Significant is the silence of the forty Jewish and Pagan writers named in this chapter. This silence alone disproves Christ’s existence. Had this wonderful being really existed the earth would have resounded with his fame. His mighty deeds would have engrossed every historian’s pen. The pages of other writers would have abounded with references to him. Think of going through the literature of the nineteenth century and searching in vain for the name of Napoleon Bonaparte! Yet Napoleon was a pigmy and his deeds trifles compared with this Christ and the deeds he is said to have performed.
With withering irony Gibbon notes this ominous silence: “But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world, to those evidences which were represented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world. Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phenomena of Nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect. Both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe” (Rome, Vol. I, pp. 588–590).
Even conceding, for the sake of argument, both the authenticity and the credibility of these passages attributed to the Roman historians, what do they prove? Do they prove that Christ was divine—that he was a supernatural being, as claimed? No more than do the writings of Paine and Voltaire, which also contain his name. This evidence is favorable not to the adherents, but to the opponents, of Christianity. If these passages be genuine, and their authors have penned historical truths, it simply confirms what most Rationalists admit, that a religious sect called Christians, who recognized Christ as their founder, existed as early as the first century; and confirms what some have charged, but what the church is loath to admit, that primitive Christians, who have been declared the highest exemplars of human virtue, were the most depraved of villains.
An unlettered and credulous enthusiast, named Jones, imagines that he has had a revelation, and proceeds to found a new religious sect. He gathers about him a band of “disciples” as ignorant and credulous as himself. He soon gets into trouble and is killed. But the Jonesists increase—increase in numbers and in meanness—until at length they become sufficiently notorious to receive a paragraph from an annalist who, after holding them up to ridicule and scorn, accounts for their origin by stating that they take their name from one Jones who, during the administration of President Roosevelt, was hanged as a criminal. The world contains two billions of inhabitants—mostly fools, as Carlyle would say—and as the religion of this sect is a little more foolish than that of any other sect, it continues to spread until at the end of two thousand years it covers the globe. Then think of the adherents of this religion citing the uncomplimentary allusion of this annalist to prove that Jones was a god!
CHAPTER III.
Christian Evidence.
The Four Gospels.
Farrar, in his “Life of Christ,” concedes and deplores the dearth of evidence concerning the subject of his work. He says: “It is little short of amazing that neither history nor tradition should have embalmed for us one certain or precious saying or circumstance in the life of the Savior of Mankind, except the comparatively few events recorded in four very brief biographies.”