(Continued.)
PROPOSITION 4. The ancient enemies of the New Testament have virtually admitted its authority.
Infidels often object to the mode of argument which has been pursued, that our testimony has come from the friends of Christianity: to be of weight it should come from enemies. Profundity of logic! An infidel would not dare to testify to the authenticity of Paine's "Age of Reason," because forsooth he believes the doctrine contained in it!! Now let me ask who would be a better witness than the most rigid Christian? Think of Paul. One day his heart is filled with malice and revenge, being "exceedingly mad against" Christians, and going about to put them to death, compels them to blaspheme; the next day becomes convinced that Christianity is true, he becomes an humble penitent, and though "bonds and afflictions await him," and no earthly prospect before him, he spends the remainder of his days in advocating Christianity. Is his testimony not good? Recollect the friends of Christianity from whom we have quoted were all once enemies, but the preponderance of evidence being in behalf of Christianity, they were compelled to yield. Now will the infidel dare to say that their testimony is not so good as if they had become convinced of its authenticity and genuineness and still remained opposers? We think the fact of their being Christians gives weight to their testimony. But we will gratify the infidel by compelling51opposers to admit the authenticity of the New Testament.
As the fact that Thomas Paine wrote against the New Testament in the eighteenth century proves its existence at that time, so the fact that the apostate Julian wrote against it in the year 361, proves its existence at that time. And think you that if its authenticity could have been called in question, he would not have done it? He concedes and argues the early date of the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, but picks flaws with the doctrines of the New Testament. "He has also quoted or plainly referred to the epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians, and nowhere insinuates that the authenticity of any portion of the New Testament could reasonably be questioned."
Mr. Campbell quotes Julian as saying to Christians, "You are so unfortunate that you do not continue in those things which were delivered to you by the apostles. For their successors have dressed them up for the worse, and more impiously. For neither Paul, nor Matthew, nor Luke, nor Mark ventured to call Jesus, God. But that good man John, perceiving that numbers of the Grecian and Italian cities were caught with that distemper, and hearing, as I suppose, that the sepulchres of Peter and Paul were privately worshipped, was the first who had the boldness to pronounce it." Further, he objects to what John says, No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath revealed him. Whether then is this God word made flesh, the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father? and if he is the same as I think, then certainly even you have seen God; for he dwelt among you, and you beheld his glory.—
Let us ascend a little higher. In the year 270, Porphyry wrote a work against Christianity. It is said that he was the most severe and formidable adversary that Christianity had to meet with in all primitive antiquity. He was well acquainted with the New Testament. "In the little that has been preserved of his writings, there are plain references to the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John, the Acts of the Apostles and the epistle to the Galatians." Marsh says, "It never occurred to Porphyry to suppose it (the New Testament) was spurious.
This ingenuous writer denies the authenticity of the book of Daniel, and think you he would not have denied that of the New Testament if he could?
Celsus, a man of learning, wrote about seventy-six years after the last of the apostles. No one ever manifested a greater zeal in trying to ruin Christianity. His work lacks nothing in point of antiquity. If there was anything suspicious about the authorship of the New Testament, he must have known it. His book entitled "The True Word," is not extant, but the answer written by Origen, contains many long extracts from it. From the fragments of his work quoted by Origen, we can gather all of the particulars of the teachings, miracles, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, of Jesus Christ. Hence the New Testament is authentic, our enemies themselves being judges.
PROPOSITION 5.The language and style of the New Testament indicate that it was written by Jews who lived before the destruction of Jerusalem.
Upon this point Mr. Campbell remarks: "Each of these pieces was deemed by the writer perfectly sufficient to accomplish the object which he designed by it. But when all is collected into one volume, corroborating and illustrating each other, how irresistible the evidence, and how brilliant the light which they display! To him who contemplates the New Testament as the work of one individual, all written at one time, and published in one country; and to him who views it as the work of eight authors, written in different parts of the world, and at intervals in the extreme more than half a century apart, how different the amount of evidence, intrinsic and extrinsic, which it presents! The writers themselves, though all Jews, born in different provinces of the Roman empire, having each a provincial dialect, a peculiarity of style, and some of them of different ranks and avocations of life, give great variety to the style, and weight to the authority of this small volume. They are eight witnesses, who depose not only to the original facts on which Christianity is based, but to a thousand incidents directly or indirectly bearing upon the pretensions of the Founder of this religion; and from the variety of information, allusion, description, and reference to persons, places, and events, which they present to us, they subject themselves not only to cross-examination among themselves, but to be compared and tried by cotemporary historians, geographers, politicians, statesmen, and orators. In fact, they bring themselves in contact with all the public documents of the age in which they lived and wrote."
If the position taken by Mr. Campbell be true (and its truthfulness cannot be disputed) we have a three-fold cord against imposture. Would an impostor of the third or fourth century, if he were going to write a book to impose upon the people as an apostolic document, commence it in this wise? "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness, and he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." Luke iii, 1-3. Here in one sentence are twenty-three historical, geographical, political, and genealogical references; and it is said that every one of them can be confirmed by reference to secular history. The combined efforts of the enemies of Christianity have never been able to disprove one out of hundreds of such statements as the above. Such statements show where, and when the New Testament was written. They are characteristics of the apostolic age, also the nation and circumstances by which they were surrounded. The writers of the New Testament were Jews by birth, by education, and numerous strong attachments, and in different associations. The greater part of their writings were addressed to the Jews, hence their efforts in all their writings to remove Jewish prejudice and superstition. The religious institutions of the Jewish nation were in full establishment until after the death of all the apostles except one, hence we could not expect but that Jewish peculiarities should be found in the apostolic writings. Indeed we would look with suspicion upon any writings which did not abound with such peculiarities.
The national polity of the Jews ended at the destruction of Jerusalem, hence we should not expect the writings of those born this side of that event to be filled with such peculiarities. The New Testament is filled with words and phrases which are known to have been peculiar to Judea, in the times of the apostles. The continual allusions to the temple-services of the Jews as then existing, and which soon passed away, and the manner of expression used in the New Testament are such as none but Jews, brought up under the Old Testament were accustomed to use. The New Testament abounds with quotations from the Old, and references to the types and shadows of the law, with which none but Jews were familiar, and which could not have been introduced into writings as late as the second century without extreme awkwardness, inasmuch that the forgery would have been detected.
M'Ilvaine says: "In the times of the apostles, Greek was almost a universal language. It was spread over all Palestine. The Jewish coast on the Mediterranean was occupied by cities either wholly or half Greek. On the eastern border of the land from the Arnon upwards, toward the north the cities were Greek, and toward the south in possession of the Greeks.
Being thus favored on all sides, this language was spread by means of traffic and intercourse, through all classes, so that the people, though with many exceptions, considered generally, understood it, although they adhered more to their own language. But the Greek thus spoken in Palestine was not like that of Attica, nor of the cities of Asia Minor; but having become degenerated in consequence of its associations with people whose native tongue was Hebrew, by means of Chaldee and Syriac intermixtures, into western Aramean, it contained a large share of the idioms and other peculiarities belonging to its heterogeneous neighbor. Such was the language in which the apostles must have written. Now if the books of the New Testament be their writings, they must contain the characteristic features of that Palestine Greek. Such is most manifestly the case. These books are in Greek, not pure and classic, such as a native and educated Grecian would have written, but in Hebraic Greek; in a language mixed up with the words and idioms of that peculiar dialect of the Hebrews which constituted the vernacular tongue of the inhabitants of Judea and Galilee in the age of the apostles. Had it been otherwise, were the language of the New Testament pure and classic, then the writers must have been either native and educated Grecians, or else Jews of much more Attic cultivation than the apostles of Christ. In either case a suspicion would attach to the authenticity of our sacred books. Neither case being true, the evidence of authenticity is materially confirmed. But we go further.
"The Greek of the New Testament could not have been written by men who had learned this language after the age of the apostles. This mingling of Grecian and Aramean as it is preserved in the New Testament, ceased to be the familiar tongue of Christians in Palestine before the death of St. John. When Jerusalem with the whole civil and religious polity of the Jews was in the seventieth year of the Christian era, entirely destroyed, and the descendants of Abraham were rooted out of the land, and foreigners came in from all quarters to take their places, the language of the country underwent such changes, that except with a scattered few who had survived the desolation of their country, the Greek of the New Testament was no more a living language. When St. John died there was probably not a man alive who could speak or write precisely that tongue. In the second century an attempt to compose a book in the name of the apostles, and in imitation of their Greek, would have been detected as easily as if a full-bred Frenchman, never out of France, should attempt to compose a volume in a dialect of English, and endeavor to pass it off as the work of a plain, sensible but unpolished Yorkshireman. Hence, while doubts were entertained for a while in some parts of the church, as to the authenticity of some portions of the New Testament, it was never doubted whether they were written by men who had lived when the Greek of Palestine, as it had been in the apostolic age, was yet alive." Evidences, pp. 112-114.
PROPOSITION 6.The Christian ordinances testify to the authenticity of the New Testament.
Suppose it were possible for some one to conceive the idea of framing a document and passing it off upon the people of Michigan as their State Constitution, one which was adopted when this State became an Independent Sovereignty, and which had been obeyed from that time to this. How far would he proceed on such an errand until he would be told that the people of Michigan knew nothing about such a book, that indeed we had a State Constitution, but that this book never had been known, much less obeyed in this State. Suppose that in addition to the Constitution under which this State was organized, this book professes to contain certain historical facts, and among other facts which it professes to relate, it states that there was a terrible battle fought at the city of Detroit between the white inhabitants of the State and the Indians, on the tenth of August in the year 1804, in which the whites gained a great victory, and that from that time to the present every 10th of August had been celebrated as52a memorial of our deliverance; would not the fact that no such celebrations are or ever have been known be sufficient to refute the whole book? This illustration is feeble, but let us apply it. Supposing the New Testament to be a forgery of the third or fourth century. Somebody wrote the New Testament, and made Christians believe that for two or three centuries they had been reading it, referring to it as authority and obeying it. Moreover, it claims to have ordinances (baptism and the Lord's supper) which were instituted when the Lord was on earth, by which we remember his death, burial, and resurrection. Would not such a person be assured that we never heard of such a person as "Jesus of Nazareth," much less his death, burial, and resurrection? Not only so, but the celebrations your book speaks of are not found among us.
Again, it is a notorious fact that we have Christian ministers in this age. When did they commence, or how? The New Testament says that Christ ordained them and sent them out to preach, and promised to be "with them to the end of the world." Now suppose there were no ministers, would it not be objected that that part of the gospel narrative is false? If so, will not their existence prove the authenticity of that book which tells when they began their existence, and how?
Permit us here to leave the question of authenticity. When we consider the cloud of witnesses with which the Lord has encompassed this subject, we do not wonder that Sir Isaac Newton said, "I find more sure marks of authenticity in the New Testament than in any profane history whatever." Its integrity will claim attention in our next chapter.