Chapter 10

The very large part that must be assigned to deliberate forgeries in the early apologetic literature of the Church we have already seen; and no impartial reader can, I think, investigate the innumerable grotesque and lying legends that, during the whole course of the Middle Ages, were deliberately palmed upon mankind as undoubted facts, can follow the history of the false decretals, and the discussions that were connected with them, or can observe the complete and absolute incapacity most Catholic historians have displayed of conceiving any good thing in the ranks of their opponents, or of stating with common fairness any consideration that can tell against their cause, without acknowledging how serious and how inveterate has been the evil. It is this which makes it so unspeakably repulsive to all independent and impartial thinkers, and has led a great German historian (Herder) to declare, with much bitterness, that the phrase "Christian veracity" deserves to rank with the phrase "Punic faith."

I could go on quoting such passages. I could give specific instances of forgery by the dozen, but I do not think it necessary. It is sufficient to show that forgery was common, and has been always common, amongst all kinds of priests, and that therefore we cannot accept the Gospels as genuine and unaltered documents.

Yet upon these documents rests the whole fabric of Christianity.

Professor Huxley says:

There is no proof, nothing more than a fair presumption, that any one of the Gospels existed, in the state in which we find it in the authorised version of the Bible, before the second century, or, in other words, sixty or seventy years after the events recorded. And between that time and the date of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Gospel there is no telling what additions and alterations and interpolations may have been made. It may be said that this is all mere speculation, but it is a good deal more. As competent scholars and honest men, our revisers have felt compelled to point out that such things have happened even since the date of the oldest known manuscripts. The oldest two copies of the second Gospel end with the eighth verse of the sixteenth chapter; the remaining twelve verses are spurious, and it is noteworthy that the maker of the addition has not hesitated to introduce a speech in which Jesus promises His disciples that "in My name shall they cast out devils."

The other passage "rejected to the margin" is still more instructive. It is that touching apologue, with its profound ethical sense, of the woman taken in adultery--which, if internal evidence were an infallible guide, might well be affirmed to be a typical example of the teaching of Jesus. Yet, say the revisers, pitilessly, "Most of the ancient authorities omit John vii. 53--viii. 11." Now, let any reasonable man ask himself this question: if after an approximate settlement of the canon of the New Testament, and even later than the fourth or fifth centuries, literary fabricators had the skill and the audacity to make such additions and interpolations as these, what may they have done when no one had thought of a canon; when oral tradition still unfixed, was regarded as more valuable than such written records as may have existed in the latter portion of the first century? Or, to take the other alternative, if those who gradually settled the canon did not know of the oldest codices which have come down to us; or, if knowing them, they rejected their authority, what is to be thought of their competency as critics of the text?

Since alterations have been made in the text of Scripture we can never be certain that any particular text is genuine, and this circumstance militates seriously against the value of the evidence for the Resurrection.

CHRISTIANITY BEFORE CHRIST

If the story of Christ's life were true, we should not expect to find that nearly all the principal events of that life had previously happened in the lives of some earlier god or gods, long since acknowledged to be mythical.

If the Gospel record were the _only_ record of a god coming upon earth, of a god born of a virgin, of a god slain by men, that record would seem to us more plausible than it will seem if we discover proof that other and earlier gods have been fabled to have come on earth, to have been born of virgins, to have lived and taught on earth, and to have been slain by men.

Because, if the events related in the life of Christ have been previously related as parts of the lives of earlier mythical gods, we find ourselves confronted by the possibilities that what is mythical in one narrative may be mythical in another; that if one god is a myth another god may be a myth; that if 400,000,000 of Buddhists have been deluded, 200,000,000 of Christians may be deluded; that if the events of Christ's life were alleged to have happened before to another person, they may have been adopted from the older story, and made features of the new.

If Christ was God--the omnipotent, eternal, and _only_ God--come on earth, He would not be likely to repeat acts, to re-act the adventures of earlier and spurious gods; nor would His divine teachings be mere shreds and patches made up of quotations, paraphrases, and repetitions of earlier teachings, uttered by mere mortals, or mere myths.

What are we to think, then when we find that there are hardly any events in the life of Christ which were not, before His birth, attributed to mythical gods; that there are hardly any acts of Christ's which may not be paralleled by acts attributed to mythical gods before His advent; that there are hardly any important thoughts attributed to Christ which had not been uttered by other men, or by mythical gods, in earlier times? What _are_ we to think if the facts be thus?

Mr. Parsons, in _Our Sun God_, quotes the following passage from a Latin work by St. Augustine:

Again, in that I said, "This is in our time the Christian religion, which to know and also follow is most sure and certain salvation," it is affirmed in regard to this name, not in regard to the sacred thing itself to which the name belongs. For the sacred thing which is now called the Christian religion existed in ancient times, nor, indeed, was it absent from the beginning of the human race until the Christ Himself came in the flesh, whence the true religion which already existed came to be called "the Christian." So when, after His resurrection and ascension to heaven, the Apostles began to preach and many believed, it is thus written, "The followers were first called Christians at Antioch." Therefore I said, "This is in our time the Christian religion," not because it did not exist in earlier times, but as having in later times received this particular name.

From Eusebius, the great Christian historian, Mr. Parsons, quotes as follows:

What is called the Christian religion is neither new nor strange, but--_if it be lawful to testify as to the truth_-- was known to the ancients.

Mr. Arthur Lillie, in _Buddha and Buddhism_, quotes M. Burnouf as saying:

History and comparative mythology are teaching every day more plainly that creeds grow slowly up. None came into the world ready-made, and as if by magic. The origin of events is lost in the infinite. A great Indian poet has said: "The beginning of things evades us; their end evades us also; we see only the middle."

Before Darwin's day it was considered absurd and impious to talk of "pre-Adamite man," and it will still, by many, be held absurd and impious to talk of "Christianity before Christ."

And yet the incidents of the life and death of Christ, the teachings of Christ and His Apostles, and the rites and mysteries of the Christian Church can all be paralleled by similar incidents, ethics, and ceremonies embodied in religions long anterior to the birth of Jesus.

Christ is said to have been God come down upon the earth. The idea of a god coming down upon the earth was quite an old and popular idea at the time when the Gospels were written. In the Old Testament God makes many visits to the earth; and the instances in the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythologies of gods coming amongst men and taking part in human affairs are well known.

Christ is said to have been the Son of God. But the idea of a son-god is very much older than the Christian religion.

Christ is said to have been a redeemer, and to have descended from a line of kings. But the idea of a king's son as a redeemer is very much older than the Christian religion.

Christ is said to have been born of a virgin. But many heroes before Him were declared to have been born of virgins.

Christ is said to have been born in a cave or stable while His parents were on a journey. But this also was an old legend long before the Christian religion.

Christ is said to have been crucified. But very many kings, kings' sons, son-gods, and heroes had been crucified ages before Him.

Christ is said to have been a sacrifice offered up for the salvation of man. But thousands and thousands of men before Him had been slain as sacrifices for the general good, or as atonements for general or particular sins.

Christ is said to have risen from the dead. But that had been said of other gods before Him.

Christ is said to have ascended into Heaven. But this also was a very old idea.

Christ is said to have worked miracles. But all the gods and saints of all the older religions were said to have worked miracles.

Christ is said to have brought to men, direct from Heaven, a new message of salvation. But the message He brought was in nowise new.

Christ is said to have preached a new ethic of mercy and peace and good-will to all men. But this ethic had been preached centuries before His supposed advent.

The Christians changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Sun-day is the day of the Sun God.

Christ's birthday was fixed on the 25th of December. But the 25th of December is the day of the Winter solstice--the birthday, of Apollo, the Sun God--and had been from time immemorial the birthday of the sun gods in all religions. The Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Phoenicians, and Teutonic races all kept the 25th of December as the birthday of the Sun God.

The Christians departed from the monotheism of the Jews, and made their God a Trinity. The Buddhists and the Egyptians had Holy Trinities long before. But whereas the Christian Trinity is unreasonable, the older idea of the Trinity was based upon a perfectly lucid and natural conception.

Christ is supposed by many to have first laid down the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you." But the Golden Rule was laid down centuries before the Christian era.

Two of the most important of the utterances attributed to Christ are the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. But there is very strong evidence that the Lord's Prayer was used before Christ's time, and still stronger evidence that the Sermon on the Mount was a compilation, and was never uttered by Christ or any other preacher in the form in which it is given by St. Matthew.

Christ is said to have been tempted of the Devil. But apart from the utter absurdity of the Devil's tempting God by offering Him the sovereignty of the earth--when God had already the sovereignty of twenty millions of suns--it is related of Buddha that he also was tempted of the Devil centuries before Christ was born.

The idea that one man should die as a sacrifice to the gods on behalf of many, the idea that the god should be slain for the good of men, the idea that the blood of the human or animal "scapegoat" had power to purify or to save, the idea that a king or a king's son should expiate the sins of a tribe by his death, and the idea that a god should offer himself as a sacrifice to himself in atonement for the sins of his people--all these were old ideas, and ideas well known to the founders of Christianity.

The resemblances of the legendary lives of Christ and Buddha are surprising: so also are the resemblances of forms and ethics of the ancient Buddhists and the early Christians.

Mr. Arthur Lillie, in _Buddha and Buddhism_, makes the following quotation from M. Leon de Rosny:

The astonishing points of contact between the popular legend of Buddha and that of Christ, the almost absolute similarity of the moral lessons given to the world between these two peerless teachers of the human race, the striking affinities between the customs of the Buddhists and the Essenes, of whom Christ must have been a disciple, suggest at once an Indian origin to Primitive Christianity.

Mr. Lillie goes on to say that there was a sect of Essenes in Palestine fifty years B.C., and that fifty years after the death of Christ there existed in Palestine a similar sect, from whom Christianity was derived. Mr. Lillie says of these sects:

Each had two prominent rites: baptism, and what Tertullian calls the "oblation of bread." Each had for officers, deacons, presbyters, ephemerents. Each sect had monks, nuns, celibacy, community of goods. Each interpreted the Old Testament in a mystical way--so mystical, in fact, that it enabled each to discover that the bloody sacrifice of Mosaism was forbidden, not enjoined. The most minute likenesses have been pointed out between these two sects by all Catholic writers from Eusebius to the poet Racine... Was there any connection between these two sects? It is difficult to conceive that there can be two answers to such a question.

The resemblances between Buddhism and Christianity were accounted for by the Christian Fathers very simply. The Buddhists had been instructed by the Devil, and there was no more to be said. Later Christian scholars face the difficulty by declaring that the Buddhists copied from the Christians.

Reminded that Buddha lived five hundred years before Christ, and that the Buddhist religion was in its prime two hundred years before Christ, the Christian apologist replies that, for all that, the Buddhist Scriptures are of comparatively late date. Let us see how the matter stands.

The resemblances of the two religions are of two kinds. There is, first, the resemblance between the Christian life of Christ and the Indian life of Buddha; and there is, secondly, the resemblance between the moral teachings of Christ and Buddha.

Now, if the Indian Scriptures _are_ of later date than the Gospels, it is just possible that the Buddhists may have copied incidents from the life of Christ.

But it is perfectly certain that the change of borrowing cannot be brought against Augustus Caesar, Plato, and the compilers of the mythologies of Egypt and Greece and Rome. And it is as certain that the Christians did borrow from the Jews as that the Jews borrowed from Babylon. But a little while ago all Christendom would have denied the indebtedness of Moses to King Sargon.

Now, since the Christian ideas were anticipated by the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, and the Greeks, why should we suppose that they were copied by the Buddhists, whose religion was triumphant some centuries before Christ?

And, again, while there is no reason to suppose that Christian missionaries in the early centuries of the era made any appreciable impression on India or China, there is good reason to suppose that the Buddhists, who were the first and most successful of all missionaries, reached Egypt and Persia and Palestine, and made their influence felt.

I now turn to the statement of M. Burnouf, quoted by Mr. Lillie. M. Burnouf asserts that the Indian origin of Christianity is no longer contested:

It has been placed in full light by the researches of scholars, and notably English scholars, and by the publication of the original texts... In point of fact, for a long time folks had been struck with the resemblances--or, rather, the identical elements--contained in Christianity and Buddhism. Writers of the firmest faith and most sincere piety have admitted them. In the last century these analogies were set down to the Nestorians; but since then the science of Oriental chronology has come into being, and proved that Buddha is many years anterior to Nestorius and Jesus. Thus the Nestorian theory had to be given up. But a thing may be posterior to another without proving derivation. So the problem remained unsolved until recently, when the pathway that Buddhism followed was traced step by step from India to Jerusalem.

There was baptism before Christ, and before John the Baptist. There were gods, man-gods, son-gods, and saviours before Christ. There were Bibles, hymns, temples, monasteries, priests, monks, missionaries, crosses, sacraments, and mysteries before Christ.

Perhaps the most important sacrament of the Christian religion to-day is the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper. But this idea of the Eucharist, or the ceremonial eating of the god, has its roots far back in the prehistoric days of religious cannibalism. Prehistoric man believed that if he ate anything its virtue passed into his physical system. Therefore he began by devouring his gods, body and bones. Later, man mended his manners so far as to substitute animal for human sacrifice; still later he employed bread and wine as symbolical substitutes for flesh and blood. This is the origin and evolution of the strange and, to many of us, repulsive idea of eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ.

Now, supposing these facts to be as I have stated them above, to what conclusion do they point?

Bear in mind the statement of M. Burnouf, that religions are built up slowly by a process of adaptation; add that to the statements of Eusebius, the great Christian historian, and of St. Augustine, the great Christian Father, that the Christian religion is no new thing, but was known to the ancients, and does it not seem most reasonable to suppose that Christianity is a religion founded on ancient myths and legends, on ancient ethics, and on ancient allegorical mysteries and metaphysical errors?

To support those statements with adequate evidence I should have to compile a book four times as large as the present volume. As I have not room to state the case properly, I shall content myself with the recommendation of some books in which the reader may study the subject for himself.

A list of these books I now subjoin:

_The Golden Bough._ Frazer. Macmillan & Co. _A Short History of Christianity._ Robertson. Watts & Co. _The Evolution of the Idea of God._ Grant Allen. Rationalist

Press Association. _Buddha and Buddhism._ Lillie. Clark. _Our Sun God._ Parsons. Parsons. _Christianity and Mythology._ Robertson. Watts & Co. _Pagan Christs._ Robertson. Watts & Co. _The Legend of Perseus._ Hartland. Nutt. _The Birth of Jesus._ Soltau. Black.

The above are all scholarly and important books, and should be generally known.

For reasons given above I claim, with regard to the divinity and Resurrection of Jesus Christ:

That outside the New Testament there is no evidence of any value to show that Christ ever lived, that He ever taught, that He ever rose from the dead.

That the evidence of the New Testament is anonymous, is contradictory, is loaded with myths and miracles.

That the Gospels do not contain a word of proof by any eye-witness as to the fact that Christ was really dead; nor the statement of any eye-witness that He was seen to return to life and quit His tomb.

That Paul, who preached the Resurrection of Christ, did not see Christ dead, did not see Him arise from the dead, did not see Him ascend into Heaven.

That Paul nowhere supports the Gospel accounts of Christ's life and teaching.

That the Gospels are of mixed and doubtful origin, that they show signs of interpolation and tampering, and that they have been selected from a number of other Gospels, all of which were once accepted as genuine.

And that, while there is no real evidence of the life or the teachings, or the Resurrection of Christ, there is a great deal of evidence to show that the Gospels were founded upon anterior legends and older ethics.

But Christian apologists offer other reasons why we should accept the stories of the miraculous birth and Resurrection of Christ as true. Let us examine these reasons, and see what they amount to.

OTHER EVIDENCES OF CHRIST'S DIVINITY

Archdeacon Wilson gives two reasons for accepting the doctrines of Christ's divinity and Resurrection as true. The first of these reasons is, the success of the Christian religion; the second is, the evolution of the Christlike type of character.

If the success of the Christian religion proves that Christ was God, what does the success of the Buddhist religion prove? What does the success of the Mohammedan religion prove?

Was Buddha God? Was Mahomet God?

The archdeacon does not believe in any miracles but those of his own religion. But if the spread of a faith proves its miracles to be true, what can be said about the spread of the Buddhist and Mohammedan religions?

Islam spread faster and farther than Christianity. So did Buddhism. To-day the numbers of these religions are somewhat as follows:

Buddhist: 450 millions.

Christians: 375 millions, of which only 180 millions are Protestants.

Hindus: 200 millions.

Mohammedans: 160 millions.

It will be seen that the Buddhist religion is older than Christianity, and has more followers. What does that prove?

But as to the reasons for the great growth of these two religions I will say more by and by. At present I merely repeat that the Buddhist faith owed a great deal to the fact that King Asoka made it the State religion of a great kingdom, and that Christianity owes a great deal to the fact that Constantine adopted it as the State religion of the Roman Empire.

We come now to the archdeacon's second argument: that the divinity of Christ is proved by the evolution of the Christlike type of character.

And here the archdeacon makes a most surprising statement, for he says that type of character was unknown on this globe until Christ came.

Then how are we to account for King Asoka?

The King Asoka of the Rock Edicts was as spiritual, as gentle, as pure, and as loving as the Christ of the Gospels.

The King Asoka of the Rock Edicts was wiser, more tolerant, more humane than the Christ of the Gospels.

Nowhere did Christ or the Fathers of His Church forbid slavery; nowhere did they forbid religious intolerance; nowhere did they forbid cruelty to animals.

The type of character displayed by the rock inscriptions of King Asoka was a higher and sweeter type than the type of character displayed by the Jesus of the Gospels.

Does this prove that King Asoka or his teacher, Buddha, was divine? Does it prove that the Buddhist faith is the only true faith? I shall treat this question more fully in another chapter.

Another Christian argument is the claim that the faithfulness of the Christian martyrs proves Christianity to be true. A most amazing argument. The fact that a man dies for a faith does not prove the faith to be true; it proves that he believes it to be true--a very different thing.

The Jews denied the Christian faith, and died for their own. Does that prove that Christianity was not true? Did the Protestant martyrs prove Protestantism true? Then the Catholic martyrs proved the reverse.