and merchandize overboard, to lighten the vessel, while Jonah like a stupid fellow, was fast asleep in the hold. After the lot had designated Jonah to be the offender, they questioned him to know who and what he was; and he told them he was an Hebrew; and the story implies, that he confessed himself to be guilty. But these Gentiles, instead of sacrificing him at once, without pity or mercy, as a company of Bible prophets or priests would have done by a Gentile in the same case, and as it is related Samuel had done by Agag, and Moses by the women and children, they endeavoured to save him, though at a risk of their own lives; for the account says, Jonah, chap. i., ver. 13, "Nevertheless [that is, though Jonah was a Jew, and a foreigner, and the cause of all their misfortunes, and the loss of their cargo,] the men rowed hard to bring it, (the boat) to land, but they could not, for the sea wrought and was tempestuous against them." Still, however, they were unwilling to put the fate of the lot into execution; and they cried [says the account] unto the Lord, saying, ver. 14, "We beseech thee, O Lord, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not upon us innocent blood; for thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased thee." Meaning thereby, that they did not presume to judge Jonah guilty, since that he might be innocent; but that they considered the lot that had fallen upon him as a decree of God, or as it pleased God. The address of this prayer shows that the Gentiles worshipped one Supreme Being, and that they were not idolaters, as the Jews represented them to be. But the storm still continuing, and the danger increasing, they put the fate of the lot into execution, and cast Jonah into the sea; where, according to the story, a great fish swallowed him up whole and alive. We have now to consider Jonah securely housed from the storm in the fish's belly. Here we are told that he prayed; but the prayer is a made-up prayer, taken from various parts of the Psalms, without any connection or consistency, and adapted to the distress but not at all to the condition that Jonah was in. It is such a prayer as a Gentile, who might know something of the Psalms, could copy out for him. This circumstance alone, were there no other, is sufficient to indicate that the whole is a made-up story. The prayer, however, is supposed to have answered the purpose, and the story goes on, (taking up at the same time the cant-language of a Bible-prophet,) saying, Jonah, chap. ii., ver. 10, “ And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land." Jonah then received a second mission to Nineveh, with which he sets out; and we have now to consider him as a preacher. The distress he is represented to have suffered, the remembrance of his own disobedience as the cause of it, and the miraculous escape he is supposed to have had, were sufficient, one would conceive, to have impressed him with sympathy and benevolence in the execution of his mission; but, instead of this, he enters the city with denunciation and malediction in his mouth, crying, Jonah, chap. iii., ver. 4, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." We have now to consider this supposed missionary in the last act of his mission: and here it is that the malevolent spir of a Bible-prophet, or of a predicting priest, appears in all that backness of character that men ascribe to the being they call the devil. Having published his predictions he withdrew, says the story, to the east side of the city. But for what? not to contemplate in retirement the mercy of his Creator to himself, or to others, but to wait with malignant impatience the destruction of Nineveh? It came to pass, however, as the story relates, that the Ninevites reformed, and that God, according to the Bible phrase, repented him of the evil he had said he would do unto them, and did it not. This, saith the first verse of the last chapter, Displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. His obdurate heart would rather that Nineveh should be destroyed, and every soul, young and old, perish in its ruins, than that his prediction should not be fulfilled. To expose the character of a prophet still more, a gourd is made to grow up in the night, that promiseth him an agreeable shelter from the heat of the sun, in the place to which he is retired; and the next morning it dies. Here the rage of the prophet becomes excessive, and he is ready to destroy himself. Jonah, chap. iv., ver., 8, " It is better, (said he) for me to die than to live." This brings on a supposed expostulation between the Almighty and the prophet: in which the former says, ver. 9, 10, 11, "Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then, said the Lord, thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow, which came up in a night, and perished in a night; and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons, that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand?" Here is both the winding up of the satire, and the moral of the fable. As a satire it strikes against the character of all the Bibleprophets, and against all the indiscriminate judgments upon men, women, and children, with which this lying book, the Bible, is crowded; such as Noah's flood, the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the extirpation of the Canaanites, even to sucking infants, and women with child, because the same reflection, that there are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, meaning young children, applies to all their cases. It satirizes also the supposed partiality of the Creator for one nation more than for another. As a moral, it preaches against the malevolent spirit of prediction; for as certainly as a man predicts ill, he becomes inclmed to wish it. The pride of having his judgment right hardens his heart, till at last he beholds with satisfaction, or sees with disappointment, the accomplishment or the failure of his predic tions. This book ends with the same kind of strong and welldirected point against prophets, prophecies, and indiscriminate judgments, as the chapter that Benjamin Franklin made for the Bible, about Abraham and the Stranger, ends against the intolerant spirit of religious persecution. Thus much for the book of Jonah. Of the poetical parts of the Bible, that are called prophecies, I have spoken in the former part of the Age of Reason, and already in this, where I have said that the word prophet is the Bible word for poet; and that the flights and metaphors of those poets, many of which are become obscure by the lapse of time and the change of circumstances, have been ridiculously erected into things called prophecies, and applied to purposes the writers never thought of. When a priest quotes any of those passages, he unriddles it agreeably to his own views, and imposes that explanation upon his congregation as the meaning of the writer. The whore of Babylon has been the common whore of all the priests, and each has accused the other of keeping the strumpet; so well do they agree in their explanations. : There now remain only a few books, which they call the books of the lesser prophets and as I have already shown that the greater are impostors, it would be cowardice to disturb the repose of the little ones. Let them sleep, then, in the arms of their nurses, the priests, and both be forgotten together. I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie; and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow. I pass on to the books of the New Testament. THE NEW TESTAMENT. The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation. As it is nothing extraordinary that a woman should be with child before she was married, and that the son she might bring forth should be executed, even unjustly: I see no reason for not believing that such a woman as Mary, and such a man as Joseph, and Jesus, existed: their mere existence is a matter of indifference, about which there is no ground, either to believe or to disbelieve, and which comes under the common head of, It may be so; and what then? The probability, however, is, that there were such persons, or at least such as resembled them in part of the circumstances, because almost all romantic stories have been suggested by some actual circumstances, as the adventures of Robinsor Crusoe, not a word of which is true, were suggested by the case o Alexander Selkirk. It is not then the existence, or non-existence, of the person that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and, while under this engagement, she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost, under the impious pretence (Luke, chap. i., ver. 35,) that "the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee." Notwithstanding which, Joseph afterwards marries her, cohabits with her as his wife, and in his turn rivals the ghost. This is putting the story into intelligible language, and, when told in this manner, there is not a priest but must be ashamed to own it.* Obscenity in matters of faith, however wrapped up, is always a token of fable and imposture; for it is necessary to our serious belief in God, that we do not connect it with stories that run, as this does, into ludicrous interpretations. This story is upon the face of it, the same kind of story as that of Jupiter and Leda, or Jupiter and Europa, or any of the amorous adventures of Jupiter; and shows, as is already stated in the former part of the Age of Reason, that the Christian faith is built upon the heathen Mythology. As the historical parts of the New Testament, so far as concerns Jesus Christ, are confined to a very short space of time, less than two years, and all within the same country, and nearly to the same spot, the discordance of time, place, and circumstance, which detects the fallacy of the books of the Old Testament, and proves them to be impositions, cannot be expected to be found here in the same abundance. The New Testament, compared with the Old, is like a farce of one act, in which there is not room for very numerous violations of the unities. There are, however, some glaring contradictions, which, exclusive of the fallacy of the pretended prophecies, are sufficient to show the story of Jesus Christ to be false. I lay it down as a position which cannot be controverted, first, that the agreement of all the parts of a story does not prove that story to be true, because the parts may agree, and the whole may be false; secondly, that the disagreement of the parts of a story proves the whole cannot be true. The agreement does not prove truth, but the disagreement proves falsehood positively. The history of Jesus Christ is contained in the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first chapter of Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the third chapter of Luke, there is also given a genealogy of Jesus Christ. Did these two agree, it would not prove the genealogy to Mary the supposed virgin-mother of Jesus, had several other childrer sons and daughters. See Matthew, chap. xiii., ver. 55, 56. a be true, because it might, nevertheless, be a fabrication; but, as they contradict each other in every particular, it proves falsehood absolutely. If Matthew speaks truth, Luke speaks falsehood; and if Luke speaks truth, Matthew speaks falsehood; and as there is no authority for believing one more than the other, there is no authority for believing either; and if they cannot be believed even in the very first thing they say, and set out to prove they are not entitled to be believed in any thing they say afterwards. Truth is an uniform thing; and as to inspiration and revelation, were we to admit it, it is impossible to suppose it can be contradictory. Either then the men called apostles were impostors, or the books ascribed to them have been written by other persons, and fathered upon them, as is the case in the Old Testament. The The book of Matthew gives, chap. i., ver. 6, a genealogy by name from David, up through Joseph, the husband of Mary, to Christ; and makes there to be twenty-eight generations. book of Luke gives also a genealogy by name from Christ, through Joseph, the husband of Mary, down to David, and makes there to be forty-three generations; besides which there are only the two names of David and Joseph that are alike in the two lists. I here insert both genealogical lists, and for the sake of perspicuity and comparison have placed them both in the same direction, that is, from Joseph down to David. Genealogy, according to Christ Genealogy, according to Christ 2 Joseph 3 Jacob 4 Matthan 5 Eleazar 6 Eliud .7 Achim 8 Sadoc 9 Azor 10 Eliakim 11 Abiud 12 Zorobabel 13 Salathiel 14 Jechonias 15 Josias 17 Manasses 81 Ozias 42 Joram 2 Joseph 3 Heli 4 Matthat 5 Levi 6 Melchi 7 Janna 8 Joseph 10 Amos 11 Naum |