Part 7 (1/2)
2. The prophecies of the New Testament are not many. First, we have that of Jesus in Matt xxiv. concerning the destruction of Jerusalem.
It is marvellously exact, down to the capture of the city and miserable enslavement of the population; but at this point it becomes clearly and hopelessly false: namely, it declares, that ”_immediately after_ that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, &c. &c., and then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect,” &c. This is a manifest description of the Great Day of Judgment: and the prophecy goes on to add: ”Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pa.s.s, till all these things be fulfilled.” When we thus find a prediction to break down suddenly in the middle, we have the well-known mark of its earlier part being written after the event: and it becomes unreasonable to doubt that the detailed annunciations of this 24th chapter of Matthew, were first composed _very soon after_ the war of t.i.tus, and never came from the lips of Jesus at all. Next: we have the prophecies of the Apocalypse.
Not one of these can be interpreted certainly of any human affairs, except one in the 17th chapter, which the writer himself has explained to apply to the emperors of Rome: and that is proved false by the event.--Farther, we have Paul's prophecies concerning the apostacy of the Christian Church. These are very striking, as they indicate his deep insight into the moral tendencies of the community in which he moved. They are high testimonies to the prophetic soul of Paul; and as such, I cannot have any desire to weaken their force. But there is nothing in them that can establish the theory of supernaturalism, in the face of his great mistake as to the speedy return of Christ from heaven.
3. As for the Old Testament, if all its prophecies about Babylon and Tyre and Edom and Ishmael and the four Monarchies were both true and supernatural, what would this prove? That G.o.d had been pleased to reveal something of coming history to certain eminent men of Hebrew antiquity. That is all. We should receive this conclusion with an otiose faith. It could not order or authorize us to submit our souls and consciences to the obviously defective morality of the Mosaic system in which these prophets lived; and with Christianity it has nothing to do.
At the same time I had reached the conclusion that large deductions must be made from the credit of these old prophecies.
First, as to the Book of Daniel: the 11th chapter is closely historical down to Antiochus Epiphanes, after which it suddenly becomes false; and according to different modern expositors, leaps away to Mark Antony, or to Napoleon Buonaparte, or to the Papacy.
Hence we have a _prima facie_ presumption that the book was composed in the reign of that Antiochus; nor can it be proved to have existed earlier: nor is there in it one word of prophecy which can be shown to have been fulfilled in regard to any later era. Nay, the 7th chapter also is confuted by the event; for the great Day of Judgment has not followed upon the fourth[19] Monarchy.
Next, as to the prophecies of the Pentateuch. They abound, as to the times which precede the century of Hezekiah; higher than which we cannot trace the Pentateuch.[20] No prophecy of the Pentateuch can be proved to have been fulfilled, which had not been already fulfilled before Hezekiah's day.
Thirdly, as to the prophecies which concern various nations,--some of them are remarkably verified, as that against Babylon; others failed, as those of Ezekiel concerning Nebuchadnezzar's wars against Tyre and Egypt. The fate predicted against Babylon was delayed for five centuries, so as to lose all moral meaning as a divine infliction on the haughty city.--On the whole, it was clear to me, that it is a vain attempt to forge polemical weapons out of these old prophets, for the service of modern creeds.[21]
V. My study of John's gospel had not enabled me to sustain Dr.
Arnold's view, that it was an impregnable fortress of Christianity.
In discussing the Apocalypse, I had long before felt a doubt whether we ought not rather to a.s.sign that book to John the apostle in preference to the Gospel and Epistles: but this remained only as a doubt. The monotony also of the Gospel had often excited my _wonder_. But I was for the first time _offended_, on considering with a fresh mind an old fact,--the great similarity of the style and phraseology in the third chapter, in the testimony of the Baptist, as well as in Christ's address to Nicodemus, that of John's own epistle. As the three first gospels have their family likeness, which enables us on hearing a text to know that it comes out of one of the three, though we perhaps know not which; so is it with the Gospel and Epistles of John. When a verse is read, we know that it is either from an epistle of John, or else from the Jesus of John; but often we cannot tell which. On contemplating the marked character of this phenomenon, I saw it infallibly[22] to indicate that John has made both the Baptist and Jesus speak, as John himself would have spoken; and that we cannot trust the historical reality of the discourses in the fourth gospel.
That narrative introduces an entirely new phraseology, with a perpetual discoursing about the Father and the Son; of which there is barely the germ in Matthew:--and herewith a new doctrine concerning the heaven-descended personality of Jesus. That the divinity of Christ cannot be proved from the three first gospels, was confessed by the early Church, and is proved by the labouring arguments of the modern Trinitarians. What then can be dearer, than that John has put into the mouth of Jesus the doctrines of half a century later, which he desired to recommend?
When this conclusion pressed itself first on my mind, the name of Strauss was only beginning to be known in England, and I did not read his great work until years after I had come to a final opinion on this whole subject. The contemptuous reprobation of Strauss in which it is fas.h.i.+onable for English writers to indulge, makes it a duty to express my high sense of the lucid force with which he unanswerably shows that the fourth gospel (whoever the author was) is no faithful exhibition of the discourses of Jesus. Before I had discerned this so vividly in all its parts, it had become quite certain to me that the secret colloquy with Nicodemus, and the splendid testimony of the Baptist to the Father and the Son, were wholly modelled out of John's own imagination. And no sooner had I felt how severe was the shock to John's general veracity, than a new and even graver difficulty rose upon me.
The stupendous and public event of Lazarus's resurrection,--the circ.u.mstantial cross-examination of the man born blind and healed by Jesus,--made those two miracles, in Dr. Arnold's view, grand and una.s.sailable bulwarks of Christianity. The more I considered them, the mightier their superiority seemed to those of the other gospels. They were wrought at Jerusalem, under the eyes of the rulers, who did their utmost to detect them, and could not; but in frenzied despair, plotted to kill Lazarus. How different from the frequently vague and wholesale statements of the other gospels concerning events which happened where no enemy was watching to expose delusion! many of them in distant and uncertain localities.
But it became the more needful to ask; How was it that the other writers omitted to tell of such decisive exhibitions? Were they so dull in logic, as not to discern the superiority of these? Can they possibly have known of such miracles, wrought under the eyes of the Pharisees, and defying all their malice, and yet have told in preference other less convincing marvels? The question could not be long dwelt on, without eliciting the reply: ”It is necessary to believe, at least until the contrary shall be proved, that the three first writers either had never heard of these two miracles, or disbelieved them.” Thus the account rests on the unsupported evidence of John, with a weighty presumption against its truth.
When, where, and in what circ.u.mstances did John write? It is agreed, that he wrote half a century after the events; when the other disciples were all dead; when Jerusalem was destroyed, her priests and learned men dispersed, her nationality dissolved, her coherence annihilated;--he wrote in a tongue foreign to the Jews of Palestine, and for a foreign people, in a distant country, and in the bosom of an admiring and confiding church, which was likely to venerate him the more, the greater marvels he a.s.serted concerning their Master. He told them miracles of firstrate magnitude, which no one before had recorded. Is it possible for me to receive them _on his word_, under circ.u.mstances so conducive to delusion, and without a single check to ensure his accuracy? Quite impossible; when I have already seen how little to be trusted is his report of the discourses and doctrine of Jesus.
But was it necessary to impute to John conscious and wilful deception?
By no means absolutely necessary;--as appeared by the following train[23] of thought. John tells us that Jesus promised the Comforter, _to bring to their memory_ things that concerned him; oh that one could have the satisfaction of cross-examining John on this subject!
Let me suppose him put into the witness-box; and I will speak to him thus: ”O aged Sir, we understand that you have two memories, a natural and a miraculous one: with the former you retain events as other men; with the latter you recall what had been totally forgotten. Be pleased to tell us now. Is it from your natural or from your supernatural memory that you derive your knowledge of the miracle wrought on Lazarus and the long discourses which you narrate?” If to this question John were frankly to reply, ”It is solely from my supernatural memory,--from the special action of the Comforter on my mind:” then should I discern that he was perfectly truehearted. Yet I should also see, that he was liable to mistake a reverie, a meditation, a day-dream, for a resuscitation of his memory by the Spirit. In short, a writer who believes such a doctrine, and does not think it requisite to warn us how much of his tale comes from his natural, and how much from his supernatural memory, forfeits all claim to be received as an historian, witnessing by the common senses to external fact. His work may have religious value, but it is that of a novel or romance, not of a history. It is therefore superfluous to name the many other difficulties in detail which it contains.
Thus was I flung back to the three first gospels, as, with all their defects,--their genealogies, dreams, visions, devil-miracles, and prophecies written after the event,--yet on the whole, more faithful as a picture of the true Jesus, than that which is exhibited in John.
And now my small root of supernaturalism clung the tighter to Paul, whose conversion still appeared to me a guarantee, that there was at least some nucleus of miracle in Christianity, although it had not pleased G.o.d to give us any very definite and trustworthy account.
Clearly it was an error, to make miracles our _foundation_; but might we not hold them as a result? Doctrine must be our foundation; but perhaps we might believe the miracles for the sake of it.--And in the epistles of Paul I thought I saw various indications that he took this view. The practical soundness of his eminently sober understanding had appeared to me the more signal, the more I discerned the atmosphere of erroneous philosophy which he necessarily breathed. But he also proved a broken reed, when I tried really to lean upon him as a main support.
1. The first thing that broke on me concerning Paul, was, that his moral sobriety of mind was no guarantee against his mistaking extravagances for miracle. This was manifest to me in his treatment of _the gift of tongues_.
So long ago as in 1830, when the Irving ”miracles” commenced in Scotland, my particular attention had been turned to this subject, and the Irvingite exposition of the Pauline phenomena appeared to me so correct, that I was vehemently predisposed to believe the miraculous tongues. But my friend ”the Irish clergyman” wrote me a full account of what he heard with his own ears; which was to the effect--that none of the sounds, vowels or consonants, were foreign;--that the strange words were moulded after the Latin grammar, ending in -abus, -obus, -ebat, -avi, &c., so as to denote poverty of invention rather than spiritual agency;--and _that there was no interpretation_. The last point decided me, that any belief which I had in it must be for the present unpractical. Soon after, a friend of mine applied by letter for information as to the facts to a very acute and pious Scotchman, who had become a believer in these miracles. The first reply gave us no facts whatever, but was a declamatory exhortation to believe.
The second was nothing but a lamentation over my friend's unbelief, because he asked again for the facts. This showed me, that there was excitement and delusion: yet the general phenomena appeared so similar to those of the church of Corinth, that I supposed the persons must unawares have copied the exterior manifestations, if, after all, there was no reality at bottom.
Three years sufficed to explode these tongues; and from time to time I had an uneasy sense, how much discredit they cast on the Corinthian miracles. Meander's discussion on the 2nd Chapter of the Acts first opened to me the certainty, that Luke (or the authority whom he followed) has exaggerated into a gift of languages what cannot have been essentially different from the Corinthian, and in short from the Irvingite, tongues. Thus Luke's narrative has transformed into a splendid miracle, what in Paul is no miracle at all. It is true that Paul speaks of _interpretation of tongues_ as possible, but without a hint that any verification was to be used. Besides, why should a Greek not speak Greek in an a.s.sembly of his own countrymen? Is it credible, that the Spirit should inspire one man to utter unintelligible sounds, and a second to interpret these, and then give the a.s.sembly endless trouble to find out whether the interpretation was pretence or reality, when the whole difficulty was gratuitous? We grant that there _may_ be good reasons for what is paradoxical, but we need the stronger proof that it is a reality. Yet what in fact is there? and why should the gift of tongues in Corinth, as described by Paul, be treated with more respect than in Newman Street, London? I could find no other reply, than that Paul was too sober-minded: yet his own description of the tongues is that of a barbaric jargon, which makes the church appear as if it ”were mad,” and which is only redeemed from contempt by miraculous interpretation. In the Acts we see that this phenomenon pervaded all the Churches; from the day of Pentecost onward it was looked on as the standard mark of ”the descent of the Holy Spirit;” and in the conversion of Cornelius it was the justification of Peter for admitting uncirc.u.mcised Gentiles: yet not once is ”interpretation” alluded to, except in Paul's epistle. Paul could not go against the whole Church. He held a logic too much in common with the rest, to denounce the tongues as _mere_ carnal excitement; but he does anxiously degrade them as of lowest spiritual value, and wholly prohibits them where there is ”no interpreter.” To carry out this rule, would perhaps have suppressed them entirely.
This however showed me, that I could not rest on Paul's practical wisdom, as securing him against speculative hallucinations in the matter of miracles; for indeed he says: ”I thank my G.o.d, that I speak with tongues _more than ye all_.”
2. To another broad fact I had been astonis.h.i.+ngly blind, though the truth of it flashed upon me as soon as I heard it named;--that Paul shows total unconcern to the human history and earthly teaching of Jesus, never quoting his doctrine or any detail of his actions. The Christ with whom Paul held communion was a risen, ascended, exalted Lord, a heavenly being, who reigned over arch-angels, and was about to appear as Judge of the world: but of Jesus in the flesh Paul seems to know nothing beyond the bare fact that he _did_[24] ”humble himself”
to become man, and ”pleased not himself.” Even in the very critical controversy about meat and drink, Paul omits to quote Christ's doctrine, ”Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth the man,” &c.