The legend became more and more marvelous as it spread abroad. Enthusiasm inflamed the minds of the ignorant and superstitious until the subjective visions of Paul became crystalized into objective realities. His visions, and the visions, revelations and messages of the angels of others were reduced in popular belief to historical facts.
CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT HISTORICAL BASIS.
1. No one of the four gospels is mentioned in any other part of the New Testament. [This assuredly would not have been the case had they been the oldest, and the foundation on which the whole was built.]
2. No work of art of any kind has ever been discovered, no painting or engraving, no sculpture or other relic of antiquity which may be looked upon as furnishing additional evidence of the existence of those gospels, and which was executed earlier than the latter part of the second century. Even the explorations of the Christian catacombs failed to bring to light any evidence of that character.
3. The four gospels were written in Greek, and there was no translation of them into other languages earlier than the third century.
4. No manuscript of the gospels are in existence dating further back than the fourth century. Of that century, or the next, there are three or four, and some twenty or thirty, more than a thousand years old.
5. No autograph manuscript of any of the gospels has ever been known, so far as there is any authentic record, nor has any credible witness ever claimed to have seen such a manuscript. No one has ever claimed to have seen such a manuscript of either of the four gospels in the hand-writing of Luke, Mark, Matthew, or John. If the autograph manuscripts had ever existed they would have been preserved among the most sacred relics of the church.
6. During the first two centuries tradition was esteemed of more value and better evidence of the gospel history, than any written books or manuscripts.
7. The dialect in which the New Testament books were written, a sort of Hebraistic Greek, has been considered evidence of their antiquity. But this dialect prevailed three centuries after Christ, and was in full use during the second century. The same or similar Hebraisms abound in the apocryphal gospels of that age.