CHAPTER I. Is the Conversion of St. Paul a proof in favour of the

Christian Religion?

Many theologians would make us regard the miraculous conversion and apostleship of St. Paul as one of the strongest proofs of the truth of Christianity. But in viewing the thing closely it appears that this conversion, far from proving any thing in favour of this religion, invalidates the other proofs of it, in fact, our doctors continually assure us that the Christian religion draws its strongest proofs from the prophecies of the Old Testament, whilst there is not in fact a single one of these prophecies that can be literally applied to the Messiah of the Christians. St. Paul himself willing to make use of these oracles of the Jewish nation to prove the mission of Christ, is obliged to distort them, and to seek in them a mystical, allegorical, and figurative sense. On the other side, how can these prophecies made by Jews and addressed to Jews, serve as proofs of the doctrine of St. Paul, who had evidently formed the design of altering, or even of destroying, the Jewish religion, in order to raise a new system on its ruins? Such being the state of things, what real connection, or what relation, can there be between the religious system of the Jews, and that of St. Paul? For this Apostle to have had the right of making use of the Jewish prophecies, it would have been necessary that he should have remained a Jew; his conversion to Christianity evidently deprived him of the privilege of serving himself, by having recourse to the prophecies belonging to a religion that he had just abandoned, and the ruin of which he meditated. True prophecies can only be found in a divine religion, and a religion truly divine, can neither be altered, reformed, nor destroyed: God himself, if he is immutable, could not change it.

In fact, might not the Jews have said to St. Paul, "Apostate that you are! you believe in our prophecies, and you come to destroy the religion founded upon the same prophecies. If you believe in our oracles, you are forced to believe that the religion which you have quitted is a true religion and divinely inspired. If you say, that God has changed his mind, you are impious in pretending that God could change, and was not sufficiently wise, to give at once to his people a perfect worship, and one which had no need of being reformed. On the other side, do not the reiterated promises of the Most High, confirmed by paths to our fathers, assure us, that his alliance with us should endure eternally? You are then an impostor, and, according to our law, we ought to exterminate you; seeing that Moses, our divine legislator, orders us to put to death, whoever shall have the temerity to preach to us a new worship, even though he should confirm his mission by prodigies. The God that you preach is not the God of our fathers: you say that Christ is his son; but we know that God has no son. You pretend that this son, whom we have put to death as a false prophet, has risen from the dead, but Moses has not spoken of the resurrection; thus your new God and your dogmas are contrary to our law, and consequently we ought to hold them in abhorrence." In short these same Jews might have said to St. Paul: "You deceive yourself in saying, that you are the disciple of Jesus, your Jesus was a Jew, during the whole of his life he was circumcised, he conformed himself to all the legal ordinances; he often protested that he came to accomplish, and not to abolish the law; whilst you in contempt of the protestations of the Master, whose Apostle you say you are, take the liberty of changing this holy law, of decrying it, of dispensing with its most essential ordinances."

Moreover the conversion of St. Paul strangely weakens the proof that the Christian religion draws from the miracles of Jesus Christ and his Apostles. According to the evangelists themselves the Jews were not at all convinced by these miracles. The transcendant prodigy of the resurrection of Christ, the wonders since wrought by some of his adherents did not contribute more to their conversion. St. Paul believed nothing of them at first, he was a zealous persecutor of the first Christians to such a degree, that, according to the Christians, nothing short of a new miracle, performed for him alone, was able to convert him; which proves to us that there was, at least, a time when St. Paul did not give any credit to the wonders that the partisans of Jesus related at Jerusalem.

He needed a particular miracle to believe in those miracles, that we are obliged to believe in at the time in which we live, without heaven operating any new prodigy to demonstrate to us the truth of them.