John Stuart Mill says: “It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith” (Liberty).
589
We are told that Christ manifested “a strong and enduring courage which never shrank or quailed before any danger however formidable.” Is this true?
It is not. When he heard that John was imprisoned, he retreated to the Sea of Galilee ([Matthew iv, 12, 13]); when John was beheaded, he took a ship and retired to a desert ([xiv, 13]); in going from Galilee to Judea, he went beyond the Jordan to avoid the Samaritans; when his brethren went up to Jerusalem he refused to accompany them for fear of the Jews ([John vii, 8, 9]); when the Jews took up stones to stone him he “hid himself” ([viii, 59]); when the Pharisees took council against him he fled ([Matthew xii, 14, 16]): at Gethsemane, in the agonies of fear, he prayed that the cup might pass from him; at Calvary, he frantically exclaimed, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!”
Commenting on this dying exclamation of Christ, Dr. Conway says: “That cry could never be wrung from the lips of a man who saw in his own death a prearranged plan for the world’s salvation, and his own return to divine glory temporarily renounced for transient misery on earth. The fictitious theology of a thousand years shrivels beneath the awful anguish of that cry.”
590
What was the character of Christ’s male ancestors?
Assuming Matthew’s genealogy to be correct, nearly all of those whose histories are recorded in the Old Testament were guilty of infamous crimes or gross immoralities. Abraham married his sister and seduced her handmaid; Jacob, after committing bigamy, seduced two of his housemaids; Judah committed incest with his daughter-in-law; David was a polygamist, an adulterer, a robber and a murderer; Solomon had a thousand wives and concubines; Rehoboam, Abijam, Joram, Ahaziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Manasseh, Amon and Jehoiachin, are all represented as monsters of iniquity; while others are declared to have been too vile to even name in his genealogy.