Cross...357
Crucifix...358
Devils and angels...383
Divinity of Christ...363
Essenes...388
Immortality...374
Judgment of the Dead...385
Logos, ideas of...364
Lord’s Supper...379
Mediator...362
Mithras...362
Monasticism...385
Nature and Sun-worship the origin of creeds...355
Osirianism and Christianity...391
Philo, date of...367, 387
Plato’s teaching...364
Priesthood...381
Saints, old gods...391
Symbols of male energy...356
" female energy...361
" both in present ceremonies...381
Therapeuts...386
Trinity...359
Union of male and female foundation of religion...355
Unity of God...377
Virgin and child...360
Zoroaster’s teaching...362, 376
How much may fairly be included under the title “Christian Morality”? Some of the more enlightened Christians would confine the term to the morality of the New Testament, and would exclude the Hebrew code as being the outcome of a barbarous age. But the Freethinker may fairly contend that any moral rules taught by the Bible are part of Christian morality. By the statute 9 and 10 William III, cap. 32, the “Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament” are declared to be “of divine authority,” and there is no exclusion indicated of the Mosaic code; this statute is binding on all British subjects educated as Christians, and enacts penalties against those who infringe it. By Article VI. of the Church of England, Holy Scripture is defined as “those canonical books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church,” and a list is subjoined. In Article VII. we are instructed that the “Commandments which are called moral” are to be obeyed, but that the “civil precepts” of the Mosaic code ought not “of necessity to be received in any commonwealth;” from which we may conclude that the Church does not feel bound to enforce, as “of necessity,” polygamy, prostitution, murder of heretics, and slavery. She does not venture to designate such precepts as immoral, but she does not feel bound in conscience to enforce them, for which small concession we must feel grateful. Passing from the law of the land to the Bible itself, we find that the Mosaic code must certainly be recognised as divine. Jesus himself proclaims: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil,” and this is emphasised by the declaration: “Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” The Broad Church party will be very little, if this be true. Turning to the Old Testament, we find that some of the most immoral precepts are spoken by God himself, immediately after the “Ten Commandments;” surely that which “The Lord said” out of “the thick darkness where God was,” from the top of Sinai “on a smoke, with the thunderings and lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet,” can scarcely be reverently designated as “the outcome of a barbarous age”? Yet it is under these circumstances that God taught that a Hebrew servant might be bought for seven years; that a wife might be given him by his master, and that the wife and the children proceeding from the union belonged to the master; that the servant could only go free by deserting his wife and his own children and leaving them in slavery (Ex. xxi. 1-6). It was under these circumstances that God taught that a man might sell his daughter to be a “maid servant” (the translator’s euphemism for concubine),
If we pass from these precepts, given with such special solemnity, to the other articles of the so-called Mosaic code, we shall find rules of an equally immoral character. Lev. xxiv. 16 commands that “he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord” shall be stoned. Lev. xxv. 44-46 directs the Hebrews to buy bondmen and bondwomen of the nations around them, “and ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession,” thus sanctioning the slave-traffic. Leviticus xxvii. 29 distinctly commands human sacrifice, forbidding the redemption of any that are “devoted of men.” Clear as the words are, their meaning has been hotly contested, because of the stain they affix on the Mosaic code. “[Hebrew: MOT VOMOT]” that he die. The commentators take much trouble to soften this terrible sentence. According to Raschi, it concerns a man condemned to death, in which case he must not be redeemed for money. According to others, it is necessary that the person shall be devoted by public authority, and not by private vow; and the Talmud speaks of Jephthah as a fanatic for having thought that a human being could serve as a victim, as a burnt-offering; but there are too many facts which prove the existence and the execution of this barbarous law; see, besides, the paraphrase of Ben Ouziel: [Hebrew: KL APRShA TMVL DDYN QShVL MYTChYYB] “all anathema which shall be anathematised of the human race cannot be redeemed neither by money, by vows, nor by sacrifices, neither by prayers for mercy before God, since he is condemned to death” (Levitique, par Cahen, p. 143; ed. 1855). Thus Jephthah devoted to the Lord “whatsoever cometh out of the doors of my house to meet me,” and, his daughter being the one who came, he “did with her according to his vow” (Judges xi. 30-40).
Kalisch, in his Commentary on the Old Testament, gives us an exhaustive essay on “Human Sacrifices among the Hebrews,” endeavouring, as far as possible, to defend his people from the charge of offering such sacrifices to Jehovah by reducing instances of it to a minimum. He says, however: “Yet we have at least two clear and unquestionable instances of human sacrifices offered to Jehovah. The first is the immolation of Jephthah’s daughter.” He then analyses the account, pointing out that it was clearly a sacrifice to Jehovah, and that Jephthah’s “intention of sacrificing his daughter was publicly known for two full months; no priest, no prophet, no elder, no magistrate interfered,
In Numbers v. 12-31 we find the command to practise the brutal and superstitious custom of the ordeal, the endorsement of the whole ordeal system of the Middle Ages. Deuteronomy xiii. is entirely devoted to commands of murder, and is the indulgence given beforehand to every persecuting priest. The prophet whom God uses to prove his people, is to be put to death for being God’s instrument; anyone who tries to turn people aside from God is to be stoned, and the hand of the nearest and dearest is to be “first upon him to put him to death;” any city which becomes idolatrous is to be destroyed, the inhabitants and the cattle are to be slain, and everything else is to be burnt. Deuteronomy xvii. 2-7 is to the same effect. These commands have also borne abundant fruit. Who can reckon the millions of human lives that have been spilt in obedience to them? The slaughter of the Midianites, of the people of Jericho, Ai, Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, and of many another city, marking with blood each step of the people of God, who smote “all the souls that were” in each, and “let none remain”—all these are but as the first-fruits of the great harvest of human slaughter, reaped for the glory of God. Right through the “sacred volume” runs the scarlet river, staining every page; when its record closes, the Church takes it up, and the river rolls on down the centuries; let the Inquisition tell over its victims; let Spain reckon her murdered ones, 31,912 burnt alive in that one land alone; let the Netherlands speak of their slain sons and daughters; let France and Italy swell the tale; nor let England and Scotland be forgotten, nor the blood-roll of Ireland be missed; Catholic murdering Arian; Arian slaying Catholic; Romanist burning Protestant; Protestant hanging Romanist. The names of those who obey God’s command may be changed, but they all do the same accursed work, spreading religion everywhere with fire and sword; nor does the harm confine itself to Jews and Christians only, for Mahomet, the prophet of Arabia, catches up the teaching of Moses and re-echoes it, and the Moslem follows on the inspired path, and stains it once again with human blood. A God, a Bible, a priesthood—how have they ruined the world; how fair and bright might earth have been had there been no teachers of religion!
“How powerless were the mightiest
monarch’s arm,
Vain his loud threat and impotent his
frown!
How ludicrous the priest’s dogmatic
roar!
The weight of his exterminating curse
How light! and his affected charity,
To suit the pressure of the changing times,
What palpable deceit! but for thy aid,
Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend,
Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with
men,
And heaven with slaves!
Thou taintest all thou look’st upon.......”
—("Queen Mab,” by P.B. Shelley; can. 6. Collected works, p. 12, edition 1839.)
Deuteronomy xxi. 10-14 instructs the Hebrew that if, after victory, he sees a beautiful woman and desires her, he may take her, and if later, “thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will,” to starvation, to misery, what matter, after God’s chosen is satisfied. Deut. xxiii. 2 punishes a man for that which is no fault of his, his illegitimate birth. We have omitted many absurd precepts found in this Mosaic code, and have only chosen those which are grossly immoral, and can be defended by no kind of reasoning as to “defective,” or “imperfect” morality, “suited to a nation in a low stage of civilisation.”
These laws not only fall short of a perfect morality, but they are distinctly and foully immoral, and tend directly to the brutalisation of the nation which should live under them. It is true that there is much pure morality in this code, and some refined feeling here and there. These jewels are curiously out of place in their surroundings. Imagine a people so savage as to need laws permitting all the abominations referred to above, and yet so cultivated as to be capable of appreciating the beauty of: “If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden, and wouldest forbear to help him; thou shalt surely help him” (Exodus xxiii. 5). It is time that it should be publicly acknowledged that the so-called Mosaic code is literally a mosaic of scattered fragments of legislation, of various ages, and various stages of civilisation, put together a few hundred years before Christ. At present, the whole code lies on the shoulders of Christianity, and is fairly pleaded against it by the Freethinker.
It is not necessary to speak here against the practical morality of Old Testament saints; the very names of Lot, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, etc., bring before the mind’s eye a list of crimes so foul, so cowardly, so bloody, that no enumeration of them can be needed. Of them, we may fairly say with Virgil:—
“Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.”
Turning to the New Testament morality, we may attack it in various ways: we may argue that the better part of it is not new, and therefore cannot be regarded as especially inspired, or that it leaves out of account many virtues necessary to the well-being of families and states; or we may contend that much of it is harmful, and much of it impracticable.
The better part is that which is NON-ORIGINAL. All that is fair and beautiful in Christian morality had been taught in the world ages before Christ was born. Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tsze, Mencius, Zoroaster, Manu, taught the noble human morality found in some of the teaching ascribed to Christ (throughout this Section the morality put into Christ’s mouth in the New Testament will be treated as his).
Christ taught the duty of returning good for evil. Buddha said: “A man who foolishly does me wrong I will return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil comes from him, the more good shall go from me” ("Anthology,” by Moncure D. Conway, page 240). In the Buddhist Dhammapada we read: “Let a man overcome anger by love; let him overcome evil by good; let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth” (Ibid, p. 307). Again: “Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love; this is an old rule” (Ibid, p. 131). Lao-Tsze says: “The good I would meet with goodness. The not good I would meet with goodness also. The faithful I would meet with faith. The not faithful I would meet with faith also. Virtue is faithful. Recompense injury with kindness” (Ibid, p. 365). Confucius struck a yet higher and truer note: “Some one said, ’What do you say concerning the principle that injury should be recompensed with kindness?’ The Sage replied, ’With what, then, will you recompense kindness? Recompense kindness with kindness, and injury with justice’” (Ibid, p. 6). Manu places “returning good for evil” in his tenfold system of duties; in his code also we find: “By forgiveness of injuries the learned are purified” (Ibid, p. 311). The “golden rule” is as old as the generous and just heart. The Saboean Book of the Law taught: “Let none of you treat his brother in a way which he himself would dislike” (Ibid, p. 7). “Tsze-Kung asked, ’Is there one word which may serve as a rule for one’s whole life?’ Confucius answered, ’Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not wish done to yourself, do not to others. When you are labouring for others let it be with the same zeal as if it were for yourself’” (Ibid, pp. 6, 7).
If Christ taught humility, we read from Lao-Tsze: “I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize—Compassion, Economy, Humility. Being compassionate, I can therefore be brave. Being economical, I can therefore be liberal. Not daring to take precedence of the world, I can therefore become chief among the perfect ones. In the present day men give up compassion, and cultivate only courage. They give up economy and aim only at liberality. They give up the last place, and seek only the first. It is their death” (Ibid, p. 216). Lao-Tsze says again: “By undivided attention to the passion-nature and tenderness it is possible to be a little child. By putting away impurity from the hidden eye of the heart, it is possible to be without spot. There is a purity and quietude by which we may rule the whole world. To keep tenderness, I pronounce strength.... The fact that the weak can conquer the strong and the tender the hard, is known to all the world; yet none carry it out in practice. The reason of heaven does not strive, yet conquers well; does not call, yet things come of their own accord; is slack, yet plans well” (Ibid, pp. 323, 324). Again: “The sage ... puts himself last, and yet is
Jesus is said to be pre-eminent as a moral teacher because he directed his teaching to the improvement of the heart, knowing that from a good heart a good life would flow; in Manu’s code we read: “Action, either mental, verbal, or corporeal, bears good or evil fruit as itself is good or evil ... of that threefold action be it known in the world that the heart is the instigator” (Ibid, p. 4). Buddha said: “It is the heart of love and faith accompanying good actions which spreads, as it were, a beneficent shade from the world of men to the world of angels” (Ibid, p. 234). Jesus reminded the people that the ceremonial duties of religion were small compared with “the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and truth;” Manu wrote: “To a man contaminated by sensuality, neither the Vedas, nor liberality, nor sacrifices, nor observances, nor pious austerities will procure felicity. A wise man must faithfully discharge his moral duties, even though he dares not constantly perform the ceremonies of religion. He will fall very low if he performs ceremonial acts only, and fails to discharge his moral duties” (Ibid, p. 3). Exactly parallel to a saying of Jesus is one in the Saboean Book of the Law: “Adhere so firmly to the truth that your yea shall be yea, and your nay, nay” (Ibid, p. 7).
In urging that all great moral duties were taught by pre-Christian thinkers, we do not mean that Christ took his moral sayings from the books of these great Eastern teachers; there was no necessity that he should go so far in search of them, for in the teachings of the Rabbis of his nation he found all of which he stood in need. Many of these teachings have been preserved in the more modern Talmud, grains of wheat amid much chaff, the moral thoughts of some of the purest Jewish minds. “Take the Talmud and study it, and then judge from what uninspired source Jesus drew much of his highest teaching. ’Whoso looketh on the wife of another with a lustful eye, is considered as if he had committed adultery’—(Kalah). ’With what measure we mete, we shall be measured again’—(Johanan). ’What thou wouldst not like to be done to thyself, do not to others; this is the fundamental law’—(Hillel). ’If he be admonished to take the splinter out of his eye, he would answer, Take the beam out of thine own’—(Tarphon). ’Imitate God in his goodness. Be towards thy fellow-creatures as he is towards the whole creation. Clothe the
What nobler or grander moral teachings can be found anywhere than breathe through the following passages, taken from the “bibles of all nations” so ably collected for us by Mr. Corway in the “Sacred Anthology” quoted from above? “Let a man continually take pleasure in truth, in justice, in laudable practices and in purity; let him keep in subjection his speech, his arm, and his appetites. Wealth and pleasures repugnant to law, let him shun; and even lawful acts which may cause pain, or be offensive to mankind. Let him not have nimble hands, restless feet, or voluble eyes; let him not be flippant in his speech, nor intelligent in doing mischief. Let him walk in the path of good men” (Manu, p. 7). “He who neglecteth the duties of this life is unfit for this, much less for any higher world” ("Bhagavat Gita,” p. 26). “Charity is the free gift of anything not injurious. If no benefit is intended, or the gift is harmful, it is not charity. There must also be the desire to assist, or to show gratitude. It is not charity when gifts are given from other considerations, as when animals are fed that they may be used, or presents given by lovers to bind affection, or to slaves to stimulate labour. It is found where man, seeking to diffuse happiness among all men—those he loves, and those he loves not—digs canals and pools, makes roads, bridges, and seats, and plants trees for shade. It is found where, from compassion for the miserable and the poor, who have none to help them, a man erects resting-places for wanderers, and drinking-fountains, or provides food, raiment, medicine for the needy, not selecting one more than another. This is true charity, and bears much fruit” ("Katha Chari,” pp. 219, 220). “Never will I seek, nor receive, private individual salvation—never enter into final peace alone; but for ever, and everywhere, will I live and strive for the universal redemption of every creature throughout the world” (Kwan-yin, p. 233). “All men have in themselves the feelings of mercy and pity, of shame and hatred of vice. It is for each one by culture to let these feelings grow, or to let them wither. They are
In “The Wheel of the Law,” by Henry Alabaster, we find some most interesting information on the moral teaching of Buddhism, and the following quotation is taken from one of the Sutras: “On a certain occasion the Lord Buddha led a number of his disciples to a village of the Kalamachou, where his wisdom and merit and holiness were known. And the Kalamachou assembled, and did homage to him and said, ’Many priests and Brahmins have at different times visited us, and explained their religious tenets, declaring them to be excellent, but each abused the tenets of every one else, whereupon we are in doubt as to whose religion is right and whose wrong; but we have heard that the Lord Buddha teaches an excellent religion, and we beg that we may be freed from doubt, and learn the truth.’ And the Lord Buddha answered, ’You were right to doubt, for it was a doubtful matter. I say unto all of you, Do not believe in what ye have heard; that is, when you have heard anyone say this is especially good or extremely bad; do not reason with yourselves that if it had not been true, it would not have been asserted, and so believe in its truth. Neither have faith in traditions, because they have been handed down for many generations and in many places. Do not believe in anything because it is rumoured and spoken of by many; do not think that it is a proof of its truth. Do not believe merely because the written statement of some old sage is produced; do not be sure that the writing has ever been revised by the said sage, or can be relied on. Do not believe in what you have fancied, thinking that because an idea is extraordinary it must have been implanted by a Dewa, or some wonderful being. Do not believe in guesses, that is, assuming some thing at haphazard as a starting-point, draw your conclusions from it; reckoning your two and your three and your four before you have fixed your number one. Do not believe because you think there is analogy, that is, a suitability in things and occurrences, such as believing that there must be walls of the world, because you see water in a basin, or that Mount Meru must exist because you have seen the reflection of trees: or that there must be a creating God because houses and towns have builders.... Do not believe merely on the authority of your teachers and masters, or believe and practise merely because they believe and practise. I tell you all, you must of your own selves know that ’this is evil this is punishable, this is censured by wise men, belief in this will bring no advantage to one, but will cause sorrow.’ And when you know this, then eschew it. I say to all you dwellers in this village, answer me this. Lopho, that is covetousness, Thoso, that is anger and savageness, and Moho, that is ignorance and folly—when any or all of these arise in the hearts of men, is the result beneficial or the reverse?’ And they answered, ‘It is not beneficial, O Lord!’ Then the Lord continued, ’Covetous, passionate, and ignorant men destroy life and steal, and commit
“First. Thou shall abstain from destroying or causing the destruction of any living thing.
“Second. Thou shalt abstain from acquiring or keeping, by fraud or violence, the property of another.
“Third. Thou shalt abstain from those who are not proper objects for thy lust.
“Fourth. Thou shalt abstain from deceiving others either by word or deed.
“Fifth. Thou shalt abstain from intoxication” (Ibid, p. 57).
From Dr. Muir’s translations of “religious and moral sentiments,” already quoted from, we might fill page after page with purest morality. “Let a man be virtuous even while yet a youth; for life is transitory. If duty is performed, a good name will be obtained, as well as happiness, here and after death” ("Mahabharata,” xii., 6538, p. 22). “Deluded by avarice, anger, fear, a man does not understand himself. He plumes himself upon his high birth, contemning those who are not well-born; and overcome by the pride of wealth, he reviles the poor. He calls others fools, and
Such are a few of the moral teachings current in the East before the time of Christ. Since that period, these non-Christian nations have gone on in their paths, and many a gem of pure morality might be culled from their later writings, but we have only here presented teachings that were pre-Christian, so as to prove how little need there was for a God to become incarnate to teach morality to the world. “Revealed morality” has nothing grander to say than this earth-born morality, nothing sublimer comes from Judaea than comes from Hindustan and from China. Just as the symbolism of Christianity comes from nature, and is common to many creeds, so does the morality of Christianity flow from nature, and is common to many faiths; when nations attain to a certain stage of civilisation, and inherit a certain amount of culture, they also develop a morality proportionate to the point they have reached, because morality is necessary to the stability of States, and utility formulates the code of moral laws. Christianity can no longer stand on a pinnacle as the sole possessor of a pure and high morality. The pedestal she has occupied is built out of the bricks of ignorance, and her apostles and her master must take rank among their brethren of every age and clime.
It is a serious fault in Christian morality that it has so many OMISSIONS in it. It is full of exhortations to bear, to suffer, to be patient; it sorely lacks appeals to patriotism, to courage, to self-respect. “The heroes of Paganism exemplified the heroism of enterprise. Patriotism, chivalrous deeds of valour, high-souled aspirations after glory, stern justice taking its course in their hands, while natural feeling was held in abeyance—this was the line in which they shone. Our blessed Lord illustrated all virtues indeed, but most especially the passive ones. His heroism took its colouring from endurance. Women, though inferior to men in enterprise, usually come out better than men in suffering; and it is always to be remembered that our blessed Lord held his humanity, not of the stronger, but of the weaker sex” ("Thoughts on Personal Religion,” by Dean Goulburn, vol. ii., p. 99; ed. 1866). What is this but to say, in polite language, that Jesus was very effeminate?
Intertwined with the evil of omissions of duty is the direct injury of commanding NON-RESISTANCE, and of enforcing INDIFFERENCE TO EARTHLY CARES. “I say unto you that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away” (Matt. v. 39-42). The surface
We can scarcely wonder that, inculcating a course of conduct which must inevitably lead to poverty, Christ should hold up a state of poverty as desirable. We read in Matthew v. 3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and it is contended that it is poverty only of spirit which Christ blesses; if so, he blesses the source of much wretchedness, for poor-spirited people get trampled down, and are a misery to themselves and a burden to those about them. If, however, we turn to Luke vi. 20, we find the declaration: “Blessed are ye poor,” addressed directly to his Apostles, who were anything but poor in spirit (Luke ix. 46, and xxii. 24); and we find it, further, joined with the announcement, “blessed are ye that hunger now,” and followed by the curses:
But Jesus did more than panegyrise poverty; he gave still more exact directions to his disciples as to how poverty should be attained. Matt. vi. 25-34 is as mischievous a passage as has been penned by any moralist. “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” It is said that “take no thought” means, “be not over anxious;” if this be so, why does Christ emphasise it by quoting birds and lilies as examples, things, which, literally, take no thought? the argument is: birds do not store food in barns, yet God feeds them. You are more valuable than the birds. God will take equal care of you if you follow the birds’ example. The lilies spin no raiment, yet God clothes them. So shall he clothe you, if you follow their example. The passage has no meaning, the illustrations no appositeness, unless Christ means that no thought is to be taken for the future. He makes the argument still stronger: “the Gentiles seek” meat, drink, and clothing. But God, your Father, knows your need for all these things. Therefore, “seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. Take, therefore, no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” If Christ only meant the common-place advice, “do not be over-anxious,” he then lays the most absurd stress on it, and speaks in the most exaggerated way. Sensible Gentiles do not worry themselves by over-anxiety, after they have taken for the morrow’s needs all the care they can; but they do not act like birds or like lilies, for they know that many a bird starves in a hard winter because it is not capable of gathering and storing food into barns, and that many a garbless lily is shrivelled up by the cold east wind. They notice that though men and women are “much better than” birds and lilies, yet God does not always feed and clothe them; that, on the contrary, many a poor creature dies of starvation and of winter’s bitter cold; when our daily papers record no inquests on those who die from want, because none but God takes thought for them, then it will be time enough for us to cease from preparing for the morrow, and to trust that “heavenly Father” who at present “knoweth that” we “have need of these things,” and, knowing, lets so many of his children starve for lack of them.
The true meaning of Christ is plainly shown by his injunctions to the twelve apostles and to the seventy when he sent them on a journey: “Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, nor money; neither have two coats apiece” (Luke ix. 3); and: “Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes ... in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give” (Ibid, x. 4, 7). The same spirit breathes in his injunction to the young man: “Go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou
The dogma of rewards and punishments as taught by Christ is fatal to all reality of virtue. To do right from hope of heaven: to avoid wrong for fear of hell: such virtue is only skin-deep, and will not stand rough usage. True virtue does right because it is right, and therefore beneficial, and not from hope of a personal reward, or from dread of a personal punishment, hereafter. Christianity is the apotheosis of selfishness, gilded over with piety; self is the pivot on which all turns: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark viii. 36). “He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward. And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in nowise lose his reward” (Matt. x. 41, 42). “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven” (Ibid, 32, 33). “Pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly” (Ibid, vi. 6). “We have forsaken all and followed thee: what shall we have therefore?... When the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones” (Matt. xix. 27, 28). The passages might be multiplied; but these are sufficient to show the thorough selfishness inculcated. All is done with an eye to personal gain in the future; even the cold water is to be given, not because the “little one” is thirsty and needs it, but for the reward promised therefore to the giver. Pure, generous love is excluded: there is a taint of selfishness in every gift.
The thought of Heaven is also injurious to human welfare, because men learn to disregard earth for the sake of “the glory to be revealed.” People whose “citizenship is in heaven,” make but sorry citizens of earth, for they regard this world as “no continuing city,” while they “seek one to come.” Hence, as all history shows us, they are apt to despise this world while dreaming about another, to trouble little about earth’s wrongs while thinking of the mansions in the skies; to acquiesce in any assertion that “the whole world lieth in wickedness,” and to trouble themselves but little as to the means of improving it. From this line of thought follows the long list of monasteries and nunneries, wherein people “separate” themselves from this world in order to “prepare” for another. All this evil flows directly from the Christian morality which teaches that all hopes, efforts, and aims should be turned towards laying up treasures in heaven, where also the heart should be. One need scarcely add a word of reprobation as to the horrible doctrine of eternal torture, although that, too, is part of the teaching of Christ. The whole conscience of civilised mankind is so turning against that shameful and cruel dogma, that it is only now believed among the illiterate and uncultured of the Christians, and soon will be too savage even for them. It has, however, hardened the hearts of many in days gone by, and has made the burning of heretics seem an appropriate act of faith, since men only began on earth the roasting which God was to continue to all eternity.
The morality of Christ is also faulty because it shares in the persecuting spirit of the Mosaic code. The disciples are told: “Whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily, I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city” (Matt. x. 14, 15). Christ proclaims openly: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household” (Ibid, 34-36). To a man whom he calls to follow him, and who asks to be allowed first to bury his father, Christ gives the brutal reply: “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God” (Luke x. 60). Another time he says: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Ibid, xiv. 26). A religion that destroys the home, that introduces discord into the family, that bids its votaries hate all else save Christ, acts as a disintegrating force in human life, and cannot be too strongly opposed.
Neither must we forget the teaching of Christ regarding marriage. He deliberately places virginity above marriage, and counsels self-mutilation to those capable of making the sacrifice. “All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given ... there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it” (Matt. xix. 11, 12). Following this, 1 Cor. vii. teaches the superiority of an unmarried state, and threatens “trouble in the flesh” to those who marry. And in Rev. xiv. 1-4, we find, following the Lamb, with special privileges, 144,000 who “were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.” This coarse and insulting way of regarding women, as though they existed merely to be the safety-valves of men’s passions, and that the best men were above the temptation of loving them, has been the source of unnumbered evils. To this saying of Christ are due the self-mutilations of many, such as Origen, and the destruction of myriads of human lives in celibacy; monks and nuns innumerable owe to this evil teaching their shrivelled lives and withered hearts. For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as of a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despised women the most. The subjection of women in Western lands is wholly due to Christianity. Among the Teutons women were honoured, and held a noble and dignified place in the tribe; Christianity brought with it the evil Eastern habit of regarding women as intended for the toys and drudges of man, and intensified it with a special spite against them, as the daughters of Eve, who was first “deceived.” Strangely different to the general Eastern feeling and showing a truer and nobler view of life, is the precept of Manu: “Where women are honoured, there the deities are pleased; but where they are dishonoured, there all religious acts become fruitless” ("Anthology,” p. 310).
Evil also is the teaching that repentance is higher than purity: “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance” (Luke xv. 7, 10). The fatted calf is slain for the prodigal son, who returns home after he has wasted all his substance; and to the laborious elder son, during the many years of his service, the father never gave even a kid that he might make merry with his friends (Ibid, 29). What is all this but putting a premium upon immorality, and instructing people that the more they sin, the more joyous will be their welcome whenever they may choose to reform, and, like the prodigal, think to mend their broken fortunes by repentance?
Thoroughly immoral is the teaching contained in the two parables in Luke xvi. In the one, a steward who has wasted his master’s goods, is commended because he went and bribed his employer’s debtors to assist him, by suggesting to them that they should cheat his master by altering the amount of the bills they owed him. In the other, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the evil moral is taught that riches are in themselves deserving of punishment, and poverty of reward. The rich man is in hell simply because he was rich, and the poor man in Abraham’s bosom simply because he was poor; it can scarcely add, one may remark, to the pleasure of heaven for the Lazaruses all to look at the Diveses, and be unable to reach them, even to give them a single drop of water.
Thus whether we see that the nobler part of the Christian morality is pre-Christian, and is neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Hindu, nor Buddhist, but is simply human, and belongs to the race and not to one creed. Whether we note the omissions in its code, making it insufficient for human guidance; whether we mark its errors, mistakes, and injurious teachings; whichever point of view we take from which to consider it, we find in it nothing to distinguish it above other moral codes, or to prevent it from being classed among other moralities, as being a mixture of good and bad, and, therefore, not to be taken as an, unerring guide, being like them, all FALLIBLE.
* * * * *
* * * * *
Bhagavat Gita, in Anthology...406
Bradlaugh, The Bible: what it is...397
" What Did Jesus Teach?...414
Buddha, in Anthology...403, 405
" Wheel of the Law...408
Cahen, Levitique...398
Colenso, Pentateuch and Book of Joshua...396
Confucius, in Anthology...403, 404, 408
Dante, Inferno...403
Dhammapada, in Anthology...403
Gouldburn, Thoughts on Personal Religion...411
Kalisch, Leviticus...399, 400, 401
Katha-Chari, in Anthology...407
Kwan-yin, in Anthology...407
Lao-Tsze, in Anthology...403, 404
Mahabharata, in Muir...410
Manu, in Anthology...404, 405, 406, 419
Mencius, in Anthology...407
Prayer Book, Art. vi. vii....395
Ramayana, in Anthology...407
Sabaean Book of the Law, in Anthology...404, 405
Shelley, Queen Mab...402
She-King, in Anthology...407
Statutes, 9 and 10 William III. cap. 32...395
Talmud, quoted by Besant...405
* * * * *
Christian morality, compared with others...403
" degrading to women...419
" immoral towards
sin...419
" non-original...403
" non-resistant...412
" omissions in...411
" paved way for despotism...412
" persecuting in
spirit...418
" sanctions mendicancy...416
" selfish...417
" what included in...395
Heaven and Hell, harm done by belief in...417
Heroism of Paganism...412
Human sacrifice, sanctioned by God...398
" among Jews...398
Marriage, teaching of Christ concerning...419
Morality of great Pagan teachers...406
" compared with that of Christ...403
Murder of blasphemer, sanctioned by God...397
" heretics...401
Ordeal, sanctioned by God...401
Poverty inculcated by Christ...414
Prostitution, sanctioned by God...402
Religion, evil of...402
Sale of daughter sanctioned by God...396
" thief...396
Slaves, beaten to death...396
Slavery, sanctioned by God...396, 397
Unthrift taught by Christ...415
Utility the test of morality...411
" religion according to Buddha...408
Value of Christianity to tyrants...412
Witches, number of killed...397
Witch-murder, sanctioned by God...397
This section does not pretend, within the short limits of some fifty pages, to give even a complete summary of Christian history. It proposes only to draw up an impeachment against Christianity from the facts of its history which occurred in the day of its power, from the time of Constantine, up to the time of the Reformation. If it be urged that Christianity was corrupt during this period, and ought not therefore to be judged by it, we can only reply that, corrupt or not, it is the only Christianity there was, and if only bad fruit is brought forth, it is fair to conclude that the tree which bears nothing else is also bad. If the bishops, and clergy, and missionaries were ignorant, sensual, tyrannical, and superstitious, they are none the less the representatives of Christianity, and if these are not true Christians, where are the true Christians from A.D. 324 to A.D. 1,500?
We propose, in this section, to practically condense the dark side of Mosheim’s “Ecclesiastical History,” as translated from the Latin by Dr. A. Maclaine (ed. 1847), only adding, here and there, extracts from other writers; all extracts, therefore, except where otherwise specified, will be taken from this valuable history, a history which, perhaps from its size and dryness, is not nearly so much studied by Freethinkers as it should be; its special worth for our object is that Dr. Mosheim is a sincere Christian, and cannot, therefore, be supposed to strain any point unduly against the religion to which he himself belongs.
During the second and third centuries the Christians appear to have grown in power and influence, and their faith, made up out of many older creeds and forming a kind of eclectic religion, gradually spread throughout the Roman empire, and became a factor in political problems. In the struggles between the opposing Roman emperors, A.D. 310-324, the weight of the Christian influence was thrown on the side of Constantine, his rivals being strongly opposed to Christianity; Maximin Galerius was a bitter persecutor, and his successor, Maximin, trod in his steps in A.D. 312, and 313, Maxentius was defeated by Constantine, and Maximin by Licinius, and in A.D. 312 Constantine and Licinius granted liberty of worship to the Christians; in the following year, according to Mosheim, or in A.D. 314 according to Eusebius, a second edict was issued from Milan, by the two emperors, which granted “to the Christians and to all, the free choice to follow that mode of worship which they may wish ... that no freedom at all shall be refused to Christians, to follow or to keep their observances or worship; but that to each one power be granted to devote his mind to that worship which he may think adapted to himself” (Eusebius, “Eccles. Hist.” p. 431). Licinius, however, renewed the war against Constantine, who immediately embraced Christianity, thus securing to himself the sympathy and assistance of the faith which now for the first time saw its votary on the imperial throne of the world, and Licinius, by allying himself with Paganism, and persecuting the Christians, drove them entirely over to Constantine, and was finally defeated and dethroned, A.D. 324. From that date Christianity was supreme, and became the established religion of the State. Dr. Draper regards the conversion of Constantine from the point of view taken above. He says: “It had now become evident that the Christians constituted a powerful party in the State, animated with indignation at the atrocities they had suffered, and determined to endure them no longer. After the abdication of Diocletian (A.D. 305), Constantine, one of the competitors for the purple, perceiving the advantages that would accrue to him from such a policy, put himself forth as the head of the Christian party. This gave him, in every part of the empire, men and women ready to encounter fire and sword in his behalf; it gave him unwavering adherents in every legion of the armies. In a decisive battle, near the Milvian bridge, victory crowned his schemes. The death of Maximin, and subsequently that of Licinius, removed all obstacles. He ascended the throne of the Caesars—the first Christian emperor. Place, profit, power—these were in view of whoever now joined the conquering sect. Crowds of worldly persons, who cared nothing about its religious ideas, became its warmest supporters. Pagans at heart, their influence was soon manifested in the Paganisation of Christianity that forthwith ensued. The emperor, no better than they, did nothing to check their proceedings. But he did not personally conform to the ceremonial requirements of the Church until the close of his evil life, A.D. 337” ("History of the Conflict between Religion and Science,” p. 39; ed. 1875). Constantine, in fact, was not baptised until a few days before his death.
The character of the first Christian emperor is not one which strikes us with admiration. As emperor he sank into “a cruel and dissolute monarch, corrupted by his fortune, or raised by conquest above the necessity of dissimulation ... the old age of Constantine was disgraced by the opposite yet reconcilable vices of rapaciousness and prodigality” (Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” vol. ii., p. 347). He was as effeminate as he was vicious. “He is represented with false hair of various colours, laboriously arranged by the skilful artists of the time; a diadem of a new and more expensive fashion; a profusion of gems and pearls, of collars and bracelets, and a variegated flowing robe of silk, most curiously embroidered with flowers of gold.” To his other vices he added most bloodthirsty cruelty. He strangled Licinius, after defeating him; murdered his own son Crispus, his nephew Licinius, and his wife Fausta, together with a number of others. It must indeed have needed an efficacious baptism to wash away his crimes; and “future tyrants were encouraged to believe that the innocent blood which they might shed in a long reign would instantly be washed away in the waters of regeneration” (Ibid, pp. 471, 472).
The wealth of the Christian churches was considerable during the third century, and the bishops and clergy lived in much pomp and luxury. “Though several [bishops] yet continued to exhibit to the world illustrious examples of primitive piety and Christian virtue, yet many were sunk in luxury and voluptuousness, puffed up with vanity, arrogance, and ambition, possessed with a spirit of contention and discord, and addicted to many other vices that cast an undeserved reproach upon the holy religion of which they were the unworthy professors and ministers. This is testified in such an ample manner by the repeated complaints of many of the most respectable writers of this age, that truth will not permit us to spread the veil which we should otherwise be desirous to cast over such enormities among an order so sacred.... The example of the bishops was ambitiously imitated by the presbyters, who, neglecting the sacred duties of their station, abandoned themselves to the indolence and delicacy of an effeminate and luxurious life. The deacons, beholding the presbyters deserting thus their functions, boldly usurped their rights and privileges; and the effects of a corrupt ambition were spread through every rank of the sacred order” (p. 73). During this century also we find much scandal caused by the pretended celibacy of the clergy, for the people—regarding celibacy as purer than marriage, and considering that “they, who took wives, were of all others the most subject to the influence of malignant demons”—urged their clergy to remain celibate, “and many of the sacred order, especially in Africa, consented to satisfy the desires of the people, and endeavoured to do this in such a manner as not to offer an entire violence to their own inclinations. For this
The doctrine of the Church in these primitive times was as confused as its morality was impure. In the first century (during which we really know nothing of the Christian Church), Dr. Mosheim, in dealing with “divisions and heresies,” points to the false teachers mentioned in the New Testament, and the rise of the Gnostic heresy. Gnosticism (from [Greek: gnosis] knowledge), a system compounded of Christianity and Oriental philosophy, long divided the Church with the doctrines known as orthodox. The Gnostics believed in the existence of the two opposing principles of good and evil, the latter being by many considered as the creator of the world. They held that from the Supreme God emanated a number of AEons—generally put at thirty; (see throughout “Irenaeus Against Heresies")—and some maintained that one of these, Christ, descended on the man Jesus at his baptism, and left him again just before his passion; others that Jesus had not a real, but only an apparent, body of flesh. The Gnostic philosophy had many forms and many interdivisions; but most of the “heresies” of the first centuries were branches of this one tree: it rose into prominence, it is said, about the time of Adrian, and among its early leaders were Marcion, Basilides, and Valentinus. In addition to the various Gnostic theories, there was a deep mark of division between the Jewish and the Gentile Christians; the former developed into the sects, of Nazarenes and Ebionites, but were naturally never very powerful in the Church. In the second century, as the Christians become more visible, their dissensions are also more clearly marked; and it is important to observe that there is no period in the history of Christianity wherein those who laid claim to the name “Christian” were agreed amongst themselves as to what Christianity was. Gnosticism we see now divided into two main branches, Asiatic and Egyptian. The Asiatic believed that, in addition to the two principles of good and evil, there was a third being, a mixture of both, the Demiurgus, the creator, whose son Jesus was; they maintained that the body of Jesus was only apparent; they enforced the severest discipline against the body, which was evil, in that it was material; and marriage, flesh, and wine were forbidden. The Elcesaites were a judaising branch of this Asiatic Gnosticism; Saturninus of Antioch, Ardo of Syria, and Marcion of Pontus headed the movement, and after them Lucan, Severus, Blastes, Apelles, and Bardesanes formed new sects. Tatian (see ante, pp. 259, 260) had many followers called
Constantine attained undisputed and sole authority A.D. 324, and in the year 325 he summoned the first general council, that of Nicea, or Nice, which condemned the errors of Arius, and declared Christ to be of the same substance as the Father. This council has given its name to the “Nicene Creed,” although that creed, as now recited, differs somewhat from the creed issued at Nice, and received its present form at the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 381. During the reign of Constantine, the Church grew swiftly in power and influence, a growth much aided by the penal laws passed against Paganism. The moment Christianity was able to seize the sword, it wielded it remorselessly, and cut its way to supremacy in the Roman world. Bribes and penalties shared together in the work of conversion. “The hopes of wealth and honours, the example of an emperor, his exhortations, his irresistible smiles, diffused conviction among the venal and obsequious crowds which usually fill the apartments of a palace. The cities, which signalised a forward zeal by the voluntary destruction of their temples, were distinguished by municipal privileges and rewarded with popular donatives; and the new capital of the East gloried in the singular advantage that Constantinople was never profaned by the worship of idols. As the lower ranks of society are governed by imitation, the conversion of those who possessed any eminence of birth, of power, or of riches, was soon followed by dependent multitudes. The salvation of the common people was purchased at an easy rate, if it be true, that, in one year, twelve thousand men were baptised at Rome, besides a proportionable number of women and children; and that a white garment, with twenty pieces of gold, had been promised by the emperor to every convert” (Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” vol. ii. pp. 472, 473). With Constantine began the ruinous system of dowering the Church with State funds. The emperor directed the treasurers of the province of Carthage to pay over to the bishop of that district L18,000 sterling, and to honour his further drafts. Constantine also
In this century is the first instance of the burning alive of a heretic, and it was Spain who lighted that first pile. Theodosius, of all the emperors of this age, was the bitterest persecutor of the heretic sects. “The orthodox emperor considered every heretic as a rebel against the supreme powers of heaven and of earth; and each of those powers might exercise their peculiar jurisdiction over the soul and body of the guilty.... In the space of fifteen years [A.D. 380-394], he promulgated at least fifteen severe edicts against the heretics; more especially against those who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity; and to deprive them of every hope of escape, he sternly enacted, that if any laws or rescripts should be alleged in their favour, the judges should consider them as the illegal productions either of fraud or forgery.... The heretical teachers ... were exposed to the heavy penalties of exile and confiscation, if they presumed to preach the doctrine, or to practise the rites of their accursed sects.... Their religious
One important event of this century must not be omitted, the dispersion of the great Alexandrine library, collected by the Ptolemies. In the siege of Alexandria by Julius Caesar, the Philadelphian library in the museum, containing some 400,000 volumes, had been burned; but there still remained the “daughter library” in the Serapion, containing about 300,000 books. During the episcopate of Theophilus, predecessor of Cyril, a riot took place between the Christians and the Pagans, and the latter “held the Serapion as their head-quarters. Such were the disorder and bloodshed that the emperor had to interfere. He despatched a rescript to Alexandria, enjoining the bishop, Theophilus, to destroy the Serapion; and the great library, which had been collected by the Ptolemies, and had escaped the fire of Julius Caesar, was by that fanatic dispersed” ("Conflict of Religion and Science,” p. 54), A.D. 389. To Christian bigotry it is that we owe the loss of these rich treasures of antiquity.
Heresies grew and strengthened during this fourth century. Chief leader in the heretic camp was Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria; he asserted that the Son, although begotten of the Father before the creation of aught else, was not “of the same substance” as the Father, but only “of like substance;” a vast number of the Christians embraced his definition, and thus began the long struggle between the Arians and the Catholics. Arius also “took the ground that there was a time when, from the very nature of sonship, the Son did not exist, and a time at which he commenced to be, asserting that it is the necessary condition of the filial relation that a father must be older than his son. But this assertion evidently denied the co-eternity of the three persons of the Trinity; it suggested a subordination or inequality among them, and indeed implied a time when the Trinity did not exist. Hereupon the bishop, who had been the successful competitor against Arius [for the episcopate], displayed his rhetorical powers in public debates on the question, and, the strife spreading, the Jews and Pagans, who formed a very large portion of the population of Alexandria,
This century sees the destruction of the Roman Empire of the West, and the rise into importance of the great Gothic monarchies. The Christian emperors of the East put down paganism with a strong hand, conferring state offices on Christians only, and forbidding pagan ceremonies [unless under Christian names]. The sons of Constantine had pronounced the penalty of death and confiscation against any who sacrificed to the old gods; and Theodosius, in A.D. 390, had forbidden, under heavy penalties, all pagan rites. This work of repression was rigorously carried on. Clovis, king of the Franks, embraced Christianity, finding its profession “of great use to him, both in confirming and enlarging his empire”
Learning during this century fell lower and lower, in spite of the schools established and fostered by the emperors, and while knowledge diminished, vice increased. “The vices of the clergy were now carried to the most enormous lengths; and all the writers of this century, whose probity and virtue render them worthy of credit, are unanimous in their accounts of the luxury, arrogance, avarice, and voluptuousness of the sacerdotal orders. The bishops, particularly those of the first rank, created various delegates or ministers, who managed for them the affairs of their dioceses, and a sort of courts were gradually formed, where these pompous ecclesiastics gave audience, and received the homage of a cringing multitude” (p. 123). Superstition performed its maddest freak in the Stylites, men “who stood motionless on the tops of pillars;” the original maniac being one Simon, a Syrian, who actually spent thirty-seven years of his life on pillars, the last of which was forty cubits high. Another of the same class spent sixty-eight years in this useful manner (see pp. 128, 129, and note). The Agapae were abolished, and auricular confession was established, during this century.
Among the bishops of this century, one name deserves an immortality of infamy. It is that of Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria. Under his rule took place the terrible murder of Hypatia, that pure and beautiful Platonic teacher, who was dragged by a fanatic mob, headed by Peter the Reader, into the great church of Alexandria, and tortured to death on the steps of the high altar. Cyril’s “hold upon the audiences of the giddy city [Alexandria] was, however, much weakened by Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the mathematician, who not only distinguished herself by her expositions of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, but also by her comments on the writings of Apollonius and other geometers. Each day, before her academy, stood a long train of chariots; her lecture-room was crowded with the wealth and fashion of Alexandria.... Hypatia and Cyril! Philosophy and bigotry. They cannot exist together. So Cyril felt, and on that feeling he acted. As Hypatia repaired to her academy, she was assaulted by Cyril’s mob—a mob of many monks. Stripped naked in the street, she was dragged into a church, and there killed by the club of Peter the Reader [A.D. 415]. The corpse was cut to pieces, the flesh was scraped from the bones with shells, and the remnants cast into a fire. For this frightful crime Cyril was never called to account. It seemed to be admitted that the end sanctified the means” (Draper’s “Conflict between Religion and Science,” p. 55).
The heresies of the last century were continued in this, and various new ones arose. Chief among these was the heresy of Nestorius, a Bishop of Constantinople, who distinguished so strongly between the two natures in Christ as to make a double personality, and he regarded the Virgin Mary as mother of Christ, but not mother of God. The Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431) was called to decide the point, and was presided over by the great antagonist of Nestorius, Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria. The matter was settled very quickly. Church Councils vote on disputed points, and the vote of the majority constitutes orthodoxy. The Council was held before the arrival of the bishops who sympathised with Nestorius, and thus, by the simple expedient of getting everything over before the opponents arrived, it was settled for evermore that Christ is one person with two natures. A heresy of the very opposite character was that of Eutyches, abbot of the monastery in Constantinople. He maintained that in Christ there was only one nature, “that of the incarnate word,” and his opinion was endorsed by a council called at Ephesus, A.D. 449; but this decree was annulled by the Council of Chalcedon (reckoned the fourth OEcumenical), A.D. 451, wherein it was again declared that Christ had two natures in one person. It was at the Council of Ephesus, in A.D. 449, that Flavianus, Bishop of Constantinople, was so beaten by the other bishops that he died of his wounds, and the bishops who held with him hid themselves under benches to get out of the way of their infuriate brothers in Christ (see notes on pp. 136, 137). The Theopaschites were a branch of the Eutychian heresy, and the Monophysites were a cognate sect; from these arose the Acephali, Anthropomorphites, Barsanuphites, and Esaianists. Not less important than the heresy of Eutyches was that of Pelagius, a British monk, who taught that man did not inherit original sin on account of Adam’s fall, but that each was born unspotted into the world, and was capable of rising to the height of virtue by the exercise of his natural faculties. The semi-Pelagians held that man could turn to God by his own strength, but that divine grace was necessary to enable him to persevere.
One heretic of this period deserves a special word of record. Vigilantius was a Gallic priest, remarkable for his eloquence and learning, and he devoted himself to an effort to reform the Church in Spain. “Among other things, he denied that the tombs and the bones of the martyrs were to be honoured with any sort of homage or worship; and therefore censured pilgrimages that were made to places that were reputed holy. He turned into derision the prodigies which were said to be wrought in the temples consecrated to martyrs, and condemned the custom of performing vigils in them. He asserted, and indeed with reason, that the custom of burning tapers at the tombs of the martyrs in broad day, was imprudently borrowed from the ancient superstition
The darkness deepens as we proceed. Christianity spread among the barbarous tribes of the East and West, but “it must, however, be acknowledged, that of these conversions, the greatest part were owing to the liberality of the Christian princes, or to the fear of punishment, rather than to the force of argument or to the love of truth. In Gaul, the Jews were compelled by Childeric to receive the ordinance of baptism; and the same despotic method of converting was practised in Spain” (p. 141). “They required nothing of these barbarous people that was difficult to be performed, or that laid any remarkable restraint upon their appetites and passions. The principal injunctions they imposed upon these rude proselytes were that they should get by heart certain summaries of doctrine, and to pay the images of Christ and the saints the same religious services which they had formerly offered to the statues of the gods” (p. 142). Libraries were formed in many of the monasteries, and schools were opened, but apparently only for those who intended to enter the monastic life; these, however, did not flourish, for many bishops showed “bitter aversion” towards “every sort of learning and erudition, which they considered as pernicious to the progress of piety” (p. 144). “Greek literature was almost everywhere neglected.... Philosophy fared still worse than literature; for it was entirely banished from all the seminaries which were under the inspection and government of the ecclesiastical order” (Ibid). The wealth of the Church grew apace. “The arts of a rapacious priesthood were practised upon the ignorant devotion of the simple; and even the remorse of the wicked was made an instrument of increasing the ecclesiastical treasure. For an opinion was propagated with industry among the people, that the remission of their sins was to be purchased by their liberalities to the churches and monks” (p. 146). “The monastic orders, in general, abounded with fanatics and profligates; the latter were more numerous than the former in the Western convents, while in those of the East the fanatics were predominant” (ibid). It was in this
Many are the missionary enterprises of this century, and we find the missionaries grasping at temporal power, and exercising a “princely authority over the countries where their ministry had been successful” (p. 157). Learning had almost vanished; “they, who distinguished themselves most by their taste and genius, carried their studies little farther than the works of Augustine and Gregory the Great; and it is of scraps collected out of these two writers, and patched together without much uniformity, that the best productions of this century are entirely composed.... The schools which had been committed to the care and inspection of the bishops, whose ignorance and indolence were now become enormous, began to decline apace, and were in many places, fallen into ruin. The bishops in general were so illiterate, that few of that body were capable of composing the discourses which they delivered to the people. Such of them as were not totally destitute of genius, composed out of the writings of Augustine and Gregory a certain
Winfred, better known as Boniface, “the Apostle of Germany,” is, perhaps, the chief ecclesiastical figure of this century. He taught Christianity right through Germany; was consecrated bishop in A.D. 723, created archbishop in A.D. 738, and Primate of Germany and Belgium in A.D. 746; in A.D. 755 he was murdered in Friesland, with fifty other ecclesiastics. Much stress is laid upon his martyrdom by Christian writers, but Boniface, after all, only received from the Frieslanders the measure he had meted out to their brethren, and there seems no good reason why Christian missionaries should claim a monopoly of the right to kill. Mosheim allows that he “often employed
In the East, the Church was torn with dissensions, while the imperial throne was rocking under the repeated attacks of the Turks—a tribe descended from the Tartars—who entered Armenia, struggled with the Saracens for dominion, subdued them partially, and then turned their arms against the Greek empire. The great controversy of this century is that on the worship of images, between the Iconoduli or Iconolatrae (image worshippers), and the Iconomachi or Iconoclastae (image breakers). The Emperor Bardanes, a supporter of the Monothelite heresy, ordered that a picture representing the sixth general council should be removed from the Church of St. Sophia, because that council had condemned the Monothelites. Not content with doing this (A.D. 712), Bardanes sent an order to Rome that all pictures and images of the same nature should be removed from places of worship. Constantine, the Pope, immediately set up six pictures, representing the six general councils, in the porch of St. Peter’s, and called a council at Rome, which denounced the Emperor as an apostate. Bardanes was dethroned by a revolution, but his successor, Leo, soon took up the quarrel. In A.D. 726, he issued an imperial edict commanding the removal of all images from the churches and forbidding all image worship, save only those representing the crucifixion of Christ. Pope Gregory I. excommunicated the Emperor, and insurrections broke out all over the empire in consequence; the Emperor retorted by calling a council at Constantinople, which deposed the bishop of that city for his leanings
The Arian, Manichaean, Marcionite, and Monothelite heresies spread, during this century, through the Greek Church, and, where the Arabians ruled, the Nestorians and Monophysites also flourished. In the Latin Church a phase of the Nestorian heresy made its way, under the name of Adoptianism, a name given because its adherents regarded Christ, so far as his manhood was concerned, as the Son of God by adoption only.
Christendom, during this century, as during the preceding one, was threatened and harassed by the inroads of Mahommedan powers, and the first gleams of returning light began to penetrate its thick darkness—light proceeding from the Arabians and the Saracens, the restorers of knowledge and of science. It is not here our duty to trace that marvellous work of the revival of thought—thought which Christianity had slain, but which, revived by Mahommedanism, was destined to issue in the new birth of heretic philosophy. While this work was proceeding among the Saracens, the Arabians, and the Moors, Christendom went on its way, degraded, vicious, and superstitious; only here and there an effort at learning was made, and some few went to the Arabian schools, and returned with some tincture of knowledge. John Scotus Erigena, a subtle and acute thinker, left behind him works which have made some regard him as the founder of the Realist school of the middle ages, the school which followed Aristotle, in opposition to the Nominalists, who held with Zeno and the Stoics. Erigena taught that the soul would be re-absorbed into the divine spirit, from which it had originally emanated; from God all things had come—to Him would they ultimately return; God alone was eternal, and in the end nothing but God would exist. Some of Erigena’s works naturally fell under the displeasure of the Church, and were duly burned: he was a philosopher, and therefore dangerous.
While this slight effort at thought was thus frowned upon, vice made its way unchecked and unrebuked by the authorities. “The impiety and licentiousness of the greater part of the clergy arose, at this time, to an enormous height, and stand upon record in the unanimous complaints of the most candid and impartial writers of this century. In the East, tumult, discord, conspiracies, and treason reigned uncontrolled, and all things were carried by violence and force. These abuses appeared in many things, but particularly in the election of the Patriarchs of Constantinople.... In the western provinces, the bishops were become voluptuous and effeminate to a very high degree. They passed their lives amidst the splendour of courts, and the pleasures of a luxurious indolence, which corrupted their taste, extinguished their zeal, and rendered them incapable of performing the solemn duties of their function; while the inferior clergy were sunk in licentiousness, minded nothing but sensual gratifications, and infected with the most heinous vices the flock whom it was the very business of their ministry to preserve, or to deliver from the contagion of iniquity. Besides, the ignorance of the sacred order was, in many places, so deplorable that few of them could either read or write, and still fewer were capable of expressing their wretched notions with any degree of method or perspicuity” (p. 193). “Many other causes also contributed to dishonour the Church, by introducing into it a corrupt ministry. A nobleman who, through want of talents, activity, or courage, was rendered incapable of appearing with dignity in the cabinet, or with honour in the field, immediately turned his views towards the Church, aimed at a distinguished place among its chiefs and rulers, and became, in consequence, a contagious example of stupidity and vice to the inferior clergy. The patrons of churches, in whom resided the right of election, unwilling to submit their disorderly conduct to the keen censure of zealous and upright pastors, industriously looked for the most abject, ignorant, and worthless ecclesiastics, to whom they committed the cure of souls” (p. 193). Of the Roman pontiffs, Mosheim says: “The greatest part of them are only known by the flagitious actions that have transmitted their names with infamy to our times” (p. 194). And “the enormous vices that must have covered so many pontiffs with infamy in the judgment of the wise, formed not the least obstacle to their ambition in these memorable times, nor hindered them from extending their influence and augmenting their authority both in church and state” (p. 195). Among the vast mass of forgeries which gradually built up the supremacy of the Roman see, the famous Isidorian Decretals deserve a word of notice. They were issued about A.D. 845, and consisted of “about one hundred pretended decrees of the early Popes, together with certain spurious writings of other church dignitaries and acts of synods. This forgery produced an
The ancient heresy of the Paulicians had not yet died out, spite of having suffered much persecution at Catholic hands, and under the Emperors Michael and Leo, a fierce attack upon these unfortunate beings took place. They were hunted down and executed without mercy, and at last they turned upon their persecutors, and revenged themselves by murdering the bishop, magistrates, and judges in Armenia, after which they fled to the countries under Saracen rule. After a while, they gradually returned to the Greek empire; but when the Empress Theodora was regent, during her son’s minority, she issued a stern decree against them. “The decree was severe, but the cruelty with which it was put in execution, by those who were sent into Armenia for that purpose, was horrible beyond expression; for these ministers of wrath, after confiscating the goods of above a hundred thousand of that miserable people, put their possessors to death in the most barbarous manner, and made them expire slowly in a variety of the most exquisite tortures” (p. 212).
In addition to the heresies inherited from the previous centuries, three new ones, important in their issues, arose to divide yet more the divided indivisible Church. A monk, named Pascasius Radbert, wrote a treatise (A.D. 831 and 845), in which he maintained that, at the Eucharist, the substance of the bread and wine became changed, by consecration, into the body and blood of Christ, and that this body “was the same body that was born of the Virgin, that suffered upon the cross, and was raised from the dead” (p. 205). Charles the Bald bade Erigena and Ratramn (or Bertramn) draw up the true doctrine of the Church, and the long controversy began which is continued even in the present day. The second great dispute arose on the question of predestination and divine grace. Godeschalcus, an eminent Saxon monk, returning from Rome in A.D. 847, resided for a space in Verona, where he spoke much on predestination, affirming that God had, from all eternity, predestined some to heaven and others to hell. He was condemned at a council held in Mayence, A.D. 848, and in the following year, at another council, he was again condemned, and was flogged until he burned, with his own hand, the apology for his opinions he had presented at Mayence. The third great controversy regarded the manner of Christ’s birth, and monks furiously disputed whether or no Christ was born after the fashion of other infants. The details of this dispute need not here be entered into.
“The deplorable state of Christianity in this century, arising partly from that astonishing ignorance that gave a loose rein both to superstition and immorality, and partly from an unhappy concurrence of causes of another kind, is unanimously lamented by the various writers who have transmitted to us the history of these miserable times” (p. 213). Yet “the gospel” spread. The Normans embraced “a religion of which they were totally ignorant” (p. 214), A.D. 912, because Charles the Simple of France offered Count Rollo a large territory on condition that he would marry his daughter and embrace Christianity: Rollo gladly accepted the territory and its encumbrances. Poland came next into the fold of the Church, for the Duke of Poland, Micislaus, was persuaded by his wife to profess Christianity, A.D. 965, and Pope John III. promptly sent a bishop and a train of priests to convert the duke’s subjects. “But the exhortations and endeavours of these devout missionaries, who were unacquainted with the language of the people they came to instruct [how effective must have been their arguments!] would have been entirely without effect, had they not been accompanied with the edicts and penal laws, the promises and threats of Micislaus, which dejected the courage and conquered the obstinacy of the reluctant Poles” (p. 214). “The Christian religion was established in Russia by means every way similar to those that had occasioned its propagation in Poland” (p. 215); the Greek wife of the Russian duke persuaded him to adopt her creed, and he was baptized A.D. 987. Mosheim assumes that the Russian people followed their princes of their own accord, since “we have, at least, no account of any compulsion or violence being employed in their conversion” (p. 215); if the Russians adopted Christianity without compulsion or violence, all we can say is, that their conversion is unique. The Danes were converted in A.D. 949, Otto the Great having defeated them, and having made it an imperative condition of peace, that they should profess Christianity. The Norwegians accepted the religion of Jesus on the same terms. Thus the greater part of Europe became Christian, and we even hear a cry raised by Pope Sylvester II. for the deliverance of Palestine from the Mahommedans—for a holy war. Christianity having now become so strong, learning had become proportionately weak; it had been sinking lower and lower during each succeeding epoch, and in this tenth century it reached its deepest stage of degradation. “The deplorable ignorance of this barbarous age, in which the drooping arts were entirely neglected, and the sciences seemed to be upon the point of expiring for want of encouragement, is unanimously confessed and lamented by all the writers who have transmitted to us any accounts of this period of time” (p. 218). In vain a more enlightened emperor in the East strove to revive learning and encourage study: “many of the most celebrated
The vice of the clergy was something terrible. “These corruptions were mounted to the most enormous height in that dismal period of the Church which we have now before us. Both in the eastern and western provinces, the clergy were, for the most part, composed of a most worthless set of men, shamefully illiterate and stupid, ignorant, more especially in religious matters, equally enslaved to sensuality and superstition, and capable of the most abominable and flagitious deeds. This dismal degeneracy of the sacred order was, according to the most credible accounts, principally owing to the pretended chiefs and rulers of the universal Church, who indulged themselves in the commission of the most odious crimes, and abandoned themselves to the lawless impulse of the most licentious
As late as A.D. 1430 the houses of the peasantry were “constructed of stones put together without mortar; the roofs were of turf—a stiffened bull’s-hide served for a door. The food consisted of coarse vegetable products, such as peas, and even the bark of trees. In some places they were unacquainted with bread. Cabins of reeds plastered with mud, houses of wattled stakes, chimneyless peat fires, from which there was scarcely an escape for the smoke, dens of physical and moral pollution swarming with vermin, wisps of straw twisted round the limbs to keep off the cold, the ague-stricken peasant with no help except shrine-cure,” i.e., cure by the touching bone of saint, or image of virgin (Draper’s “Conflict between Religion and Science,” p. 265). Even among the wealthy, the life was coarse and rough; carpets were unknown; drainage never thought of. The Anglo-Saxon “’nobles, devoted to gluttony and voluptuousness, never visited the church, but the matins and the mass were read over to them by a hurrying priest in their bed-chambers, before they rose, themselves not listening. The common people were a prey to the more powerful; their property was seized, their bodies dragged away to distant countries; their maidens were either thrown into a brothel or sold for slaves. Drinking, day and night, was the general pursuit: vices, the companions of inebriety, followed, effeminating the manly mind.’ The baronial castles were dens of robbers. The Saxon chronicler [William of Malmesbury, from whom the quotation above] records how men and women were caught and dragged into those strongholds, hung up by their thumbs or feet, fire applied to them, knotted strings twisted round their heads, and many other torments inflicted to extort ransom” (Ibid, p. 266). When the barons had nearly finished their evil lives, the church stepped in, claiming her share of the plunder and the wealth thus amassed, and opening the gates of paradise to the dying thief. The cities were as wretched as their inhabitants: no paving, no cleaning, no lighting. In the country the old Roman roads were unmended, unkept; Europe was slipping backwards into uttermost barbarism. Meanwhile things were very different where the blighting power of Christianity was not in the ascendant. “Europe at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement, more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. The houses were frescoed and carpeted;
There was but little heresy during this melancholy century; people did not think enough even to think badly. The Paulicians spread through Bulgaria, and established themselves there under a patriarch of their own. Some Arians still existed. Some Anthropomorphites gave some trouble, maintaining that God sat on a golden throne, and was served by angels with wings: their “heresy” is, however, directly supported by the Scriptures. A.D. 999, a man named Lentard began to speak against the worship of images, and the payment of tithes to priests, and asserted that in the Old Testament prophecies truth and falsehood are mingled. His disciples seem to have merged into the Albigenses in the next century.
The year A.D. 1000 deserves a special word of notice. Christians fancied that the world was to last for but one thousand years after the birth of Christ, and that it would therefore come to an end in A.D. 1000. “Many charters begin with these words: ’As the world is now drawing to its close.’ An army marching under the emperor Otho I. was so terrified by an eclipse of the sun, which it conceived to announce this consummation, as to disperse hastily on all sides” ("Europe during the Middle Ages,” Hallam, P. 599) “Prodigious numbers of people abandoned all their civil connections, and their parental relations, and giving over to the churches or monasteries all their lands, treasures, and worldly effects, repaired with the utmost precipitation to Palestine, where they imagined that Christ would descend to judge the world. Others devoted themselves by a solemn and voluntary oath to the service of the churches, convents, and priesthood, whose slaves, they became in the most rigorous sense of that word, performing daily their heavy tasks; and all this from a notion that the Supreme Judge
The Prussians, during this century, were driven into the fold of the Church. A Christian missionary, Adalbert, bishop of Prague, had been murdered by the “fierce and savage Prussians,” and in order to show the civilising results of the gentle Christian creed, Boleslaus, king of Poland, entered “into a bloody war with the Prussians, and he obtained, by the force of penal laws and of a victorious, army, what Adalbert could not effect by exhortation and argument. He dragooned this savage people into the Christian Church” (p. 230). Some of his followers tried a gentler method of conversion, and were murdered by the Prussians, who clearly saw no reason why Christians should do all the killing. We have already seen that Sylvester II. called upon the Christian princes to commence a “holy war” against “the infidels” who held the holy places of Christianity. Gregory VII. strove to stir them up in like fashion, and had gathered together an army of upwards of 50,000 men, whom he proposed to lead in person into Palestine. The Pope, however, quarrelled with Henry IV., emperor of Germany, and his project fell through. At the close of this century, the long-talked of effort was made. Peter the Hermit, who had travelled through Palestine, came into Europe and related in all directions tales of the sufferings of the Christians under the rule of the “barbarous” Saracens. He appealed to Urban II., the then Pope, and Urban, who at first discouraged him, seeing that Peter had succeeded in rousing the most warlike nations of Christian Europe into enthusiasm, called a council at Placentia, A.D. 1095, and appealed to the Christian princes to take up the cause of the Cross. The council was not successful, and Urban summoned another at Clermont, and himself addressed the assembly. “It is the will of God” was the shout that answered him, and the people flew to arms. “Every
A collateral advantage accrued to the clergy through the crusades; “their wealth, continually accumulated, enabled them to become the regular purchasers of landed estates, especially in the time of the crusades, when the fiefs of the nobility were constantly in the market for sale or mortgage” (Ibid, p. 333).
The last vestiges of nominal paganism were erased in this century, and it remained only under Christian names. Capital punishment was proclaimed against all who worshipped the old deities under their old titles, and “this dreadful severity contributed much more towards the extirpation of paganism, than the exhortations and instructions of ignorant missionaries, who were unacquainted with the true nature of the gospel, and dishonoured its pure and holy doctrines by their licentious lives and their superstitious practices” (p. 236). Learning began to revive, as men, educated in the Arabian schools, gradually spread over Europe; thus: “the school of Salernum, in the kingdom of Naples, was renowned above all others for the study of physic in this century, and vast numbers crowded thither from all the provinces of Europe to receive instruction in the art of healing;
Hallam sums up for us the state of learning, or rather of ignorance, during the eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, and his account may well find its place here. “When Latin had thus ceased to be a living language, the whole treasury of knowledge was locked up from the eyes of the people. The few who might have imbibed a taste for literature, if books had been accessible to them, were reduced to abandon pursuits that could only be cultivated through a kind of education not easily within their reach. Schools confined to cathedrals and monasteries, and exclusively designed for the purposes of religion, afforded no encouragement or opportunities to the laity. The worst effect was that, as the newly-formed languages were hardly made use of in writing, Latin being still preserved in all legal instruments and public correspondence, the very use of letters, as well as of books, was forgotten. For many centuries, to sum up the account of ignorance in a word, it was rare for a layman, of whatever rank, to know how to sign his name. Their charters, till the use of seals became general, were subscribed with the mark of the cross. Still more extraordinary it was to find one who had any tincture of learning. Even admitting every indistinct commendation of a monkish biographer (with whom a knowledge of church music would pass for literature), we could make out a very short list of scholars. None certainly were more distinguished as such than Charlemagne and Alfred. But the former, unless we reject a very plain testimony, was incapable of writing; and Alfred found difficulty in making a translation from the pastoral instruction of St. Gregory, on account of his imperfect knowledge of Latin. Whatever mention, therefore, we find of learning and the learned, during these dark ages, must be understood to relate only to such as were within the pale of clergy, which indeed was pretty extensive, and comprehended many who did not exercise the offices of religious ministry. But even the clergy were, for a long period, not very materially superior, as a body, to the uninstructed
If we look at the ministers of the Church, the old story of tyranny and vice is told over again during this century. Among its popes is numbered Benedict IX., deposed for his profligacy, restored and again deposed, restored by force of arms, and selling the pontificate, so that three popes at once claimed the tiara, and were all three declared unworthy, and a fourth placed on the throne. Fresh disturbances followed, and new usurpers, until in A.D. 1059 the election of the pope was taken out of the hands of the people and transferred to the college of cardinals, a change which was much struggled against, but which was ultimately adopted. In A.D. 1073 Hildebrand was elected pope under the title of Gregory VII.; this man, perhaps, more than any other, augmented the temporal power of the papacy. It was he who moulded the church into the form of an absolute monarchy, and fought against all local privileges and national freedom of the churches in each land; it was he who claimed rule over all kings and princes, and treated them as vassals of the Roman see; it was he who, in 1074, calling a council at Rome, caused it to decree the celibacy of the clergy, so that priests having no home, and no family ties, might feel their only home in the Church, and their only tie to Rome; it was he who struggled against Germany, and who kept the excommunicated emperor standing barefoot and almost naked in the snow for three days, in the courtyard of his castle. A bold bad man was this Hildebrand, but a man of genius and a master-mind, who conceived the mighty idea of a universal Church, wherein all princes should be vassals, and the head of the Church absolute monarch of the world.
It was at the annual council of Rome, A.D. 1076, that Pope Gregory VII. recited and proclaimed “all the ancient maxims, all the doubtful traditions, all the excessive pretensions, by which he could support his supremacy. It was, in a manner, the abridged code of his domination—the laws of servitude that he proposed to the world at large. Here are the terms of this charter of theocracy: ’The Roman Church is founded by God alone. The Roman pontiff alone can legitimately take the title of universal ... There shall be no intercourse whatever held with persons excommunicated by the Pope, and none may dwell in the same house with them.... He alone may wear the imperial insignia. All the princes of the earth shall kiss the feet of the Pope, but of none other.... He has the right of deposing emperors.... The sentence of the Pope can be revoked by none, and he alone can revoke the sentences passed by others. He can be judged by none. None may dare to pronounce sentence on one who appeals to the See Apostolic. To it shall be referred all major causes by the whole Church. The Church of Rome never has erred, and never can err, as Scripture warrants. A Roman pontiff, canonically ordained, at once becomes, by the merit of Saint Peter, indubitably holy. By his order and with his permission it
The struggle between the Greek and Latin Churches, hushed for awhile, broke out again fiercely A.D. 1053, and in 1054 Rome excommunicated Constantinople, and Constantinople excommunicated Rome. The disputes as to transubstantiation continued, and shook the Roman Church with their violence. Outside orthodoxy, some of the old heresies lingered on. The Paulicians wandered throughout Europe, and became known in Italy as the Paterini and the Cathari, in France as the Albigenses, Bulgarians, or Publicans. The Council of Orleans condemned them to be burned alive, and many perished.
The wars which spread Christianity were not yet entirely over, but we only hear of them now on the outskirts, so to speak, of Europe, except where some tribes apostatized now and then, and were brought back to the true faith by the sword. The struggles between the popes and the more stiff-necked princes as to their relative rights and privileges continued, and we sometimes see the curious spectacle of a pontiff on the side of the people, or rather of the barons, against the king: whenever this is so, we find that the king is struggling against Roman supremacy, and that the pope uses the power of the nation to subdue the rebellious monarch. We do not find Rome interfering to save the people from oppression when the oppressor is a faithful and obedient son of Holy Church.
Fresh heresies spread during this century, and we everywhere met with one corrective—death. Most of them appear to have grown out of the old Manichaean heresy, and taught much of the old asceticism. The Cathari were hunted down and put to death throughout Italy. Arnold of Brescia, who loudly protested against the possessions of the Church, and maintained that church revenues should be handed over to the State, proved himself so extremely distasteful to the clergy that they arrested him, crucified him and burned his dead body (A.D. 1155). Peter de Bruys, who objected to infant baptism, and may be called the ancestor of the Baptists, was burnt A.D. 1130. Many other reformers shared the same fate, and one large sect must here be noted. Peter Waldus, its founder, was a merchant of Lyons, who (A.D. 1160) employed a priest to translate the Gospels for him, together with other portions of the Bible. Studying these, he resolved to abandon his business and distribute his wealth among the poor, and, in A.D. 1180, he became a public preacher, and formed an association to teach the doctrines of the Gospel, as he conceived them, against the doctrines of the Church. The sect first assumed only the simple name of “the poor men of Lyons,” but soon became known as the Waldenses, one of the most powerful and most widely spread sects of the Middle Ages. They were, in fact, the precursors of the Reformation, and are notable as heretics protesting against the authorty of Rome because that authority did not commend itself to their reason; thus they asserted the right of private judgment, and for that assertion they deserve a niche in the great temple of heretic thought.
In the far west of Europe paganism still struggled against Christianity, and from A.D. 1230 to 1280 a long, fierce war was waged against the Prussians, to confirm them in the Christian faith; the Teutonic knights of St. Mary succeeded finally in their apostolic efforts, and at last “established Christianity and fixed their own dominion in Prussia” (p. 309), whence they made forays into the neighbouring countries, and “pillaged, burned, massacred, and ruined all before them.” In Spain, Christianity had a yet sadder triumph, for there the civilized Moors were falling under the brutal Christians, and the “garden of the world” was being invaded by the hordes of the Roman Church. The end, however, had not yet come. In France, we see the erection of THE INQUISITION, the most hateful and fiendish tribunal ever set up by religion. The heretical sects were spreading rapidly in southern provinces of France, and Innocent III., about the commencement of this century, sent legates extraordinary into the southern provinces of France to do what the bishops had left undone, and to extirpate heresy, in all its various forms and modifications, without being at all scrupulous in using such methods as might be necessary to effect this salutary purpose. The persons charged with this ghostly commission were Rainier, a Cistercian monk, Pierre de Castelnau, archdeacon of Maguelonne, who became also afterwards a Cistercian friar. These eminent missionaries were followed by several others, among whom was the famous Spaniard, Dominic, founder of the order of preachers, who, returning from Rome in the year 1206, fell in with these delegates, embarked in their cause, and laboured both by his exhortations and actions in the extirpation of heresy. These spiritual champions, who engaged in this expedition upon the sole authority of the pope, without either asking the advice, or demanding the succours of the bishops, and who inflicted capital punishment upon such of the heretics as they could not convert by reason and argument, were distinguished in common discourse by the title of inquisitors, and from them the formidable and odious tribunal called the Inquisition derived its origin (pp. 343, 344). In A.D. 1229, a council of Toulouse “erected in every city a council of inquisitors consisting of one priest and two laymen” (Ibid). In A.D. 1233, Gregory IX. superseded this tribunal by appointing the Dominican monks as inquisitors, and the pope’s legate in France thereupon went from city to city, wherever these monks had a monastery, and there appointed some of their number “inquisitors of heretical pravity.” The princes of Europe were then persuaded to lend the aid of the State to the work of blood, and to commit to the flames those who were handed over as heretics to the civil power by the inquisitors. The plan of working was most methodical.
The rules of torture were carefully drawn out: the prisoner was stripped naked, the hair cut off, and the body then laid on the rack and bound down; the right, then the left, foot tightly bound and strained by cords; the right and left arm stretched; the fleshy part of the arm compressed with fine cords; all the cords tightened together by one turn; a second and third turn of the same kind: beyond this, with the rack, women were not to be tortured; with men a fourth turn was employed. These directions were written in a Manual, used by the Grand Inquisitor of Seville as late as A.D. 1820. An analysis is given by Dr. Rule, in his “History of the Inquisition,” Appendix to vol. i., pp. 339-359, ed. 1874. Then we hear, elsewhere, of torture by roasting the feet, by pulleys, by red-hot pincers—in short, by every abominable instrument of cruelty which men, inspired by religion, could conceive. Let the student take Llorente and Dr. Rule alone, and he will learn enough of the Inquisition horrors to make him shudder at the sight of a cross—at the name of Christianity.
Llorente gives the most revolting details of the torture of Jean de Salas, at Valladolid, A.D. 1527, and this one case may serve as a specimen of Inquisition work during these bloodstained centuries. Stripped to his shirt, he was placed on the chevalet (a narrow frame, wherein the body was laid, with no support save a pole across the middle), and his feet were raised higher than his head; tightly twisted cords cut through his flesh, and were twisted yet tighter and tighter as the torture proceeded; fine linen, thrust into his mouth and throat, added to the unnatural position, made breathing well nigh impossible, and on the linen water slowly fell, drop by drop, from a suspended vessel over his head, till every struggling breath stained the cloth with blood (see “Histoire critique de l’Inquisition d’Espagne,” t. II., pp. 20-23, ed. 1818). This Spanish Inquisition, during its existence, punished heretics as follows:—
Burnt alive ....................... 31,912
Burnt in effigy.................... 17,659
Heavily punished................... 291,450 ------- Total 341,021
(Ibid, t. IV. p. 271). Add to this list the ruined families, some of whose members fell victims to the Inquisition, and then—remembering that Spain was but one of the countries which it desolated—let the student judge of the huge total of human agony caused by this awful institution. Nor must it be forgotten that its dungeons did not gape only for those who opposed the pretensions of Rome; men of science, philosophers, thinkers, all these were its foes; Llorente gives a list of no less than 119 learned and eminent scientific men who, in Spain alone, fell under the scourge of the Inquisition (see t. II. pp. 417-483).
One special crime of the Church in this age must not be forgotten: her treatment of Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon was a Franciscan monk, who not only studied Greek, Hebrew, and Oriental languages, but who devoted himself to natural science, and made many discoveries in astronomy, chemistry, optics, and mathematics. He is said to have discovered gunpowder, and he proposed a reform of the calendar similar to that introduced by Gregory XIII., 300 years later. His reward was to be hooted at as a magician, and to be confined in a dungeon for many years.
The heretics spread and increased in this century, spite of the terrible weapon brought to bear against them. The “Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit,” known also as Beghards, Beguttes, Bicorni, Beghins, and Turlupins, were the chief additional body. They believed that all things had emanated from God, and that to Him they would return; and to this Eastern philosophy they added practical fanaticism, rushing wildly about, shouting, yelling, begging. The Waldenses and Albigenses multiplied, and diversity of opinion spread in every direction.
This fourteenth century is one of the epochs that sorely test the ingenuity of believers in papal infallibility; for the cardinals, having elected one pope in A.D. 1378, rapidly took a dislike to him, and elected a second. The first choice, Urban VI., remained at Rome; the second, Clement VII., betook himself to Avignon. They duly excommunicated each other, and the Latin Church was rent in twain. “The distress and calamity of these times is beyond all power of description; for not to insist upon the perpetual contentions and wars between the factions of the several popes, by which multitudes lost their fortunes and lives, all sense of religion was extinguished in most places, and profligacy arose to a most scandalous excess. The clergy, while they vehemently contended which of the reigning popes was the true successor of Christ, were so excessively corrupt as to be no longer studious to keep up even an appearance of religion or decency” ("Europe During the Middle Ages,” Hallam, p. 359).
Meanwhile, the struggle between Rome and the heretics went on with ever-increasing fury. In England, Dr. John Wickcliff, rector of Lutterworth, became famous by his attack on the mendicant orders in A.D. 1360, and from that time he raised his voice louder and louder, till he spoke against the pope himself. He translated the Bible into English, attacked many of the prevailing superstitions, and although condemned as holding heretical opinions, he yet died in peace, A.D. 1387. Rome revenged itself by digging up his bones and burning them, about thirteen years later. Rebellion spread even among the monks of the Church, and a vast number of some nonconformist Franciscan monks, termed Spirituals, were burned for their refusal to obey the pope on matters of discipline. The intense hatred between the Franciscan and Dominican orders made the latter the willing instrument of the papacy; and, in their character as inquisitors, they hunted down their unfortunate rivals as heretics. The Flagellants, a sect who wandered about flogging themselves to the glory of God, fell also under the merciless hands of the inquisitors, as did also the Knights Templars in France. A new body, known as the Dancers, started up in A.D. 1373, and spread through Flanders; but the priests prayed them away by exorcising the dancing devils that, they said,
In this fifteenth century the knell of the Church rang out; it is memorable evermore in history for the discovery of the New World, and the consequent practical demonstration of the falsehood of the whole theory of the patristic and ecclesiastical theology. In the flood only “Noah and his three sons, with their wives, were saved in an ark. Of these sons, Sham remained in Asia and repeopled it. Ham peopled Africa; Japhet, Europe. As the fathers were not acquainted with the existence of America, they did not provide an ancestor for its people” ("Conflict between Religion and Science,” Dr. Draper, p. 63). Lactantius, indeed, inveighed against the folly of those who believed in the existence of the antipodes, and Augustine maintained that it was impossible there should be people living on the other side of the earth. Besides, “in the day of judgment, men on the other side of a globe could not see the Lord descending through the air” (Ibid, p. 64). Clearly there was no other side, theologically; only Columbus sailed there. Another fatal blow was struck at the Church by the invention of the printing press, about A.D. 1440, an invention which made knowledge possible for the many, and by diffusion of knowledge made heresy likewise certain. It is not for me, however, to trace here the progress of heretic thought; that brighter task is for another pen; mine only to turn over the bloodstained and black pages of the Church. One name stands out in the list of the pontiffs of this century, which is almost unparalleled in its infamy; it is that of Roderic Borgia, Pope Alexander VI. Foully vicious, cruel, and bloodthirsty, he is startlingly bad, even for a pope. Among his children are found the names of Caesar and Lucretia Borgia, names whose very mention recalls a list of horrible crimes. Alexander died A.D. 1503, from swallowing, by mistake, a poison which he and his son Caesar had prepared for others. Turning to the heretics, we see great lives cut short by the terrible blows of the inquisition:—Savanarola, the brave Italian preacher, the reformer monk, tortured and burned A.D. 1498; John Huss, the enemy of the papacy, burned A.D. 1415, in direct violation of the
Burnt at the stake alive................... 10,220 Burnt in effigy, the persons having died in prison or fled the country............ 6,860 Punished with infamy, confiscation, perpetual imprisonment, or loss of civil rights .................................. 97,321 ------- Total .....................................114,401
—("History of the Inquisition,” by Dr. W.H. Rule, vol. i., p. 150. Full details of numbers are given in the “Histoire critique de l’Inquisition d’Espagne,” Llorente, t. I., pp. 272-281).
Cardinal Ximenes was not quite so successful as Torquemada, but still his roll is long:
Burnt at the stake alive ................... 3,564 Burnt in effigy ............................ 1,232 Punished heavily .......................... 48,059 ------ --(Ibid, p. 186). Total ................... 52,855
In A.D. 1481, in the bishoprics of Seville and Cadiz, “two thousand Judaizers were burnt in person, and very many in effigy, of whom the number is not known, besides seventeen thousand subject to cruel penance” (Ibid, p. 133). In A.D. 1485, no less than 950 persons were burned at Villa Real, now Ciudad Real.
Spite of all this awful suffering, heretics and Jews remained antagonistic to the church, and in March, A.D. 1492, the edict of the expulsion of the Jews was signed. “All unbaptized Jews, of whatever age, sex, or condition, were ordered to leave the realm by the end of the following July. If they revisited it, they should suffer death. They might sell their effects, and take the proceeds in merchandise or bills of exchange, but not in gold or silver. Exiled thus, suddenly from the land of their birth, the land of their ancestors for hundreds of years, they could not in the glutted market that arose sell what they possessed. Nobody would purchase what could be got for nothing after July. The Spanish clergy occupied themselves by preaching in the public squares sermons filled with denunciations against their victims, who, when the time for expatriation came, swarmed in the roads, and filled the air with their cries of despair. Even the Spanish onlookers wept at the scene of agony. Torquemada, however, enforced the ordinance that no one should afford them any help.... Thousands, especially mothers with nursing children, infants, and old people, died by the way—many of them in the agonies of thirst” (Ibid, p. 147). Thus was a peaceable, industrious, thoughtful population, driven out of Spain by the Church. Nor did her hand stay even here. Ferdinand, alas! had completed the conquest of the Moors; true, Granada had only yielded under pledge of liberty of worship, but of what value is the pledge of the Christian to the heretic? The Inquisition harried the land, until, in February 1502, word went out that all unbaptized Moors must leave Spain by the end of April. “They might sell their property, but not take away any gold or silver; they were forbidden to emigrate to the Mahommedan dominions; the penalty of disobedience was death. Their condition was thus worse than that of the Jews, who had been permitted to go where they chose” (Ibid, p. 148). And so the Moors were driven out, and Spain was left to Christianity, to sink down to what she is to-day. 3,000,000 persons are said to have been expelled as Jews, Moors and Moriscoes. The Moors departed,—they who had made the name of Spain glorious, and had spread science and thought through Europe from that focus of light,—they who had welcomed to their cities all who thought, no matter what their creed, and had covered with an equal protection Mahommedan, Christian, and Jew.
Nor let the Protestant Christian imagine that these deeds of blood are Roman, not Christian. The same crimes attach to every Church, and Rome’s black list is only longer because her power is greater. Let us glance at Protestant communions. In Hungary, Giska, the Hussite, massacred and bruised the Beghards. In Germany, Luther cried, “Why, if men hang the thief upon the gallows, or if they put the rogue to death, why should not we, with all our strength, attack these popes and cardinals, these dregs of the Roman
In Switzerland, Calvin burned Servetus. In America, the Puritans carried on the same hateful tradition, and whipped the harmless Quakers from town to town. Wherever the cross has gone, whether held by Roman Catholic, by Lutheran, by Calvinist, by Episcopalian, by Presbyterian, by Protestant dissenter, it has been dipped in human blood, and has broken human hearts. Its effect on Europe was destructive, barbarising, deadly, until the dawning light of science scattered the thick black clouds which issued from the cross. One indisputable fact, pregnant with instruction, is the extremely low rate of increase of the population of Europe during the centuries when Christianity was supreme. “What, then, does this stationary condition of the population mean? It means, food obtained with hardship, insufficient clothing, personal uncleanness, cabins that could not keep out the weather, the destructive effects of cold and heat, miasm, want of sanitary provisions, absence of physicians, uselessness of shrine cure, the deceptiveness of miracles, in which society was putting its trust; or, to sum up a long catalogue of sorrows, wants and sufferings in one term—it means a high death-rate. But, more, it means deficient births. And what does that point out? Marriage postponed, licentious life, private wickedness, demoralized society” (Draper’s “Conflict of Religion and Science,” p. 263). “The surface of the Continent was for the most part covered with pathless forests; here and there it was dotted with monasteries and towns. In the lowlands and along the river courses were fens, sometimes hundreds of miles in extent, exhaling their pestiferous miasms, and spreading agues far and wide.” In towns there was “no attempt made at drainage, but the putrefying garbage and rubbish were simply thrown out of the door. Men, women, and children slept in the same apartment; not unfrequently domestic animals were their companions; in such a confusion of the family it was impossible
* * * * *
* * * * *
Draper, Conflict of Religion and Science...425, 433,
437, 449, 455,
456, 464, 465, 471, 472, 475, 476
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History...424
Gibbon, Decline and Fall...425, 429, 432, 433, 435
Hallam, Europe during the Middle Ages...454, 457,
458, 459, 460, 461,
462, 463, 470, 471
Hume, Student’s History of England...474
Le Maistre, Spanish Inquisition...474
Llorente, Histoire critique de l’Inquisition
d’Espagne...468, 469, 472, 473
Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History...Used throughout
Rule, History of the Inquisition...468, 472
Villemain, Life of Gregory VII...464
*
* * * *
Advent of Christ expected...456, 457
Alexandrine Library, destruction of...432
Arius...433, 434
Boniface, Apostle of Germany...442
Century 2nd and 3rd...423, 429
Century 4th...429, 435
Century 5th...435, 439
Century 6th...439, 441
Century 7th...441, 442
Century 8th...442, 447
Century 9th...447, 451
Century 10th...451, 457
Century 11th...457, 465
Century 12th...466, 467
Century 13th...467, 469
Century 14th...469, 470
Century 15th...471, 474
Charlemagne...442, 444
Christianity, general effect of...474, 476
Church, wealth of...425, 440, 441, 444, 457, 460
Church, doctrine of...426, 450
Church, refuge for evil doers...442
Clergy, frauds of...431, 444, 448, 449
Clergy, vice of...426, 431, 435, 437, 441, 447, 448,
451, 453, 454, 469
Constantine...424, 425
Conversions...429, 430, 435, 439, 443, 451, 457, 467
Crusades...452, 458
Eastern and Western Churches, separation of...449,
450
Endowment of Church, first...429
Filioque...446, 449
Heresies...426-428, 433-435, 438, 440, 442, 446, 450,
456,
465, 466, 470, 471, 472, 473
Heretic, first burnt alive...431
" number burned in Spain...469,
472
Hildebrand...463, 464
Hypatia, murder of...437
Iconoclastic controversy...445, 446
Ignorance of bishops...441
Inquisition...467-469, 472-474
Isidorian decretals...448
Jews, expulsion of, from Spain...473, 474