Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith Part 8

FOOTNOTES:

[38] Strauss' Life of Jesus, 64, 74, 87.

[39] Bauer's Hebrew Mythology.

[40] See Pearson on Infidelity, page 93, 40th edition; and Aga.s.siz's Penikese lectures.

[41] Newman's Phases of Faith, 157.

[42] Carlyle's Past and Present, 307.

[43] Discourse on Religion, p. 209.

[44] Carlyle's Past and Present, p. 312.

[45] Ib. p. 37.

[46] The Soul, p. 342.

[47] Ib. p. 359.

[48] Parker's Discourses, 171, 33.

[49] Plato. Republic. Books IV. and VI., and Alcibiades II.

[50] Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians, Second Series, Vol. II.

page 176, et pa.s.sim.

[51] Juvenal, Satire XV.

[52] Diodorus Siculus, Book I.

[53] Duff's India, page 222.

[54] Tusc. Quaest. lib. 1.

[55] Seneca, Ep. 102.

[56] Parker's Discourse, 83.

[57] Turner's Anglo-Saxons, b. vii. chap. 13.

[58] Diodorus Siculus, b. xx. chap. 14.

[59] Aristotle, Polit. lib. vii. chap. 17.

[60] Horne's Introduction of the Scriptures, Vol. I. page 25.

[61] Printed repeatedly in New York newspapers, and given entire in the report of the discussion between Dr. Berg and Mr. Barker. W. S. Young, Philadelphia, 1854.

[62] _The Occident_, 20th August, 1874, San Francisco.

[63] Ardeches' Life of Napoleon I. 222.

[64] Horne's Introduction to the Scriptures, Vol. I. page 26, where ample references to contemporary French writers are given.

CHAPTER V.

WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT?

"The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen."--2 Thess. iii. 17.

Religion rests not on dogmas, but on a number of great facts. In a previous chapter we found one of these to be, that people dest.i.tute of a revelation of G.o.d's will ever have been, and now are, ignorant, miserable, and wicked. If it were at all needful, we might go on to show that there are people in the world, who have decent clothing and comfortable houses, who work well-tilled farms and sub-soil plows, and reaping machinery, who yoke powerful streams to the mill wheel, and harness the iron horse to the market wagon, who career their floating palaces up the opposing floods, line their coasts with flocks of white-winged schooners, and show their flags on every coast of earth, who invent and make everything that man will buy, from the bra.s.s b.u.t.ton, dear to the barbarian, to the folio of the philosopher, erect churches in all their towns, and schools in every village, who make their blacksmiths more learned than the priests of Egypt, their Sabbath scholars wiser than the philosophers of Greece, and even the criminals in their jails more decent characters than the sages, heroes, and G.o.ds of the lands without the Bible; and that these people are the people who possess a Book, which they think contains a revelation from G.o.d, teaching them how to live well; which Book they call the Bible. This is the book about which we make our present inquiry, Who wrote it?

The fact being utterly undeniable, that these blessings are found among the people who possess the Bible, and only among them, we at once, and summarily, dismiss the arrogant falsehood presented to prevent any inquiry about the Book, namely, that "Christianity is just like any other superst.i.tion, and its sacred books like the impositions of Chinese, Indian, or Mohammedan impostors. They, too, are religious, and have their sacred books, which they believe to be divine." A profound generalization indeed! Is a peach-tree just like a horse-chestnut, or a scrub-oak, or a honey-locust? They are all trees, and have leaves on them. The Bible is just as like the Yi King, or the Vedas, or the Koran, as a Christian American is like a Chinaman, a Turk, or a Hindoo. But it is too absurd to begin any discussion with these learned Thebans of the relative merits of the Bible as compared with the Vedas, and the Chinese Cla.s.sics, of which they have never read a single page. Let them stick to what they pretend to know.

The Bible is a great fact in the world's history, known alike to the prince and the peasant, the simple and the sage. It is perused with pleasure by the child, and pondered with patience by the philosopher.

Its psalms are caroled on the school green, cheer the chamber of sickness, and are chanted by the mother over her cradle, by the orphan over the tomb. Here, thousands of miles away from the land of its birth, in a world undiscovered for centuries after it was finished, in a language unknown alike at Athens and Jerusalem, it rules as lovingly and as powerfully as in its native soil. To show that its power is not derived from race or clime, it converts the Sandwich Islands into a civilized nation, and transforms the New Zealand cannibal into a British shipowner, the Indian warrior into an American editor, and the Negro slave into the President of a free African Republic. It has inspired the Caffirs of Africa to build telegraphs, and to print a.s.sociated press dispatches in their newspapers; while the Zulus, one of whom would have converted Bishop Colenso from Christianity, if he had been a Christian, are importing steel plows by hundreds every year. It has captured the enemy's fortresses, and turned his guns. Lord Chesterfield's parlor, where an infidel club met to sneer at religion, is now a vestry, where the prayers of the penitent are offered to Christ. Gibbon's house, at Lake Lemon, is now a hotel; one room of which is devoted to the sale of Bibles. Voltaire's printing press, from which he issued his infidel tracts, has been appropriated to printing the Word of G.o.d.[65] It does not look as if it had finished its course and ceased from its triumphs.

Translated into the hundred and fifty languages spoken by nine hundred millions of men, carried by ten thousand heralds to every corner of the globe, sustained by the cheerful contributions and fervent prayers of hundreds of thousands of ardent disciples, it is still going forth conquering and to conquer. Is there any other book so generally read, so greatly loved, so zealously propagated, so widely diffused, so uniform in its results, and so powerful and blessed in its influences? Do you know any? If you can not name any book, no, nor any thousand books, which in these respects equal the Bible--then it stands out clear and distinct, and separate from all other authorship; and with an increased emphasis comes our question, Who wrote it?

With all these palpable facts in view, to come to the examination of this question as if we knew nothing about them, or as if knowing them well, we cared nothing at all about them, and were determined to deny them their natural influence in begetting within us a very strong presumption in favor of its divine origin, were to declare that our heads and hearts were alike closed against light and love. But to enter on this inquiry into the origin of the Book which has produced such results, with a preconceived opinion that it must be a forgery, and an imposition, the fruit of a depraved heart, and a lying tongue, implies so much home-born deceit that, till the heart capable of such a prejudice be completely changed, no reasoning can have any solid fulcrum of truth or goodness to rest on. It is sheer folly to talk of one's being wholly unprejudiced in such an inquiry. No man ever was, or could be so. As his sympathies are toward goodness and virtue, and the happiness of mankind, or toward pride and deceit, and selfishness and savageness, so will his prejudices be for or against the Bible.

On looking at the Bible, we find it composed of a number of separate treatises, written by different writers, at various times; some parts fifteen hundred years before the others. We find, also, that it treats of the very beginning of the world, before man was made, and of other matters of which we have no other authentic history to compare with it.

Again, we find portions which treat of events connected in a thousand places with the affairs of the Roman Empire, of which we have several credible histories. Now, there are two modes of investigation open to us, the dogmatic and the inductive. We may take either. We may construct for ourselves, from the most flimsy suppositions, a metaphysical balloon, inflated with self-conceit into the rotundity of a cosmogony, according to which, in our opinion, the world should have been made, and we may paint it over with the figures of the various animals and n.o.ble savages which ought to have sprung up out of its fornea, and we may stripe its history to suit our notions of the progress of such a world, and soaring high into the clouds, after a little preliminary amus.e.m.e.nt in the discovery of eternal red-hot fire-mists, and condensing comets, and so forth, we may come down upon the summit of some of this earth's mountains, say Ararat, and take a survey of the Bible process of world-making. Finding that the Creator of the world had to make his materials--a business in which no other world-maker ever did engage--and, further, that G.o.d's plan of making it by no means corresponds to our patent process and that the article is not at all like what we intend to produce when we go into the business, and that it does not work according to our expectations, we can denounce the whole as a very mean affair, and the Book which describes it as not worth reading. If one wants some new subject for merriment, and does not mind making a fool of himself, and is not to be terrified by old-fashioned notions about G.o.d Almighty, and is perfectly confident that G.o.d can tell him nothing that he does not know better already, and merely wants to see whether he is not trying to pa.s.s off old fables upon wide-awake people for facts--this dogmatic plan will suit him.

On the other hand, if one is tolerably convinced that he does not know everything, not much of the world he lives in, less of its history, and nothing at all about the best way of making it, and that when it needs mending it will not be sent to his workshop; that he knows nothing about what happened before he was born unless what other people tell him, and that, though men do err, yet all men are not liars, that all the blessings of education, civilization, law and liberty, from the penny primer to the Const.i.tution of the United States, came to him solely through the channel of abundant, reliable testimony; that the only way in which he can ever know anything beyond his eyesight with certainty, is to gather testimony about it, and compare the evidence, and inquire into the character of the witnesses; that when one has done so, he becomes so satisfied of the truth of the report that he would rather risk his life upon it than upon the certainty of any mathematical problem, or of any scientific truth, whatever--that ninety-nine out of every hundred citizens of the United States are a thousand times more certain that the Yankees whipped the British in 1776, declared the Colonies free and independent States, and made Washington President, than they ever will be that all bodies attract each other directly as their ma.s.s, and inversely as the squares of their distances, that the sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right angles, or that the earth is nearer the sun in winter than in summer--and that certainty about the Bible history is just as attainable, and just as reliable, as certainty about American history, if he will seek it in the same way--and if he is really desirous to know how this Book was written, which alone in the world teaches men how to obtain peace with G.o.d, how to live well, and how to die with a firm and joyful hope of a resurrection to life eternal, and what part of it is easiest to prove either true or false--then he will take the inductive mode. He will begin at the present time, and trace the history up to the times in which the Book was written. He will ascertain what he can about that part of it which was last written--the New Testament--and begin with that part of it which lies nearest him--the Epistles.

By the comparison of the doc.u.ments themselves, with all kinds of history and monuments which throw light on the period, he will try to ascertain whether they are genuine or not. And from one well-ascertained position he will proceed to another, until he has traversed the whole ground of the genuineness of the writings, the truth of the story, and the divine authority of the doctrine.

This is my plan of investigation; one thing at a time, and the nearest first. It is not worth while to inquire whether it be inspired by G.o.d, if it be really a forgery of impostors; nor whether the gospel story is worthy of credit, if the only book which contains it be a religious novel of the third or fourth century. We dismiss then the questions of the inspiration, or even the truth of the New Testament, till we have ascertained its authors. We take up the Book, and find that it purports to be a relation of the planting of the Church of Christ, of its laws and ordinances, and of the life, death and resurrection of its Founder, written by eight of his companions, at various periods and places, toward the close of the first century. There is a general opinion among all Christians that the Book was composed then, and by these persons. We want to know why they think so? In short, is it a genuine book, or merely a collection of myths with the apostles' names appended to them by some lying monks? Is it a fact, or a forgery?

In any historical inquiry, we want some fixed point of time from which to take our departure; and in this case we want to know if there is any period of antiquity in which undeniably this Book was in existence, and received as genuine by Christian societies. For I will not suppose my readers as ignorant as some of those Infidels who allege that it was made by the Bible Society. It used to be the fashion with those of them who pretended to learning, to affirm that it was made by the Council of Laodicea, in A. D. 364; because, in order to guard the churches against spurious epistles and gospels, that Council published a list of those which the apostles did actually write, which thenceforth were generally bound in one volume.

Before that time, the four Gospels were always bound in one volume and called "The Gospel." The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles universally and undoubtedly known to be written by Paul, to the churches of Thessalonica, Galatia, Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colosse, and to Philemon, a well-known resident of that city, and those to Timothy and t.i.tus, missionaries of world-wide celebrity, the First General Epistle of Peter, and the First General Epistle of John, which were at once widely circulated to check prevailing heresies--were bound in another volume and called "The Apostle." The Epistle to the Hebrews, being general, and anonymous, _i. e._, not bearing the name of any particular church, or person, to whom anybody who merely looked at it could refer for proof of its genuineness, as in the case of the other Epistles--was not so soon known by the European churches to be written by Paul. The General Epistles of James, Jude, and the Second General Epistle of Peter, lying under the same difficulty, and besides being very disagreeable to easy-going Christians, from their sharp rebukes of hypocrisy, and the Second and Third Epistles of John, from their brevity, and the Revelation of John, being one of the last written of all the books of the New Testament, and the most mysterious--were not so generally known beyond the churches where the originals were deposited, until the other two collections had been formed. They were accordingly kept as separate books, and sometimes bound up in a third volume of apostolical writings. Besides these, at the time of the Council of Laodicea, and for a long time before, other books, written by Barnabas, Clement, Polycarp, and other companions and disciples of the apostles, and forged gospels and epistles attributed by heretics to the apostles, were circulated through the churches, and read by Christians. The Council of Laodicea did, what many learned men had done before them; it investigated the evidence upon which any of these books was attributed to an apostle; and finding evidence to satisfy them, that the Gospel written by Luke had the sanction of the Apostle Paul, that the Gospel of Mark was revised by the Apostle Peter, that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by Paul, and the other Epistles by John, Jude, James, and Peter, respectively, and not finding evidence to satisfy them about the Revelation of John, they expressed their opinion, and the grounds of it, for the information of the world.[66] Into these reasons we will hereafter inquire, for our faith in Holy Scripture does not rest on their canons. We are not now asking what they _thought_, but what they _did_; and we find that they did criticise certain books, reported to be written by the apostles of Jesus Christ some three hundred years before, approve some, and reject others as spurious, and publish a list of those they thought genuine. Infidels admit this, and on the strength of it long a.s.serted that the Council of Laodicea made the New Testament. At length they became ashamed of the stupid absurdity of alleging that men could criticise the claims, and catalogue the names of books before they were written; and they now shift back the writing--or the authentication of the New Testament--for they are not quite sure which, though the majority incline to the former--to the Emperor Constantine, and the Council of Nice which met in the year 325. Why they have fixed on the Council of Nice is more than I can tell. They might as well say the Council of Trent, or the Westminster a.s.sembly, either of which had just as much to do with the Canon of Scripture. However, on some vague hearsay that the Council of Nice and the Emperor Constantine made the Bible, hundreds in this city are now risking the salvation of their souls.

We have in this a.s.sertion, nevertheless, as many facts admitted as will serve our present purpose. There did exist, then, undeniably, in the year 325, large numbers of Christian churches in the Roman Empire, sufficiently numerous to make it politic, in the opinion of Infidels, for a candidate for the empire to profess Christianity; sufficiently powerful to secure his success, notwithstanding the desperate struggles of the heathen party; and sufficiently religious, or if you like superst.i.tious, to make it politic for an emperor and his politicians to give up the senate, the court, the camp, the chase, and the theater, and weary themselves with long prayers, and longer speeches, of preachers about Bible religion. Now that is certainly a remarkable fact, and all the more remarkable if we inquire, How came it so? For these men, preachers, prince, and people, were brought up to worship Jupiter and the thirty thousand G.o.ds of Olympus, after the heathen fashion, and to leave the care of religion to heathen priests, who never troubled their heads about books or doctrines after they had offered their sacrifices. In all the records of the world there is no instance of a general council of heathen priests to settle the religion of their people. How happens it then that the human race has of a sudden waked up to such a strange sense of the folly of idolatry and the value of religion? The Council of Nice, and the Emperor Constantine, and his counselors, making a Bible is a proof of a wonderful revolution in the world's religion; a phenomenon far more surprising than if the Secretaries of State, and the Senate, and President Grant should leave the Capital to post off to London, to attend the meetings of a Methodist Conference, a.s.sembled to make a hymn book. Now what is the cause of this remarkable conversion of prince, priests, and people? How did they all get religion? How did they get it so suddenly? How did they get so much of it?

The Infidel gives no answer, except to tell us[67] that the austerity, purity, and zeal of the first Christians, their good discipline, their belief in the resurrection of the body and the general judgment, and their persuasion that Christ and his apostles wrought miracles, had made a great many converts. This is just as if I inquired how a great fire originated, and you should tell me that it burned fast because it was very hot. What I want to know is, how it happened that these licentious Greeks, and Romans, and Asiatics, became austere and pure; how these frivolous philosophers suddenly became so zealous about religion; what implanted the belief of the resurrection of the body and of the judgment to come in the skeptical minds of these heathen scoffers; and how did the pagans of Italy, Egypt, Spain, Germany, Britain, come to believe in the miracles of one who lived hundreds of years before, and thousands of miles away, or to care a straw whether the written accounts of them were true or false? According to the Infidel account, the Council of Nice, and the Emperor Constantine's Bible-making, is a most extraordinary business--a phenomenon without any natural cause, and they will allow no supernatural--a greater miracle than any recorded in the Bible.

If we inquire, however, of the parties attending that Council, what the state of the case is, we shall learn that they believed--whether truly or erroneously we are not now inquiring--but they believed, that a teacher sent from G.o.d, had appeared in Palestine two hundred and ninety years before, and had taught this religion which they had embraced; had performed wonderful miracles, such as opening the eyes of the blind, healing lepers, and raising the dead; that he had been put to death by the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, had risen again from the dead, had spoken to hundreds of people, and had gone out and in among them for six weeks after his resurrection; that he had ascended up through the air, to heaven, in the sight of numbers of witnesses, and had promised that he would come again in the clouds of heaven, to raise the dead, and to judge every man according to his works; that before he went away he appointed twelve of his intimate companions to teach his religion to the world, giving them power to work miracles in proof of their divine commission, and requiring mankind to hear them as they would hear him; that they and their followers did so, in spite of persecutions, sufferings, and death, with so much success, that immense numbers were persuaded to give up idolatry and its filthiness, and to profess Christianity and its holiness, and to brave the fury of the heathen mob, and the vengeance of the Roman law; that a difference of opinion having arisen among them as to whether this teacher was an angel from heaven, or G.o.d, whether they should pray and sing psalms to Him, as Athanasius and his party believed, or only give Him some lesser honor as Arius and his party believed, and this difference making all the difference between idolatry on the one hand, and impiety on the other, and so involving their everlasting salvation or d.a.m.nation, they had embraced the first opportunity after the cessation of persecution, and the accession of the first Christian Emperor, to a.s.semble three hundred and eighteen of their most learned clergymen, of both sides, and from all countries between Spain and Persia, to discuss these solemn questions; and that, through the whole of the discussions, both sides appealed to the writings of the apostles, as being then well known, and of unquestioned authority with every one who held the Christian name. These facts, being utterly indisputable, are acknowledged by all persons, Infidel or Christian, at all acquainted with history.[68]

Here, then, we have the books of the New Testament at the Council of Nice well known to the whole world; and the Council, so far from _giving_ any authority to them, _bowing to theirs_--both Arian and Orthodox with one consent acknowledging that the whole Christian world received them as the writings of the apostles of Christ. There were venerable men of fourscore and ten at that Council; if these books had been first introduced in their lifetime, they must have known it. There were men there whose parents had heard the Scriptures read in church from their childhood, and so could not be imposed upon with a new Bible.

The New Testament could not be less than three generations old, else one or other of the disputants would have exposed the novelty of its introduction, from his own information. The Council of Nice, then, did not make the New Testament. It was a book well known, ancient, and of undoubted authority among all Christians, ages before that Council. _The existence of the New Testament Scriptures, then, ages before the Council of Nice, is a great fact._

We next take up the a.s.sertions, propounded with a show of learning, that the books of the New Testament, and especially the Gospels, were not in use, and were not known till the third century; that they are not the productions of contemporary writers; that the alleged ocular testimony or proximity in point of time of the sacred historians to the events recorded is mere a.s.sumption, originating in the t.i.tles which Biblical books bear in our canon; that we stand here (in the gospel history), upon purely mythical and poetical ground; and that the Gospels and Epistles are a gradually formed collection of myths, having little or no historic reality. So Strauss, Eichorn, De Wette, and their disciples here, attempt to set aside the New Testament. In plain English, it is a collection of forgeries.