"And they said unto him, Why do the disciples of John fast often, and make prayers, and likewise the disciples of the Pharisees; but thine eat and drink? And he said unto them, Can ye make the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days.
"And he spake also a parable unto them: No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better." (Luke v. 33-39.)
I have again resorted to italics. I think we have here a genuine speech of Christ, and a very important one. His doctrine was "new wine," and it was quite unfit for the "old bottles" of Mosaism. The gravity of this speech was felt by the Roman monks who were trying to force the new wine into the old bottles (with much prejudice to the wine), so they tried to nullify it with flat contradiction let in both above and below.
"For the old is better."
This completely contradicts Christ's eulogy of the Christian's "new wine." Moreover, the words are not found in Matthew's version, which makes the cheat more palpable. There, too, we have the gospel of eating and drinking, a gospel that did not require an avatâra of the Maker of the Heavens for its promulgation.
But supposing that we concede the two passages to be genuine, I do not see that the priests of materialism will gain very much.
These texts are internecine, involving contradictions due either to more than one author, or to an interpolator singularly deficient in logical consistency and common sense. The statement, as far as it is intelligible, is that Christ, having determined to forsake mystical for anti-mystical Israel, made the following enactments:—
1. That the ascetic practices that He had taken over from John the Baptist and the Nazarenes, and which in other gospels He enjoins under the phrase of "prayer and fasting" as the machinery for developing miraculous gifts, interior vision, etc., shall be discontinued by His disciples during His lifetime and then again renewed.
2. That feastings and the use of wine, which as Nazarites He and His disciples had specially forsworn, should be again resumed, with no restrictions in this case in the matter of His death. So that by one enactment His disciples after His death were to remain jovial "wine-bibbers" by the other fasting ascetics. It is scarcely necessary to bring forward the true Luke to confute the pseudo Luke.