Part 2

The birth of Jesus was, according to Matthew, made publicly known by means of certain wise men. These men saw his star in the East, but it did not tell them much, for they were obliged to come and ask information from Herod the King. Is astrology credible? Herod inquired of the chief priests and scribes; and it is evident Jeremiah was right, if he said, "The prophets prophecy falsely and the priests bear rule by their means," for these chief priests misquoted to suit their purposes, and invented a false prophecy by omitting a few words from, and adding a few words to, a text until it suited their purpose. The star, after they knew where to go, and no longer required its aid, went before them, until it came and stood over where the young child was. The credibility of this will be better understood if the reader notice some star, and then see how many houses it will be over. Luke does not seem to have been aware of the star story, and he relates about an angel who tells some shepherds the good tidings, but this last-named adventure does not appear to have happened in the reign of Herod at all. Is it credible that Jesus was born twice? After the wise men had left Jesus, an angel warned Joseph to flee with him and Mary into Egypt, and Joseph did fly, and remained there with the young child and his mother until the death of Herod; and this, it is alleged, was done to fulfil a prophecy. On referring to Hosea xi., 1, we find the words have no reference whatever to Jesus, and that, therefore, either the tale of the flight is invented as a fulfilment of the prophecy, or the prophecy manufactured to support the tale of the flight. The Jesus of Luke never went into Egypt at all in his childhood. Directly after the birth of the child his parents instead of flying away because of persecution into Egypt, went peacefully up to Jerusalem to fulfil all things according to the law, returned thence to Nazareth, and apparently dwelt there, going up to Jerusalem every year until Jesus was twelve years of age.

In Matthew ii., 15, we are told that Jesus remained in Egypt, "That it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son." In Hosea ii., 1, we read, "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt." In no other prophet is there any similar text. This not only is not a prophecy of Jesus, but is, on the contrary, a reference to the Jewish Exodus from Egypt. Is the prophecy manufactured to give an air of credibility to the Gospel history, or how will the Religions Tract Society explain it? The Gospel writings betray either a want of good faith, or great incapacity on the part of their authors in the mode adopted of distorting quotations from the Old Testament?

When Jesus began to be about thirty years of age he was baptised by John in the river Jordan. John, who, according to Matthew, knew him, forbade him directly he saw him; but, acccording to the writer of the fourth Gospel, he knew him not, and had, therefore, no occasion to forbid him. God is an "invisible" "spirit," whom no man hath seen (John i., 18), or can see (Exodus xxxiii., 20); but the man John saw the spirit of God descending like a dove. God is everywhere, but at that time was in heaven, from whence he said, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." Although John heard this from God's own mouth, he some time after sent two of his disciples to Jesus to inquire if he were really the Christ (Matthew xi., 2, 3). Yet it is upon the credibility of this story, says Dr. Teschendorf, that Christianity rests like a building on its foundations.

It is utterly impossible John could have known and not have known Jesus at the same time. And if, as the New Testament states, God is infinite and invisible, it is incredible that as Jesus stood in the river to be baptised, the Holy Ghost was seen as it descended on his head as a dove, and that God from heaven said, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." Was the indivisible and invisible spirit of God separated in three distinct and two separately visible persons? How do the Religious Tract Society reconcile this with the Athanasian Creed?

The baptism narrative is rendered doubtful by the language used as to John, who baptised Jesus. It is said, "This is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight." Isaiah xl., 1--5, is, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, 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 the glory of the Lord shall be revealed." These verses have not the most remote relation to John? And this manufacture of prophecies for the purpose of bolstering up a tale, serves to prove that the writer of the Gospel tries by these to impart an air of credibility to an otherwise incredible story.

Immediately after the baptism, Jesus is led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil. There he fasts forty days and forty nights.

John says, in chapter i., 35, "Again, the next day after, John stood and two of his disciples; and looking upon Jesus as he walked, he said, behold the Lamb of God. And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus." Then, at the 43rd verse, he says, "The day following Jesus would go forth into Galilee, and findeth Philip, and saith unto him, follow me." And in chapter ii., 1, he says, "And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there; and both Jesus was called and his disciples unto the marriage." According to Matthew, there can be no doubt that immediately after the baptism Jesus went into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil. And we are to believe that Jesus was tempted of the Devil and fasting in the wilderness, and at the same time feasting at marriage in Cana of Galilee? Is it possible to believe that Jesus actually did fast forty days and forty nights? If Jesus did not fast in his capacity as man, in what capacity did he fast? And if Jesus fasted, being God, the fast would be a mockery; and the account that he became a hungered must be wrong. It is barely possible that in some very abnormal condition or cataleptic state, or state of trance, a man might exist, with very slight nourishment or without food, but that a man could walk about, speak, and act, and, doing this, live forty days and nights without food is simply an impossibility.

Is the story that the Devil tempted Jesus credible? If Jesus be God, can the Devil tempt God? A clergyman of the Church of England writing on this says: "That the Devil should appear personally to the Son of God is certainly not more wonderful than that he should, in a more remote age, have appeared among the sons of God, in the presence of God himself, to torment the righteous Job. But that Satan should carry Jesus bodily and literally through the air, first to the top of a high mountain, and then to the topmost pinnacle of the temple, is wholly inadmissable, it is an insult to our understanding, and an affront to our great creator and redeemer." Supposing, despite the monstrosity of such a supposition, an actual Devil--and this involves the dilemma that the Devil must either be God-created, or God's co-eternal rival; the first supposition being inconsistent with God's goodness, and the second being inconsistent with his power; but supposing such a Devil, is it credible that the Devil should tempt the Almighty maker of the universe with "all these will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me?"

In the very names of the twelve Apostles there is an uncertainty as to one, whose name was either Lebbaeus, Thaddaeus, or Judas. It is in Matthew x., 3, alone that the name of Lebbaeus is mentioned, thus--"Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus." We are told, on this point, by certain: Biblicists, that some early MSS. have not the words "whose surname was Thaddaeus," and that these words have probably been inserted to reconcile the Gospel according to Matthew with that attributed to Mark. In the English version of the Rheims Testament used in this country by our Roman Catholic brethren, the reconciliation between Matthew and Mark is completed by omitting the words-"Lebbaeus whose surname was," leaving only the name "Thaddaeus" in Matthew's text. The revised version of the New Testament now agrees with the Rheims version, and the omission will probably meet with the entire concurrence of Dr. Tischendorf and the Religious Tract Society, now they boast autograph letters of approval from the infallible head of the Catholic Church. If Matthew x., 3, and Mark hi., 18, be passed as reconciled, although the first calls the twelfth disciple Lebbaeus, and the second gives him the name Thaddaeus; there is yet the difficulty that in Luke vi., 16, corroborated by John xiv., 22, there is a disciple spoken of as "Judas, not Iscariot," "Judas, _the brother_ of James." Commentators have endeavored to clear away this last difficulty by declaring that Thaddaeus is a Syriac word, having much the same meaning as Judas. This has been answered by the objection that if Matthew's Gospel uses Thaddaeus in lieu of Judas, then he ought to speak of Thaddaeus Iscariot, which he does not; and it is further objected also that while there are some grounds for suggesting a Hebrew original for the Gospel attributed to Matthew, there is not the slightest pretence for alleging that Matthew wrote in Syriac. The Gospels also leave us in some doubt as to whether Matthew is Levi, or whether Matthew and Levi are two different persons.

The account of the calling of Peter is replete with contradictions. According to Matthew, when Jesus first saw Peter, the latter was in a vessel fishing with his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea of Galilee. Jesus walking by the sea said to them--"Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." The two brothers did so, and they became Christ's disciples. When Jesus called Peter no one was with him but his brother Andrew. A little further on, the two sons of Zebedee were in a ship with their father mending nets, and these latter were separately called. From John, we learn that Andrew was originally a disciple of John the Baptist, and that when Andrew first saw Jesus, Peter was not present, but Andrew went and found Peter who, if fishing, must have been angling on land, telling him "we have found the Messiah," and that Andrew then brought Peter to Jesus, who said, "Thou art Simon, the son of Jonas; thou shalt be called Cephas." There is no mention in John of the sons of Zebedee being a little further on, or of any fishing in the sea of Galilee. This call is clearly on land. Luke's Gospel states that when the call took place, Jesus and Peter were both at sea. Jesus had been preaching to the people, who pressing upon him, he got into Simon's ship, from which he preached. After this he directed Simon to put out into the deep and let down the nets. Simon answered, "Master, we have toiled all night and taken nothing; nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net." No sooner was this done, than the net was filled to breaking, and Simon's partners, the two sons of Zebedee, came to help, when at the call of Jesus, they brought their ships to land, and followed him.

Is it credible that there were three several calls, or that the Gospels being inspired, you could have three contradictory versions of the same event? Has the story been here "painfully modified," or how do Dr. Tischendorf and the Religious Tract Society clear up the matter? Is it credible that, as stated in Luke, Jesus had visited Simon's house, and cured Simon's wife's mother, before the call of Simon, but did not go to Simon's house for that purpose, until after the call of Simon, as related in Matthew? It is useless to reply that the date of Jesus's visit is utterly unimportant, when we are told that it is upon the credibility of the complete narrative that Christianity must rest. Each stone is important to the building, and it is not competent for the Christian advocate to regard as useless any word which the Holy Ghost has considered important enough to reveal.

Are the miracle stories credible? Every ancient nation has had its miracle workers, but modern science has relegated all miracle history to realms of fable, myth, illusion, delusion, or fraud. Can Christian miracles be made the exceptions? Is it likely that the nations amongst whom the dead were restored to life would have persistently ignored the author of such miracles? Were the miracles purposeless, or if intended to convince the Jews, was God unable to render his intentions effective? That five thousand persons should be fed with five loaves and two fishes, and that an apparent excess should remain beyond the original stock, is difficult to believe; but that shortly after this--Jesus having to again perform a similar miracle for four thousand persons--his own disciples should ignore his recent feat, and wonder from whence the food was to be derived, is certainly startlingly incredible. If this exhibition of incredulity were pardonable on the part of the twelve apostles, living witnesses of greater wonders, how much more pardonable the unbelief of the sceptic of to-day, which the Religious Tract Society seek to overcome by a faint echo of asserted events all contrary to probability, and with nineteen centuries intervening.

The casting out the devils presents phenomena requiring considerable credulity, especially the story of the devils and the swine. To-day insanity is never referable to demoniacal possession, but eighteen hundred years ago the subject of lunacy had not been so patiently investigated as it has been since. That one man could now be tenanted by several devils is a proposition for which the maintainer would in the present generation incur almost universal contempt; yet the repudiation of its present possibility can hardly be consistent with implicit credence in its ancient history. That the devils and God should hold converse together, although not without parallel in the book of Job, is inconsistent with the theory of an infinitely good Deity; that the devils should address Jesus as son of the most high God, and beg to be allowed to enter a herd of swine, is at least ludicrous; yet all this helps to make up the narrative on which Dr. Tischendorf relies. That Jesus being God should pray to his Father that "the cup might pass" from him is so incredible that even the faithful ask us to regard it as mystery. That an angel from heaven could strengthen Jesus, the almighty God, is equally mysterious. That where Jesus had so prominently preached to thousands, the priests should need any one like Judas to betray the founder of Christianity with a kiss, is absurd; his escapade in flogging the dealers, his wonderful cures, and his raising Lazarus and Jairus's daughter should have secured him, if not the nation's love, faith, and admiration, at least a national reputation and notoriety. It is not credible if Judas betrayed Jesus by a kiss that the latter should have been arrested upon his own statement that he was Jesus. That Peter should have had so little faith as to deny his divine leader three times in a few hours is only reconcilable with the notion that he had remained unconvinced by his personal intercourse with the incarnate Deity. The mere blunders in the story of the denial sink into insignificance in face of this major difficulty. Whether the cock did or did not crow before the third denial, whether Peter was or was not in the same apartment with Jesus at the time of the last denial, are comparatively trifling questions, and the contradictions on which they are based may be the consequence of the errors which Dr. Tischendorf says have crept into the sacred writings.

Jesus said, "as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so shall the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Jesus was crucified on Friday, was buried on Friday evening, and yet the first who went to the grave on the night of Saturday as it began to dawn towards Sunday, found the body of Jesus already gone. Did Jesus mean he should be three days and three nights in the grave? Is there any proof that his body remained in the grave for three hours? Who went first to the grave? was it Mary Magdalene alone, as in John, or two Maries as in Matthew, or the two Maries and Salome as in Mark, or the two Maries, Joanna, and several unnamed women as in Luke? To whom did did Jesus first appear? Was it, as in Mark, to Mary Magdalene, or to two disciples going to Emmaus, as in Luke, or to the two Maries near the sepulchre, as in Matthew? Is the eating boiled fish and honeycomb by a dead God credible? Did Jesus ascend to heaven the very day of his resurrection, or did an interval of nearly six weeks intervene?

Is this history credible, contained as it is in four contradictory biographies, outside which biographies we have, as Dr. Tischendorf admits, "no other source of information with respect to the life of Jesus"? This history of an earth-born Deity, descended through a crime-tainted ancestry, and whose genealogical tree is traced through one who was not his father; this history of an infinite God nursed as a baby, growing through childhood to manhood like any frail specimen of humanity; this history, garnished with bedevilled men, enchanted fig tree, myriads of ghosts, and scores of miracles, and by such garnishment made more akin to an oriental romance than to a sober history; this picture of the infinite invisible spirit incarnate visible as man; immutability subject to human passions and infirmities; the creator come to die, yet wishing to escape the death which shall bring peace to his God-tormented creatures; God praying to himself and rejecting his own prayer; God betrayed by a divinely-appointed traitor; God the immortal dying, and in the agony of the death-throes--stronger than the strong man's will--crying with almost the last effort of his dying breath, that he being God, is God forsaken!

If all this be credible, what story is there any man need hesitate to believe? Dr. Teschendorf asks how it has been possible to impugn the credibility of the four Gospels, and replies that this has been done by denying that the Gospels were written by the men whose names they bear. In the preceding pages it has been shown that the credibility of the Gospel narrative is impugned because it is uncorroborated by contemporary history, because it is self-contradictory, and because many of its incidents are _prima facie_ most improbable, and some of them utterly impossible. Even English Infidels are quite prepared to admit that the four Gospels may be quite anonymous; and yet, that their anonymous character need be of no weight as an argument against their truth. All that is urged on this head is that the advocates of the Gospel history have sought to endorse and give value to the otherwise unreliable narratives by a pretence that some of the Evangelists, at least, were eyewitnesses of the events they refer to. Dr. Teschendorf says: "The credibility of a writer clearly depends on the interval of time which lies between him and the events which he describes. The farther the narrator is removed from the facts which he lays before us the more his claims to credibility are reduced in value." Presuming truthfulness in intention for any writer, and his ability to comprehend the facts he is narrating, and his freedom from a prejudice which may distort the picture he intends to paint correctly with his pen: we might admit the correctness of the passage we have quoted; but can these always be pre-turned in the case of the authors of the Gospels? On the contrary, a presumption in an exactly opposite direction may be fairly raised from the fact that immediately after the Apostolic age the Christian world was flooded with forged testimonies in favor of the biography of Jesus, or in favor of his disciples.

A writer in the _Edinburgh Review_ observes: "To say nothing of such acknowledged forgeries as the Apostolic constitutions and liturgies, and the several spurious Gospels, the question of the genuineness of the alleged remains of the Apostolic fathers, though often overlooked, is very material. Any genuine remains of the 'Apostle' Barnabas, of Hermas, the contemporary (Romans xvi., 14), and Clement, the highly commended and gifted fellow laborer of St. Paul (Phil, iv., 3), could scarcely be regarded as less sacred than those of Mark and Luke, of whom personally we know less. It is purely a question of criticism. At the present day, the critics best competent to determine it, have agreed in opinion, that the extant writings ascribed to Barnabas and Hermas are wholly spurious--the frauds of a later age. How much suspicion attaches to the 1st Epistle of Clement (for the fragment of the second is also generally rejected) is manifest from the fact, that in modern times it has never been allowed the place expressly assigned to it among the canonical books prefixed to the celebrated Alexandrian MS., in which the only known copy of it is included. It must not be forgotten that Ignatius expressly lays claim to inspiration, that Irenasus quotes Hermas as Scripture, and Origen speaks of him as inspired, while Polycarp, in modestly disclaiming to be put on a level with the Apostles, clearly implies there would have been no essential distinction in the way of his being ranked in the same order. But the question is, how are these pretensions substantiated?" So far the _Edinburgh Review_, certainly not an Infidel publication.

Eusebius, in his "Ecclesiastical History," admits the existence of many spurious gospels and epistles, and some writings put forward by him as genuine, such as the correspondence between Jesus and Agbaras, have since been rejected as fictitious. It is not an unfair presumption from this that many of the most early Christians considered the then existing testimonies insufficient to prove the history of Jesus, and good reason is certainly afforded for carefully examining the whole of the evidences they have bequeathed us. On p. 48, Dr. Teschendorf quotes Irenaeus, whose writings-belong to the extreme end of the second century, as though that Bishop must be taken as vouching the four Gospels as we now have them. Yet, if the testimony of Irenaeus be-reliable ("Against Heresies," Book III., cap. i.) the Gospel attributed to Matthew was believed to have been composed in Hebrew, and Irenaeus says that as the Jews desired a Messiah of the royal line of David, Matthew having the same desire to a yet greater degree, strove to give them full satisfaction. This may account for some of the genealogical curiosities to which we have drawn attention, but hardly renders Matthew's Gospel more reliable; and how can the suggestion that Matthew wrote in Hebrew prove that Matthew penned the first Gospel, which has only existed in Greek? Irenaeus, too, flatly contradicts the Gospels by declaring that the ministry of Jesus extended over ten years and that Jesus lived to be fifty years of age ("Against Heresies," Book II., cap. 22).