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(Continued from vol. vii. p. 595.)
The riches of others seems to have excited great
indignation in the apostles. There is little doubt
but that, during the ministry of Jesus, when they
wandered with him from one place to another. they
subsisted by levying contributions. Judas was
purse-bearer. Occasionally they were joined by large
companies of curious spectators. Mark mentions that
Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the Less,
and of Joses and Salome, followed Jesus when he was
in Galilee, and ministered unto him, (we must
suppose that their ministry was restricted to
cooking and mending) were present at the
crucifixion, together with many other women which
came up with him to Jerusalem.
There is another view in which Paley presents the
discourses of Jesus. He gives no particular
description of the invisible world, but merely
inculcates the doctrine of the Pharisees, the
resurrection and the <<25>>
final retribution to the
just and the wicked. In the course of his discourses
he uses a number of metaphors and comparisons, the
point of which may not always have been discovered
by his hearers. As a fabulist he is decidedly
inferior to Æsop and Phædrus. A disquisition into
the merit and applicability of his parables would be
superfluous, as they cannot have any weight in the
question of the truth of the Christian doctrine.
Paley observes that Jesus, bred up a Jew under a
religion extremely technical, in an age and among a
people more tenacious of their ceremonies than any
other part of their religion, he delivered an
institution containing less of ritual, and that
more simple, than is to be found in any religion
which ever prevailed among mankind. Now what is the
fact? He confirmed and predicted the duration and
obligation of the law which contained that technical
religion. He personally observed the ritual, and
never opposed any of the institutions. When it was
objected to him that his disciples had profaned the
Sabbath, he did not attempt to justify them and say
the commandment was no longer valid, but excuses
them under the plea of necessity, refers to the case
of Abiatar, who gave to David and his followers the
shew-bread, which it was not lawful for any but the
priests to eat, and ends with the pompous
declaration, that the Sabbath was made for man, not
man for the Sabbath, which though quite true has
nothing to do with the question, whether it was
lawful for his disciples to pluck the corn. In the
same manner, when it was inquired why his disciples
did not fast as the disciples of John the Baptist
and the Pharisees did, he did not offer any excuse,
but evaded the question with a fable or parable
about the children of the bride-chamber, about
patching old clothes, and putting new wine into old
bottles.
Jesus finds fault with the Pharisees for their
over-scrupulousness, their refining on the law, and
extending their observances to the most minute
objects; but he never denied the ordinances. His
injunctions to his disciples to cut off their hand
or their foot, and pluck out their eye if it offend
them, are instances of the over-scrupulousness which
he condemns in the Pharisees, though I am at a loss
to understand how the hand, or foot, or eye, can
offend so as to bring the owner in jeopardy of being
cast into hell-fire, since he has affirmed that all
sin proceeds from the heart. The instances which
Paley gives of his meekness, devotion, hatred of
strife, and submission to authority, show the
amiability of his character. The habitual
denunciation of hell-fire to the Pharisees and
others, which are related of him, are unnatural to
one of his disposition, and we must ascribe them to
the rancorous feel <<26>>ings of the apostles, or
whoever were the writers of the gospels. When
searching questions were propounded to him, he did
not attempt to answer them, but evaded them,
sometimes by putting another question to the
questioner, other times by some observation which
had not any bearing on the subject, or by telling a
parable.
In asserting my belief of the meek and pious turn of
his mind, in course I do not mean to admit any claim
to divinity; he was a good but weak man, and no
doubt there have been and are many equally amiable
characters. He no doubt first deceived himself with
respect to his divinity by the bold assertion of
Peter, before he attempted to deceive others; but he
must have had some misgivings on the subject, when
he anticipated from the enmity of the priests and
Pharisees, that he should be put to death. A man
under the illusion of being a god, and consequently,
not subject to death, would not entertain such an
idea. His earnest supplication to God in the garden
(when he acknowledged his unity) would prove that
the illusion was then dispelled, could we be assured
that he actually made that prayer; but it seems,
according to Matthew, that leaving the rest of the
disciples, he took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee
with him, and going a little further along, prayed;
when he returned, he found them asleep; this
occurred all the three times that he repeated the
prayer; we may therefore reasonably inquire, how
they came to the knowledge of what he prayed for?
Paley adds a few remarks on the moral tendency of
the epistles of Paul, which I shall not at present
examine; but will only observe that they do not bear
on the truth of Christianity, in respect of its
theology. He proceeds to point out the candour of
the writers of the New Testament, in not relating
their story in the most unexceptionable form; but we
must keep in mind that the apostles preached a very
few years after the crucifixion, and most likely
among the Jews who were contemporary with Jesus.
Peter was the home missionary, and it behoved him
not to advance anything which would be positively
contradicted by any of his hearers. Paul most likely
allowed himself a little more latitude, but would
not deliver anything which Peter did not teach or
would positively deny, for there seems to have
existed a feeling or jealousy between them. The
gospels were written to collect and recapitulate all
that the disciples had taught at the several
churches; and although written thirty years after
the events they recorded, and the lapse of time
might have afforded opportunity to insert statements
to corroborate the facts as at first published, they
did not find it practicable to insert additional
proofs which had been kept back so long, and which
might be therefore subject to suspicion.
Paley gives an instance of this candour in the admis<<27>>sion
by all the four evangelists that after the
resurrection, Jesus appeared only to the eleven; but
that is a proof of their art, not of their candour;
for had they asserted that Jesus had appeared to the
scribes and Pharisees, the Roman Governor, and
Jewish Council, this assertion, coming as it must
have done, directly after the event, and forming a
principal support of their doctrine, would, have
been rejected by the personal knowledge of the
Jewish converts, and the common sense of the Greek
converts, who would not be able to conceive the
possibility of such an astounding occurrence having
taken place without its being universally known, or
if it did take place, without convincing the whole
Jewish nation. Such an assertion would have stamped
the whole story with falsehood. Be it also
remembered that Matthew relates that at the
crucifixion, the graves were opened, and many of the
saints arose and went into the holy city and
appeared to many. I think few Christians would
contend for the truth of this last assertion, which
has a greater claim for evidence than the other, it
being a public appearance, while the other was
strictly private, being confined to the eleven; as
far as Matthew is concerned, they must both be
believed or neither.
The next proof adduced of the candour of the
evangelists, is the doubt expressed by John the
Baptist in his message: “Art thou he who should
come, or look we for another?” This doubt was
expressed that it might be removed, for there could
not be any doubt with John, who had baptized him
some time before, and on whom he saw the spirit
descend from heaven. The avowal of John that many of
the disciples went back and walked no more with him,
I cannot account for, except as a warning to
renegadoes; as Paul says, those who had believed and
fallen away, could not repent and return. The
writers of the gospels had to inculcate a doctrine
which was rejected by the nation to which it was
preached; it was therefore necessary to account in
some measure why it was not received; they, for this
reason, gave some instances in which it was
rejected. They prepared their readers for the little
publicity which attended the miraculous cures said
to have been performed by Jesus, by making him
always enjoin on the convalescent to keep them
secret.
The admission of the perpetuality of the law I
believe to have been made by Jesus, and to have been
retained by the Evangelists to account for his
adherence to all the observances and frequent
references to the Law. Paley says it is a proof of
their regard for truth that they should have
ascribed a saying to Christ “which primo intuitu
militated with the judgment of the age in which his
(Matthew’s) gospel was written.”
Does he call the judgment of the age the doctrine
which was inculcated <<28>>to a few knots of
proselytes which Paul had converted, and which he
dignified with the title of “churches?” “At the time
the Gospels were written, the apparent tendency of
the mission of Christ was to diminish the authority
of the Mosaic Code, and it was so considered by the
Jews themselves.” If the Jews thought so it was not
from the doctrine which Jesus taught, but from the
preaching of Paul. The first converts under the
ministry of James were “all zealous of the Law.”
Paley thinks it very unlikely that the statement of
Jesus having told his disciples that if they had
faith, and bade the mountain be removed, and cast
into the sea, it would be done,* should not be true.
He may possibly have said it, and believed it too.
The evangelist ran no danger in repeating it or
inventing it, and if any enthusiast tried the
experiment and failed, the answer was ready, “You
have not faith, or it would have been done.” Matthew
relates this promise to the faithful in reference to
the miracle of the fig tree. Paley, with very bad
taste, quotes his account rather than that of Luke,
to which he refers at the foot of the page, where
the same promise is given without, reference to the
fig tree but applied to a sycamore tree.† Duly
impressed as I am with the omnipotence of our God, I
cannot believe that he performed that miracle (of
the fig tree), which would not answer any other
purpose than to make the apostles stare. It does not
say much for the common sense of Jesus, who went to
it to seek for figs, though “the time of figs was
not yet;” in his anger and disappointment he cursed
it. “And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat
fruit of thee hereafter for ever,”‡ was it the fig
tree to which he answered, or whom?
Paley argues that the conversation recorded in
John, vi. is very unlikely to have been fabricated;
as it is there that his disciples said, “This is a
hard saying, who can hear it?” It is very probable
that Jesus said this as well as what is attributed
to him at the Last Supper to the same effect; but we
must recollect that he also declared that he was in
the Father, and the Father in him, and that whoever
saw him saw the Father. Such extravagant
declarations are not incompatible with the usual
mildness of his character. It may have been bad
policy to have recorded so many instances where
Jesus was not believed, or where the disciples left
him on some startling dogma; but they had to account
to their proselytes for the rejection of their
doctrine by the Jewish nation, and the doctrine of
the real presence was too firmly established, as we
see by the Acts and the Epistles, to be weakened by
the unbelief of the disciples recounted in the
Gospels; it is well known <<29>>that the doctrine of
the real presence was taught from the time of Paul,
and is still implicitly believed by the Roman and
Greek Churches.
I cannot now make this letter much longer, and have
taken the subjects from Paley’s work promiscuously,
without rejecting any one for its apparent
difficulty; but to have noticed every one would have
filled a large volume. I will conclude with some
remarks on the short chapter which he devotes to
“The History of the Resurrection.” He sets out with
the fact that the resurrection is part of the
evidence of Christianity, and expresses a doubt
whether “the proper strength of this passage of the
Christian history or its peculiar value as a head of
evidence consists be generally understood.” He
allows that it is not as a miracle that it is a more
decisive proof of supernatural agency than other
miracles are, nor that as it stands in the Gospel it
is better attested than some others. It is not for
these reasons that more weight belongs to it than to
other miracles, but for the following: that it is
completely certain that the apostles and the first
teachers of Christianity asserted it. A most cogent
reason; pretending to show that the mere fact of a
tale being asserted by the inventors was a proof of
its veracity. He assumes that the certainty would
not be affected if the four gospels had been lost or
never written; since every piece of Scripture
recognises the resurrection, every epistle of every
apostle, every contemporary author, every writing
from that age to the present, whether genuine or
spurious, all concur in representing the
resurrection of Christ as an article of his history,
received without doubt or disagreement by all who
called themselves Christians, as alleged from the
beginning and as the centre of their testimony.
(To be continued.) |
