Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

DEMONSTRATION THAT NO SUCH PERSON AS JESUS CHRIST EVER EXISTED

There were two very different opinions concerning Christ very early among Christians. Some, as Augustin says, believed Christ to be God, and denied him to be man; others believed he was a man, and denied him to be God. The former was the opinion of the Manichees, and of many others before them: of others so early, indeed, and so certainly, that Cotelerius, in a note on Ignatius's Epistle to the Trallians, assures us that it would be as absurd as to question that the sun shone at mid-day, to deny that the doctrine that taught that Christ's body was a phantom only, and that no such person as Jesus Christ had ever any corporeal existence, was held in the time of the apostles themselves Ignatius, the apostolic Father expressly censures this opinion, as having gained ground even before hit time. " If, as some who are atheists — that is, unbelievers— say, that he only suffered in appearance,"— an expression which, as Cetelerius observes, plainly shows the early rise of this doctrine. And from the apostolic age downwards, in a never interrupted succession, but never so strongly and emphatically as in the most primitive times, was the existence of Christ as a man most strenuously denied. So that though nothing is so convenient to some persons as to assume airs of contempt, and to cry out that those who deny that such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ever existed, are utterly unworthy of being answered, and would fly in the face of all historical evidence, the fact of the case is, that the being of no other individual mentioned in history ever laboured under such a deficiency of evidence as to its reality, or was ever overset by a thousandth part of the weight of proof positive, that it was a creation of imagination only.

To the question, then, on what grounds do you deny that such a person as Jesus Christ existed as a man ? the proper answer is:

Because his existence as a man has, from the earliest day on which it can be shown to have been asserted, been as earnestly and strenuously denied, and that, not by enemies of the Christian name, or unbelievers of the Christian faith, but by the most intelligent, most learned, most sincere of the Christian name, whoever left the world proofs of their intelligence and learning in their writings, and of their sincerity in their sufferings;

And because the existence of no individual of the human race, that was real and positive, was ever, by a like conflict of jarring evidence, rendered equivocal and uncertain.

It was distinctly charged against the early preachers of Christianity that they had adapted and transferred to their own use the materials they found prepared to their hands, in the writings of the ancient poets and philosophers ; and by giving a very slight turn to the matter, and a mere change of names, had vamped up a patchwork of mythology and ethics, a mixture of the Oriental Gnosticism and the Greek Philosophy, into a system which they were for foisting upon the world as matter of a divine revelation that had been especially revealed to themselves.

"All these figments of cracked-brained opiniatry and silly solaces played off in the sweetness of song by deceitful poets, by you too credulous creatures, have been shamefully reformed and made over to your own God".* Such is the objection of Coecilius, in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, written in dialogue, about the year 211.

A charge answered by admission, rather than denial, and corroborated by the never-to-be forgotten fact, that the Egyptian Therapeuts in their university of Alexandria, where first Christianity gained an establishment, were professedly followers and maintainers of the Eclectic philosophy, which consisted in nothing else but this very overt and avowed practice of bringing together whatever they held to be useful and good in all other systems ; and thus, as they pretended, concentrating all the rays of truth that were scattered through the world into the common centre of their own system. This is fully admitted by Lactantius, Arnobius, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Origen: and denied by none who have ventured fearlessly to investigate the real origin of Christianity.

* 'Omnia ista figmenta malesanae opinionis, et inepta solatia, a poetis fallacibus, in dulcedine carminis lusa, a vobis nimium credulis in Deum vestrum, turpiter reformata sunt.' — Minucius Felix in Apol.

Porphyry, whose very name is aconite to Christian intolerance, objects against Origen; that, being really a Pagan, and brought up in the schools of the Gentiles, he had, to serve his own ambitious purposes, contrived to turn the whole Pagan system, which he had first egregiously corrupted, into the new-fangled theology of Christians.

(Porphyry.—Theoderet calls him Ασπονδος ηυον νπολεμιος, And Ο παντων ημιν εχ9ιστνσ. Augustin calls him "Christianorum acerrimus inimicus".)

Celsus, in so much of his work concerning the "true Logos," as Origen has thought proper to suffer posterity to become acquainted with, charges the Christians with a recoinage of the misunderstood doctrine of the ancient Logos [Quasi refingernet—Τα τον παλυιον λογου παγαχουσματα.—Lib.3].

Charges thus affecting the character of Origen, the great pillar of the Christian church, cannot fall innocent of [a] wound on Christianity itself. Origen is the very first of all the Fathers who has presented us with a catalogue of the books contained in the New Testament. He was the most laborious of all writers; and his authoritative pen alone competent to produce every iota of variation which existed between the old Pagan legends of the Egyptian Therapeuts and that new version of them which first received from him the designation of the New Testament.^

... ^ See the Chapter on Origen

Bishop Marsh, in his Michaelis, the highest authority we could possibly appeal to on this subject,^a admits that, "it is a certain fact, that several readings in our common printed text are nothing more than alterations made by Origen, whose authority was so great in the Christian church, that emendations which he proposed, though, as he himself acknowledges, they were supported by the evidence of no manuscript, were very generally received".^b The reader will do himself the justice to recollect, that Origen lived and wrote in the third century, and that "no manuscript of the New Testament now extant is prior to the sixth century; and, what is to be lamented, various readings which, as appears from the quotations of the Fathers, were in the text of the Greek Testament, are to be found in none of the manuscripts which are at present remaining".^c

1. "The introduction to the New Testament by Michaelis, late professor at Gottingen, as translated by Marsh, is the standard work, comprehending all that is important on the subject." — The learned Bishop of Llandaff, quoted in Elsley's Annotations on the Gospels, vol. 1. (the introd.), p. xxvi.
2. Michaelis's Introduction to New Test., by Bishop Marsh, vol. 2, p 368
3. Ibid, vol.2, p.160.

https://archive.org/stream/diegesis00un ... g_djvu.txt
and https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/p ... tayl_0.pdf

American’s belief in angels (69%) is about on par with belief in Heaven and the power of prayer, but bested by belief in God or a Higher Power (79%).