wicked and sceptical art of criticism began to undermine the pillarsof faith.

2. "There were present at that season, some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.”—Luke xiii. 1.

No historian, Jewish, Greek or Roman, has made the least allusion to this bloody work; which it is next to impossible that they could have failed to do, had it really happened.

Such an act was entirely out of character; for Pilate was a Pagan and a sacrificer himself, and would never have considered idolatry as a crime in any body. We have the solution of the difficulty at once, by admitting the probability, that as the name of King Herod was substituted in the later or more orderly and methodical transcripts of the Diegesis, for that of King Solomon, so the act of good King Josiah (2 Kings xxiii.) has here been fathered upon Pontius Pilate.

FALSEHOOD OF GOSPEL STATISTICS.

1. Annas and Caiaphas being the high-priests (Luke iii. 2); when any person acquainted with the history and polity of the Jews, must have known that there never was but one high-priest at a time, any more than among ourselves there is never but one Archbishop of Canterbury.

2. Caiaphas, which was the high-priest that same year, (John viii. 13,) being high-priest that year, he prophesied (John xi. 50); when no Jew could have been ignorant that the high-priest's office was not annual, but for life, and that prophesying was no privilege nor part of that office.

3. "Search and look, for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet," (John vii. 52); when the most distinguished of the Jewish prophets, Nahum and Jonah, were both Galileans.

FALSEHOOD OF GOSPEL PHRASEOLOGY.

They brought the ass and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and set him thereon," (Matt. xxi. 7); i.e. like Mr. Ducrow, at Astley's Theatre, a-straddle across them both. This translator of Matthew's supposed original Hebrew copy of the Diegesis, being so grossly ignorant of the common pleonasm of the Hebrew language, as to mistake

its ordinary emphatic way of indicating a particular object by a repetition of the word; as, an ass, "even that which was the son," or foal, or had been born of an ass; for two of the species.*

2. "And he said unto them, Go wash in the pool of Siloam, which is by interpretation Sent," (John xix. 7);† which happens to be an interpretation which no Jewish writer could possibly have given: SILOAM signifying, not Sent, but the place of the sending forth of waters, that is, the sluice: to say nothing of the absurdity of representing the pool as sent to the man, instead of the man being sent to the pool or of the absurdity of supposing that one who was blind, could see his way thither. Sure, here seems to have been a greater chance of the poor man's getting his baptism than his conversion. This text has so puzzled the commentators, that they have endeavoured to get the words "which is by interpretation, Sent," considered as a mere marginal note; but the authority of the Codices attests them to be a part of the text itself. Whatever, then, be the credit due to the three first evangelists, the fourth may well be considered as neither better nor worse, and must stand or fall with them.

CHAPTER XVIII.

ULTIMATE RESULT.

SUCH errors as we have exemplified, and innumerable other such there are, in every one of the four gospels, can be accounted for on no suppositions congruous with the idea of their having been written either by any such per

Similar pleonasms, not without considerable beauty, are

"God is not a man, that he should lie, nor the Son of man, that he should repent."-Numb. xxiii. 19.

Shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion."— Numb. xxiii. 21.

66

Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him, or the Son of man, that thou so regardest him?"-Psalm.

+ Cap. xix. 7. Ubi auctor vocem Awau falso interpretatur per awEOTAλμενος, et ex errore missus, pronuntiavit Emissio, scil. aquarum Ejusmodi error vero, nec Joanni Apostolo, neque alii cuidam scriptori Judæo accidere potuisset. Codicum auctoritate prorsus genuina judicanda sunt ista verba.-Bretschneider.

sons, at any such time, or under any such circumstances, as have been generally assumed for them. But we may challenge the whole world's history to furnish, from a period of such remote antiquity, a coincidence of circumstantial evidence to prove any fact whatever, so strong, so concatenated, and so entirely responsive to all the claims of the phænomena, as the evidence here adduced, that the first types of the Gospel-story sprang from the Egyptian monks, and constituted the substance of the mystical romance, which they had modified from the Pagan mythology, in conformity to their professed and acknowledged Eclectic Philosophy, and imposed for antecedent ages on the ecclesiastical colonies, which had migrated from the mother church of Alexandria.

Thus, after Europe and all Christian communities have been for so many ages led to believe that in the four Gospels they possessed the best translations that could be derived, in their several languages, from the original inspired text of immediate disciples and contemporaries of Christ; it is at length admitted, that mankind have 1. It is admitted, been and are egregiously deceived. that these gospels were not written by the persons to whom they are ascribed; 2. That Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were only translators or copyists of previously existing documents; 3. Composed by we know not whom; 4. We know not how; 5. We know not where; 6. We know not when; 7. And containing we know not what. The very first assertion in the title-page of our New Testament, in stating that it is translated from the original Greek, involves a fallacy; since it is absolutely certain that the Greek, from which our translations were made, was well nigh as far from being original, as the translations themselves, and it is absolutely uncertain what the original

was.

Irenæus indeed, the disciple of Polycarp, which Polycarp is said to have conversed with St. John, and who himself lived and wrote in the middle of the second century, is the first of all the Fathers who mentions the four But if this testimony were as cerevangelists by name. tainly unexceptionable, as it certainly is not-the being able to trace these scriptures so high or even higher than the second century, would be no relief to the difficulties of the evidence; since the same testimony attests the antecedent prevalence of the heresies of the Marcionites, Ebion

ites and Valentinians, which were to be refuted out of these gospels, and which, as they were undoubtedly heresies from Christian doctrine, carry us as much too far beyond the mark, as it might have been feared that we should fall short of it; and go to prove, that as those heresies, so these gospels which refuted them, existed before the time ascribed to the birth of Christ. All the indications of date contained in those gospels themselves, are manifestly erroneous. It is universally known and admitted, that we have no history, nor Christian writing whatever besides, that so much as purports to come within the limits of the first century. At any rate, the predicament of being too soon on the stage, is as fatal to the congruities of the story, as being too late.

"The history of the New Testament," says Dr. Lardner, " is attended with many difficulties."-Vol. 1. p. 136.

What could he mean by difficulties, but appearances of not being true? What could he mean by many difficulties, but that such appearances are not one, two, or a dozen, but meet us in every page? And what means the labour of his cumbrous volumes, but so much labour of so great `a man, laid out on the sophistical business of making what he virtually admits appears to be falsehood, appear to be truth?

All these geographical, chronological, political, and physiological perplexities, are such as never could have crossed the path of straight-forward narrative; but are such exactly as would occur to Eclectic plagiaries, engaged in the business of setting forth in order a tale of the then olden time; fitting new names and new scenery to the characters and catastrophes of an antiquated plot; and endeavouring to put an appearance of history and reality upon the creations of fictions and romance.

That this Eclectic philosophy of the Alexandrine monks is the true parent of their Diegesis, of which the gospels that have come down to us, are the legitimate issue, is the demonstration that will meet us now at every stage of that comparison of the Pagan and Christian theology, which our investigation challenges from us.

CHAPTER XIX.

RESEMBLANCES OF THE PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY-AUGURY AND BISHOPS ESCULAPIUS, JESUS CHRIST HERCULES, JESUS CHRIST ADONIS,

JESUS CHRIST.

No conviction of our reason could be conceived to be more absolute and conclusive, than that which assures us of the utter impossibility of there being any common features of resemblance between divine truth and human imposture. We are not conscious of our own existence with a greater degree of certainty, than that by which we know, that a religion which hath "God for its author, happiness for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter," could have no likeness to the foolish and impotent devices of weak and wicked men. The existence of such a likeness or resemblance between any two religions whatever, however superior the one might be to the other, would itself constitute the surest possible demonstration that both of them were false. In a religion, then, which purports to be from God, we have a right to expect internal evidences of its divinity, and a character as infinitely superior to any devices of men-as infinite wisdom must be superior to human ignorance.

Having, then, obtained the consent of all parties, that the Christian Saviour, if any such person ever lived at all, must have lived and conversed with men in the era of Augustus, that is, eighteen hundred years ago, and that all the facts and doctrines of his religion are contained in the book called the New Testament*; this great and important question becomes capable of being put to the test-from which, nothing that is honest would shrinkfrom which nothing that is true, can have any thing to fear. Nothing which can be shown to have been in existence before the alleged time of the birth of Christ, nothing which came into existence long after "his glorious resurrection and ascension," can have any claim to be taken for Christianity. If before the date assigned to Christianity, and in regions and countries where a religion under that name was not known, we shall find all the ideas which that religion involves, pre-existent, and already familiar to the apprehensions of men; there is no alternative but that the

We say not the Old Testament, though the Bible is a term that comprehends both; the Old Testament will never be vindicated, and ought not to be attacked by any man.