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.
Such errors as we have exemplified, and innumerable other such there are, in every one of the four gospels, can be accounted for on no suppositions congruous with the idea of there, having been written either by any such persons, at any such time, or under any such circumstances, as have been generally assumed for them. But we may challenge the whole world's history to furnish, from a period of such remote antiquity, a coincidence of circumstantial evidence to prove any fact whatever, so strong, so concatenated, and so entirely responsive to all the claims of the phenomena, as the evidence here adduced, that the first types of the Gospel-story sprang from the Egyptian monks, and constituted the substance of the mystical romance, which they had modified from the Pagan mythology, in conformity to their professed and acknowledged Eclectic Philosophy, and imposed for antecedent ages on the ecclesiastical colonies, which had migrated from the mother church of Alexandria.
Thus, after Europe and all Christian communities have been for so many ages led to believe that in the four gospels they possessed the best translations that could be derived, in their several languages, from the original inspired text of immediate disciples and contemporaries of Christ; it is at length admitted, that mankind have been and are egregiously deceived.
1. It is admitted, that these gospels were not written by the persons to whom they are ascribed;
2. That Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were only translators or copyists of previously existing documents;
3. Composed by, we know not whom?
4. We know not how?
5. We know not where?
6. We know not when?
7. And containing we know not what?
The very first assertion in the title-page of our New Testament, in stating that it is translated from the original Greek, involves a fallacy; since it is absolutely certain that the Greek, from which our translations were made, was well-nigh as far from being original, as the translations themselves, and it is absolutely uncertain what the original was.
Irenaeus indeed, the disciple of Polycarp, which Polycarp is said to have conversed with St. John, and who himself lived and wrote in the middle of the second century, is the first of all the Fathers who mentions the four evangelists by name. But if this testimony were as certainly unexceptionable, as it certainly is not - the being able to trace these scriptures so high or even higher than the second century, would be no relief to the difficulties of the evidence; since the same testimony attests the antecedent prevalence of the heresies of the Marcionites, Ebionites and Valentinians, which wore to be refuted out of these gospels, and which} as they were undoubtedly heresies from Christian doctrine, carry us as much too far beyond the mark, as it might have been feared that we should fall short of it; and go to prove, that as those heresies, so these gospels which refuted them, existed before the time ascribed to the birth of Christ. All the indications of date contained in those gospels themselves, are manifestly erroneous. It is universally known and admitted, that we have no history, nor Christian writing whatever besides, that so much as purports to come within the limits of the first century. At any rate, the predicament of being 1 too soon on the stage, is as fatal to the congruities of the story, as being too late. [Irenaeus, died around 202AD, he was a Greek cleric, who developed Christian theology and battled against heresy, generally in what is now southern France.] The history of the New Testament, "says Dr Lardner," "is attended with many difficulties." - Vol. 1. p. 136.
What could he mean by difficulties, but appearances of not being true? What could he mean by many difficulties, but that such appearances are not one, two, or a dozen, but meet us in every page? And what means the labour of his cumbrous volumes, but so much labour of so great a man, laid out on the sophisticatedly business of making what he virtually admits appears to be falsehood, appear to be truth.
All these geographical, chronological, political, and philological perplexities, are such as never could have crossed the path of straight-forward narrative; but are such exactly as would occur to Eclectic plagiaries, engaged in the business of setting forth in order a tale of the then olden time; fitting new names and new scenery to the characters and catastrophes of an antiquated plot; and endeavouring to put an appearance of history and reality upon the creations of fictions and romance.
That this Eclectic philosophy of the Alexandrine monks is the true parent of their Diegesis, of which the gospels that have come down to us, are the legitimate issue, is the demonstration that will meet us now at every stage of that comparison of the Pagan and Christian theology, which our investigation challenges from us.
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Next chapter 19. Resemblances of the Pagan and Christian Theology, Augury and Bishops, Aesculapius, Jesus Christ Hercules, Jesus Christ Adonis., Jesus Christ.