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

boiled) says, verse 43: “And the Lord said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of the passover: there shall no stranger eat thereof; but every man’s servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof, a foreigner and hired servant shall not eat thereof. In one house shall it be eaten; thou shalt not carry forth aught of the flesh abroad out of the house, neither shall ye brake a bone thereof.”

We here see that the case as it stands in Exodus is a ceremony and not a prophecy, and totally unconnected with Jesus’s bones, or any part of him.

John having thus filled up the measure of apostolic fable, concludes his book with something that beats all fable; for he says in the last verse: “And there are many other things which Jesus did, the which if they should be written everyone I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”

This is what in vulgar life is called a “thumper”⁠—that is, not only a lie, but a lie beyond the line of possibility; besides which, it is an absurdity, for if they should be written in the world, the world would contain them. Here ends the examination of passages called prophecies.

I have now, reader, gone through and examined all the passages which the four books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, quote from the Old Testament, and call them prophecies of Jesus Christ. When I first sat down to this examination, I expected to find cause for some censure, but little did I expect to find them so utterly destitute of truth, and all pretensions to it, as I have shown them to be.

The practice which the writers of those books employ is not more false than it is absurd. They state some trifling case of the person they call Jesus Christ, and then cut out a sentence from some passage of the Old Testament, and call it a prophecy of that case. But when the words thus cut out are restored to the place they are taken from, and read with the words before and after them, they give the lie to the New Testament. A short instance or two of this will suffice for the whole.

They make Joseph to dream of an angel, who informs him that Herod is dead, and tells him to come with the child out of Egypt. They then cut out a sentence from the book of Hosea, “Out of Egypt have I called my Son,” and apply it as a prophecy in that case.

The words: “And called my Son out of Egypt,” are in the Bible; but what of that? They are only part of a passage, and not a whole passage, and stand immediately connected with other words, which show that they refer to the children of Israel coming out of Egypt in the time of Pharaoh, and to the idolatry they committed afterwards.

Again, they tell us that the soldiers came to break the legs of the crucified persons, they found that Jesus was already dead, and therefore did not break his. They then, with some alteration of the original, cut a sentence from Exodus, “A bone of him shall not be broken,” and apply it as a prophecy of that case.

The words, “Neither shall ye brake a bone thereof” (for they have altered the text), are in the Bible; but what of that? They are, as in the former case, only part of a passage, and not a whole passage; and, when read with the words they are immediately joined to, show it is the bones of a he-lamb or a he-goat of which the passage speaks.

These repeated forgeries and falsifications create a well-founded suspicion, that all the cases spoken of concerning the person called Jesus Christ are made cases, on purpose to lug in, and that very clumsily, some broken sentences from the Old Testament, and apply them as prophecies of those cases; and that so far from his being the Son of God he did not exist even as a man⁠—that he is merely an imaginary or allegorical character, as Apollo, Hercules, Jupiter, and all the deities of antiquity were. There is no history written at the time Jesus Christ is said to have lived that speaks of the existence of such a person, even as a man.

Did we find in any other book pretending to give a system of religion, the falsehoods, falsifications, contradictions, and absurdities, which are to be met with in almost every page of the Old and New Testament, all the priests of the present day who supposed themselves capable, would triumphantly show their skill in criticisms and cry it down as a most glaring imposition. But since the books in question belong to their own trade and profession, they, or at least many of them, seek to stifle every inquiry into them, and abuse those who have the honesty and the courage to do it.

When a book, as is the case with the Old and New Testament, is ushered into the world under the title of being the Word of God, it ought to be examined with the utmost strictness, in order to know if it has a well-founded claim to that title or not, and whether we are, or are not, imposed upon; for as no poison is so dangerous as that which poisons the physic, so no falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith.

This examination becomes more necessary, because when the New Testament was written, I might say invented, the art of printing was not known, and there were no other copies of the Old Testament than written copies. A written copy of that book would cost about as much as six hundred common printed Bibles now cost. Consequently the books were in the hands but of very few persons, and these chiefly of the Church. This gave an opportunity