I ventured to express to a third infidel friend my dissatisfaction
with it. "Not only," said I, "is such a perpetual and felicitous
genius for gross blundering, such absolute craziness of credulity,
in strange contrast with the intellectual and moral elevation which
the New Testament writers everywhere evince, and especially in the
conception of that Ideal of Excellence which even those who reject
all that is supernatural in Christianity acknowledge to be so
sublime a masterpiece,--in whose discourses the most admirable ethics
are illustrated, and in whose life they are still more divinely
dramatized,--not only is such ludicrous madness of fanaticism at
variance with the tone of sobriety and simplicity everywhere
traceable; but,--what is more,--when I reflect on the number and
grossness of these supposed illusions, I find it hard to imagine how
to image how even individual could have been honestly stupid enough
to be beguiled by them, and utterly impossible to suppose that a
number of men should on many occasions have been simultaneously
thus befooled! But, what is much more, how can those who must
often have managed the phenomena which were thus misinterpreted
into miracles,--how, especially, can the great Physician himself,
who knew that he was only playing the doctor, be supposed honestly
to have allowed the simple-minded followers to persist in so strange
an error? Either he, or they, or both, must, one would think, have
been guilty of the grossest frauds. But the mere number and
simultaneity of such strange illusions, under such a variety of
circumstances, render it impossible to receive this hypothesis. I
cannot see, I said, that it is so very easy for a number of men to
have been continually mistaking 'flambeaux' for 'stars,' 'thunder'
for 'human speech,' and 'Roman soldiers' for 'angels.'"
My friend laughed outright. "I should think it is not easy, indeed!"
he exclaimed, "especially that last. For my part, I see clearly, on
this theory, that either the Apostles or their commentators were the
most crazy, addle-headed wretches in the world. Either Paulus of Tarsus
or Paulus of Heidelberg was certainly cracked: I believe the last. No,
my friend; depend upon it that the Gospels consist of a number of
fictions,--many of them very beautiful,--invented, I am inclined to
believe, for a very pious purpose, by highly imaginative minds."
This sat me thinking again. And, in time, my doubts, as usual, assumed
a determinate shape, and I hastened to another oracle of infidelity in
hopes of a solution.
If the New Testament be supposed a series of fictions, I argued,--the
work of highly imaginative minds for a pious purposes--there is perhaps
a slight moral anomaly in the case (but I do not insist upon it): I mean
that of supposing pious men writing fictions which they evidently wish to
impose on the world as simple history, and which they must have known
would, if received at all, be actually regarded as such; as, in fact,
they have been. I do not quite understand how pious men should thus
endeavor to cheat men into virtue, nor inculcate sanctity and truth
through the medium of deliberate fraud and falsehood. But let that pass;
perhaps one could forgive it. Other anomalies, far more inexplicable,
strike me. That Galilean Jews (such as the history of the time represents
them), with all their national and inveterate prejudices,--wedded not
more to the law of Moses than to their own corruptions of it, bigoted
and exclusive beyond all the nations that ever existed, eaten up with
the most beggarly superstitions,--should rise to the moral grandeur,
the nobility of sentiment, the catholicity of spirit, which characterize
the Gospel, and, above all, to such an ideal as Jesus Christ,--this is
a moral anomaly, which is to me incomprehensible: the improbability of
Christianity having its natural origin in such a source is properly
measured by the hatred of the Jews against it, both then and through
all time. I said I could as little understand the intellectual anomalies
of such a theory. Could men, among the most ignorant of a nation sunk
in that gross and puerile superstition of which the New Testament itself
presents a true picture, and which is reflected in the Jewish literature
of that age, and ever since,--a nation whose master minds then and ever
since (think of that!) have given us only such stuff as fills the Talmud,
--could such men, I said, have created such fictions as those of the New
Testament,--reached such elevated sentiments, or conveyed them in
perfectly original forms, embodied truth so sublime in a style so simple?
Throughout those writings is a peculiar tone which belongs to no other
compositions of man. While the individuality of the writers not lost,
there are still peculiarities which pervade the whole, and have, as I
think, justly been called a Scripture style. One of their most striking
characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform
freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment,
the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of
volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since.
Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have
invented those extraordinary fictions,--the miracles and the parables?
Could they, in spite of their gross ignorance, have so interwoven the
fictitious and the historical as to make the fiction let into the
history seem a natural part of it? Could they, above all, have conceived
the daring, but glorious, project of embodying and dramatizing the
ideal of the system they inculcated in the person of Christ? And yet
they have succeeded, though choosing to attempt the wonderful task in
a life full of unearthly incidents, which they have somehow wrought
into an exquisite harmony! But even if one such man in such an age
and nation could have been found equal to all this, could we, I argued,
believe that several (with undeniable individual varieties of manner)
were capable of working into the picture similarly unique, but
different materials, with similar success, and of reproducing the same
portrait, in varying posture and attitude, of the great Moral Idea?
Could we believe that, in achieving this task, not one, but several,
were intellectual magicians enough to solve that great problem of
producing compositions in a form independent of language,--of laying
on colors which do not fade by time; so that while Homer, Shakspeare,
Milton, suffer grievous wrong the moment their thoughts are transferred
into another tongue, these men should have written so that their
wonderful narrative naturally adapts itself to every dialect under
heaven?
These intellectual anomalies, I confessed,--if these had been all,--
staggered me. As Lord Bacon said that he would sooner believe "all the
fables of the Talmud, than that this universal frame was without a
mind," so I could sooner believe all those fables, than that minds
that can only produce Talmuds should have conceived such fictions as
the Gospel. I could as soon believe that some dull chronicler of the
Middle Ages composed Shakspeare's plays, or a ploughman had written
Paradise Lost; only that, to parallel the present case, we ought to
believe that four ploughmen wrote four Paradise Losts! Nay, I said,
I would as soon believe that most laughable theory of learned folly,
that the monks of the Middle Ages compiled all the classics! Nor could
it help me to say that it was Christians, not Jews, who compiled the
New Testament; for they must have been Jews before they were Christians:
and the twofold moral and intellectual problem comes back upon our
hands,--to imagine how the Jewish mind could have given birth to the
ideas of Christianity, or have embodied them in such a surpassing form.
And as to the intellectual part of the difficulty,--unhappily abundant
proof exists in Christian literature that the early Christians could as
little have manufactured such fictions as the Jews themselves! The
New Testament is not more different from the writings of Jews, or
superior to them, than it is different from the writings of the
Fathers, and superior to them. It stands alone, like the Peak of
Teneriffe. The Alps amidst the flats of Holland would not present a
greater contrast than the New Testament and the Fathers. And the further
we come down, the less capable morally, and nearly as incapable
intellectually, do the rapidly degenerating Christians appear, of
producing such a fiction as the New Testament; so that, if it be asked
whether it was not possible that some Christians of after times might
have forged these books, one must say with Paley, that they could not.
And by the by, gentlemen, said I, (interrupting my narrative, and
addressing the present company,) I may remind some of you who are
great admirers of Professor Newman, that he admits (as indeed all
must, who have had an opportunity of comparing them) the infinite
inferiority of the Fathers, though he does not attempt to account,
as surely he ought, for so singular a circumstance. He says in his
Phases: "On the whole, this reading [of the Apostolical Fathers]
greatly exalted my sense of the unapproachable greatness of the New
Testament. The moral chasm between it and the very earliest Christian
writers seemed to me so vast, as only to be accounted for by the
doctrine ..... that the New Testament was dictated by the immediate
action of the Holy Spirit." (Phases, p. 25.)
But to resume the statement of my early difficulties. I felt that
the anomalies involved in the theory of the fictitious origin of the
New Testament were almost endless; I said that, however hard to
believe that any men, much less such men as Jews of that age, were
capable of such achievements as I had already specified, I must
believe much more still; for the men, with all their wisdom, were
fools enough to make their enterprise infinitely more hazardous,--by
intrusting the execution of it to a league of many minds, thus
multiplying indefinitely their chances of contradiction; by adopting
every kind and style of composition, full of reciprocal allusions; and,
above all, by dovetailing their fabrications into true history, thus
encountering a perpetual danger of collision between the two; all as
if to accumulate upon their task every difficulty which ingenuity
could devise! Could I believe that such men as those to whom history
restricts the problem had been able, while thus giving every advantage
to the detection of imposture, to invent a narrative so infinitely
varied in form and style, composed by so many different hands,
traversing, in such diversified ways, contemporary characters and
events, involving names of places, dates, and numberless specialities
of circumstance, and yet maintain a general harmony of so peculiar a
kind, such a callida junctura of these most heterogeneous materials,
as to have imposed on the bulk of readers in all ages an impression
of their artless truth and innocence, and that they were writing
facts, and not fictions? Above all, could they be capable of
fabricating those deeply-latent coincidences, which, if fraud
employed them, overreached fraud itself; lying so deep as to be
undiscovered for nearly eighteen centuries, and only recently
attracting the attention of the world in consequence of the objections
of infidels themselves? We know familiarly enough, that to sustain
any verisimilitude in a fictitious history (even though only one
man has the manufacture of it) is almost impossible, because the
relations of fact that must be anticipated and provided against are
so infinitely various, that the writer is certain to betray himself.
The constant detection of very limited fabrications of a similar
nature, when evidence is sifted in a court of justice, shows us the
impossibility of weaving a plausible texture of this kind.
Many things are sure to have been forgotten which ought to have
been remembered. If this be the case, even where one mind has the
fabrication of the whole, how much more would it be the case if many
minds were engaged in the conspiracy? Should we not expect, at the
very least, the hesitating, suspicious, self-betraying tone usual
in all such cases? Could we expect that general air of truth which
so undeniably prevails throughout the New Testament,--the inimitable
tone of nature, earnestness, and frank sincerity, which, in the case
of such extravagant forgeries, would alone be marvellous traits? But,
at all events, could we expect those minute coincidences, which lay
too deep for the eye of all ordinary readers, and would never have
been discovered had not infidelity provoked Paley and others to
excavate those subterranean galleries in which they are found?
And here again I interrupted my narrative to remark, that Professor
Newman acknowledges the force of these coincidences, and, as usual,
gives no account of them. He says of the Horae Paulinae, in his
"Phases": "This book greatly enlarged my mind as to the resources of
historical criticism. Previously my sole idea of criticism was that
of the discreet discernment of style; but I now began to understand
what powerful argument rose out of combinations; and the very complete
establishment which this work gives to the narrative concerning Paul
in the latter half of the Acts appeared to me to reflect critical honor
on the whole New Testament." (Phases, p. 23.)
But once more to resume my statement. Upon mentioning these and such
like considerations to my infidel friend, who pleaded, that the New
Testament was fiction, he replied. "As to the harmony in these fictions,
--if they be such,--you acknowledge that it is not absolute: that are
discrepancies."
Yes, I said, there are discrepancies, I admit; and I was about to
mention that as another difficulty in the way of my reception of his
theory: I refer to the nature and the limits of those discrepancies.
If there had been an absolute harmony, even to the mildest point, I
am persuaded that, on the principle of evidence in all such cases,
many would have charged collusion on the writers, and have felt that
it was a corroboration of the theory of the fictitious origin of these
compositions. But as the case stands, the discrepancies, if the
compositions be fictitious indeed, are only a proof that these men
attained a still more wonderful skill in aping verisimilitude than
if there had been no discrepancies at all. They have left in the
historic portions of their narrative an air of general harmony, with
an exquisite congruity in points which lie deep below the
surface,--a congruity which they must be supposed to have known would
astonish the world when once discovered; and have at the same time left
certain discrepancies on the surface (which criticism would be sure to
point out), as if for the very purpose of affording guaranties and
vouchers against the suspicion of collusion. The discords increase the
harmony. Once more, I asked, could I believe Jews, Jews in the reign of
Tiberius or Nero, equal to all these wonders?
But all this, even all this, I said, was as nothing compared with
another difficulty involved in this theory. How came these fictions,
containing such monstrous romance, if romance at all, and equally
monstrous doctrines, to be believed; to be believed by multitudes of
Jews and Gentiles, both opposed and equally opposed to them by previous
inveterate superstition and prejudice? How came so many men of such
different races and nations of mankind to hasten to unclothe themselves
of all their previous beliefs in order to adopt these fantastical
fables? How came they to persist in regarding them as authoritative
truth? How came so many in so many different countries to do this at
once? Nay, I added with a laugh, I think there are distinct traces,
as far as we have any evidence, that these very peculiar fictions must
have been believed by many before they were even compiled and published.
My infidel friend mused, and at last said, "I agree with you that
these compositions could not have been fictions in the ordinary
sense, that is, deliberately composed by a conspiracy of highly
imaginative minds. That last argument alone, of their success,
is conclusive against that; but may they not have been legends
which gradually assumed this form out of floating traditions
and previous popular and national prepossessions?" In short, he
faintly sketched a notion somewhat similar to that mythic theory,
since so elaborately wrought out by Strauss.
I answered somewhat as follows:--If the first place, on this
hypothesis, all the intellectual and moral anomalies of the last
theory reappear. That such legends should have been the product of
the Jewish mind (whether designedly or undesignedly, consciously or
unconsciously, makes no difference), is one of the principal
difficulties. If it had been objected to Pere Hardouin, that Virgil's
"Aeneid" could nor have been composed by one of the monks of the
Middle Ages. I suppose that it would have been no relief from the
difficulties of his hypothesis to say that it was a gradual,
unconsciously formed deposit of the monkish mind! But besides all
this, I said, the theory was loaded with other absurdities specially
its own: for we must then believe all the indications of historic
plausibility to which I had adverted in speaking of the previous theory
to be the work of accident; a supposition, if possible, still more
inconceivable than that some superhuman genius for fiction had been
employed on their elaboration. Things moulder into rubbish, but they
do not moulder into fabrics. And then (I continued) the greatest
difficulty, as before, reappears, how came these queer legends,
the product whether of design or accident, to be believed? Jews and
Gentiles were and must have been thoroughly opposed to them.
To this he replied, "I suppose the belief, as you also do, anterior
to the books, which express that belief, but did not cause it. I
suppose the Christian system already existing as a floating vapor
and merely condensed into the written form. It was a gradual
formation, like the Greek and Indian mythologies." I thought on this
for some time, and then said something like this:--
Worse and worse: for I fear that the age of Augustus was no age in
which the world was likely to frame a mythology at all:--if it had
been such an age, the problem does not allow sufficient time for it;--if
there had been sufficient time, it would not have been such a mythology;
--and if there had been any formed, it would not have been rapidly
embraced, any more than other mythologies, by men of different races,
but would have been confined to that which gave it birth.
As to the first point, you ask me to believe that something like the
mythology of the Hindoos or Egyptians could spring up and diffuse
itself in such an age of civilization and philosophy, books and
history; whereas all experience shows us that only a time of
barbarism, before authentic history has commenced, is proper to
the birth of such monstrosities; that this congelation of tradition
and legend takes place only during the long frosts and the deep night
of ages, and is impossible in the bright sun of history;--in whose
very beams, nevertheless, these prodigious icicles are supposed to
have been formed!
As to the second point, you ask me to believe that the thing should
be done almost instantly; for in A.D. 1, we find, by all remains
of antiquity, that both Jews and Gentiles were reposing in the
shadow of their ancient superstitions; and in A. D. 60. multitudes
among different races had become the bigoted adherents of this
novel mythology!
As to the third point, you ask me to believe that such a mythology
as Christianity could have sprung up when those amongst whom it is
supposed to have originated, and those amongst whom it is supposed
to have been propagated, must have equally loathed it. National
prepossessions of the Jews. Why, the kind of Messiah on which the
national heart was set, the inveteracy with which they persecuted
to the death the one that offered himself, and the hatred with
which for eighteen hundred years they have recoiled from him,
sufficiently show how preposterous this notion is! As a nation,
they were, ever have been, and are now, more opposed to Christianity
than any other nation on earth. Prepossessions of the Gentiles! There
was not a Messiah that a Jew could frame a notion of, but would have
been an object of intense loathing and detestation to them all! Yet
you ask me to believe that a mythology originated in the prejudices
of a nation the vast bulk of whom from its commencement have most
resolutely rejected it, and was rapidly propagated among other
nations and races, who must have been prejudiced against
it; who even in its favor those venerable superstitions which were
consecrated by the most powerful associations of antiquity!
As to the fourth point, you ask me to believe that, at a juncture when
all the world was divided between deep-rooted superstition and
incredulous scepticism,--divided, as regards the into Pharisees and
Sadducees, and, as regards the Gentiles, into their Pharisees and
Sadducees, that is, into the vulgar who believed, or at least practised,
all popular religions, and the philosophers who laughed at them all,
and whose combined hostility was directed against the supposed new
mythology,--it nevertheless found favor with multitudes in almost
all lands! You ask me to believe that a mythology was rapidly received
by thousands of different races and nations, when all history
proclaims, that it is with the utmost difficulty that any such
system ever passes the limits of the race which has originated
it; and that you can hardly get another race even to look at it as
a matter of philosophic curiosity! You ask me to believe that this
system was received by multitudes among many different races, both
of Asia and Europe, without force, when a similar phenomenon has
never been witnessed in relation to any mythology whatever! Thus,
after asking me to burden myself with a thousand perplexities to
account for the origin of these fables, you afterwards burden me with
a thousand more, to account for their success! Lastly, you ask me to
believe, not only that men of different races and countries became
bigotedly attached to legends which none were likely to originate,
which all were likely to hate, and, most of all, those who are supposed
to have originated them; but that they received them as historic facts,
when the known recency of their origin must have shown the world that
they were the legendary birth of yesterday; and that they acted thus,
though those who propagated these legends had no military power no civil
authority, no philosophy, no science, no one instrument of human success
to aid them, while the opposing prejudices which everywhere
encountered them had! I really know not how to believe all this.
"There are certainly many difficulties in the matter" candidly replied
my infidel friend. But, as if wishing to effect a diversion,--"Have you
ever read Gibbon's celebrated chapter?"
Why, yes, I told him, two or three years before; but he does not say a
syllable in solution of my chief difficulties; he does not tell me any
thing as to the origin of the ideas of Christianity, nor who could
have written the wonderful books in which they are embodied; besides,
said I, in my simplicity, he yields the point, by allowing miracles to
be the most potent cause of the success of Christianity.
"Ah" he replied, "but every one can see that he is there speaking
ironically."
Why, then, said I, laughing, I fear he is telling us how the success
of Christianity cannot be accounted for, rather than how it can.
"O, but he gives you the secondary causes; which it is easy to see
he considers the principal; and also sufficient."
I will read him again, I said, and with deep attention. Some time
after, in meeting with the same friend, I began upon Gibbon's secondary
causes.
"They have given you satisfaction, I hope."
Any thing but that, I replied; they do not, as I said before, touch
my principal difficulties: and even as to the success of the system
when once elaborated,--his reasons are either a mere restatement of
the difficulty to be solved, or aggravate it indefinitely.
"You are hard to please," he replied.