Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith / Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity

by Robert Patterson

3. It is a hard matter to lie well. A liar has need of a good memory, else he will contradict himself before he writes far. And he needs to be very well posted up in the matters of names, dates, places, manners and customs, else he will contradict some well-known facts, and so expose his forgery to the world. Therefore writers of forgeries avoid all such things as much as possible, and as surely as they venture on specifications of that sort they are detected. A man who is conscious of writing a book of falsehoods does not begin on this wise: "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, Pontius Pilate being Governor of Judea, and Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip Tetrarch of Iturea and of the regions of Trachonitis, and Lysanias Tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiphas being high priests, the Word of God came unto John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness." Here in one sentence are twenty historical, geographical, political, and genealogical references, every one of which we can confirm by references to secular historians. The enemies of the Lord have utterly failed in their attempts to disprove one out of the hundreds of such statements in the New Testament. The only instance of any public political event recorded in the gospel, said not to be confirmed by the fragments of secular history we possess, is Luke's account of a census of the Roman Empire, ordered by Augustus Cæsar. Were it so that Luke stood alone in his mention of this, surely his credit as a historian would be as good for this fact, as the credit of Tacitus, when he states matters of which Suetonius makes no mention, or of Pliny, when he relates things not recorded by Tacitus. But we can account for the want of corroborative history in this instance, when we know that all the history of Dion Cassius, from the consulships of Antistius and Balbus to those of Messala and Cinna—that is, for five years before and five years after the birth of Christ—is lost; as also Livy's history of the same period. It is certain that some one did record the fact, for Suidas, in his lexicon upon the word apographe, says, "that Augustus sent twenty select men into all the provinces of the empire to take a census, both of men and property, and commanded that a just proportion of the latter should be brought into the imperial treasury. And this was the first census."

To object to the gospel history, that everything contained in it of the doings of Christ and his apostles in Judea, is not recorded by the historians of Greece and Italy, is much the same as to say that there are a multitude of facts recorded in D'Aubigne's History of the Reformation in Germany, of which Hume and Macaulay make no mention in their histories of England. How should they?—treating of different countries, and for the most part of different periods, and writing civil and not church history? Does anybody go to Macaulay to look for the history of the Westminster Assembly, or to Bancroft for an account of the Great Revival in New England? Or is the veracity of Baillie, or Edwards suspected, because political history does not concern itself much about religion? It is enough that not a single statement of the gospel history has ever been disproved.

I might give you quotations from the enemies of the Christian faith, from Josephus the Jew, and Celsus, and Porphyry, heathen philosophers, and from the Emperor Julian, the apostate—who, having been raised a Christian, became a heathen, and used all his ingenuity to overturn the religion of Christ—expressly admitting the principal miracles recorded in the gospel. But I attach no such importance to the testimony of this class of persons as to suppose that it should be placed, for one moment, on a level with the testimony of the apostles, or that their testimony to the facts of the life and death of Christ needs any confirmation from such witnesses. We have such overwhelming evidence of the sincerity and truth of the witnesses chosen by God to bear testimony to the resurrection of Christ, as we never can have of the credibility of any secular historian whatever.

You will remember that these are the writers whose accounts of the existence, the faith and worship, the numbers and morals of the Christian Church, we have seen so strikingly confirmed by their enemies; and we now inquire, Can we believe the other part of their history to be as true? These are the men who taught the heathen a pure Christian morality, one principal article of which was, "Lie not one to another, seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds"—"All liars shall have their portion in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone"—and we are to inquire if they themselves lied; lied publicly, lied repeatedly, if the very business of their lives was to propagate falsehood, and if they died with a lie in their right hands. You will remember that we proved conclusively that the belief of the death and resurrection of Jesus did turn immense multitudes of wicked men to a life of virtue, and now we are to inquire if the belief of a lie produced this blessed result, and whether, if so, there be any such thing as truth in the world, or any use in it?

4. Of no other series of events of ancient history do we possess the same number of records by contemporary historians, as of the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. We have four direct systematic memoirs of him by four of his companions; and we have a collection of letters by four others, in which the events of the memoirs are continually referred to. At the mouth of two or three witnesses any man's property and life will be disposed of in a court of justice, but here we have the testimony of eight eye-witnesses of the facts they relate, and they refer to five hundred other persons, the greater part of whom were then alive, who had also seen and heard Christ after his resurrection. These eight persons give us their separate and independent statements of those things they deemed worthy of record in the life and death of Christ, and of the sayings and doings of several of his friends and enemies. Now every person knows that it is impossible to make two crooked boughs tally, or two false witnesses agree. You never saw two lying reports of any considerable number of transactions agree, unless the one was copied from the other.

It is evident that the gospels were not copied from each other, for they often relate different events, and when they relate the same occurrence, each man relates those parts of it which he saw himself, and which impressed him most. Yet the utmost ingenuity of infidelity has utterly failed to make them contradict each other in any particular. Here are eight witnesses to the truth of the same story, four of whom in their letters make occasional allusions to the facts of the history as being perfectly well known, and therefore needing only to be alluded to, yet these cursory references fit into the history with every mark of truthfulness. Does the history of Matthew, written at Jerusalem, tell us that Jesus took Peter, and James, and John up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them? Peter, in his letter, written from Babylon, says, "We were eye-witnesses of his majesty. We were with him in the holy mount."—2 Peter ii. 10. If the history tells how Paul was beaten and cast into prison at Philippi, and his feet made fast in the stocks, and that, nevertheless, he manfully defended his birthright as a Roman citizen, and made the tyrannical magistrates humble themselves, and apologize for their illegal conduct, we find Paul himself, in a letter to a neighboring church, appealing to their knowledge of the facts, "that after we had suffered before, and were shamefully entreated, as ye know, at Philippi, we were bold in our God to speak unto you the gospel of God with much contention. For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile. For neither at any time used we flattering words, as ye know, nor a cloak for covetousness."—1 Thessalonians ii. 2. Hundreds of such undesigned coincidences may be found in the New Testament, confirming the veracity of the several historians and letter writers, and giving that impression of the naturalness and truth of the story, which can neither be described nor disputed. The reader who desires to prosecute this interesting branch of the evidences of Christianity will find an ample collection of these coincidences in Paley's Horæ Paulinæ.

This agreement of independent writers is the more remarkable, as the writers were persons of very various degrees of education, of different professions and ranks of life, born in different countries, and writing from various places in Italy, Greece, Palestine, and Assyria, without any communication with each other. Matthew was an officer of customs in Galilee; Mark a Hebrew citizen of Jerusalem; Luke a Greek physician of Antioch; James and John owned and sailed a fishing smack on Lake Tiberias; Jude left his thirty-nine acres of land, worth nine thousand denarii, to be farmed by his children when he went forth to preach the gospel; and college-bred Paul carried his sturdy independence in his breast, and his sail needles in his pocket, and dictated epistles, and cut out marquees and lug-sails in the tent factory of Aquila, Paul & Co., at Corinth. Several of his letters were written in a dungeon in Rome; the last of Peter's is dated at Babylon; Matthew's Gospel was penned at Jerusalem, and John's Gospel and Epistles were written at Ephesus. The agreement of eight such witnesses, of such different pursuits, and so scattered over the world, in the relation of the same story, in all its leading particulars, together with their variety of style and manner, and their various relations of minor incidents, yet without a single contradiction, are most convincing proofs that they all tell truth. Nothing but truth could be thus told without contradiction.

The fact that some considerable difficulties and many minor obscurities in these brief though pregnant narratives, prevent the combination of eight accounts so independent in their sources, and various in their style, and design, and auditors, into a flowing historical novel, a homogeneous mass, rounded and squared to our ideas of mathematical precision, is only an additional proof of their truth to nature, which abhors mathematical, as much as truth does rhetorical figures. Like the variety of expression used by American, German, French, and Polish witnesses in our courts of justice, testifying the same facts in their native idioms, though in English words, the apparent discrepancy, but actual harmony, becomes the most decisive test of the absence of any collusion, and consequently of the verity of the facts which such various witnesses unite in testifying. Especially will any such apparent discrepancy resolve itself into our own unskillfulness or ignorance, when we remember that the mists of ages, and the drapery of a strange language, and world-wide removal of residence, and the turning of the world upside down by the progress of Christian civilization, and our consequent ignorance of the thousand little details of every-day life, well known to the writer and his immediate readers, and of the force of expressive idioms, perfectly familiar to them—have rendered us not near so capable of detecting inaccuracies, as those contemporary writers and opponents, who allowed them—if they existed—to pass unchallenged. Like those antique coins, whose rust-dimmed and abbreviated inscriptions exercise the patience and historic lore of the antiquarian, though neither are needed to declare the precious material, this very rust of antiquity, through which his patience has penetrated, becomes one of the inimitable marks of historic verity. Every year throws some new light on texts difficult to us from our ignorance of those manners, customs, names, and places, which Infidel malice and Christian piety have combined to explore; and from the ruins of Nineveh and the sepulchers of Egypt we receive unlooked-for testimonies to the minute accuracy of the penmen of the Bible.

5. The manner in which the apostles published their testimony to the world bears every mark of truthfulness. Deception and forgery skulk, and try to spread themselves at first in holes and corners, but he that doeth truth cometh to the light. Had the apostles been conscious of falsehood, would they have dared to assert that Jesus was risen from the dead in the very streets of the city where he was crucified? in the temple, the most public place of resort of the Jews who saw him crucified? and to the teeth of the very men who put him to death? If conscious of falsehood, would they have dared, before the chief priests, and the council, and all the senate of Israel, to assert that "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Savior, to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins. And we are his witnesses of these things, and so is also the Holy Ghost which God hath given to them that obey him."—Acts v. 30. Would Paul, had he been conscious that he was relating falsehood, have dared to appeal to the judge, before whom he was on trial for his life, as to one who knew the notoriety of these facts, "For the king knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely; for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him: for this thing was not done in a corner."—Acts xxvi. 26. Would such appeals have been suffered to pass uncontradicted had the statements of the apostles been false?

The boldness of their manner, however, of telling their story, is little, compared with the boldness of the design which they had in view in telling it; which was nothing less than to convert the world. Now the idea of proselyting other nations to a new religion was absolutely unknown to the world at that time. The Greeks and Romans never dreamed of any such thing. They would sometimes add a new god to their old Pantheon, but the idea of turning a nation to the worship of new deities was never before heard of. The Jews were so indignant at the project, that when Paul hinted it to them, they cried, "Away with such a fellow from the earth, for it is not fit that he should live." And this new and strange idea, of conquering the world for a crucified man, is taken up by a few private citizens, who resolve to overturn the craft by which priests have their wealth, and to bring the kingdoms of the world to become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.