THE KORAN AND THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
_The Jews emerge into history, not a nation of keen spiritual
aspirations and altruistic ethics, but that pagan people,
worshipping rocks, sheep and cattle, and spirits of caves and wells,
of whom the Old Testament, tending towards its higher ideal, gives
fragmentary but convincing evidence_.
JAMES T. SHOTWELL.
_Consider Jahveh. Cruel god of a horde of nomadic invaders settling
in a land of farmers, he had his images, ranging in elaboration from
an uncut mazzebah or asherah, to a golden bull. He was plural by
place and tribe and function. What did the prophetic movement do
with his sacred powers? It identified his taboos with a written
constitution_.
HORACE M. KALLEN.
_The mental attitude of these priest-dominated ancestors of ours is
amazing. They were like children in the hands of unscrupulous
teachers. In reading these old chronicles it is impossible not to be
shocked by the incongruity ever arising out of the juxtaposition of
theory and practice_.
LLEWELYN POWYS.
Our Martian visitor, having withstood the blasts of the Zealot, is
approached by a Mohammedan who places in his hands the Koran and tells
him that it is a divinely inspired revelation, as revealed by Allah
through his prophet, Mohammed. Having already had some experience with
earthly religionists, the Martian is disposed to avail himself of the
historical evidence regarding the life of Mohammed.
He finds that Mohammed, from all accounts, was a demagogue, a charlatan,
and a victim of mental disease. It strikes him strangely that such an
individual should be chosen by Allah as his disciple on earth to make
known his commands. He notes Mohammed's appearance on earth in 600 A.D.
and wonders why the Creator should have procrastinated for such a long
time; but decides to read the revelations anyhow.
He discovers that "from the literary point of view, the Koran has little
merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic, and
incoherence strike him at every turn. He finds it humiliating to the
human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the
subject of innumerable commentaries and that millions of men are still
wasting time in absorbing it."
A Hebrew next takes his turn at this obstinate guest and sets before him
the Old Testament. Again, the Martian is informed that it is an inspired
book actuated by God.
In his attempt to find the historical evidence corroborating this book,
the Martian finds that authentic history begins for the Israelites with
the constitution of Saul's monarchy about 1100 B.C. All that precedes
this--the deluge, the dispersal of mankind, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, the
captivity in Egypt, Moses, Joshua, and the conquest of Canaan, is more
or less mythical.
In the Old Testament, our Martian reads the first chapter, glances at
the chronology, and is immediately bewildered since he has a fair
knowledge of our scientific advances. As he reads on, he becomes aware
of a host of errors, contradictions, and manifest absurdities. When he
questions the zealous Hebrew, he comes in contact with what he is
informed is Concordism, which he perceives is a false science that
consists in determining, at any cost, a perfect harmony between modern
science and the knowledge possessed by God's people. He is thus told
that the days of creation were not days at all, but periods; although
the Bible mentions the morning and evening of each day. Delving further
in this most holy of revelations, he learns that God is represented in a
manner most unworthy of what such a being should be represented. He
finds the Lord walking in the cool of the evening, showing his hind
quarters to Moses, ordering abominable massacres, and punishing chiefs
who had not killed enough people. On further perusal, there is revealed,
"A great deal of Oriental bombast, incoherence and absurdity, that the
marvels recounted are often ludicrous or grotesque."
In a chance moment, when the Hebrew had relaxed his hold for a second, a
vile heretic points out to the visitor (_Exodus XXII, 18_): "Thou shalt
not suffer a witch to live!" and explains the witchcraft delusion to
him.
From a comparison between Exodus XXXIV and Exodus XX, he is at a loss to
decipher which are the true commandments that the Lord gave to Moses.
The first five books of the Pentateuch, he finds, are attributed to
Moses, although they contain the account of the latter's death. On
inquiry, he learns that this is still maintained by the synagogue. His
Martian intellect is unable to comprehend the logic of a God who would
demand human and animal sacrifice, and the story of Abraham about to
sacrifice his son Isaac fills him with disgust. His estimate of the
mentality of Jehovah receives a severe jolt when he reads in Leviticus
XVI, "Herewith shall Aaron come unto the holy place with a young bullock
for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. He shall put on the
holy linen coat, and he shall have the linen breeches upon his flesh,
and he shall be girded with the linen girdle, and with the linen mitre
shall he be attired; they are the holy garments; and he shall bathe his
flesh in water and put them on. And he shall take of the congregation of
the children of Israel two he-goats for a sin offering, and one ram for
a burnt offering. And Aaron shall present the bullock of the sin
offering, which is for himself, and he shall make atonement for himself
and for his houses. And he shall take the two goats and set them before
the Lord at the door of the tent of the meeting."
Our visitor reads on to Leviticus XVIII, after which he must stop to
question the Hebrew, for here he finds, "None of you shall approach to
any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness; I am the
Lord. The nakedness of thy father, even the nakedness of thy mother,
shalt thou not uncover; she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her
nakedness. The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou not uncover; it
is thy father's nakedness. The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of
thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or
abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover. The nakedness of
thy son's wife--the nakedness of the wife of thy father--the nakedness
of thy father's sister, thy mother's sister, the nakedness of thy
daughter-in-law, thy brother's wife, the nakedness of a woman and her
daughter, thou shalt not uncover. And unto a woman separated by her
uncleanliness thou shalt not approach to uncover her nakedness. Thou
shalt not be carnally with thy neighbor's wife, to defile thyself with
her. Thou shalt not be with mankind as with womankind. And thou shalt
not be with any beast to defile thyself thereto; neither shall any woman
stand before a beast to lie down thereto; it is confusion."
The Martian, totally aghast, is constrained to exclaim that he cannot
believe that a Deity should find it necessary to place this in a divine
revelation. The Hebrew Zealot relents somewhat to explain that perhaps
this was not revealed, but found its way into the divine text as a
moral lesson to the primitive tribes for which it was written. To this,
our guest counters with the remark that if this be a parable of manners
and morals, then, from what he observes on the earth, we, Earthlings,
have certainly outgrown the need for such coarse and obscene statements
made some 2000 years ago; and that on Mars, although the inhabitants are
not blessed with such divine revelations, common sense and reason have
taught their most primitive men the same lessons in morality while they
were yet in their infancy.
Reflecting on this maze of contradictions, the Martian determines to
analyze the Old Testament and the Hebrew religion in the same manner
that he would investigate any other problem presented to him.
Thirty-five hundred years ago, the Hebrews were a pastoral, primitive
people inhabiting the wilderness known today as the Arabian Desert.
Their religion was that of all other primitive peoples--Animism, an
illusion which made primitive man recognize everywhere spirits similar
to his own spirit. They worshiped the spirits of the sun and the moon,
the mountains and rocks, as well as the spirits of the dead.
It appears certain that the barrenness of this desert land necessitated
these wandering tribes to migrate to adjacent areas of greater
fertility. To the north lay the fertile valleys of the Tigris and
Euphrates and the coast of the Mediterranean Sea; to the west lay the
land of the Egyptians. Time and time again, these Bedouin tribes hurled
themselves against the inhabitants of the northern fertile valleys.
Babylonia, to the northeast, was the first country to be invaded, and
later Canaan to the northwest. Successful at times in establishing
themselves in Babylonia and Canaan, they were at other times driven back
into the desert when the native inhabitants in turn attacked the
invaders. Migrating into Egypt in search of food, they were made a
captive nation and escaped again into the desert when the Egyptians were
engaged in fighting the savage invaders from Libya.
The leader of this flight from Egypt was the prophet Moses. The Martian
decides to investigate the character and deeds of this influential
figure at another time. It is probable that the exodus gave the proper
stimulus for the beginnings of a distinctive Hebrew religion, and was
the reason for their finally establishing themselves in Canaan, with
Jehovah as their chief deity. It has often been proclaimed that the
value of Judaism has been in first establishing a religion of
monotheism; but it must not be forgotten that centuries before the
Hebrews escaped into the desert, the Egyptians were tending to
monotheism. It is known that one god was exalted over all the rest in
Egypt, and that as far back as 1375 B.C. King Ikhnaton made the religion
of Egypt an absolute monotheism. The Hebrews, in proclaiming their
Yahveh as the one and supreme deity, were but following what they had
assimilated from the Egyptians. The faith of these desert marauders, at
the time of their entrance into Canaan, was as crude and savage as the
Hebrews themselves. Brought into contact with the gods of the
Phoenicians and Babylonians, their Yahveh underwent a change, as have
all other creeds since that time when brought into contact with another
creed. The final idea of Yahveh accepted by the Hebrews was not the
product of a sudden revelation but of a gradual evolution.
The Hebrews, about the twelfth century B.C., gained access into Canaan,
and at first were successful in warfare, so that under King David they
presented the aspect of a united nation. However, following the
extravagant reign of King Solomon, the nation was embroiled in a
revolution, and the land was divided into two kingdoms--Israel in the
north, Judah in the south. These two tiny kingdoms were habitually at
war with each other and, finally, in 722 B.C. Israel was conquered,
while in 586 B.C., Judah was defeated and its population either
scattered or taken into captivity.
In 538 B.C., Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylonia and set the exiles
free. Returning to their own land, the exiles took back with them the
law code which the priests had manufactured for them. Then began a
period of priestly domination and corruption, a period of subjugation to
Rome, of insurrection against Rome, and the capture and destruction of
Jerusalem in 70 A.D. With the capture of Jerusalem, the Hebrew nation
was finally dispersed.
Just as the Martian was able to trace the evolution of the Hebrews from
the stage of the marauding tribes of the Arabian desert who wandered
into Egypt, Canaan, and Babylonia, and finally established a kingdom for
themselves which was dispersed by Rome; just so could he trace the
evolution of their religious beliefs from their incipient crudities to
their not too great refinement at 70 A.D. This evolution of the Hebrew
religion is best exemplified by an analysis of the Old Testament itself.
There are several canons, or official collection of books which comprise
the Old Testament. The Jews and Protestants accept fewer books than the
Roman Catholics. The Jewish Canon consists of those so-called sacred
books of which the Synagogue possessed Hebrew texts about a century
before the Christian era. "About 150 B.C. the sacred books of the Jews
were translated into Greek for the use of those Egyptian Jews who could
not read Hebrew. This translation is called the Septuagint, from a
tradition that seventy or seventy-two translators had worked upon it."
(_Salomon Reinach, "Orpheus._") The earliest manuscripts of the Hebrew
Bible date only from the tenth century A.D., but there are very much
older manuscripts of the Greek and Latin translations in existence. At
the time of Jesus Christ, three divisions of the Old Testament were
recognized. These were, the Law, the Prophets, and the other Scriptures.
The first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and
Deuteronomy, are known as the Pentateuch, and are attributed to Moses
himself; although, as has been noted, they contain the account of his
death. This conception of the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch was
accepted by the Israelites as early as the fifth century B.C. and has
been maintained by the Synagogue since that time. Following the example
of the Hebrews, the Christian Churches accepted this version as to
origin, and the Roman Catholic Church still upholds this view. The
Jewish Synagogue and the various Christian Churches further hold that
the Old Testament is a collection of works inspired or dictated by God.
Even as late as 1861, the famous Dean Burgon, in a sermon preached at
Oxford University, declared, "The Bible is none other than the voice of
Him that sitteth upon the throne. Every book of it, every chapter of it,
every verse of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is the
direct utterance of the Most High. The Bible is none other than the Word
of God, not some part of it more, some part of it less, but all alike
the utterance of Him who sitteth upon the throne, faultless, unerring,
supreme." The Martian compared this statement with the words of the
scholar Loisy, "If God himself wrote the Bible, we must believe Him to
be either ignorant or untruthful."
As he delves further into the intricacies of the construction of the
Bible, our visitor perceives that the Old Testament gradually evolved
from the tenth century to the second century B.C., and in its present
form is mainly a fifth century compilation, so distorting the facts
that it has taken scholars one hundred and fifty years to get them
straight. "It may rightly be said that there is not a single book in the
Bible which is original in the sense of having been written by one man,
for all the books are made up of older documents or pre-existing sources
which were combined with later materials, undergoing, in this way,
several revisions and editions at the hands of different scribes or
compilers. Deep traces have therefore been left upon the text of the
Bible by these several stages of expansions, additions, modifications,
revisions, and incorporations--they appear to the scholar of biblical
literature much like the striations grooved in the rocks by large
glaciers to the student of Geology." (_Trattner, "Unravelling the Book
of Books._")
The Martian ascertains that to most thinking men it has become very
obvious that the Bible is the work of man, and not the inspiration of a
god; that an increasing number of liberal theologians are discarding the
theory of the divine inspiration of the Bible. He likewise clearly
perceives that there are as yet many men that have given this matter but
little thought; with the Divine inspiration looming up as a corner stone
in the Hebrew faith he realizes that it behooves him to carry his
investigations further.
The Christians, accepting the Old Testament as a book dictated by God,
had fixed the age of the earth as 4004 B.C. The harm done by the
Christian ecclesiastics in attempting to force science to conform to the
ridiculous concept of the construction of the universe as contained in
the Bible, and as interpreted by the Church, the Martian considers in a
further chapter. Scientists incline to the view that the earth has
existed as a separate planet for something like two thousand million
years (2,000,000,000). The rocks give a history of 16,000,000,000. Just
as in the study of the origin of primitive beliefs, one finds that man
made his gods and invented all that they are reported to have said, so a
study of the Old Testament reveals that the ancient Hebrew invented his
God, and manufactured the vast mass of myth and fable that are recorded
as the words and deeds of God. Throughout the ages, the words of these
ancient Hebrews have been taken as the words of a god.
"Everything goes to show that the Hebrew literature was produced like
other literatures. Hebrews were not the first to tell tales. When they
did come to write 'for our learning' they borrowed from other people.
The only reason why anything more than a literary attention is paid to
these old Jewish writings is that Jesus was a Jew. When Christianity was
founded--a difficult date to fix--there was no such thing as a Bible.
The old Brahmans and Buddhists had Holy Scriptures; the Egyptians had a
Book of the Dead, and the Sayings of Khuenaten; the Persians had the
Zend-Avesta; the Chinese had sacred books. They were all as sacred as
the Jewish books. Priests made them sacred. Priests generally rewrote
and edited them, even if they had not originally imagined them. There is
nothing to guide the man of common sense save knowledge and reason.
Every priest swears his religion and his scriptures are true. But they
cannot all be true. If the first are true, then the Jews are past
further consideration, for they were not the first in the field with
sacred writings.... Holy scriptures are merely Jewish classics. We have
had to accept these old writings of the Hebrews as holy and inspired
because the priests said so, and for no other reason whatsoever. There
is no other reason." Assuming the existence of a deity, a man exercising
his common sense would be compelled to deny that the Old Testament is
inspired of God, because it abounds in stupidities and errors such as
no god could inspire. "But because the Jews accumulated these writings,
the subsequent adopters of Christianity, realizing that Jesus was a Jew,
and had been a professing Jew, promptly annexed these tales of fancy and
of fear, of muddled, sensual, silly things and said they must be
accepted with the teachings of Jesus. And in the course of time, people
had to believe these old Jewish writings were the Word of God." (_W. H.
Williamson, "Thinker or Believer_.")
The Hebrews had as one of their gods, Yahveh, whom they endowed with
their qualities; qualities inherent in a primitive people: jealousy and
might, trickery and fickleness. They evolved a worship that contained in
a modified form many of the ceremonials that they witnessed when they
came into contact with the Babylonians and Phoenicians. Their Bible
they maintained to be a collection of books which appeared at intervals,
with divine inspiration, during a thousand years of Jewish history.
Similarly, they insisted that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, that Judges,
Kings, and Chronicles go back to the times they describe, that the
prophecies were added from the ninth century onward, and so on.
The Martian found that not a single book of the Old Testament is older
than the ninth century B.C. and that in the fifth century B.C. all the
older books and fragments were combined together into the Old Testament
as we have it, and were drastically altered so as to yield a version of
early Jewish history which is not true. The manipulation of the Hebrew
writings by the Jewish priests had for its object to represent the
Jewish priesthood, and its rights and customs, as having been
established in the days of Moses. Deuteronomy and Leviticus have been
classed as priestly forgeries. Nearly every occurrence, from the
creation of the world to the death of Moses, is related twice and, in
some cases, three times; and as the Pentateuch is supposed to have been
written by Moses one must assume that Moses had double and triple
vision.
Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah are impudent forgeries of the fourth
century, giving a totally false version of the events. The Martian finds
that the terms used for these fabrications are "redaction" or
"recension," but, in his understanding, he finds the word most
descriptive of the process to be forgery. "The main point is that
practically all the experts assure you that in scores of material points
the Old Testament history has been discredited, and has only been
confirmed in a few unimportant incidental statements; and that the books
are a tissue of inventions, expansions, conflations, or recensions
dating centuries after the event."
The Martian in his analysis becomes aware of instances related in the
Old Testament that on his planet would have to be termed
forgeries,--deliberate falsifications or fabrications of documents or of
the signature to them. "Now the far greater part of the more learned
clerical authorities on the Bible say that many books of the Old
Testament pretend to be written by men who did not write them; that many
books were deliberately written as history when the writers knew that
they were not history; and that the Old Testament as a whole, as we have
it, is a deliberate attempt to convey an historical belief which the
writers knew to be false. But these learned authorities do not like the
word forgery. It is crude." (_Joseph McCabe, "The Forgery of The Old
Testament."_) They veil the meaning of this word in the elegance, the
subtlety, the resources, of diplomatic language. They talk of certain
books in terms of "their legendary character," "their conformity to a
scheme," and "their didactic purpose." To the Martian these are but an
extremely polite description of what he would call a forgery.
A theologian in speaking of David states that "Keen criticism is
necessary to arrive at the kernel of fact," and, "the imaginative
element in the story of David is but the vesture which half conceals,
half discloses certain facts treasured in popular tradition." The
Martian thinks this is polite language, but the word forgery is much
more concise and to the point, and he finds an excellent example of this
described by Joseph McCabe in "The Forgery of the Old Testament." He
states, "Some time ago we recovered tablets of the great Persian king,
Cyrus, and Professor Sayre gives us a translation of them, and he
compares them, as you may, with the words of Daniel, 'In that night was
Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans, slain, and Darius the Median took
the kingdom.' The tablets of Cyrus describe the taking of Babylon, and
are beyond the slightest suspicion. The Persians had adopted the
Babylonian custom of writing on clay, then baking the brick or tablet,
and such documents last forever. And these and other authentic and
contemporary documents of the age which 'Daniel' describes show:
1. That Belshazzar was not the king of Babylon.
2. That the name of the last king was Nabonidos.
3. That the city was taken peacefully, by guile, not by bloodshed.
4. That it was Cyrus, not Darius the Median, who took it.
5. That Darius, who is said (XI, 1) by Daniel to have been the son
of "Ahasuerus" (Xerxes), was really his father.
6. That all the Babylonian names in Daniel are absurdly misspelt
and quite strange to the writer.
7. That the writer described the Chaldeans in a way that no writer
could have done before the time of Alexander the Great.
It is now beyond question that the man who wrote Daniel, and pretended
to be alive in 539 B.C. (when Babylon fell), did not live until three or
four centuries later. The book is a tissue of errors, as we find by
authentic documents and by reading the real Babylonian names on the
tablets."
The Martian discovers glaring instances of forgery in the book of Isaiah
and the Psalms of David, which, while they pretend to have been written
by Isaiah and David, are really compilations by various writers.
Similarly, he finds that the Book of Esther has been pronounced by
scholars as a clumsy forgery of the second century, and that the story
of the slaying of Goliath by David is not consistent with the
unlegendary tradition that the slayer of Goliath was Elhanan, and the
period of this adventure not in Saul's but in David's reign. The Book of
Psalms, although attributed to King David, was not written by King
David; and the Book of Proverbs, although attributed to Solomon, was not
written by King Solomon.
The Book of Genesis relates the mythical traditions of the Hebrews from
the creation of the world to the death of Joseph. "A French physician of
the eighteenth century, Astruc, was the first scholar to point out that
the two principal designations of God in Genesis, Elohim and Jahveh, are
not used arbitrarily. If we place side by side the passages in which God
is called Elohim, and those in which he is called by the other name, we
get two perfectly distinct narratives, which the author of the
Pentateuch, as we possess it, has juxtaposed rather than fused. This one
discovery suffices to discredit the attribution of these books to
Moses, who could not have been an unintelligent compiler, and also
discredits the theory of the divine inspiration of the Bible text. A
comparison of the two narratives shows that all which relates to the
creation of Eve, the Garden of Eden, and Adam's transgression, exists
only in the Jehovist text. Thus it is evident that two versions of the
Creation are given in Genesis. But there are traces in the Old Testament
of a third legend, akin to that of the Babylonians, in which Marduk
creates the world by virtue of a victory over the waters of chaos
(Tiamat). This conception of a conflict between the creator and hostile
forces was contrary to the monotheistic thesis, and has disappeared from
our two versions of Genesis; but the suppression sufficiently proves
that it was very ancient and had long been accepted."
The Martian finds that theologians have attempted to crawl out of
desperate situations in their interpretation of the Old Testament by a
method of reading into a passage or extracting out of it ideas
altogether foreign to its original intent. This method they call
"Allegory." By means of this process they have been able to extract any
meaning which suits their purposes, and by this method of juggling could
prove anything. A classic example is that licentious piece of literature
called the "Song of Solomon," in which it is claimed that a woman's
breasts, thighs, and belly are the symbols of the union of Jahveh and
the Synagogue.
Continuing his researches, the Martian notices a number of passages in
the Old Testament that lead him to the conclusion that the Hebrews were
originally polytheists. The name Elohim, he finds, is plural (singular,
Eloah), meaning the gods. Again, in another passage of Genesis, God is
described as saying, "Let us make man in our image (I, 26)," and further
on, "The man is become as one of us." It becomes evident to him that
the Hebrews, like their neighbors, worshiped "baalim" or the gods of the
heathens. The "teraphim," the etymology of which is unknown, were little
portable idols which seem to have been the Lares of the ancient Hebrews.
David owned some (I Samuel XIX, 13-16), and the prophet Hosea, in the
eighth century before Christ, seems still to have considered the
"teraphim" as indispensable in worship (Hos. III, 4). These evidences of
polytheism and fetichism in the people of Israel destroy, in the mind of
the Martian, the claim of these people to have been faithful from their
earliest origin to a spiritual monotheism. Rather does he find that they
took the religions of other peoples with whom they came in contact.
The Old Testament contains numerous instances of the practice of magic.
Moses and Aaron were magicians who rivalled Pharaoh's magicians (Ex.
VII, 11-20); and Balaam was a magician who pronounced incantations
against Israel and afterwards passed over to the service of Jehovah.
Jacob resorted to a kind of sympathetic magic to procure the birth of a
speckled sheep (Gen. XXX, 39). "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,"
is written in Exodus XXII, 18, and this phrase offered an affirmation of
the reality of witchcraft during the period of the Witchcraft Delusion.
The Martian notes that the sentence, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to
live," has caused more suffering, torture, and death than probably any
other sentence ever framed. His mind revolts at the stupidity and the
slavish adherence to so-called authority of the human mind, which is
manifested in this example of what occurred in the period of the
Witchcraft Delusion, when the words of an ignorant and barbaric Hebrew
were taken by Christian followers to be the words of a god. And yet our
Martian guest recognizes that in this day all men are aware of the
fallacy of this utterance in a book which is still claimed to be
infallible.
The Martian then considers the many ancient Hebrew rites and religious
taboos that have come down through the ages, and are still practiced in
a modified form by the modern Hebrew. Thus, in the Old Testament, there
are numerous instances recorded of the practices of slaughtering of
innocent animals who were offered as peace offerings to Yahveh. As time
passed, the practice of slaughtering and then burning the sacrificial
animal gave way to the practice of only giving the blood of the animal
as an offering. This custom has come down to the present day in the
modern worship of Jehovah; the blood of animals is still forbidden to
the modern Hebrew. Therefore, the orthodox Jew has the neck of the
chicken slit by a "Shochet" who allows the blood to drip to the
ground--a modern blood offering to the Gods. The explanations given by
the rabbis of our day are spurious. Similarly, the orthodox Jew of our
time still persists in salting the meat before cooking, a process which
is intended to remove the blood, which is the portion of the Gods.
The reason that the pious Jew abstains from pork leads to the
consideration of Totemism as found in the Old Testament. Totemism is a
kind of worship rendered to animals and vegetables considered as allied
and related to man. The worship of animals and plants is found as a
survival in all ancient societies and is the origin of the belief in the
transmigration of souls. Totemism seems to have been as widespread as
the animism from which it is derived, and has been closely intertwined
in the development of religious beliefs. Totemism in a modified form is
found in the Old Testament where animals speak on occasion, as the
serpent in Genesis, or Balaam's ass. In the most remote periods it is
probable that every clan had at least one totem animal which might no
more be killed or eaten than the human individuals of the clan. The
totem was protected by taboo. The totem was sacred and in this capacity
it was looked upon as a source of strength and holiness, and to live
beside it and under its protection was considered as a righteous custom.
In certain communities the idea that it was necessary to abstain from
eating certain totems survived the progress of material civilization.
The cow is taboo to the Hindus, the pig is taboo to the Mohammedans and
to the Jews. The pious Jew abstains from pork because his remote
ancestors, five or six thousand years before our era, had the wild boar
as their totem. This is the origin of this alimentary taboo; among the
ancient Hebrews it arose, and only comparatively recently has it been
suggested that the flesh of these taboo animals was unwholesome. In the
eighteenth century, philosophers propagated the erroneous notion that if
certain religious legislators had forbidden various aliments, it was for
hygienic motives. Even Renan believed that dread of trichinosis and
leprosy had caused the Hebrews to forbid the use of pork. To show the
irrational nature of this explanation, it will be enough to point out
that in the whole of the Bible there is not a single instance of an
epidemic or a malady attributed to the eating of unclean meats; the idea
of hygiene awoke very late in the Greek world. To the Biblical writers,
as to contemporary savages, illness is supernatural; it is an effect of
the wrath of spirits.
Primitive man ascribed all diseases either to the wrath of God, or the
malice of an evil being. The curing of disease by the casting out of
devils and by prayers were the means of relief from sickness recognized
and commanded by the Old Testament. The hygienic explanation of an
alimentary prohibition as still insisted upon by the rabbis is entirely
erroneous and marks the expounder of such an explanation as one who is
entirely ignorant of the evolution of religious beliefs. The entire
matter is well stated in one sentence by Reinach, "Nothing can be more
absurd, generally speaking, than to explain the religious laws and
practices of the remote past by considerations based on modern science."
The Martian is able to trace some curious customs that were exhibited by
the ancient Hebrews as well as most other ancient peoples, and which
have persisted to this day. The customs remain the same, the meanings
have become lost in the blind adherence to custom. It is known that the
old Jewish mourning customs originated with the desire for protection
from the liberated spirit of the deceased. The loud cries uttered by the
mourners were thought to frighten away the spirits. The change of dress,
the covering of the head with ashes, and the shaving of the hair of the
mourners were done with the purpose of making themselves unrecognizable
to the spirits. Hence, the custom still prevails of wearing the mourning
veil. The covering of mirrors when death occurs in the household may
well be an attempt to prevent the spirit from lingering in the vicinity.
Similarly, even today, the orthodox Jew, in case of grave illness in his
family, changes the given name of the sufferer. To confuse the evil
spirit causing the disease?
Further survivals of totemism as found in the Old Testament are
illustrated by the worship of the bull and the serpent. Portable gilded
images of bulls were consecrated and Hosea protested against the worship
of the bull in the kingdom of Israel (Hos. VIII, 5; X, 5). The famous
golden calf of the Israelites, which was the object of Moses' anger, was
a totemic idol. The worship of the serpent was practiced by Moses
himself (Num. XXI, 9). A brazen serpent was worshiped in the temple of
Jerusalem, and was only destroyed by Hezekiah about 700 B.C. (2 Kings
XVIII, 4).
The ancient Hebrews, as well as their neighbors, were phallic
worshipers. To primitive people it is but a natural phase to have the
phallus become the exponent of creative power, and as such to be
worshiped. To these primitive minds there was nothing immoral in genuine
phallic worship. Signs of phallicism among the ancient Hebrews can be
clearly pointed out; the serpent was a phallic symbol. "That the serpent
was the phallus is proved by the Bible itself. The Hebrew word used for
serpent is 'Nachash,' which is everywhere else translated in the Bible
in a phallic sense, as in Ezekiel XVI, 36, where it is rendered
'filthiness' in the sense of exposure, like the 'having thy Boseth
naked' of Micah." (_J. B. Hannay, "Christianity, the Sources of its
Teaching and Symbolism."_) The ark itself was a feminine symbol, and
phallicism would explain why Moses made an ark and put in it a rod and
two stones. "The Eduth, the Shechina, the Tsur, and the Yahveh were
identical; simply different names for the same thing, the phallus. They
occupied the female ark with which they formed the double sexed life
symbol. The Hebrew religion had thus a purely phallic basis, as was to
be expected from a ritual and symbolism derived from two extremely
phallic nations, Babylon and Egypt." (_J. B. Hannay, Ibid._) An
intelligent reading of Exodus XXXIV, 13, and 1 Kings XIV, 23 and 24,
will prove the above contention.
Once more our Martian guest is besieged by the Hebrew Zealot to examine
the divine revelation of his religion. This time the Martian notes, "I,
Yahveh, thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers
upon the children unto the third and fourth generations" (Deut.), which
seems to him to savor of a cruel and monstrous being. He cannot perceive
of a just being favoring slavery (Ex. XI), or of a merciful father
ordering human sacrifice (Ex. XIII), (Lev. XXVII, 29), (Num. XIII, 3).
He is dumbfounded to find references to cannibalism (Lev. XXVI,
14-16-28; Deut. XXVIII, 53-58; Jer. XIX, 9; Ezek. V, 10; Kings VI,
26-29-33). A Benevolent Being, he reasons, would not sanction war and
destruction of the captured enemy, yet there are instances of this
(Deut. XXI, 10-14; Deut. XX, 13-14; Deut. VII, 1-2-16). The reading of
Numbers V, 11-29, and Deuteronomy XXII nauseated him. The Hebrew Zealot,
observing the utter disgust with which the reader was regarding his
revelation, is obliged to explain to the bewildered barbarian unbeliever
that the Old Testament is the foundation for all of our morals and that
without it we would have developed into a very shocking and immoral
race.
Since the visitor wishes to remain courteous he proceeds, but with a
great deal of hesitation, to further examine the revelation of God. At
this point he is assured that this work is read in most schools and
taught to small children. However, our guest is again disillusioned; for
no sooner does he arrive at Genesis, XII, 11-20, than he finds that
Abraham, good Abraham, the pure, the father of all Hebrews, makes of the
sacred relationship of marriage a means of personal gain and safety by
betraying his own wife. Now it is the Martian's turn to inquire of the
Hebrew whether the latter had ever read this story to his own daughter?
Or, the story of Abraham's affair with Hagar, his handmaiden? Was the
Hebrew's young daughter aware that Isaac, son of Abraham, was as ready
and willing to prostitute his wife for protection for himself as was his
father Abraham?
The Martian is puzzled by the word "sporting" in Genesis, XXVI, 8-11,
and is informed of its meaning. A few moments after reading Genesis XIX,
1-7, he informs his would-be converter that if Lot had lived in Mars and
had offered his daughters to appease the mob, the account of that
incident would never have found its way into any work on morals.
Moreover, he failed utterly to see how the account of Lot's daughters
getting him into a drunken state, followed by a statement such as, "Thus
were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father," could ever
have any moral value.
The story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel does not appeal to this infidel
Martian, since he still believes that integrity and faithfulness are
virtues. Yet, in his endeavor to respect the courtesy due to his host,
he reaches for pencil and pad, and notes the various moral lessons he
had derived thus far from the Old Testament. He wrote lust, incest,
infidelity, and prostitution; arriving at the story of Dinah, Genesis
XXXIV, 1-2, he wrote that in addition to those vices already listed,
rape should be given a prominent place. The stories of Joseph and
Potiphar's wife, Judah and Tamar, King David and his wives, the rape of
Tamar by her brother Ammon, did not impress the Martian as stories for
the delectation of children, since he was crude enough to hold that
anything which would shock the mind of a child, could not have any moral
value and would thus be automatically excluded from any religion. He,
therefore, returned the volume to the Hebrew with the remark that as an
adult he found the stories of De Maupassant and Balzac more interesting,
even though they belonged to the same genre.
Our guest now repaired to one of our golf courses where, during the
interval of a few hours, the fresh air, the sunshine, and exercise
dispelled the mental nausea which the reading of the Old Testament had
occasioned in him. Returning to his quarters, he is approached by one of
the Christian Brethren and the New Testament is placed in his hands with
these remarks, "The Christian recognizes that in the Old Testament the
Jews have given to the Christian world its greatest heritage." The fact
that in exchange for this priceless heritage, the Christians have given
to the Jews a series of persecutions unequaled in the annals of human
warfare is explained by the quality of the Brotherhood of Man that
naturally manifests itself after a complete conversion to the Bible's
precepts. The Old Testament contains the first revelations of God; the
New Testament, the last revelations. Our Christian Brother "forgets" to
remind the visitor that the difference of opinion regarding these two
Testaments of God has caused more sorrow, bloodshed, harm, devilment,
misery, and devastation than any other single item in the life and
history of the human race.
The Martian is hard pressed to reconcile the fact that Mohammedanism six
hundred years after the appearance of Christianity triumphed over
Christianity in a great portion of the earth's surface; yet he is
informed that Christianity is _the_ religion of God, that Allah made the
Mohammedans, Jehovah the Jews, the Trinity the Christians, and the rest
of the believers were illegitimate children of the above gods, was the
only conclusion he could reach. In a few moments the myth of Christ
begins to unfold itself before his eyes in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Apocalypse. He finds,
"The so-called Messianic texts which are supposed to prefigure Jesus in
the Old Testament have all been either misunderstood or deliberately
misinterpreted. The most celebrated is that in Isaiah VII, 14, which
predicts that a virgin shall bear a son, Emmanuel, but the word, Al-mah,
which the Septuagint rendered "virgin" means in Hebrew a young woman,
and this passage merely deals with the approaching birth of a son to the
king or the prophet himself. This error of the Septuagint is one of the
sources of the legend relating to the virginal birth of Jesus. As early
as the second century A.D. the Jews perceived it and pointed it out to
the Greeks, but the Church knowingly persisted in the false reading, and
for over fifteen centuries she has clung to her error."
His attentive reading convinces him that not one of the Gospels is the
work of an eyewitness to the scenes recorded; a little side
investigation reveals that there were a great many writings called
Gospels, from which the Church finally adopted four, guaranteeing their
inspiration and absolute veracity, no doubt because they were in favor
in four very influential churches, Matthew at Jerusalem, Mark at Rome or
at Alexandria, Luke at Antioch, and John at Ephesus. Moreover, what the
Gospels tell him, he perceives is what different Christian communities
believed concerning Jesus between the years 70 and 100 A.D. In Matthew
XXVI, 39, Mark XIV, 35, and Luke XXII, 42, there are words such as those
Jesus is supposed to have uttered during the slumber of these very same
Apostles. This occurrence enlightens him as to what St. Augustine meant
when he wrote, "I should not believe in the Gospel if I had not the
authority of the Church for so doing." If the documents are stuffed with
the authority of the Church, these Gospels cannot be utilized for a
history of the real life of Jesus.
A study of the Epistles of St. Paul reveals that St. Paul taught that
sin and death came into the world by Adam's fall. In spite of a diligent
search the Martian found no mention of this in the words ascribed to
Jesus. From St. Paul's utterances he learns that Christ came to redeem
mankind by his voluntary oblation of himself. He was the Son of God!
Paul, not knowing that in the future a special form of conception would
be superimposed on Jesus, states that he was of human birth. The Martian
determined to ascertain what effect the teachings of St. Paul have had
on Christianity. He learns that, "Ever since St. Paul, the ruling idea
of Christianity has been that of the redemption of man, guilty of a
prehistoric fault, by the voluntary sacrifice of a superman. This
doctrine is founded upon that of expiation; a guilty person must suffer
to atone for his fault; and that of the substitution of victims, the
efficacious suffering of an innocent person for a guilty one. Both are
at once pagan and Jewish ideas; they belong to the old fundamental
errors of humanity. Yet, Plato knew that the punishment inflicted on a
guilty person is not, nor should it be, a vengeance; it is a painful
remedy imposed on him for his own benefit and that of society. At about
the same period Athenian law laid down the principle that punishment
should be as personal as the fault, thus St. Paul founded Christian
Theology on two archaic ideas which had already been condemned by
enlightened Athenians of the fourth century before our era, _ideas which
no one would dream of upholding in these days, though the structure
built upon them still subsists_."
In chapter V of the first Epistle of St. John, these words strike the
visitor, "There are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, and
the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are One." If these two
verses are authentic, they would be an affirmation of the doctrine of
the Trinity, dating from the first century, at a time when the Gospels,
the Acts, and St. Paul ignore it. It was first pointed out in 1806 that
these verses were an interpolation, for they do not appear in the best
manuscripts, notably all the Greek manuscripts down to the fifteenth
century. The Roman Church refused to bow to evidence. The Congregation
of the Index, on January 13, 1897, with the approbation of Leo XIII,
forbade any question as to the authenticity of the text relating to the
"three heavenly witnesses." It appeared strange to the Martian that a
god should need the lies of his disciples to be incorporated in a divine
revelation. But his confusion was even greater when he read, "We worship
one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the
Persons nor dividing the substance--and yet, they are not three
Eternals, but One Eternal, not three Almighties, but One Almighty. So,
the Father is God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, and yet they are
not three Gods, but One God.... The Father is made of none, neither
created nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor
created, but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son,
neither made nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.... And in this
Trinity, none is afore or after the other; none is greater or less than
another; but the whole three Persons are coeternal together and
coequal."
He thought this would make a great puzzle, truly an insoluble conundrum,
to take back to bewilder his Martian friends. However, he was able to
comprehend the remarks of Vigilantius, "who returned from a journey in
Italy and the Holy Land disgusted with official Christianity. He
protested vehemently against the idolatrous worship of images, the
legacy of Paganism to the Church, a practice directly opposed to that
of the Mosaic law which Jesus came, not to destroy, but to fulfill. It
was idle to reply that these images were the Scriptures of the
illiterate, that they were not the object of, but the stimulus to,
worship. Experience showed that the majority of the faithful confounded
(as indeed they still do) the sign with the thing signified." (_Salomon
Reinach, "Orpheus."_)
The result of the critical examination of the New Testament by the
Martian is that just as most of the Old Testament books are not only
anonymous but highly composite productions, that as certain writings
traditionally ascribed to Moses, David, Solomon, Daniel, and others are
utterly lacking in the necessary evidences in support of authorship, but
bear unmistakable evidence of having gone through a long compilatory
process; so does each gospel, despite its seeming unity, give evidence
of being a composite literary product. Scholars have agreed that Mark
first set forth the doings of Jesus and "it was out of Mark that both
Matthew and Luke took the framework of their own writings, cleverly
fitting into its arrangement their own distinctive material and coloring
the whole by their own individual treatment." (_Trattner, "Unravelling
the Book of Books."_) It is estimated that Mark was written shortly
before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D. "This means that a
chasm of 30 or 40 years separates Mark's written document from the
ministry of Jesus--a long enough time to create a plastic body of oral
teachings and a highly colored tradition embellished with fanciful
stories."
Luke was a Greek physician living somewhere on the shores of the AEgean
Sea. He had been a friend of Paul, just as Mark had been with Peter.
Luke had no personal acquaintance with Jesus and had to get his
information from what others said, or from what the friends of
"eye-witnesses" had seen.
The Gospel of "Matthew" is an anonymous composition which, on analysis,
has been found to incorporate nearly fifty per cent of what is found in
Mark. It is now believed by many scholars to have been written between
the years 75 and 80 A.D. at Antioch not, of course, by the Apostle
Matthew, but by some unknown editor.
The Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, is vastly different in style,
arrangement, and in the description of the words, actions, and general
spiritual character of Jesus. Many scholars believe that it was written
in the city of Ephesus, somewhere around the year 100 A.D. "Church
tradition ascribed it to the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee, one of
the fishermen whom Jesus called to be a disciple. Years ago this view
was easily entertained, but there now exists too much refractory
evidence against assigning this Greek Gospel to an Aramaic-speaking
Galilean. That an untutored fisherman could have written so elaborate
and so highly philosophical an account of Jesus has always presented a
thorny problem. And so to most scholars John's authorship of the Fourth
Gospel is unthinkable."
Not one of the Gospels is the work of an eyewitness, and the four
Gospels do not complete each other; they contradict each other; and when
they do not contradict, they repeat each other. The Christ of John is a
totally different person from the Christ of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.
Loisy, in his "_Quelques Lettres_," states, "If there is one thing above
others that is obvious, but as to which the most powerful of theological
interests have caused a deliberate or unconscious blindness, it is the
profound, the irreducible incompatibility of the Synoptical Gospels, and
the Fourth Gospel. If Jesus spoke and acted as he is said to have
spoken and acted in the first three Gospels, he did not speak and act as
he is reported to have done in the fourth."
The Martian is forced to the conclusion that the New Testament, with its
version of the Virgin Birth, Elizabeth, the cousin of Mary, Zacharias
and the Angel Gabriel, Jesus and the Sinner, are on par with the
eroticism of the Old Testament. The interpolations, the myth, and fable
also compare with the first revelation, and, in his opinion, he prefers
Andersen's Fairy Tales, or AEsop's Fables.
Meanwhile, a Protestant Brother mentions the name of Luther, and the
conclusions he draws are that the exciting cause of the Reformation was
an extravagant sale of indulgences conceded to the German Dominicans.
The Augustinians grew jealous of the Dominicans, and an Augustinian
Monk, Martin Luther, affixed to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral
ninety-five articles against the abuse of indulgences. This started the
fray in Germany with Luther at the head of this heresy. The gravest
difference of opinion had to do with the Communion. "Luther retained
one-half of the mystery, and rejected the other half. He confesses that
the body of Jesus Christ is in the consecrated element, but it is, he
says, as fire is in the red-hot iron. The fire and the iron subsist
together. This is what they called impanation, invination,
consubstantiation. Thus, while those they called Papists ate God without
bread, the Lutherans ate God and bread; soon afterwards came the
Calvinists, who ate bread and did not eat God." In short, Luther was in
harmony with the Roman Church in nothing but the doctrines of the
Trinity, Baptism, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection. Luther thought
it was time to abolish private mass. He pretended the devil had appeared
to him and reproached him for saying mass and consecrating the
elements. The devil had proved to him, he said, that it was idolatry.
Luther declared that the devil was right and must be believed. The mass
was abolished in Wittenberg, and soon afterwards throughout Saxony; the
images were thrown down, monks and nuns left their cloisters, and, a few
years later, Luther married a nun called Catharine von Bora. This tale
did not greatly impress our guest.
A Catholic Brother, not to be outdone, extols the glories of his
Universal Church, and the Martian again sets out to investigate. This
time he finds:
The quotations in the New Testament which the Catholic creed interprets
as giving divine authority to its representatives on earth is a late
interpolation; the Trinity as stated above is a paradox which no
rational being can understand, and its dogmas and idolatry are
consistent with a civilization of 4000 years ago.
A study of the lives of its popes put to shame the statement that they
could possibly be the earthly representatives of a Benevolent Being. "In
the ninth and tenth centuries the papacy passed through a period of
shameful disorder. The Rome of John X was a cloaca in which the Popes
set the example of the worst misconduct." (For a good short account of
the lives of the popes, see Draper's, "History of the Intellectual
Development of Europe.")
During the complete control by the Church of civilization in Europe, it
has retarded the progress of humanity for at least 2000 years, and its
precepts and fundamental principles are today detrimental to the advance
of mankind. It has to its credit a long series of judicial murders for
differences of opinion. The Crusades, instigated by the popes and
seconded by the monks, cost millions of lives and exhausted the
resources of Christian Europe; they aggravated fanaticism, exaggerated
the worship of saints and relics to the point of mania, and encouraged
the abuse of and traffic in indulgences. There had never been a single
opinion persecuted by the Church in the Middle Ages the adoption of
which would not have brought about a diminution of her revenues; the
Church has always primarily considered her finances. The papacy was
responsible for the Inquisition, and it actively encouraged and excited
its ferocity. It gave birth to the Witchcraft Mania. The first Grand
Inquisitor, Torquemada, received the congratulations of the Pope. It
diabolically applauded the St. Bartholomew Massacre, and instigated the
numerous religious wars that tore Europe asunder, and was the cause of
the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and incalculable suffering.
With such savage alacrity did it carry out its object of protecting the
interests of religion that between 1481 and 1808 it had punished three
hundred and forty thousand persons, and of these, nearly 32,000 had been
burnt.
"It is perfectly certain that the Catholic Church has taught, and still
teaches that intellectual liberty is dangerous, that it should be
forbidden. It was driven to take this position because it had taken
another. It taught, and still teaches, that a certain belief is
necessary to salvation. It has always known that investigation and
inquiry led, or might lead, to doubt; that doubt leads, or may lead, to
heresy, and that heresy leads to Hell. In other words, the Catholic
Church has something more important than this world, more important than
the well-being of man here. It regards this life as an opportunity for
joining that Church, for accepting that creed, and for the saving of
your soul. If the history of the world proves anything, if proves that
the Catholic Church was for many centuries the most merciless
institution that ever existed among men. We, too, know that the
Catholic Church was, during all the years of its power, the enemy of
every science. It preferred magic to medicine, relics to remedies,
priests to physicians. It hated geologists, persecuted the chemists, and
imprisoned the naturalists, and opposed every discovery of science
calculated to improve the condition of mankind. There is no crime that
the Catholic Church did not commit, no cruelty that it did not reward,
and no virtue that it did not persecute. It was the greatest and most
powerful enemy of human rights. In one hand, it carried an alms dish,
and in the other, a dagger. It argued with the sword, persecuted with
poison, and convicted with faggot." R. G. Ingersoll, "_Rome or Reason_."
"From the time of Newton to our own day, the divergence of science from
the dogmas of the Church has steadily increased. The Church declared
that the earth is the central and most important body in the Universe,
that the sun and moon and stars are tributary to it. On these points she
was worsted by astronomy. She affirmed that a universal deluge had
covered the earth; that the only surviving animals were such as had been
saved in the Ark. In this, her error was established by geology. She
taught that there was a first man who, some 6000 or 8000 years ago, was
suddenly created or called into existence in a condition of physical and
moral perfection, and from that condition he fell. But anthropology has
shown that human beings existed far back in geological time, and in a
savage state but little better than that of the brute.... Convicted of
so many errors, the papacy makes no attempt at explanation. It ignores
the whole matter. Nay, more, relying on the efficacy of audacity,
although confronted by these facts, it lays claim to infallibility."
The persecutions of Bruno, Galileo, and Copernicus, together with the
facts hitherto stated, did not impress the Martian with the
"infallibility" of the Church. The only great spiritual power that could
have interposed to prevent the outbreak of the World War was the papacy.
Pope Pius X had his Nuncio admonish the Austrian emperor, but he failed
even to get an audition from that old imbecile. The next Pope, Benedict
XV, was under the influence of a majority of pro-German cardinals. He
strove to remain neutral. He attempted to solace the Belgians with
words, but he did not reprove the murderous invaders. He protested
against the new and devilish methods of warfare but he did not condemn,
he did not excommunicate those that used them. Had the papacy lost its
much-used power of commanding kings and nations, and had it lost its
greatest threat, a threat which hitherto could have thrown the masses of
its adherents into a panic, the threat of excommunication? No, the
papacy still blessed the banners of the armies, just as it did during
the middle ages, and sent its adherents out to slaughter; but first took
great care that the minds of the devout be completely drugged with the
poison of its creed. A creed that told its followers that do what you
might, no matter how dastardly that act might be, so long as you repent
and confess your sins, life everlasting will be the reward. What is the
value of a church that has claimed the moral leadership of the world
when such things can happen?
Now that the Martian has become acquainted with the three major
religions which dominate the world, Judaism, Christianity, and
Mohammedanism, and has been amazed and shocked at the significance of
their teachings in the history of civilization, his curiosity is further
aroused, and he decides to obtain some information of the respective
personalities responsible for the amassing of devotees to these creeds,
all "infallible," and all detrimental to progress. This time his
interest leads him to ancient and contemporary sources, of a literal
rather than verbal nature; sources dealing with the three most
influential prophets in the history of mankind, Jesus, Moses, and
Mohammed.