The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine (read aloud books TXT) 📗

but complaining of his own hard case. He represents himself as surrounded by enemies and beset by persecutions of every kind; and by way of showing the inveteracy of his persecutors, he says, at the 18th verse, “They parted my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.”

The expression is in the present tense; and is the same as to say, They pursue me to the clothes upon my back, and dispute how they shall divide them. Besides, the word “vesture” does not always mean clothing of any kind, but property, or rather the admitting a man to or investing him with property; and as it is used in this Psalm distinct from the word garment, it appears to be used in this sense. But Jesus had no property; for they make him say of himself, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”

But be this as it may, if we permit ourselves to suppose the Almighty would condescend to tell, by what is called the spirit of prophecy, what could come to pass in some future age of the world, it is an injury to our own faculties, and to our ideas of his greatness, to imagine it would be about an old coat, or an old pair of breeches, or about anything which the common accidents of life, or the quarrels that attend it, exhibit every day.

That which is within the power of man to do, or in his will not to do, is not a subject for prophecy even if there were such a thing, because it cannot carry with it any evidence of divine power or divine interposition. The ways of God are not the ways of men. That which an Almighty power performs or wills, is not within the circle of human power to do or to control. But any executioner and his assistants might quarrel about dividing the garments of a sufferer, or divide them without quarrelling, and by that means fulfil the thing called a prophecy, or set it aside.

In the passages before examined, I have exposed the falsehood of them. In this I exhibit its degrading meanness, as an insult to the Creator, and an injury to human reason.

Here end the passages called prophecies by Matthew.

Matthew concludes his book by saying, that when Christ expired on the cross, the rocks rent, the graves opened, and the bodies of many of the saints arose; and Mark says, there was darkness over the land from the sixth hour until the ninth. They produce no prophecy for this; but had these things been facts, they would have been a proper subject for prophecy, because none but an Almighty power could have inspired a foreknowledge of them, and afterwards fulfilled them. Since, then, there is no such prophecy, but a pretended prophecy of an old coat, the proper deduction is, there were no such things, and that the book of Matthew is fable and falsehood.

I pass on to the book called the Gospel according to St. Mark.

The Book of Mark

There are but few passages in Mark called prophecies; and but few in Luke and John. Such as there are I shall examine, and also such other passages as interfere with those cited by Matthew.

Mark begins his book by a passage which he puts into the shape of a prophecy, Mark 50:1. “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; as it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.” (Malachi 3:1.) The passage in the original is in the first person. Mark makes this passage to be a prophecy of John the Baptist, said by the Church to be a forerunner of Jesus Christ. But if we attend to the verses that follow this expression, as it stands in Malachi, and to the first and fifth verses of the next chapter, we shall see that this application of it is erroneous and false.

Malachi having said at the first verse, “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me,” says at the second verse, “But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap.”

This description can have no reference to the birth of Jesus Christ, and consequently none to John the Baptist. It is a scene of fear and terror that is here described, and the birth of Christ is always spoken of as a time of joy and glad tidings.

Malachi, continuing to speak on the same subject, explains in the next chapter what the scene is of which he speaks in the verses above quoted, and who the person is whom he calls the messenger.

“Behold,” says he, 4:1, “the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.”

Verse 5, “Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.”

By what right, or by what imposition or ignorance, Mark has made Elijah into John the Baptist, and Malachi’s description of the day of judgment into the birthday of Christ, I leave the Bishop to settle.

Mark, in the second and third verses of his first chapter, confounds two passages together, taken from different books of the Old Testament. The second verse, “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee” is taken, as I have said before, from Malachi. The third verse, which says, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” is not in Malachi, but in Isaiah