Are the Gospels true?






Are the Gospels True?

by

RICHARD GINDER

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Are the Gospels True?
by

RICHARD CINDER

'JD after careful and searching

study we are forced to conclude
that there never existed such a person

as the one traditionally known as
Benjamin Franklin — or at most we
might concede that although there may
have been in the eighteenth century a

man who passed by that name, serious
scholarship and the rules of historical

criticism forbid us to attribute to him
the various marvels allegedly per-
formed under his auspices, for example

the experiments with electricity, the in-

stitution of insurance, the founding of

companies for fire fighting, etc/'

Absurd? Of course. But why? Be-
cause we have all read Franklin's
‘"Autobiography." We learned about
him back in the eighth grade. We can
go to the documents of his day and
reconstruct his activities from their evi-

dences.

— 3 —



Parallel

It is not surprising that the Gospels

should have undergone vicious attacks

in the course of their history. God
comes to earth, asserts His divinity,

does everything possible to back His

claims, and urges all men to take up
their crosses and follow Him. A hard
doctrine certainly. And if the cross be
hard, it is still more difficult to believe
that the creator of the universe should

have visited earth with the body of a
man, with ten fingers and ten toes like

yours and mine, and that He should
have sweated and shivered, and wanted

food and drink, and ached with fatigue,

and undergone all the other unpleasant

phases of human life.

The twilight had hardly fallen over
Calvary on that great Friday when the
first of the charges was made against
the veracity of the Apostles. The Jews
said to Pilate:

‘'Command therefore the sepulcher

to be guarded until the third day, lest

perhaps His disciples come and steal
Him away, and say to the people: ‘He
is risen from the dead.’ And the last
error shall be worse than the first.”

A guard was placed. Yet somehow
—4 —



the tomb was empty Sunday morning.

The chief priests immediately bribed
the soldiers, saying

:

''

'Say you, His disciples came by
night, and stole Him away when we
were asleep. And if the governor shall
hear of this, we will persuade him, and
secure you.' So they taking the money,

did as they were taught
;
and this word

was spread abroad among the Jews
even unto this day."

A Blunder
There is in a way an explanation of

the perfidy of the Jewish hierarchy.

Their acceptance of the Messias would

have meant their handing their author-

ity over to another. And now that they
had bungled their way into a cosmic
blunder by murdering "the desire of the
everlasting hills"—they must have real-
ized this because of the phenomena at-
tending the death of Jesus—there was
temptation to brazen the thing through

and cover up in the vain hope that
somehow the whole business could be
quashed.

Harder to understand is the attitude

of those in our day who persist in call-
ing themselves Christian despite the

fact that they call the Gospels myths

— 5 —



that invite reconstruction or, begrudg-

ing some little historic value to these
narratives, allow only enough of the
truth of the Gospels to make Jesus a
liar, imposter, fraud, swindler or

—

worst of all — an exalte — a misguided
dupe willing to be tortured to death in

support of his megalomania.

These people have not behind their

efforts the personal interest of the

Jews. They can expect nothing for
themselves except liberation from the

Christian ethic and its sanctions.

Here for instance in part is the reply

of The Christian Century (June 2,
1937) to an inquirer who asked, ‘^How
much of the Bible is to be taken as
factual and trustworthy, and how is
one to make sure of the portions that
are to be believed?'’:

'‘Jesus was the center and the main-
spring of the action of the Christian

community. Around His person a great
body of teachings, narratives, and writ-

ings of many kinds took form. Most of
these were authentic reports of His life

and words. But with them were min-

gled less trustworthy accounts. . . .

There are incidents which are integral

with the oldest documents and yet

— 6—



seem inconsistent with the spirit of Our
Lord. ... It is evident that it is not
only the privilege but the duty of the

student of Scripture to exercise his

right of judgment regarding the state-

ments of the Bible, remembering the

origin and character of the record and

the fact that the freedom to estimate

the historical and moral value of all

parts of the book, the right of private

judgment is the foundation stone of

Protestantism.^^

Private Selection

In other words choose as you go. If

you have no inclination to accept this

or that, throw it out. Why bother with
it?

Hence I should think it pleasant to
rule all mention of hell from the Bible.

Hell is an inconvenient concept, always

there to annoy me when I am tempted
to step beyond the moral law. Besides
I hate fire, and the idea of spending a

blistered eternity is positively appall-

ing. I shall just scratch those verses

from my Bible—but I shall certainly
keep the Christmas angels, just for the

children's sake.

So this is how private judgment
blends with scholarship

!

— 7 —



Let us give the problem a casual

examination. As you grew up, your
mother told you of Jesus and His
mother and of the miracles. As you
learned to think for yourself, you fol-
lowed the liturgical year through its

round of feasts, and your parents or

the sister at school explained the vari-

ous commemorated incidents from the
life of Our Lord. You heard passages
from the New Testament read at Mass
0very Sunday. There were wonderful

things there—strange happenings that
you recognized as unusual —but the
explanation was simple: Jesus was
God, and you had no difficulty in real-

izing that whoever could make the
world and all its creatures—you among
them—should of course find no trouble
in making water into wine or in raising
His friends from the dead.

Tradition

That is how you learned the story,
and that is how your fathers before you
learned it. That story together with

the all-important other written records

left by the many witnesses, beginning
with the Apostles and continuing even

to our own day—that constitutes the

— 8 —



corporate memory of the Church, tradi-
tion.

This tradition, mind you, is not to be

confused with the type that claims that

George Washington slept in every

other bed between Mt. Vernon and

Philadelphia. This Catholic tradition

involves the complete documentation

and continuous teaching of the Church,

all the way from St. Paul down to the
present great theologians — and the
Gospels are a part of that tradition.

Eyewitnesses

Suppose now that your mother had
tried to embellish the facts a little—per-
haps by adding an exciting miracle or
two of her own invention to the list.
What would have happened?
As you grew older, you would have

read the Gospels for yourself. Your
mother’s appended stories would not
have been there. You might even have
gone so far as to consult a Scripture

student, who of course would have
recognized your mother’s additions as

un-Biblical. Finally you would have
concluded that you had been the victim
of some pious entertaining.
How much chance then do you sup-

pose anyone would have had in trying

— 9 —



to garnish the Gospel facts as time

went on? None at all. Christendom
would have risen en masse to damn the
impertinence as a fraud.

Push the date back as far as you like,
and you will find always a similar set-

up. Until well past the year 100 A. D.

there were men on the Christian scene
who had been eyewitnesses of those
strange events in Palestine—men who
had been with Jesus during His public

ministry, who had heard His teaching,
had rubbed shoulders with the Apos-

tles. There were seventy-two disciples,

remember, and St. Paul told the Chris-

tian community at Corinth about the
risen Jesus: ‘‘Then was He seen by
more than five hundred brethren at
once, of whom many remain until this
present, and some are fallen asleep.'"

Complete

These men were well able to stand
guard over the deposit of facts that

they had been told to circulate through-

out the world. A vigilance committee
of more than five hundred should be

competent.

And what do you suppose would
have happened if the hot-tempered St.

Paul had sauntered into the Council of

— 10 —



Jerusalem and learned that St. Peter

had corrected a few of Our Lord's say-
ings because they were ‘'inconsistent

with the spirit of Christianity"? The
situation is impossible even to conceive.

By the time St. John died, the story
of Our Lord had been definitely set for
all time. John must have realized that

he was the last of the official chron-
iclers, for he closed his writings with

this warning:

“If any man shall add to these things,
God shall add unto him the plagues
written in this book. And if any man
shall take away from the words of the
book of this prophecy, God shall take
away his part out of the book of life,
and out of the holy city, and from these
things that are written in this book."

No one now had authority to add or
subtract.

Circulation

Let's take it for granted that St. Paul

was beheaded during the reign of Nero,
who died in 68 A. D. Now all of Paul's
epistles must have been written before
his head was chopped off; not even
critical scholarship or private judgment
can deny that a head is indispensable
for the writing of letters. This allows

— 11 —



about thirty-two years for those epis-

tles to have circulated under the vigi-

lance of that sharp-eyed committee that

had spent three exciting years with
Our Lord.

Think how far information can
spread in thirty-two years. St. Paul's

epistles must have seeped throughout
the Near East, to Greece, to Italy, even
to the young communities in Spain.
People were wo6ed from the pleasant
morality of paganism on the basis of

this teaching. They exchanged lust
and drunkenness for purity and sobri-

ety, arrogance for humility, selfishness

and greed for love of neighbor—all at
the behest of the God-Man. It would
have been impossible to change a word
of that doctrine in the face of these

earnest converts.

And think of the intricacies of Paul-
ine theology. Every letter of his pre-

supposes a doctrine already preached

by word of mouth. Paul writes hastily,
sometimes touching on the problems

referred to him, making mention of

profound mysteries that, he implies,

have already been expounded and need

no further development from him,

pressed for time as he is. And already

— 12 —



—between A. D. 57 and 60, only twen-
ty-five years or so after Our Lord’s
Ascension—he has put down the facts
of the Resurrection as though he were

reciting the points of a creed already

formulated and spread among the
Christians

:

No

'‘For I delivered unto you first of all,

which I also received, how that Christ
died for our sins, according to the

Scriptures; and that He was buried,
and that He rose again the third day,
according to the Scriptures; ,^nd that

He was seen by Cephas Peter, and after
that by the eleven. Then He was seen
by more than five hundred brethren at
once, of whom many remain until this
present, and some are fallen asleep.
After that. He was seen by James, then
by all the Apostles. And last of all. He
was seen also by me, as by one born
out of due time.”

St. Paul was educated. He was no
Galilean fisherman. He had learned to
hate Christianity. He had sat at the
feet of Gamaliel and studied Jewish
law. It took quite a lot to convert him,

and you may be sure that even after he
was struck from his horse on the way

— 13 —



to Damascus he gave the evidences
for Christianity careful scrutiny before

he ventured to preach the new creed.
Paul was not by any means a “boob/'
and, as one scholar has remarked, “He
would no more have believed in the
Resurrection of Jesus without convinc-

ing proof than you or I would believe
in the resurrection of Mrs. Eddy."

No; once the story of Our Lord's life
had been published, change was impos-
sible. Along with the oral tradition

there were always these official docu-

ments
;
in the beginning there were the

official witnesses to censor viva voce

new writings and guard the old.

Double Check

With the death of these witnesses
came the second generation, still close
to the life and times of Jesus. If my
father had walked with Jesus, and

eaten of the multiplied loaves, and

talked with Lazarus after he had

washed the grave-mold from his limbs,
I myself would know all these things
from him and would be an authority in
my own small way. Thus positioned
were Ignatius of Antioch and old

Bishop Polycarp, intimates of St. John
the Beloved.

— 14 —



Bulwarks

Still another factor enters to preclude

revisions of any sort: the peculiar na-

ture of sacred writings. It would be

bad enough scholarship and we would
all protest if a line of '‘Paradise LosP'

or of "Hamlet'' were altered; but let a

man touch the Bible—and a storm of
protest breaks loose. The same thing
could be said with equal force of Mrs.

Eddy's "Science and Health," or the

Koran, or the "Book of Mormon." We
are not especially interested in how
these books came to be written; but
now that they have been published,
their texts are likely to be static as long

as there is an interested person left to

vindicate them.

It is plain then that we have even
more reason to accept the New Testa-
ment as history than to accept, say, the
annals of the Pennsylvania Historical

Society. The Gospels hang together.
There is no contradiction. And we have
four stories by four individuals, each
story concerned with the life and works
of one man. These accounts were
eagerly snatched up by communities
throughout the world and copied and
recopied faithfully. No word might be

— IS —



changed, for the one purpose of these

communities was to preserve for all
time those truths without which no
man can be saved.

Thus the Episcopalian Bernard Id-
dings Bell can say in his ‘‘Preface to

Religion'' that the Gospels “ . . . have

been subjected to the most rigorous
critical study ever given to products of

the human pen. Out of that study they
have emerged with their first-century

historicity established."

Factions

The chief difficulty is that while one
great faction denies the historicity of

the Gospels almost entirely—examples
of this stand are E. F. Scott's “Orphe-

us," Headlam's “Jesus Christ in His-

tory and Faith," Kuhn's “The Problem
of Jesus," Grant's “New Horizons of
the Christian Faith," Gore's “Recon-

struction of Belief"—the other faction,
while it admits that the Gospels were

written by companions of Jesus, con-

demns the Gospel writers as ignorant
oafs who could not describe even what
happened under their very noses.

These persons accept the fabric and

then rip out of it whatever tends to

establish Jesus as God. Their principle

— 16 —



inevitably is : '‘If it is a miracle, it could

never have happened/^

Unbalance

The attitude is simply put by Renan
in his introduction to "The Life of

Jesus'": "That the Gospels are in part

legendary is evident, since they are full

of miracles and of the supernatural."

You can see that if Our Lord had
raised Renan instead of Lazarus from
the dead, Renan would still not have
believed it, which, you will agree with

us, shows a lack of mental balance.

How these people would have al-
mighty God Incarnate show His cre-
dentials, we do not know. It is enough
to say that they are dissatisfied with

the methods He used nineteen hundred
years ago. Those methods, they de-
clare, were not scientific.

This latter attitude is perhaps harder

to meet than that of the people who go
"whole hog" and throw out everything.

Such people take the supernatural from
every miracle. They make Christ a
clever magician who fooled the people
for His own ends

;
nor are they stopped

by the Resurrection. With Mr. Hall
Caine in his "Life of Christ" they

"believe" in the Resurrection too

:

— 17 —



‘"I believe in the Resurrection of

Jesus. I believe He rose from the dead
after (or within) three days. But I do
not find it necessary to believe any of
the physical stories that surround the

story of the Resurrection. I do not

believe in the story of the Jewish

watch. I do not believe in the stories

of Peter and John and their run to the
grave. I do not believe in the appear-

ance of Jesus to Mary Magdalen and
the other Mary on their way back to
Jerusalem. ... I do not believe the
story of Thomas and the sign of the
wounds in the hands and the side

;
the

eating of broiled fish, either in Jeru-

salem or in Galilee (on the shore).

‘T Believe"

‘T believe Jesus rose in the sense in-

dictated by St. Paul in I Cor., xv. He
died a temporal body. He rose a spiritual
body, ... I think all the rest of the

Resurrection story was imported into
it long after the event. ..."

This is private judgment at its most

private. St. Paul of course says in

I Cor., XV, nothing at all inconsistent

with the common-sense story of the

Resurrection that is narrated by the

Evangelists. Mr. Caine, like his ration-

— 18 —



alist bedfellows (he vehemently dis-

owns all his fellow disbelievers), does

not find it necessary to believe this . . •

or this ... or this. . . . What his crite-
rion of ''necessary'' is, no one knows
but Mr. Caine.

Lack of Finesse

Here is his ingenuous opinion of the

Gospels (not all "critics," alas ! are so

naive as Mr. Hall Caine) :

"I think the four Gospels are not the

work of four men but of many men
writing at different periods, changing

and copying according to their own
views of what was said and what had
happened, and influenced by the ever-

altering demands of their time."

What loose scholarship ! What a pity
to be seduced with such lack of finesse

!

"I think ... I think ... I think . . .

It is reasonable to presume ..."

It is every man's privilege to be mur-

dered intellectually by the swift stroke
of a stiletto

;
but to be flayed about the

head and shoulders with a broadsword
such as Mr. Hall Caine wields . . .
Well both methods are equally effec-
tive in the end.

— 19 —



Take Beethoven

Translating this Caine method into
a modern example, we arrive at a sin-
gular type of criticism. Take three
biographies of, say, Beethoven, the

composer: one by Paul Bekker, one by
Romain Rolland, and one by Robert
Haven Scha:uffler.

Now let us first of all begin to quar-
rel over whether or not the biographies

were really written by those gentlemen.

Let us say that it is not a case of Bek-

ker, Rolland, and Schauffler but of

certain groups passing under the names
of those three men; that we think in
fact that these three biographies are

the work, not of three men, but of many
men who wrote at different periods,
'‘changing and copying according to

their own views’" what Beethoven said
and did, men who were "influenced by
the ever-altering demands of their
time.”

In reading these works, we must also
remember our privilege of private judg-
ment. It is the duty of the student who
reads these works on Beethoven to exer-

cise his right of judgment regarding the

statements concerning Beethoven and

to remember the origin and character

— 20 —



of these records and the fact that the

freedom to estimate the historical and

artistic value of all parts of these biog-

raphies is the foundation stone of schol-

arship.

Was there, to begin with, a Bee-
thoven? And more: Were there such
people as the alleged Bekker-Rolland-

Schauffler group? Even if there was
such a composer, and if these marvel-

ous narratives are true, I do not find it

necessary to believe that Beethoven

wrote the Ninth Symphony — the so-
called ''Choral Symphony’' — so often
attributed to him. I think he may in
some mysterious way have had a
psychic influence on its inspiration and

notation
;
we may assume that he knew

of it and consented to put his name
atop the score

;
but beyond that we can-

not go.

More Selection

We think that some degree of accu-
racy may be attributed to Bekker-
Rolland-Schauffler, but surely we are
not expected to credit all this nonsense

about Beethoven’s musical gifts. It

would be well in fact for the reader to
bear in mind the biographers’ (if there
really were such people) devotion to

— 21 —



the alleged composer and to judge ac-
cordingly, being careful not to admit

that Beethoven had any activities or

talents that might distinguish him

from the ordinary individual.

Reductio ad

—

What is wrong with this analysis of
Beethoven and his biographers? It is a
reduction to the absurd. But it is car-

ried out very logically; we have only
applied modern critical scholarship to
a matter of present-day interest.

Four men sit down to execute a
sacred trust. Each man does the thing
individually. He means to recount sin-
cerely his memories—collected by expe-
rience or from firsthand sources—of the
most brilliant teacher who ever entered
the world. Each tells his story straight-
forwardly, writing —^in language that
everyone can understand — just what
he saw or heard.

How would Renan have done it? or
Hall Caine? or the editors of The
Christian Century?

Because miracles are hard to believe,

were the Evangelists to omit them? It
all must have been very convincing to
the early Christians, who were in a
position to know the truth. They did

— 22—



not hesitate to face the lions, or to burn

in pitch, or literally lose their heads in

testimony to the truth of these things

that were written. And they could so
easily have applied that handy little

principle of private judgment and de-

cided that so humane a Lord as Jesus
Christ would not mind if they compro-
mised a shade and threw a few grains

of incense into the fire burning before

the altar of Augustus. After all, they

might have argued, it is the spirit of

the Gospels that must be kept, not the

letter.

Rapidity

The pseudo Christians find great
difficulty in explaining the rapid spread

and acceptance of these four documents

throughout the then-known world. The
explanation is simple: There were the

splendid Roman roads and the mer-
chants and legionnaires to carry the
story of Jesus from the lower Danube
all the way up to England. If these
documents were such obvious fabrica-
tions made up for the most part of
whole cloth, how was it possible that
everyone swallowed them? Why there
was no time for additions of miracles

;

they were all in the documents from

— 23 —



the beginning. These pseudo Christians
know well that once the Christians laid
hands on an authentic account of

Christ’s life, not even the angels could

force a revision of that account.

Nor can the ^'critics” account for the
fact that the spurious gospels were

everywhere rejected. Can it be that
these apocryphal writings really did

not square with the oral Gospel? But if

our higher ''critics” conceded this, by

that same admission they would be
granting the historicity of the four

canonical Gospels.

Some History

Even first-century Christian docu-
ments show a familiarity with the
Gospels, as can be seen in "The Shep-
herd of Hermas,” "The Doctrine of the
Twelve Apostles,” etc. In Asia, Papias,
who lived in the time of about 125-1 SO
A. D., quotes the Evangelists. St. Jus-

tin, who lived in the time of about
100-167 A. D., moved from Palestine to
Rome and found that the same doc-
trines were being taught in both

places; his writings, based on the Gos-

pels, were everywhere accepted as or-

thodox. St. Irenaeus, who lived in the

— 24 —



time of about 135-203 A. D., was an-
other of these migrants, moving from
Asia to France and finally to Rome

;
his

writings quote all four of the Gospels.

By about 200 A. D. someone decided
to draw up a list of the genuine Gos-
pels, the books that were then used in

Rome. What remains of that list is
called the Muratorian Fragment, so

called because time has left us only a

section of the original document.

The texts themselves, the oldest
manuscripts, go back to the fourth cen-

tury. The oldest of the secular manu-
scripts that we have, a text of Horace,
goes back only to the seventh century

—and who questions the authenticity
of Horace? The Syriac translation of
the Bible dates from about the year

150 A. D.; and toward the year 200
A. D. Tertullian speaks of an ‘'old''

Latin version. “Old" in the year 200

!

Even Apostates

Even before St. John wrote his Gos-
pel, the Church was fighting Jewish
dissidents—who twisted St. Matthew's
Gospel to suit their own purpose—and
another group of heretics who, like con-
temporary scholars, refusing to fall on

— 25 —



their knees before Jesus, separated

Christ’s divinity from His humanity

and stole their thunder from St. Mark’s

Gospel. In the second century Marcion,

an anti-Semite of his time, threw out all

of the Gospels except the one written

by the gentile St. Luke, which Gospel

he censored for his own use and there-
by regarded it as authentic.

Of all those who in early times raised
their voices against the Church, no one

was so brazen as to deny the historic

value of these four records. No one
hated Christianity so earnestly as did

Julian the Apostate; yet it never oc-

curred to him, educated as he was, to

impugn the historicity of the Gospels.

Such a stand would, he knew, be

scoffed at.

The Gospels themselves show that
their authors knew their subject. Open
any of the Gospels at random, and you

will find striking detail work, casual

trivia, which reveal the hand of the eye-

witness. That SS. Matthew, Mark, and

John were Jews is patent. Luke ex-

plains Jewish customs for gentile

readers.

— 26 —



Marks of Truth

The Evangelists list data which
might have proved embarrassing to

them. Peter, we are told, denied his
Lord three times; almost all of the

Apostles left Christ to die unattended;

John and James were frankly ambi-

tious
;
and all of them were rather

stupid when it came to understanding
the parables. Was this the work of
forgers? These men were the chief
bishops of this new organization, and
St. Peter, the archcoward, was Pope

!

Compare the Gospels with the Koran
in this matter. Mohammed is most
careful to include nothing that might

disparage himself.

In fact the Evangelists would have
had to be gifted with superhuman cun-
ning to have been guilty of all the fraud

laid to their charge by the sharp wits
of the rationalists. The Evangelists
were only poor artisans

;
none of them

was a Barnum, and not even sixty
Barnums could ever make the world
believe that a man allowed himself to
be murdered and then got up from the
dead three days later. People do not so

easily stake their lives and fortunes on

--27 —



trickery. There must haves been a fact
behind the story.

Characteristics

The Gospels were written—the first
three—before the year 70 A. D. They
carry Christ’s prophecy concerning the

destruction of the Temple (what a
feather in the cap of Christianity was
the fulfillment of this prophecy by
Titus in the year 70 A. D. !), yet the

Gospels and the Acts are silent on the

matter of the fulfillment of this

prophecy.

It can be proved that all of the Gos-

pels were written by the traditional
authors. All of them have peculiar
characteristics that penetrate the narra-

tive consistently. Who could doubt for
instance that the Beloved Disciple

wrote the Fourth Gospel? or that the

gentile physician Luke, the companion

of Paul, wrote the third Gospel and the

Acts?

If the "‘critics” agreed among them-
selves, then one might be tempted to

hear them out. But in the face of a
uniform tradition that has never varied

throughout nineteen hundred years

their bickering among themselves over

28 —



an explanation of the obvious is sheer

impudence. One of them made the

sweeping statement that to begin with

all orientals are liars and that it re-

mained for us to sift the wheat from

the tare.

Explosions

This theory was exploded by another

''critic/' who said that the first of the
Gospels was not written until a hun-

dred years or so after the death of

Jesus, during which century the faith-

ful had enough time to elaborate the

facts.

This theory was in turn scoffed at by
a group of German scholars who held
that Christianity evolved naturally

from Judaism under the inspiration of

Our Lord. St. Paul, they said, gave
Christianity its present form.

And all these theories have been
blasted by contemporary "scholarship,"

which speaks glibly, if vaguely, of our

"idealization" . . . "enthusiasm" . . .

stealing from various Greek myths . . .

and which rules out the supernatural

completely.

— 29 —



Miracles

These ‘‘scholars'' would substitute
for the historic Christ a kind of Harry

Houdini, forgetting that Houdini had

to carry a carload of paraphernalia to

work a few tricks on a one-night stand.

Christ, according to them, changed

wine into wine, or water into water

—

anything but water into wine. He
awoke Lazarus, the daughter of Jairus,
the widow's son, and the son of the

synagogue ruler from cataleptic trances

which were inexplicably accompanied

by putrefaction of the body and all the

other phenomena of death. Why this
epidemic of catalepsy was so conven-
iently current in first-century Palestine

is not explained.. Christ, we are told,
fed the five thousand with a few loaves

and fishes—or He had a pack train slip
in through the desert behind the disci-

ples without their knowing it. The
shepherds imagined they saw angels on
the night of Christ's birth; the Evan-

gelists imagined that Christ and Peter

walked on the sea; Peter, James, and

John dreamed up the Transfiguration;

the stilling of the storm was a natural
coincidence; the woman who had the

— 30 —



issue of blood was healed by the power

of suggestion
;
and so on.

Do they think we are out of our
senses? Such a succession of imagin-

ings, coincidences, and suggestions

would presuppose a miracle greater al-

most than any miracle Christ worked in

his lifetime.

Firstborn

As for ‘"enthusiasm’" . . . “idealiza-
tion” ... St. Paul began his writings

in about the year 57 A. D., and the

epistles very obviously reveal the writ-

er’s previous recognition of Jesus’s

divinity.

“For let this mind be in you, which
was also in Christ Jesus; who being in
the form of God, thought it not robbery

to be equal with God; but emptied
Himself, taking the form of a servant,

being made in the likeness of men, and
in habit found as a man. . . . For which

cause God also hath exalted Him, and
hath given Him a name which is above
all names; that in the name of Jesus
every knee should bow, of those that

are in heaven, on earth, and under the

earth.”

— 31 —



It is Jesus Christ of whom the Evan-
gelist Paul is speaking when he says:
'‘In whom we have redemption through
His blood, the remission of sins. Who
is the image of the invisible God, the

first born of every creature. For in Him
were all things created in heaven and
on earth, visible and invisible, whether

thrones, or dominations, or principali-

ties, or powers. All things were created

by Him [Jesus] and in Him. And He
is before all, and by Him all things con-
sist.^^

A Question

No one even among the sweet-faced
hypocrites of our day has ventured to

deny the fact that these two epistles

—

to the Philippians and to the Colossians
—^were written by the Jew Paul some
time between 57 and 67 A. D.

That date allows about thirty-three

years at the outside for the Nazarene

carpenter to have been made into God
Almighty—if we are to admit idealiza-
tion. That is a large order, too large.

Mother Eddy, Joseph Smith, Father

Divine—all have, or had, more noto-
riety and systematic publicity in their

day than did Jesus of Nazareth in His.

Yet do you suppose that by 1972, or

— 32 —



2072, or 2172 anyone will be calling

Father Divine (God forgive me !)
. . the image of the invisible God, the

firstborn of every creature ... in whom
. . . all things were created . . . [and

who] is before all, and by [whom] . . .
all things consist''?

Conclusion

If these people do not believe in

Christ, do not want His Gospels, why
do they persist in calling themselves

Christians? Why do they not rip ofiE
the mask and admit their skepticism?
But they masquerade as disciples of

Jesus, writing interminable books that

can deceive only the uncritical; they

are double-tongued dupes, all of them.

. they are blind, and leaders of

the blind. And if the blind lead the
blind, both fall into the pit . . . because

seeing they see not, and hearing they

hear not . . .

.

"

Preachers of a watered, emasculated

form of Christianity, unbelieving Chris-

tians speaking piously of the ^'Christ

of History" and the '"Christ of Faith."
As though there were any difference
between the two

!

— 33 —



Christ towers over the incessant

wrangling of these critics. His quiet

voice is heard over the hurly-burly of

addleheaded scholarship. His gentle

authority still bids His disciples teach

all nations to observe all things what-

soever He has commanded. And He is
with us all days, even to the consum-

mation of the world.

— 34—



Two Pamphlets for
Frequent Use

How to Pray the Mass
“The Mass is our sacrifice .... Realizing this,

the Catholic wants to fulfill his royal priesthood

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an active participant.”

The pamphlet “How to Pray the Mass”
gives six methods of assisting at holy Mass.

Their variety and beauty will help to keep de-

votion fresh and glowing.

Thanksgiving After Holy
Communion

“The most precious moments of a lifetime
are those immediately after Holy Communion.
For a brief quarter of an hour our hearts are
seaors of heaven. Jesus Christ, Son of God
and Second Person of the Blessed Trinity,
Savior, Master, King of Kings, is there.”

In “Thanksgiving after Holy Communion”
Father Lord suggests eleven ways to make the
most of those precious minutes in intimate union
with Christ.

Both pamphlets: Single copy: 10c (by mail,

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Let's See the Other Side

The Light of the World

Has Life Any Meaning?
A Letter to One About to Leave

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