The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
All ecclesiastical writers seem to have agreed in representing the gospel according to St. John, as written at some considerable length of time after the publication of the three other gospels, and generally with a view to confute the heresies of the Corinthians, Sabians, and Gnostics, which had either previously existed, or had risen into a mischievous notoriety, since the publication of those gospels. He had read the three first gospels before he composed his own, and appears, says Bishop Marsh, to have corrected, though in a very delicate manner, the accounts given by his predecessors; which, if his predecessors were under such an inspiration of the holy spirit, as was sufficient to keep them clear of error, must indeed have required the greatest delicacy. The Bishop, however, has merited our forgiveness of this absurdity, by the frankness of his Confession, that after all his attempts to reconcile the contradiction of St. John's account of the resurrection of Christ with that of Mark and Luke, "he has not been able to do it, in a manner satisfactory either to himself, or to any other impartial inquirer into truth."
He concludes with even more than necessary caution, that "if it be true that there are passages in St. John's Gospel, which are at variance with the accounts given by the other Evangelists, we cannot hesitate to give the preference to St. John, who wrote last, and appears to have had an excellent memory." [a] Some persons have need of excellent memories.
[a] Vol. 3, p. 315. - Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it seems, had but indifferent memories, even with the Holy Ghost to jog them, and John's memory has corrected some of the Holy 'Ghost's blunders.]
O Sant Esprit! La voila ton ouvrage.
Dr Semler's Hypothesis.
[LN., Semler, Johann Salomo, 1725 to 1791, he was a German church historian, and biblical critic.]
Dr Semler contends, that St. John wrote before the other three Evangelists, and the weight of his authority, which alone would give respectability to his criticism, seems to be seconded by the historical evidence of the existence of the heretical sects which St. John wrote to refute, long anterior to any date which Christians have ascribed to the three first gospels. An evangelist, who had seen the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and wished to second and support their authority, would hardly have committed himself in the egregious and irreconcilable contradictions which this gospel presents, when compared with those: and surely, no one can be ignorant that the Platonic and Pythagorean doctrines, which distinguish and characterize this gospel, existed several ages before the birth of Christ. Nor ought the strong arguments which the learned have adduced, in proof that Plato and Pythagoras themselves were both members of Therapeutan society or had derived their doctrines from the sacred writings of this sect, to be of little weight with us. The universal delusion of ecclesiastical history consists in ascribing a later date to earlier institutions, in representing that which was the origination, as the corruption of Christianity, and in bringing down the monkish and monastic epoch to any period below the second or third century, in order to keep the clue of the whole labyrinth out of sight, and to evade the clear solution of all the difficulties of the inquiry, which presents itself in the fact that Eusebius has attested, that Therapeutan monks were Christians, many ages before the period assigned to the birth of Christ; and that the Diegesis and Gnomologue, from which the Evangelists compiled their gospels, were writings which had for ages constituted the sacred scriptures of those Egyptian visionaries.
Evanson on the Falsehood of Gospel Geography.
The learned Evanson, who, though a Unitarian divine, professes himself to be a firm believer in revelation, and a disciple of Jesus Christ, marks with triple notes of admiration his astonishment that the orthodox should [In his Work on the Dissonance of the Four Evangelists, published 1792, p. 222.] receive gospels which so flatly contradict each other, as each equally true. And of the adorable miracle of turning water into wine, he observes, that coming in so very exceptionable a form, upon the testimony of so very exceptionable an historian, it is altogether as unworthy of belief as the fabulous Roman Catholic legend of St. Nicholas's chickens.
Bretschneider.
Since Christian tolerance has endured these pregnant admissions against the claims of divine revelation, the sceptical world has been enriched by the Probabilia of Bretschneider, published at Leipsic 1820, in which that illustrious divine, compatibly with an equally sincere profession of faith in Christianity; and what is in some views a much more important consideration, compatibly with keeping his divinity professorship, and presidency of a Protestant university; has shown that the Jesus depicted in the fourth gospel is wholly out of keeping, and entirely a different sort of character from the Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and that it is utterly impossible that both descriptions could be true; that this gospel contains no testimony of an independent historian, or of a witness to the things therein related, but is derived solely from some written or unwritten tradition; and that its author was neither an inhabitant of Palestine, nor a Jew. [LN., Bretschneider, Karl Gottlieb, 1776 to 1848, was a German Protestant scholar and theologian.]
[Jesus, quem depinxit, quarturn evangelium, valde diversus est a Jesu in prioribus evangeliis descripto - nec utraque descriptio simul vera esse protest - Evangelista, nec ea quae facta esse tradidit, ipse videt, sed e traditione aut scripta aut non scripta, hausit - nec Palaestinensis nee Judseus fuit. - Bretschneider in Ordine Argumentorum.]
This, however, is not more than may, from internal evidence, be argued against the other evangelists, or at least Matthew and Mark, whose writings betray so great an ignorance of the geography, statistics, and even language of Judea, as the most illiterate inhabitants of that country could by no possibility have fallen into - exempligratia.
Falsehood of Gospel Geography.
1. "He came unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis," (Mark 7-31): when there were no coasts of Decapolis, nor was the name so much as known before the reign of the emperor Nero.
2. "He departed from Galilee, and came into the coasts of Judea, beyond Jordan," (Matt. 19-1): when the Jordan itself was the eastern boundary of Judea, and there were no coasts of Judea beyond it. [Evanson, p. 169.]
3. "But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judea, in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither notwithstanding being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee, and he came and dwell in a city called Nazareth; that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophets, he shall be called a Nazarene," (Matt. 2-22): when -
1. It was a son of Herod who reigned in his stead, in Galilee as well as in Judea, so that he could not be securer in one province than in the other; and when -
2. It was impossible for him to have gone from Egypt to Nazareth, without travelling through the whole extent of Archelaus's kingdom, or making a peregrination through the deserts on the north and east of the Lake Asphaltites, and the country of Moab; and then, either crossing the Jordan into Samaria or the Lake of Gennesareth into Galilee, and from thence going to the city of Nazareth; which is no better geography, than if one should describe a person as turning aside from Cheapside into the parts of Yorkshire; and when -
3. There were no prophets whatever, or certainly none that either Jew or Christian would allow to be prophets, who had prophesied that Jesus "should be called a Nazarene;" and when -
4. It is not true (according to the subsequent history) that Jesus was ever called a Nazarene; and when after Christ and the Devil had ended their forty days' familiarity in the wilderness, "He departed into Galilee, and leaving Nazareth, he came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is upon the sea-coast in the borders of Zebulon, and Nephthalim, that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, The land of Zebulon and the land of Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles," &c. (Matt. 4-12, 13); when, to Esaias, or any inhabitant of Judea, the country beyond must be the country east of the Jordan, (as Gaulonitis, or Galilee of the Gentiles, is well known to have been); whereas Capernaum was a city on the western side of the Lake of Gennesareth, through which the Jordan flows. [LN., Zebulun and Naphtali was meant, although it changes nothing, in this present discourse.] [LN., The writer of Luke, in telling of the birth of John the Baptist, has the angel telling his parents that he is brought up under the oath of a Nazarite, the main rules being, that they must not cut their hair, cannot drink alcohol, or any fruit that might ferment in the stomach. Luke. 1-15.]
5. Nazarene was not a name derived from any place whatever, but from a sect of Egyptian monks, and was none other than of the same significance as Essene or Therapeut - a fact which throws further light on this monkish legend; and when - 5. "He departed into Galilee, and leaving Nazareth, came and dwelt at Capernaum" (Matt. iv. 13): as if he imagined that the city Nazareth was not as properly in Galilee as Capernaum was; which is much such geographical accuracy, as if one should relate the travels of a hero, who departed into Middlesex, and leaving London, came and dwelt in Lombard-street.
6. Had Jesus been a Jew and derived his epithet according to Jewish customs from the place of his birth, he would have been called, not Jesus of Nazareth, but Jesus of Bethlehem.
Falsehood of Gospel Dates.
1. The principal indications of time occurring in the Gospels, are -
"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed; and this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria." - Luke 2-1, 2. It happens however, awkwardly enough.
1stly. That there is no mention in any ancient Roman or Greek historian, of any general taxing of people all over the world, or the whole Roman empire, in the time of Augustus, nor of any decree of the emperor for that purpose: and this is an event of such character and magnitude, as to exclude even the possibility of the Greek and Roman historians omitting to have mentioned it, had it ever really happened.
2dly. That in those days, that is, "when Jesus was born, in the days of Herod the king," Judea was not at that time a Roman province; and it is therefore absolutely impossible that there could have been any such taxing there, by any such decree, of any such Caesar Augustus.
3dly. That Cyrenius was not Governor of Syria, till ten or twelve years after the time assigned as that of the birth of Christ.
4thly. That the whole passage is taken from one of those apocryphal gospels which were in full vogue long before this of St. Luke was written; some of which, by leaving the times and seasons entirely in the hand of God, represented that this taxing was first made when King Solomon was reigning in all his glory, so that Pontius Pilate and he were contemporary, which did well enough before the wicked and sceptical art of criticism began to undermine the pillars of faith.
2. "There were present at that season, some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices." - Luke 13-1.
No historian, Jewish, Greek or Roman, has made the least allusion to this bloody work; which it is next to impossible that they could have failed to do, had it really happened.
Such an act was entirely out of character; for Pilate was a Pagan and a sacrificer himself and would never have considered idolatry as a crime in anybody. We have the solution of the difficulty at once, by admitting the probability, that as the name of King Herod was substituted in the later or more orderly and methodical transcripts of the Diegesis, for that of King Solomon, so the act of good King Josiah (2 Kings 23.) has here been fathered upon Pontius Pilate.
Falsehood of Gospel Statistics
1. Annas and Caiaphas being the high-priests (Luke 3-2); when any person acquainted with the history and polity of the Jews, must have known that there never was but one high-priest at a time, any more than among ourselves there is never but one Archbishop of Canterbury.
2. Caiaphas, which was the high-priest that same year, (John 8-13,) being high-priest that year, he prophesied (John 11-50); when no Jew could have been ignorant that the high-priest's office was not annual, but for life, and that prophesying was no privilege nor part of that office.
3. "Search and look, for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet," (John 7-52); when the most distinguished of the Jewish prophets, Nahum and Jonah, were both Galileans.
Falsehood of Gospel Phraseology
They brought the ass and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and set him thereon," (Matt. 21-7); i.e. like Mr. Ducrow, at Astley's Theatre, a-straddle across them both.
This translator of Matthew's supposed original Hebrew copy of the Diegesis, being so grossly ignorant of the common pleonasm of the Hebrew language, as to mistake its ordinary emphatic way of indicating a particular object by a repetition of the word; as, an ass, "even that which was the son," or foal, or had been born of an ass; for two of the species. [a]
[a] Similar pleonasms, not without considerable beauty, are - "God is not a man, that he should die, nor the son of man, that he should repent."- Numb, xxiii. 19. "Shall rise up as a great lion and lift up himself as a young lion." - Numb, 23-21. "Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him, or the Son of man, that thou so regardest him?" - Psalm.]
2. "And he said unto them. Go wash in the pool of Siloam, which is by interpretation Sent," (John 19-7) [b] which happens to be an interpretation which no Jewish writer could possibly have given: Siloam signifying, not Sent, but the place of the sending forth of waters, that is, the sluice: to say nothing of the absurdity of representing the pool as sent to the man, instead of the man being sent to the pool: or of the absurdity of supposing that one who was blind, could see his way thither. Sure, here seems to have been a greater chance of the poor man's getting his baptism than his conversion. This text has? so puzzled the commentators, that they have endeavoured to get the words "which is by interpretation, sent," considered as a mere marginal note; but the authority of the Codices attests them to be a part of the text itself. Whatever, then, be the credit due to the three first evangelists, the fourth may well be considered as neither better nor worse and must stand or fall with them.
[b] Chap. 19. 7. Ubi auctor vocem [ GK ] falso interpretatur per [ GK ] et ex errore [ HB ] missus, pronuntiavit [ HB ] Emissio, scil. aquarum Ejusmodi error vero, nec Joanni Apostolo, neque alii cuidam scriptori Judaao accidere potuisset. Codicum auctoritate prorsus genuina judicanda sunt ista verba. - Bretschneider.]
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Next chapter 18. Ultimate Result.