The Father of Church History.
In referring to his work of writing a history of the church up to
his own times, he says:
"We are attempting a kind of trackless and unbeaten path."
Again he says of Philo Judæus that he was a very "learned man." Among
many other things which contradict this estimate, is the fact that
Philo takes more than one hundred pages in showing how that dreams
are sent from God.
Again, Eusebius does not say that the last works of Hegesippus,
Papias and Dionysius of Corinth, contain anything concerning the
canonical gospels; therefore, they contained none.
We give the opinion of a few well-known writers upon this "father of
church history":
In Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 197, Bunsen and
Niebuhr are quoted--the one (Bunsen) as saying that he purposely
"perverted chronology for the sake of making synchronisms," and the
other (Niebuhr) declaring "he is a very dishonest writer."
"Eusebius had a peculiar faculty of diverging from the
truth." ("History of Christian Religion," p. 7.)
"The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius, himself,
indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to
the glory, and has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace of
religion." (Gibbon's "Rome," vol. 1, p. 493.)
"In one of the most learned and elaborate works that antiquity has left
us, the thirty-second chapter of the twelfth book of his evangelical
preparation, bears for its title this scandalous proposition: 'How it
may be lawful and fitting to use falsehood as a medicine and for the
benefit of those who want to be deceived.'" (Gibbon's "Vindication,"
p. 76.)
"But Eusebius, the father of church history, capped the climax by
fabricating the celebrated passage about "Jesus, a wise man, if it
be lawful to call him such." ("Anti-Christ," p. 28.)
"He (Eusebius) has frankly told us that his principle in writing
history was to conceal the facts that were injurious to the reputation
of the church." (Lecky's "European Morals," vol. 1, p. 492.)
"Eusebius, who would never lie or falsify except to promote the glory
of God." (Taylor's Diegesis, p. 345.)
Eusebius pronounces a panegyric upon Constantine. The following is
the list of Constantine's murders as given by Robert Taylor:
[**TODO: Verify table]
Maximinian, his wife's father A. D. 310
Bassianus, his sister Anastacia's husband A. D. 314
Licinianus, his nephew by Constantina A. D. 319
Fausta, his wife A. D. 320
Sopater, his former friend A. D. 321
Licinius, his sister Constantina's husband A. D. 325
Crispus, his own son A. D. 326
And the church still continues to regard these two persons as holy
men of God, raised up for a wise purpose--the one an open, wholesale
murderer, and the other a cowardly, cunning and corrupt priest. The
vast injury they have done the human race can never be computed. They
poisoned the fountains of civilization, and all Christendom has been
drinking its poisoned waters ever since. If there are anywhere in
history two men who have done their fellow men more positive harm
and wrong, I do not know them. Their names should be held up to
eternal scorn.
Baronius, a sincere advocate of the Christian faith, calls Eusebius:
"the great falsifier of ecclesiastical history, a wily sychophant,
a consummate hypocrite, a time serving persecutor, who had nothing
in his known life or writings to support the belief that he himself
believed in the Christian system."
Eusebius is the source from whom all have drawn their material. Of
him Dean Milman in a note to Gibbon's Rome says: "It is deeply to
be regretted that the history of this period rests so much on the
loose, and, it must be admitted, by no means scrupulous authority of
Eusebius." (Page 85.)
Spurious Writings of the Early Church.
"Not long after Christ's ascension into heaven, several histories of
his life and doctrines, full of pious frauds and fabulous wonders,
were composed by persons whose intentions, perhaps, were not
bad, but whose writings discovered the greatest superstition and
ignorance." (Mosheim's "Ecclesiastical History.")
"Christian churches had scarcely been gathered and organized
when here and there men rose up who, not being contented with the
simplicity and purity of that religion which the apostles taught,
attempted innovations, and fashioned religion according to their own
liking." (Mosheim's "Ecclesiastical History," vol. 1, c. 5.)
"To avoid being imposed upon, we ought to treat tradition as we do a
notorious and known liar, to whom we give no credit, unless what he
says is confirmed to us by some person of undoubted veracity." (Extract
from Bower's "Lives of the Popes.")
"This opinion has always been in the world, that to settle a certain
and assured estimation upon that which is good and true, it is
necessary to remove out of the way whatever may be an hindrance
to it. Neither ought we to wonder that even those of the honest,
innocent, primitive times made use of these deceits, seeing for a
good end they made no scruple to forge whole books." (Daille on the
Use of the Fathers, b. 1, c. 3.)
The Bible Not an Inspired Revelation.
"What would be the characteristics of a revelation? 1st. A revelation
would be free from inherent contradictions. Does the New Testament
revelation stand this test? 2d. A revelation would not contradict
natural laws, for nature is the only undisputed revelation to
man. 3d. A revelation would be so authenticated that it would be more
reasonable to admit than to deny its claims. The history of thousands
of years proves that, so far, no revelation has been made that compels
the mind's assent, as thousands of thinking men reject the so-called
revelation of the New Testament. The New Testament does not claim
infallibility for itself; and proving that a book is infallible does
not prove that it was inspired, else we might claim inspiration for
the problems of Euclid." (Anon.)
"When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two
tables of commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged
to believe him, because they had no other authority for it, than his
telling them so; and I have no authority for it than some historian
telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity
with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man
qualified to be a lawgiver or a legislator, could produce himself
without having recourse to supernatural intervention." (Thomas Paine's
"Age of Reason.")
"Revelation is a communication of something which the person, to whom
that thing is revealed, did not know before. For if I have done a
thing, or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done
it, or seen it, nor to enable me to tell it, or to write it." (Thomas
Paine's "Age of Reason.")
"If it was worth God's while to make a revelation to man at all,
it was certainly worth his while to see to it that it was correctly
made. He would not have allowed the ideas and mistakes of pretended
prophets and designing priests to become so mingled with the original
text that it is impossible to tell where he ceased and where the
priests and prophets began. Neither will it do to say that God
adapted his revelation to the prejudices of mankind. Of course it
was necessary for an infinite being to adapt his revelation to the
intellectual capacity of man; but why should God confirm a barbarian
in his prejudices? Why should he fortify a heathen in his crimes? If a
revelation is of any importance whatever, it is to eradicate prejudices
from the human mind. It should be a lever with which to raise the human
race. Theologians have exhausted their ingenuity in finding excuses
for God. It seems to me that they would be better employed in finding
excuses for men. They tell us that the Jews were so cruel and ignorant
that God was compelled to justify, or nearly to justify, many of
their crimes, in order to have any influence with them whatever. They
tell us that if he had declared slavery and polygamy to be criminal,
the Jews would have refused to receive the ten commandments. They
insist that, under the circumstances, God did the best he could;
that his real intention was to lead them along slowly, step by step,
so that, in a few hundred years they would be induced to admit that
it was hardly fair to steal a babe from its mother's breast. It has
always seemed reasonable that an infinite God ought to have been able
to make man grand enough to know, even without a special revelation,
that it is not altogether right to steal the labor, or the wife, or
the child of another. When the whole question is thoroughly examined,
the world will find that Jehovah had the prejudices, the hatreds,
and superstitions of his day.
"If there is anything of value, it is liberty. Liberty is the air of
the soul, the sunshine of life. Without it the world is a prison and
the universe an infinite dungeon.
"If Christ was in fact God, he knew all the future. Before him,
like a panorama, moved the history yet to be. He knew exactly how
his words would be interpreted. He knew what crimes, what horrors,
what infamies, would be committed in his name. He knew that the fires
of persecution would climb around the limbs of countless martyrs. He
knew that brave men would languish in dungeons, in darkness, filled
with pain; that the church would use the instruments of torture,
and that his followers would appeal to whip and chain. He must have
seen the horizon of the future red with the flames of the auto da
fe. He knew all the creeds that would spring like poisoned fungi from
every text. He saw the sects waging war against each other. He saw
thousands of men, under the orders of priests, building dungeons for
their fellow men. He saw them using instruments of pain. He heard the
groans, saw the faces white with agony, the tears, the blood--heard
the shrieks and sobs of all the moaning, martyred multitudes. He knew
that commentaries would be written on his words with swords, to be
read by the light of faggots. He knew that the Inquisition would be
born of teachings attributed to him. He saw all the interpolations
and falsehoods that hypocrisy would write and tell. He knew that above
these fields of death, these dungeons, these burnings, for a thousand
years would float the dripping banner of the cross. He knew that in
his name his followers would trade in human flesh, that cradles would
be robbed, and woman's breasts unbabed for gold, and yet he died with
voiceless lips. Why did he fail to speak? Why did he not tell his
disciples, and through them the world, that man should not persecute,
for opinion's sake, his fellow man? Why did he not cry, You shall
not persecute in my name; you shall not burn and torment those who
differ from you in creed? Why did he not plainly say, I am the Son of
God? Why did he not explain the doctrine of the trinity? Why did he
not tell the manner of baptism that was pleasing to him? Why did he
not say something positive, definite, and satisfactory about another
world? Why did he not turn the tear-stained hope of heaven to the
glad knowledge of another life? Why did he go dumbly to his death,
leaving the world to misery and to doubt?
"You may ask, And what of all this? I reply, As with everything
in nature, so with the Bible. It has a different story for each
reader. Is, then, the Bible a different book to every human being
who reads it? It is. Can God, through the Bible, make precisely the
same revelation to two persons? He cannot. Why? Because the man who
reads is not inspired. God should inspire readers as well as writers.
"You may reply: God knew that his book would be understood differently
by each one, and intended that it should be understood as it is
understood by each. If this is so, then my understanding of the
Bible is the real revelation to me. If this is so, I have no right
to take the understanding of another. I must take the revelation
made to me through my understanding, and by that revelation I must
stand. Suppose, then, that I read this Bible honestly, fairly, and
when I get through am compelled to say, 'The book is not true.' If
this is the honest result, then you are compelled to say, either that
God has made no revelation to me, or that the revelation that it is
not true is the revelation made to me, and by which I am bound. If
the book and my brain are both the work of the same infinite God,
whose fault is it that the book and the brain do not agree? Either
God should have written a book to fit my brain, or should have made
my brain to fit his book. The inspiration of the Bible depends upon
the credulity of him who reads. There was a time when its geology,
its astronomy, its natural history, were thought to be inspired:
that time has passed. There was a time when its morality satisfied
the men who ruled the world of thought: that time has passed.
"These are the passages that have liberated woman!
"According to the Old Testament, woman had to ask pardon, and had to be
purified, for the crime of having borne sons and daughters. If in this
world there is a figure of perfect purity, it is a mother holding in
her thrilled and happy arms her child. The doctrine that the woman is
the slave, or serf, of man--whether it comes from heaven or from hell,
from God or a demon, from the golden streets of the New Jerusalem or
from the very Sodom of perdition--is savagery, pure and simple.
"In no country in the world had women less liberty than in the Holy
Land, and no monarch held in less esteem the rights of wives and
mothers than Jehovah of the Jews. The position of woman was far
better in Egypt than in Palestine. Before the pyramids were built,
the sacred songs of Isis were sung by women, and women with pure
hands had offered sacrifices to the gods. Before Moses was born, women
had sat upon the Egyptian throne. Upon ancient tombs the husband and
wife are represented as seated in the same chair. In Persia women were
priests, and in some of the oldest civilizations 'they were reverenced
on earth, and worshiped afterward as goddesses in heaven.' At the
advent of Christianity, in all Pagan countries women officiated
at the sacred altars. They guarded the eternal fire. They kept the
sacred books. From their lips came the oracles of fate. Under the
domination of the Christian church, woman became the merest slave for
at least a thousand years. It was claimed that through woman the race
had fallen, and that her loving kiss had poisoned all the springs of
life. Christian priests asserted that but for her crime the world would
have been an Eden still. The ancient fathers exhausted their eloquence
in the denunciation of woman, and repeated again and again the slander
of St. Paul. The condition of woman has improved just in proportion
that man has lost confidence in the inspiration of the Bible.
"The old argument that if Christianity is a human fabrication its
authors must have been either good men or bad men, takes it for granted
that there are but two classes of persons--the good and the bad. There
is, at least, one other class--the mistaken, and both of the other
classes may belong to this. Thousands of most excellent people have
been deceived, and the history of the world is filled with instances
where men have honestly supposed that they had received communications
from angels and gods." (Ingersoll's Reply to Black.)
"But an infinite being must know not only the real meaning of
the words, but the exact meaning they will convey to every reader
and hearer. He must know every meaning that they are capable of
conveying to every mind. He must also know what explanations must
be made to prevent misconception. If an infinite being cannot,
in making a revelation to man, use such words that every person to
whom a revelation is essential, will understand distinctly what that
revelation is, then a revelation from God, through the instrumentality
of language is impossible, or it is not essential that all should
understand it correctly.
"After all, the real question is, not whether the Bible is inspired,
but whether it is true. If it is true, it does not need to be
inspired. If it is true, it makes no difference whether it was
written by a man or a god. The multiplication table is just as useful,
just as true as though God had arranged the figures himself. If the
Bible is really true, the claim of inspiration need not be urged;
and if it is not true, its inspiration can hardly be established. As
a matter of fact, the truth does not need to be inspired. Nothing
needs inspiration except a falsehood or a mistake." (Ingersoll's
"Mistakes of Moses," p. 59.)
"It may be argued that millions have not the capacity to understand a
revelation, although expressed in plainest words. To this it seems a
sufficient reply, to ask, why a being of infinite power should create
men so devoid of intelligence, that he cannot by any means make known
to them his will?" (Ingersoll's "Mistakes of Moses," p. 90.)
"Millions have declared this book to be infinitely holy, to prove
that they were right have imprisoned, robbed and burned their fellow
men. The inspiration of this book has been established by famine,
sword, and fire, by dungeon, chain, and whip, by dagger and by rack,
by force and fear and fraud, and generations have been frightened by
threats of hell, and bribed with promises of heaven.
"Had we been born in Turkey, most of us would have been Mohammedans
and believed in the inspiration of the Koran. We should have believed
that Mohammed actually visited heaven and became acquainted with an
angel by the name of Gabriel who was so broad between the eyes that
it required three hundred days for a very smart mule to travel the
distance. If some man had denied this story we should have denounced
him as a dangerous person, one who was endeavoring to undermine the
foundations of society, and to destroy all distinctions between virtue
and vice. We should have said to him 'What do you propose to give us
in place of this angel? We cannot afford to give up an angel of that
size for nothing.' We would have insisted that the wisest and best
men believed the Koran." (Ingersoll's "Mistakes of Moses," p. 36.)
The Pentateuch.
"The Pentateuch is affirmed to have been written by Moses under the
influence of divine inspiration. Considered thus a record vouchsafed
and dictated by the Almighty, it commands not only scientific but
universal consent.
"But here in the first place it may be demanded, who or what is it
that has put forth this great claim in its behalf?
"Not the work itself. It nowhere claims the authorship of one man,
or makes the impious declaration that it is the writing of Almighty
God." (Draper's "Conflict Between Religion and Science.")
The Bible Not Inspired.