You will ask me by what means this strange revolution of all divine
and human laws was brought about. I am about to tell you; and I defy
the most zealous fanatic in whom there is still a spark of reason,
and the most determined rogue who has still a trace of decency in his
soul, to resist the force of the truth, if he reads this important
inquiry with the attention it deserves.
It is certain and undoubted that the earliest societies of the
Galilæans, afterwards called Christians, remained in obscurity, in
the mud of the cities; and it is certain that, when these Christians
began to write, they entrusted their books only to those who had
been initiated into their mysteries. They were not even given to the
catechumens, much less to partisans of the imperial religion. No
Roman before the time of Trajan [98-117 A.D.] knew that the gospels
existed; no Greek or Latin writer has ever quoted the word “gospel”;
Plutarch, Lucian, Petronius, and Apuleius, who speak of everything,
are entirely ignorant of the existence of gospels. This proof, with
a hundred others, shows the absurdity of those authors who now hold,
or pretend to hold, that the disciples of Jesus died for the truth
of these gospels, of which the Romans did not hear a word during two
hundred years. The half-Jew, half-Christian Galilæans, separated from
the disciples of John, and from the Therapeuts, Essenians, Judaites,
Herodians, Sadducees, and Pharisees, recruited their little flock
among the lowest of the people, not, indeed, by means of books, but
of speech, by catechising the women and girls (_Acts_ xvi., 13 and
14) and children, and passing from town to town; in a word, like all
other sects.
Tell me frankly, Romans, what your ancestors would have said if
St. Paul, or Simon Barjona, or Matthias, or Matthew, or Luke, had
appeared in the Senate and said: “Our God, Jesus, who passed as
the son of a carpenter during life, was born in the year 752 from
the foundation of Rome, under the governorship of Cyrenius (_Luke_
ii., 2), in a Jewish village called Bethlehem, to which his father
Joseph and his mother Mariah had gone to be included in the census
which Augustus had ordered. This God was born in a stable, between
an ox and an ass.[51] The angels came down from heaven and informed
the peasants of his birth; a new star appeared in the heavens, and
led to him three kings or wise men from the east, who brought him a
tribute of incense, myrrh, and gold; but in spite of this gold he was
poor throughout life. Herod, who was then dying, and whom you had
made king, having learned that the new-born child was king of the
Jews, had fourteen thousand new-born infants of the district put to
death, to make sure that the king was included (_Matthew_ ii., 16).
However, one of our writers inspired by God says that the God-king
child fled to Egypt; and another writer, equally inspired by God,
says that the child remained at Bethlehem (_Luke_ ii., 39). One of
these sacred and infallible writers draws up a royal genealogy for
him; another composes for him an entirely different royal genealogy.
Jesus preaches to the peasants, and turns water into wine for them at
a marriage feast. Jesus is taken by the devil up into a mountain. He
drives out devils, and sends them into the body of two thousand pigs
in Galilee, where there never were any pigs. He greatly insulted the
magistrates, and the prætor Pontius had him executed. When he had
been executed, he manifested his divinity. The earth trembled; the
dead left their graves, and walked about in the city before the eyes
of Pontius. There was an eclipse of the sun at midday, at a time of
full moon, although that is impossible. He rose again secretly, went
up to heaven, and sent down another god, who fell on the heads of his
disciples in tongues of fire. May these same tongues fall on your
heads, conscript fathers; become Christians.”
If the lowest official in the Senate had condescended to answer this
discourse, he would have said: “You are weak-minded rogues, and ought
to be put in the asylum for the insane. You lie when you say that
your God was born in the year of Rome 752, under the governorship of
Cyrenius, the proconsul of Syria. Cyrenius did not govern Syria until
more than ten years afterwards, as our registers prove. Quintilius
Varus was at that time proconsul of Syria.
“You lie when you say that Augustus ordered a census of ‘all the
world.’ You must be very ignorant not to know that Augustus was
master only of one tenth of the world. If by ‘all the world’ you
mean the Roman Empire, know that neither Augustus nor anybody else
ever undertook such a census. Know that there was but one single
enumeration of the citizens of Rome and its territory under Augustus,
and that the number amounted to four million citizens; and unless
your carpenter Joseph and his wife Mariah brought forth your God in
a suburb of Rome, and this Jewish carpenter was a Roman citizen, he
cannot possibly have been included.
“You are telling a ridiculous untruth with your three kings and new
star, and the little massacred children, and the dead rising again
and walking in the streets under the eyes of Pontius Pilate, who
never wrote us a word about it, etc., etc.
“You are lying when you speak of an eclipse of the sun at a time of
full moon. Our prætor Pontius Pilate would have written to us about
it, and we, together with all the nations of the earth, would have
witnessed this eclipse. Return to your work, you fanatical peasants,
and thank the Senate that it has too much disdain to punish you.”