The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old

by George Bethune English

* The sum of our argument may be expressed thus. God is represented in the prophecies of the Old Testament as designing to send into the world an eminent deliverer, descended from David, the peace and prosperity of whose reign should far exceed all that went before him, in whom all the glorious things foretold by the prophets should receive their entire completion; and who should be distinguished by the character of the Messiah or Christ. This is an article of faith common to Christians and Jews. But that Jesus of Nazareth should be esteemed this Messiah, and that Christians can support that opinion, by alledging the prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures as belonging to, and fulfilled in, him, is what we can by no means allow, and that especially on account of these inconsistencies.

1. Because, these prophecies, acknowledged on both sides to point out the Messiah, could not otherwise answer the end of inspiring them than by an accomplishment so plain and sensible as might sufficiently distinguish the person meant by them to be that Messiah. But no such accomplishment, we contend, can possibly be discerned in Jesus, and, consequently, he cannot be the person meant by them.

2. Because, several predictions which Christians apply to Jesus, are wrested to a meaning which quite destroys the historical sense of scripture, and breaks the connexion of the passages from whence they are taken. Thus many shreds and loose sentences are culled out for this purpose, which do not appear to have any relation to Jesus, or to the Messiah either; but to have received their proper and intended completion in some other person, whom the prophet, as is manifest, had then only in view.

3. Because, in their forced applications of the prophecies, Christians, finding themselves hard pressed by the simple and natural construction, forsake the literal, and take shelter in spiritual and mystical senses; fly to hyperboles and strained metaphors, and thus expound the true meaning and importance of the prophecies quite away; the intent whereof being to instruct men in so necessary a point of faith as that relating to the Messiah, it is reasonable to think they would be delivered in the most perspicuous and intelligible terms. Since ambiguous expressions (capable of such strange meanings as they pretend,) would be too slippery a foundation to build such a point of faith upon; would be of no use, or worse than none; would be unable to teach the clear truth, and apt to ensnare men into dangerous errors, by leaving too great a latitude for fanciful interpretations, and introducing darkness and confusion, and contradiction inexplicable.

4. Because, admitting (as indeed it never was, or can be denied) that many passages of scripture, and of prophetical scripture especially, must be figuratively taken; yet, we must always put a wide difference between a sense not just as the words in their first signification import, and a sense directly the contrary of what they import. And yet we complain that this latter is the sense which Christians labour to obtrude upon the gainsayers. We say, that a kingdom of this world, and not of this world; contempt and adoration; poverty and magnificence; persecution and peace; sufferings and triumph; a cross and a throne; the scandalous death of a private man upon a gibbet, and the everlasting dominion of a universal monarch, must be reconciled, and mean the self same thing, before the prophecies appealed to, can do their cause any service. Granting, then, the goodness of God (according to them,) to have been better than his word, by giving spiritual blessings, instead of temporal; yet, what will become of the truth of God, if He act contrary to his word, even when it would be for our advantage, if He misleads people by expressions, which, if they mean any thing at all, must mean what the Jews understand by them?

In short, it seems to me, that if Providence has, in truth, any concern with the predictions of the Old Testament, it could not have taken more effectual care to justify the unbelief and obstinacy of the Jews, than by ordering matters so, that the life and death of Jesus should be so exactly, and so entirely, the very reverse of all those ideas under which their prophets had constantly described, and the Hebrew nation as constantly expected of their Messiah, and his coming; and to suppose that the Supreme Being meant to describe and point out such a person as Jesus by such descriptions of the Messiah as are contained in the Old Testament, is certainly substantially to accuse him of the moat unjustifiable prevarication, and mockery of his creatures.

In order that the subject we are examining, and the arguments we make use of, may be clearly understood by the reader, he is requested to bear in mind, that the author reasons all along upon the supposed Divine authority of the Old Testament; which is admitted by both Jews and Christians. Whether the supernatural claims of the Old Testament be just, or not, is of no consequence in the world to the controversy we are considering. For the dispute of the Jew with the Christian is one thing, and his dispute with the sceptic is another, totally different. For whether such a personage as the Messiah is described to be, has appeared eighteen hundred years ago, is quite a different thing from the question, whether such a personage will appear at all. The Christian says, that he has appeared in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This the Jew denies, but looks forward to the future fulfilment of the promises of his Bible, while the Sceptic denies that the Messiah has come, or ever will.

But the subject at present under consideration is the dispute of the Jew with the Christian, who acknowledges the Old Testament to be a Revelation, upon which a new Revelation, that of the New Testament, is founded and erected. To him the Jew argues, that if the Old Testament be a Divine Revelation, then the New Testament cannot be a Revelation, because it contradicts, and is repugnant to, the Old Testament, the more ancient, and acknowledged Revelation. Now God cannot be the author of two Revelations, one of which is repugnant to the other. One of them is certainly false. And if the Christian, conscious of the difficulty of reconciling the New, with the Old, Testament, attempts to support the New, at the expense of the Old, Testament, upon which the former is, and was, built by the founders of Christianity; then the Jew would tell him, that he acts as absurdly as would the man who should expect to make his house the firmer, by undermining, and weakening its foundation.

So that whether the Christian affirms, or denies, he is ruined either way. For he is reduced to this fatal dilemma. If the Old Testament contains a Revelation from God, then the New Testament is not from God, for God cannot contradict himself: and it can be proved abundantly, that the New Testament is contradictory, and repugnant to the Old and to itself too. If, on the other hand, the Old Testament contains no Revelation from God, then the New Testament must go down at any rate because it asserts that the Old Testament does contain a Revelation from God, and builds upon it, as a foundation.—E.

* There was nothing which gave the author, in writing this Book, so much uneasiness, at the apprehension of being supposed to entertain disrespectful sentiments of the Founder of the Christian Religion. I would most earnestly entreat the reader to believe my solemn assurances, that by nothing that I have said, or shall be under the necessity of saying, do I think, or mean to intimate the slightest disparagement to the moral character of one, whose purity of morals, and good intentions, deserve any thing else but reproach. That he was an enthusiast, I do not doubt, that he was a wilful impostor I never will believe. And I protest before God, that from the apprehensions above-mentioned alone, I would have confined the contents of this volume to myself, did I not feel compelled to justify myself for having quitted a profession: and did I not, above all, think it my duty, to make a well meant attempt, which I hope will be seconded, to vindicate the unbelief of an unfortunate nation, who, on that account, have for almost eighteen hundred years, been made the victim of rancorous prejudice, the most infernal cruelties, and the most atrocious wickedness. If the Christian religion be, in truth, not well founded, surely it is the duty of every honest and every humane, man, to endeavour to dispel an illusion, which certainly has been, notwithstanding any thing that can be said to the contrary, the bona fide, and real cause of unspeakable misery, and of repeated, and remorseless plunderings, and massacres, to an unhappy people; the journal of whose sufferings, on account of it, forms the blackest page in the history of the human race, and the most detestable one in the history of human superstition.—E.