With all these palpable facts in view, to come to the examination of this question as if we knew nothing about them, or as if knowing them well, we cared nothing at all about them, and were determined to deny them their natural influence in begetting within us a very strong presumption in favor of its divine origin, were to declare that our heads and hearts were alike closed against light and love. But to enter on this inquiry into the origin of the Book which has produced such results, with a preconceived opinion that it must be a forgery, and an imposition, the fruit of a depraved heart, and a lying tongue, implies so much home-born deceit that, till the heart capable of such a prejudice be completely changed, no reasoning can have any solid fulcrum of truth or goodness to rest on. It is sheer folly to talk of one's being wholly unprejudiced in such an inquiry. No man ever was, or could be so. As his sympathies are toward goodness and virtue, and the happiness of mankind, or toward pride and deceit, and selfishness and savageness, so will his prejudices be for or against the Bible.
On looking at the Bible, we find it composed of a number of separate treatises, written by different writers, at various times; some parts fifteen hundred years before the others. We find, also, that it treats of the very beginning of the world, before man was made, and of other matters of which we have no other authentic history to compare with it. Again, we find portions which treat of events connected in a thousand places with the affairs of the Roman Empire, of which we have several credible histories. Now, there are two modes of investigation open to us, the dogmatic and the inductive. We may take either. We may construct for ourselves, from the most flimsy suppositions, a metaphysical balloon, inflated with self-conceit into the rotundity of a cosmogony, according to which, in our opinion, the world should have been made, and we may paint it over with the figures of the various animals and noble savages which ought to have sprung up out of its fornea, and we may stripe its history to suit our notions of the progress of such a world, and soaring high into the clouds, after a little preliminary amusement in the discovery of eternal red-hot fire-mists, and condensing comets, and so forth, we may come down upon the summit of some of this earth's mountains, say Ararat, and take a survey of the Bible process of world-making. Finding that the Creator of the world had to make his materials—a business in which no other world-maker ever did engage—and, further, that God's plan of making it by no means corresponds to our patent process and that the article is not at all like what we intend to produce when we go into the business, and that it does not work according to our expectations, we can denounce the whole as a very mean affair, and the Book which describes it as not worth reading. If one wants some new subject for merriment, and does not mind making a fool of himself, and is not to be terrified by old-fashioned notions about God Almighty, and is perfectly confident that God can tell him nothing that he does not know better already, and merely wants to see whether he is not trying to pass off old fables upon wide-awake people for facts—this dogmatic plan will suit him.
On the other hand, if one is tolerably convinced that he does not know everything, not much of the world he lives in, less of its history, and nothing at all about the best way of making it, and that when it needs mending it will not be sent to his workshop; that he knows nothing about what happened before he was born unless what other people tell him, and that, though men do err, yet all men are not liars, that all the blessings of education, civilization, law and liberty, from the penny primer to the Constitution of the United States, came to him solely through the channel of abundant, reliable testimony; that the only way in which he can ever know anything beyond his eyesight with certainty, is to gather testimony about it, and compare the evidence, and inquire into the character of the witnesses; that when one has done so, he becomes so satisfied of the truth of the report that he would rather risk his life upon it than upon the certainty of any mathematical problem, or of any scientific truth, whatever—that ninety-nine out of every hundred citizens of the United States are a thousand times more certain that the Yankees whipped the British in 1776, declared the Colonies free and independent States, and made Washington President, than they ever will be that all bodies attract each other directly as their mass, and inversely as the squares of their distances, that the sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right angles, or that the earth is nearer the sun in winter than in summer—and that certainty about the Bible history is just as attainable, and just as reliable, as certainty about American history, if he will seek it in the same way—and if he is really desirous to know how this Book was written, which alone in the world teaches men how to obtain peace with God, how to live well, and how to die with a firm and joyful hope of a resurrection to life eternal, and what part of it is easiest to prove either true or false—then he will take the inductive mode. He will begin at the present time, and trace the history up to the times in which the Book was written. He will ascertain what he can about that part of it which was last written—the New Testament—and begin with that part of it which lies nearest him—the Epistles.
By the comparison of the documents themselves, with all kinds of history and monuments which throw light on the period, he will try to ascertain whether they are genuine or not. And from one well-ascertained position he will proceed to another, until he has traversed the whole ground of the genuineness of the writings, the truth of the story, and the divine authority of the doctrine.
This is my plan of investigation; one thing at a time, and the nearest first. It is not worth while to inquire whether it be inspired by God, if it be really a forgery of impostors; nor whether the gospel story is worthy of credit, if the only book which contains it be a religious novel of the third or fourth century. We dismiss then the questions of the inspiration, or even the truth of the New Testament, till we have ascertained its authors. We take up the Book, and find that it purports to be a relation of the planting of the Church of Christ, of its laws and ordinances, and of the life, death and resurrection of its Founder, written by eight of his companions, at various periods and places, toward the close of the first century. There is a general opinion among all Christians that the Book was composed then, and by these persons. We want to know why they think so? In short, is it a genuine book, or merely a collection of myths with the apostles' names appended to them by some lying monks? Is it a fact, or a forgery?
In any historical inquiry, we want some fixed point of time from which to take our departure; and in this case we want to know if there is any period of antiquity in which undeniably this Book was in existence, and received as genuine by Christian societies. For I will not suppose my readers as ignorant as some of those Infidels who allege that it was made by the Bible Society. It used to be the fashion with those of them who pretended to learning, to affirm that it was made by the Council of Laodicea, in A. D. 364; because, in order to guard the churches against spurious epistles and gospels, that Council published a list of those which the apostles did actually write, which thenceforth were generally bound in one volume.
Before that time, the four Gospels were always bound in one volume and called "The Gospel." The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles universally and undoubtedly known to be written by Paul, to the churches of Thessalonica, Galatia, Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colosse, and to Philemon, a well-known resident of that city, and those to Timothy and Titus, missionaries of world-wide celebrity, the First General Epistle of Peter, and the First General Epistle of John, which were at once widely circulated to check prevailing heresies—were bound in another volume and called "The Apostle." The Epistle to the Hebrews, being general, and anonymous, i. e., not bearing the name of any particular church, or person, to whom anybody who merely looked at it could refer for proof of its genuineness, as in the case of the other Epistles—was not so soon known by the European churches to be written by Paul. The General Epistles of James, Jude, and the Second General Epistle of Peter, lying under the same difficulty, and besides being very disagreeable to easy-going Christians, from their sharp rebukes of hypocrisy, and the Second and Third Epistles of John, from their brevity, and the Revelation of John, being one of the last written of all the books of the New Testament, and the most mysterious—were not so generally known beyond the churches where the originals were deposited, until the other two collections had been formed. They were accordingly kept as separate books, and sometimes bound up in a third volume of apostolical writings. Besides these, at the time of the Council of Laodicea, and for a long time before, other books, written by Barnabas, Clement, Polycarp, and other companions and disciples of the apostles, and forged gospels and epistles attributed by heretics to the apostles, were circulated through the churches, and read by Christians. The Council of Laodicea did, what many learned men had done before them; it investigated the evidence upon which any of these books was attributed to an apostle; and finding evidence to satisfy them, that the Gospel written by Luke had the sanction of the Apostle Paul, that the Gospel of Mark was revised by the Apostle Peter, that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by Paul, and the other Epistles by John, Jude, James, and Peter, respectively, and not finding evidence to satisfy them about the Revelation of John, they expressed their opinion, and the grounds of it, for the information of the world.[66] Into these reasons we will hereafter inquire, for our faith in Holy Scripture does not rest on their canons. We are not now asking what they thought, but what they did; and we find that they did criticise certain books, reported to be written by the apostles of Jesus Christ some three hundred years before, approve some, and reject others as spurious, and publish a list of those they thought genuine. Infidels admit this, and on the strength of it long asserted that the Council of Laodicea made the New Testament. At length they became ashamed of the stupid absurdity of alleging that men could criticise the claims, and catalogue the names of books before they were written; and they now shift back the writing—or the authentication of the New Testament—for they are not quite sure which, though the majority incline to the former—to the Emperor Constantine, and the Council of Nice which met in the year 325. Why they have fixed on the Council of Nice is more than I can tell. They might as well say the Council of Trent, or the Westminster Assembly, either of which had just as much to do with the Canon of Scripture. However, on some vague hearsay that the Council of Nice and the Emperor Constantine made the Bible, hundreds in this city are now risking the salvation of their souls.
We have in this assertion, nevertheless, as many facts admitted as will serve our present purpose. There did exist, then, undeniably, in the year 325, large numbers of Christian churches in the Roman Empire, sufficiently numerous to make it politic, in the opinion of Infidels, for a candidate for the empire to profess Christianity; sufficiently powerful to secure his success, notwithstanding the desperate struggles of the heathen party; and sufficiently religious, or if you like superstitious, to make it politic for an emperor and his politicians to give up the senate, the court, the camp, the chase, and the theater, and weary themselves with long prayers, and longer speeches, of preachers about Bible religion. Now that is certainly a remarkable fact, and all the more remarkable if we inquire, How came it so? For these men, preachers, prince, and people, were brought up to worship Jupiter and the thirty thousand gods of Olympus, after the heathen fashion, and to leave the care of religion to heathen priests, who never troubled their heads about books or doctrines after they had offered their sacrifices. In all the records of the world there is no instance of a general council of heathen priests to settle the religion of their people. How happens it then that the human race has of a sudden waked up to such a strange sense of the folly of idolatry and the value of religion? The Council of Nice, and the Emperor Constantine, and his counselors, making a Bible is a proof of a wonderful revolution in the world's religion; a phenomenon far more surprising than if the Secretaries of State, and the Senate, and President Grant should leave the Capital to post off to London, to attend the meetings of a Methodist Conference, assembled to make a hymn book. Now what is the cause of this remarkable conversion of prince, priests, and people? How did they all get religion? How did they get it so suddenly? How did they get so much of it?
The Infidel gives no answer, except to tell us[67] that the austerity, purity, and zeal of the first Christians, their good discipline, their belief in the resurrection of the body and the general judgment, and their persuasion that Christ and his apostles wrought miracles, had made a great many converts. This is just as if I inquired how a great fire originated, and you should tell me that it burned fast because it was very hot. What I want to know is, how it happened that these licentious Greeks, and Romans, and Asiatics, became austere and pure; how these frivolous philosophers suddenly became so zealous about religion; what implanted the belief of the resurrection of the body and of the judgment to come in the skeptical minds of these heathen scoffers; and how did the pagans of Italy, Egypt, Spain, Germany, Britain, come to believe in the miracles of one who lived hundreds of years before, and thousands of miles away, or to care a straw whether the written accounts of them were true or false? According to the Infidel account, the Council of Nice, and the Emperor Constantine's Bible-making, is a most extraordinary business—a phenomenon without any natural cause, and they will allow no supernatural—a greater miracle than any recorded in the Bible.
If we inquire, however, of the parties attending that Council, what the state of the case is, we shall learn that they believed—whether truly or erroneously we are not now inquiring—but they believed, that a teacher sent from God, had appeared in Palestine two hundred and ninety years before, and had taught this religion which they had embraced; had performed wonderful miracles, such as opening the eyes of the blind, healing lepers, and raising the dead; that he had been put to death by the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, had risen again from the dead, had spoken to hundreds of people, and had gone out and in among them for six weeks after his resurrection; that he had ascended up through the air, to heaven, in the sight of numbers of witnesses, and had promised that he would come again in the clouds of heaven, to raise the dead, and to judge every man according to his works; that before he went away he appointed twelve of his intimate companions to teach his religion to the world, giving them power to work miracles in proof of their divine commission, and requiring mankind to hear them as they would hear him; that they and their followers did so, in spite of persecutions, sufferings, and death, with so much success, that immense numbers were persuaded to give up idolatry and its filthiness, and to profess Christianity and its holiness, and to brave the fury of the heathen mob, and the vengeance of the Roman law; that a difference of opinion having arisen among them as to whether this teacher was an angel from heaven, or God, whether they should pray and sing psalms to Him, as Athanasius and his party believed, or only give Him some lesser honor as Arius and his party believed, and this difference making all the difference between idolatry on the one hand, and impiety on the other, and so involving their everlasting salvation or damnation, they had embraced the first opportunity after the cessation of persecution, and the accession of the first Christian Emperor, to assemble three hundred and eighteen of their most learned clergymen, of both sides, and from all countries between Spain and Persia, to discuss these solemn questions; and that, through the whole of the discussions, both sides appealed to the writings of the apostles, as being then well known, and of unquestioned authority with every one who held the Christian name. These facts, being utterly indisputable, are acknowledged by all persons, Infidel or Christian, at all acquainted with history.[68]