And by the by, gentlemen, said I, (interrupting my narrative, and addressing the present company,) I may remind some of you who are great admirers of Professor Newman, that he admits (as indeed all must, who have had an opportunity of comparing them) the infinite inferiority of the Fathers, though he does not attempt to account, as surely he ought, for so singular a circumstance. He says in his Phases: "On the whole, this reading [of the Apostolical Fathers] greatly exalted my sense of the unapproachable greatness of the New Testament. The moral chasm between it and the very earliest Christian writers seemed to me so vast, as only to be accounted for by the doctrine ….. that the New Testament was dictated by the immediate action of the Holy Spirit." (Phases, p. 25.)
But to resume the statement of my early difficulties. I felt that the anomalies involved in the theory of the fictitious origin of the New Testament were almost endless; I said that, however hard to believe that any men, much less such men as Jews of that age, were capable of such achievements as I had already specified, I must believe much more still; for the men, with all their wisdom, were fools enough to make their enterprise infinitely more hazardous,—by intrusting the execution of it to a league of many minds, thus multiplying indefinitely their chances of contradiction; by adopting every kind and style of composition, full of reciprocal allusions; and, above all, by dovetailing their fabrications into true history, thus encountering a perpetual danger of collision between the two; all as if to accumulate upon their task every difficulty which ingenuity could devise! Could I believe that such men as those to whom history restricts the problem had been able, while thus giving every advantage to the detection of imposture, to invent a narrative so infinitely varied in form and style, composed by so many different hands, traversing, in such diversified ways, contemporary characters and events, involving names of places, dates, and numberless specialities of circumstance, and yet maintain a general harmony of so peculiar a kind, such a callida junctura of these most heterogeneous materials, as to have imposed on the bulk of readers in all ages an impression of their artless truth and innocence, and that they were writing facts, and not fictions? Above all, could they be capable of fabricating those deeply-latent coincidences, which, if fraud employed them, overreached fraud itself; lying so deep as to be undiscovered for nearly eighteen centuries, and only recently attracting the attention of the world in consequence of the objections of infidels themselves? We know familiarly enough, that to sustain any verisimilitude in a fictitious history (even though only one man has the manufacture of it) is almost impossible, because the relations of fact that must be anticipated and provided against are so infinitely various, that the writer is certain to betray himself. The constant detection of very limited fabrications of a similar nature, when evidence is sifted in a court of justice, shows us the impossibility of weaving a plausible texture of this kind. Many things are sure to have been forgotten which ought to have been remembered. If this be the case, even where one mind has the fabrication of the whole, how much more would it be the case if many minds were engaged in the conspiracy? Should we not expect, at the very least, the hesitating, suspicious, self-betraying tone usual in all such cases? Could we expect that general air of truth which so undeniably prevails throughout the New Testament,—the inimitable tone of nature, earnestness, and frank sincerity, which, in the case of such extravagant forgeries, would alone be marvellous traits? But, at all events, could we expect those minute coincidences, which lay too deep for the eye of all ordinary readers, and would never have been discovered had not infidelity provoked Paley and others to excavate those subterranean galleries in which they are found?
And here again I interrupted my narrative to remark, that Professor Newman acknowledges the force of these coincidences, and, as usual, gives no account of them. He says of the Horae Paulinae, in his "Phases": "This book greatly enlarged my mind as to the resources of historical criticism. Previously my sole idea of criticism was that of the discreet discernment of style; but I now began to understand what powerful argument rose out of combinations; and the very complete establishment which this work gives to the narrative concerning Paul in the latter half of the Acts appeared to me to reflect critical honor on the whole New Testament." (Phases, p. 23.)
But once more to resume my statement. Upon mentioning these and such like considerations to my infidel friend, who pleaded, that the New Testament was fiction, he replied. "As to the harmony in these fictions, —if they be such,—you acknowledge that it is not absolute: that are discrepancies."
Yes, I said, there are discrepancies, I admit; and I was about to mention that as another difficulty in the way of my reception of his theory: I refer to the nature and the limits of those discrepancies. If there had been an absolute harmony, even to the mildest point, I am persuaded that, on the principle of evidence in all such cases, many would have charged collusion on the writers, and have felt that it was a corroboration of the theory of the fictitious origin of these compositions. But as the case stands, the discrepancies, if the compositions be fictitious indeed, are only a proof that these men attained a still more wonderful skill in aping verisimilitude than if there had been no discrepancies at all. They have left in the historic portions of their narrative an air of general harmony, with an exquisite congruity in points which lie deep below the surface,—a congruity which they must be supposed to have known would astonish the world when once discovered; and have at the same time left certain discrepancies on the surface (which criticism would be sure to point out), as if for the very purpose of affording guaranties and vouchers against the suspicion of collusion. The discords increase the harmony. Once more, I asked, could I believe Jews, Jews in the reign of Tiberius or Nero, equal to all these wonders?
But all this, even all this, I said, was as nothing compared with another difficulty involved in this theory. How came these fictions, containing such monstrous romance, if romance at all, and equally monstrous doctrines, to be believed; to be believed by multitudes of Jews and Gentiles, both opposed and equally opposed to them by previous inveterate superstition and prejudice? How came so many men of such different races and nations of mankind to hasten to unclothe themselves of all their previous beliefs in order to adopt these fantastical fables? How came they to persist in regarding them as authoritative truth? How came so many in so many different countries to do this at once? Nay, I added with a laugh, I think there are distinct traces, as far as we have any evidence, that these very peculiar fictions must have been believed by many before they were even compiled and published.
My infidel friend mused, and at last said, "I agree with you that these compositions could not have been fictions in the ordinary sense, that is, deliberately composed by a conspiracy of highly imaginative minds. That last argument alone, of their success, is conclusive against that; but may they not have been legends which gradually assumed this form out of floating traditions and previous popular and national prepossessions?" In short, he faintly sketched a notion somewhat similar to that mythic theory, since so elaborately wrought out by Strauss.
I answered somewhat as follows:—If the first place, on this hypothesis, all the intellectual and moral anomalies of the last theory reappear. That such legends should have been the product of the Jewish mind (whether designedly or undesignedly, consciously or unconsciously, makes no difference), is one of the principal difficulties. If it had been objected to Pere Hardouin, that Virgil's "Aeneid" could nor have been composed by one of the monks of the Middle Ages. I suppose that it would have been no relief from the difficulties of his hypothesis to say that it was a gradual, unconsciously formed deposit of the monkish mind! But besides all this, I said, the theory was loaded with other absurdities specially its own: for we must then believe all the indications of historic plausibility to which I had adverted in speaking of the previous theory to be the work of accident; a supposition, if possible, still more inconceivable than that some superhuman genius for fiction had been employed on their elaboration. Things moulder into rubbish, but they do not moulder into fabrics. And then (I continued) the greatest difficulty, as before, reappears, how came these queer legends, the product whether of design or accident, to be believed? Jews and Gentiles were and must have been thoroughly opposed to them.
To this he replied, "I suppose the belief, as you also do, anterior to the books, which express that belief, but did not cause it. I suppose the Christian system already existing as a floating vapor and merely condensed into the written form. It was a gradual formation, like the Greek and Indian mythologies." I thought on this for some time, and then said something like this:—
Worse and worse: for I fear that the age of Augustus was no age in which the world was likely to frame a mythology at all:—if it had been such an age, the problem does not allow sufficient time for it;—if there had been sufficient time, it would not have been such a mythology; —and if there had been any formed, it would not have been rapidly embraced, any more than other mythologies, by men of different races, but would have been confined to that which gave it birth.