In the end of the world the angels shall ... sever the wicked from the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire.
In vain do they worship me, teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men.
Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? [retort for the employer who pays the same for a day’s work and for an hour’s].
If ye have faith and doubt not ... even if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be done.
And his lord commended the unrighteous steward because he had done wisely.... And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when it shall fail, they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles.
I say unto you that unto everyone that hath shall be given; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors.... So also shall my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not everyone his brother from your hearts.
When such a mass of unmanageable doctrines is forced on the notice of the dithyrambists, there promptly begins a process of elimination—the method of Arnold, to which Mill would doubtless have subscribed, denying as he did that Jesus ever claimed to be the Son of God. Whatever is not sweetly reasonable in the Gospels, said Arnold, cannot be the word of Jesus; let us then pick and choose as we will. And justly enough may it be argued that we have been listening to different voices. It cannot be the same man who prohibited all anger, vetoing even the use of “Thou fool,” and then proceeded to vituperate Scribes and Pharisees in the mass as sons of hell; to curse a barren tree; and to call the erring “Ye fools and blind”—any more than it was the same man who said, “I am meek and lowly in heart,” and “A greater than Solomon is here,” or annulled precepts of the law after declaring that not a jot or tittle of it should pass away. But with what semblance of critical righteousness shall it be pretended that in a compilation thus palpably composite it was the teacher who said all the right things and others who said all the wrong, when as a matter of documentary fact the better sayings can all be paralleled in older or contemporary writings? That challenge is never so much as faced by the dithyrambists; to face it honestly would be the beginning of their end.
Some seem prepared to stake all on such a teaching as the parable of the Good Samaritan, which actually teaches that a man of the religiously despised race could humanely succour one of the despising race when religious men of the same race passed him by. Is the parable then assimilated by those who stress it? Can they conceive that a Samaritan could so act? If yes, why cannot they conceive that a Samaritan, or another Jew than one, could put forth such a doctrine? Here is a story of actual human-kindness, paralleled in a hundred tales and romances of later times, a story which, appealing as it does to every reader, may reasonably be believed to have been enacted a thousand times by simple human beings who never heard of the Gospels. Yet we are asked to believe that only one Jewish or Gentile mind in the age of Virgil was capable of drawing the moral that the kindly and helpful soul is the true neighbour, and that the good man will be neighbourly to all; so rebuking the tribalism of the average Jew.
When, fifteen years ago, I wrote of “the moderate ethical height of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is partly precedented in Old Testament teaching [[Deut. xxiii, 7]—an interpolation; cp. the [Book of Ruth]],” Dr. J. E. Carpenter indignantly replied: “The field of Greek literature is open; will Mr. Robertson take the Good Samaritan and from Plato to Plotinus find his match?” And the Rev. Thomas James Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., in his later work Jesus the Christ: Historical or Mythical? (1912), wrote (p. 68):—