The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
Arising from the Admissions of Eusebius,
In the New Testament Itself.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
Epistles written long before the gospels?
In order to enable the reader to see and apply the force of these admissions and their corollaries, and for the innumerable necessities of reference throughout this Diegesis, I have presented him with the best account of the times and places usually assigned as those of the first publication of the several books of the New Testament, on the very highest authority that Christians themselves can affect to refer to on this subject, which he will find in the chapter of Tables.
1. Upon referring to this, it will be seen, that the highest authorities admit, that all of the epistles were written some considerable time before any of the four gospels; and as a necessary consequence it follows, that they must have been written at a still more considerable length of time, before any one of those gospels could have come into general use and notoriety.
2. Nor must we forget, that from the very nature of epistolary writing, the information contained in letters, that would necessarily be put in the channel of conveyance to the persons to whom they were addressed, immediately upon being- written, must as necessarily outrun the slow gradual and uncertain arrival of information conveyed in general treatises, which were no more one man's business than another's, and which might remain unknown to the majority of Christians, even on the very site of their most extended publication.
3. Add too, the equally essential calculation of the effect of distance of places, in those remote ages, when our arts and means of conveyance were utterly unknown, which would necessarily render a published narration of events that had occurred in a distant province, of infinitely tardier authentication, than any epistles sent by hand, as those of the New Testament purport to be, and only passing to and from the comparatively neighbouring cities of Corinth, Ephesus, and Thessalonica.
4. Upon the admitted fact, that the most important of these epistles, (say, that to the Galatians) was written eleven or twelve years before the earliest date of any one of our gospels, we may fairly put in challenge, that that, or any other of the epistles, must have been received, read, and known, even many years, before the credit of the gospels was established.
5. These admissions seem to have been yielded, with however ill a grace, by theologians, on account of the manifestly greater difficulties, that would attend the admission of the opposite hypothesis; to wit, that, of the prior existence and prevalence of the gospels; which would palpably throw the language and style of these epistles in reference to those gospels, sheer out of the latitude of all possibility of being received as the compositions of the cotemporaries of the Evangelists.
6. Nor is there more than one single passage in the whole of these epistles, that so much as appears to conflict with this arrangement; and as that is a verbal coincidence merely, it can hardly be held sufficient to overthrow the universal consent supported by the manifest sense and character of every other chapter and verse of those epistles. That passage is 1 Cor. 11-24, 25, referring to the institution of the sacrament, in which the Apostle says, "I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, 'Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.' After the same manner also, he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, 'this cup is the New Testament in my blood: this do, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.'
This passage, indeed, has the appearance of being a direct quotation from the text of Luke's gospel, 22-19, 20. "And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This, is my body, which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise, also the cup, after supper, saying, This, cup is the New Testament in my blood, which is shed for you."
If there were no relieving alternative, but that the former of these passages must be acknowledged to be a quotation from the latter, as certainly no work could be quoted before it existed; the arrangement, which it will be seen by Dr Lardner's table, makes the Epistle to have been written at least six years before the Gospel, is convicted of anachronism; and as far as this evidence is concerned, divines are thrown again upon the stakes of all the difficulties that attend the hypothesis they have been at such pains to evade.
1. But the evidently mystical sense of the words themselves.
2. The distinct declaration of the apostle in this place, that he had received what he delivered from the Lord;
3. And in other places (Gal. 1. 11), that "the gospel which he preached was not after man; for he neither received it of man, neither was he taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ;
4. The most striking resemblance and coincidence of these words with the formularies and ritual of the Pagan mysteries of Eleusis;
5. And the admission in the preface of Luke's Gospel, that his work was only a compilation of previously existing documents, and derived in common with the works which many had taken in hand before him to copy from the Diegesis, [a] or original narration preserved in the sacred archives of the church:
[a] The first verse of St. Luke's Gospel, if Gospel-readers could but see what was under their nose, would prevent their ever more pretending that the Gospels were original compositions. "Forasmuch as many had taken in hand to set the Diegesis in order," which was the original from which the Apocryphal Gospels were taken, and afterward, the improved versions ascribed to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which obtained final approbation, and so caused not only the previous versions, but the Diegesis itself, from which they were all taken, to be laid aside.]
Preliminary conclusions on the Gospel of Luke.
These are arguments entirely sufficient to relieve the dilemma, and to leave it rather probable that Luke took his account from the same document which the apostle had previously quoted, or even from the text of the apostle himself. Thus, no exception from the general rule remains; and we must admit, with all its consequences, the prior existence of these epistolary writings, detailing, as they do, the history of communities of Christians, and fully established churches in Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colosse, and Thessalonica, "rooted and grounded in the faith," -"beloved of God," -"called of Christ Jesus," -"in everything enriched, in all utterance and all knowledge," -"coming behind in no good gift," and having, as the apostle, in the case of the Galatian church, emphatically declares, so certainly received the only true and authentic Gospel, that "if even the apostle himself or an angel from heaven should preach any other gospel than that which they had received, let him be accursed." Gal. 1-8. -See Syntagma of the Evidences, p. 75.
6. Here we find the Gospel already so fully established, that there was a sense in which it could be said that it had been preached unto every creature under heaven (Colos. 1-23), before the date assigned to any one of the gospels that have come down to us, before any one of the disciples had suffered martyrdom, before any one of them could have completed his commission. Here we find a spiritual dynasty established, exercising the most tremendous authority ever grasped by man, not merely over the lives and fortunes, minds and persons, but over the supposed eternal destinies of its enslaved and degraded vassals, and confirmed by so strong an influence over all their powers of resistance, that its haughty possessor could bear them witness that they were ready to pluck their eyes out, and give them to him. Here we find churches already perfectly organized "to their power," yea (and the Apostle boasts), beyond their power, contributing to the pomp and splendour of their ministers, and beseeching them, with much entreaty, to take their money from them. (2 Cor. 8-4). [And what goes with the story of the Apostles, meeting with such ill success as to have to lay down their lives for their testimony? It is not only not true, but not conceivable to be true; it but-Herod's Herod, and out-lies the consistency of romance itself.] Here we find the distinct orders of bishops and deacons already reigning in the plenitude of their distinctive authorities; and the bishops, forsooth, the proudest of the proud, already of such long prescription in their seat of power, as often to have abased that power, and to need admonitions "not to be self-willed, not to be given to wine, no strikers, and not given to filthy lucre," (Titus. 1-7,) as some of that right-reverend order must have been proved to be, ere such admonitions could have been called for; yet called for they were, and necessary they had become, as the reader will see by the table, some eight or ten years before the date assigned to the writing of the four Gospels.
References.
"The Essenes, of whom Philo has written the history, were confessedly Pythagorians, and to think we may see some traces of these people among the Druids. They existed before Christianity, and lived in buildings called monasteria or monasteries, and were called Koinobioi [a] or Coenobites. They were of three kinds, some never married, others of them did. They are most highly spoken of by all the authors of antiquity who have named them." - The Celtic Druids, by Godfrey Higgins, Esq. [b] AD. 1827, p. 125. [see SV, on the works of Godfrey Higgins.]
[a] [GK] - living in common. Acts iv. 32. [GK] - "they had all things in common."]
[b] Mr. Higgins's testimony is the more valuable, as it is that of a witness averse to the conclusions to which he marshals us the way. His splendid work, instructive and interesting as it is in the highest 'degree, though superfluously orthodox, has delightfully beguiled the tedium of many of my prison-hours']
Conclusion of chapter
Were there any degree of difficulty in accounting for such a scheme of tyrannous aggrandisement, and of obtaining unbounded power and influence over the subjugated reason of mankind, philosophy, that forbids all supposition of supernatural agency, would acknowledge that difficulty; but to imagine any, in accounting for the rise and progress of Christianity, we must, by a laborious effort of imagination, imagine nature to be the very reverse in everything from what we experience it to be; we must suppose a man to be at a loss to find his own head; we must suppose Infinite Wisdom teaching trickery to a thief, and the orchestra of the spheres supplying resin for a fiddlestick - introducing our God not to extricate the mystery of the scene, but to sweep the stage, and grease the pulleys.
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Next chapter 12. Chapter 12. References to the Monkish or Therapeutan Doctrines, to be traced in the New Testament.