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No. III.
To The Rev. I. M. Wise, D. D.
Dear Sir:
This week I have received your letter of last month
through the press. I thank you for it: I have
already given to its con tents some hours of
scrutinizing thought, and I hasten to present you
with a reply.
Your letter commences and ends with the assertion
that all hope and labour to convert the Jews are
“ridiculous;” and I have no doubts but that from
the point of faith or speculation where you stand,
all such labours appear singularly ridiculous. I
give you full credit for the sincerity of your
remark. There are instances in which the ridiculous
foolishness of an enterprise is attributable more to
ourselves than to itself,—to our organs of vision
more than to its properties. Unbelief, prejudice and
conceit oft often make things appear supremely
ridiculous, which in themselves are true and
momentous. In the seventeenth century, if I am
correctly informed, many of the most enlightened
doctors <<288>>considered the circulation of the
blood very ridiculous; but while they were abusing
and refuting and persecuting the new doctrine, their
own blood was most ridiculously rushing from their
heart, through their arteries, and returning through
their veins. It was once supremely ridiculous and
even impious to assert that the earth moves round
the sun, and that there are other worlds, and still
thousands of aged, experienced persons knew better
than to believe any such new thing.
To
the Egyptian court it was as ridiculous as it could
be, that the Lord of heaven should choose the
Israelites as his peculiar favourites. To many of
the most enlightened minds in Israel, it was
ridiculous that Moses, who had married a daughter of
Midian, should profess to be the deliverer of Israel
and prophet of God; and what greater amusement could
they have had than the threat that their unbelief
might destroy them? Near the close of the last
century, it was to a great and highly enlightened
nation most ridiculous that God should rest on the
seventh day, and appoint a Sabbath for man, and, in
their universal laugh, they plunged themselves into
the most desperate social and moral crime and
anguish. Many a man raised a contemptuous laugh at
the idea of converting the Chinese, when Morrison
started to spend his life in China, and undertook to
translate the Bible into Chinese. Yet every man, Jew
or Christian, who believes that the knowledge of God
shall cover the earth, must look with sublime
approbation and hope on Morrison’s enterprise. Some
men's minds are so morally perverted that the most
sacred and important objects presented before such
mirrors, must appear distorted, monstrous,
ridiculous; and the more grand the proportions of
the object, the more ridiculous its image in their
minds. I presume it is best to think on all
religious matters in solemn earnestness: in the most
groundless absurdities that hare been connected with
religion, I see little to be laughed at.
But to the particular subject before us. To your
philosophy of the divine nature, it appears
supremely ridiculous that there should be the Father
and the Son in the one divine essence, that an
eternal Father implies an eternal Son, an eternal
cause, an eternal activity and effect, or that an
everlasting fountain of <<289>>being and life
implies a commensurate everlasting issue. Possibly,
eternal absolute existence, without any eternal
relative existence, is a more serious absurdity than
you have ever supposed in your philosophy. It is
ridiculous to you that Christians call the Messiah
the Son of God in a peculiar sense, implying no
earthly father,—perhaps equally ridiculous that Adam
was the son of God in the same sense, and that the
Messiah is called in the Psalms, the Son of God, the
first born. (Ps. ii. 7, lxxxix. 27). It is
ridiculous to you that Christ withstood during forty
days the temptations and opposition of the wicked
one; but most probably if you had more orthodox and
solemn views of the moral ruin which has been
effected through the original tempter, the old
serpent, as described in the beginning of Genesis,
you would better appreciate the necessity that the
saviour from this ruin, enter into conflict with the
original infernal tempter.
The existence of evil spirits appears very
ridiculous to you. The Talmud, as you are aware,
shows that the existence of such spirits, of
מזיקין was a
generally received and strongly held doctrine of
the Rabbis; and we cannot go far in
ברכות without
meeting a horrible page on these malignant spirits.
The same doctrine is clearly taught in the most
ancient Targums. It might be interesting to know how
you have cut yourself loose from all rabbinical
tradition on this subject, and have got out on the
wide ocean of scepticism. That man ought to have
resided on more worlds than one who dares to assert
positively that there are no wicked spirits in the
universe, except the spirits of men dwelling in
clay; if there is depravity among us, there may be a
more invisible, dangerous, and fully developed
depravity among other and higher orders of beings;
if there are good angels, there may be fallen
angels. The same stupidity and conceit which assert
confidently that there are no other worlds in the
universe than our earth, are capable of asserting,
with equal confidence and on equally limited
experience, that there are no other devils in the
universe than human devils.
I
see nothing absurd in the idea that there are
invisible, wicked agents, and that they have had a
great influence both on the bodies and the minds of
men; there is much, both in sacred and profane
<<290>>record, to favour this idea; and when I see
the Son of man approaching them in irresistible
hostility, and depriving them of their power to make
men mad and extremely dangerous and miserable, and
to cause men, at will, either to be silent, or to
roar, curse, and blaspheme everything that is
sacred,—when I see him casting them down from this,
their high place of power among men, and giving them
only a momentary permission to infuse their madness
into some lower animals, and this necessarily not
that impious madness which curses and blasphemes; I
trust that I see Satan falling as lightning from
heaven, and the seed of the woman bruising the
serpent’s head.
If
you cannot accredit to Christianity a peculiar
opposition to evil spirits, how do you account for
the intimate acquaintance which the Rabbis of the
Talmud professed to have had with the
מזיקין?
The devil, you say, is a personage of Persian
origin. I suppose then, the tempting serpent of
Genesis, a personage of Persian origin! The Satan of
Job and the Satan of Zechariah, who appeared as the
adversary of Joshua, a personage of Persian origin!
The foreign unnatural element must have worked
itself tremendously into Judaism.
You laugh at the existence of a hell, and this laugh
proves that there is in your religious character a
presumptuous, impious insensibility, where there
ought to be in such sinful beings as we are, a
tender sensibility and fear. If you had more deep
and humbling views of the demerit of sin and of the
holiness and strictness of God’s law; if you had
higher views of the moral government of God. you
would not thus scoff at the idea of a future
terrible retribution to the wicked. You remind me of
the ancient sinners against whom Isaiah pronounced a
terrible wo, and who, when God threatened,
blasphemously replied: “Let him make speed, and
hasten his work, that we may see it; and let the
counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and
come, that we may know it.”
Precisely so, in the face of all such passages as
the following in your own Bible: “For a fire is
kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the
lowest hell.” Deut. xxxii. 22.) “Then understood I
their end. Surely thou didst set them in slippery
places: thou castest them down into destruc-<<291>>tion.
For lo, they that are far from thee shall perish.”
(Psalm lxxiii. 17, 18, 27.) “Therefore will I also
deal in fury; mine eye shall not spare, neither will
I have pity; and though they cry in mine ears with a
loud voice, yet will I not hear them.” (Ezek. viii.
18.) “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the
earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and
some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Dan. xii.
2.) In the face of these and many other passages in
your own Bible, and of many clearer assertions of
future punishment in the New Testament, you laugh at
every terror beyond the grave, and ask, as the
sinners of old did, for some clearer proof. Let the
Almighty, you say, make speed, and show us his
counsel, if it be so terrible. Let us see if he can
punish us any more than to take away our mortal
breath. Let us have some more convincing experience
of the terrors of which Isaiah speaks, of the worm
that never dies and the fire that is never quenched,
and then we will be here.
It
would, assuredly, be very agreeable to a
congregation of hearers who desire as much as
possible to cast off the fear of God, to hear your
elaborate arguments that in all such passages there
is no intimation of punishment continuing after
death.
As
to the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, you know
that in the last volume of the Occident, I have
endeavoured to show their harmony, to account for
the omission of the three kings, and to prove that
Jehoiakim is counted. In your brief reply some
months since, you assert that there must have been
more than fourteen generations between Abraham and
David: but remember the Hebrew Bible itself gives
no more than fourteen, and if your expected Messiah
should appear tomorrow, he would have to present
his genealogy precisely as Matthew gives it between
Abraham and David.
On
the next difficulty to which you call attention,
that, according to both Matthew and Luke, Jesus was
born under Herod the Great, and according to Luke
there was an enrolment of the inhabitants of
Palestine at the time, whereas the famous taxation
described at length by Josephus and incidentally
mentioned by Luke (Acts v. 371, was completed about
the eighth year of the Christian era, let me here
submit to you one of various solutions presented in
Horne’s Introduction.
<<292>>
“Towards the close of his reign, Herod the Great
(who held his kingdom by a grant from Mark Antony,
with the consent of the Senate, which had been
confirmed by Augustus), having incurred the
emperor’s displeasure, to whom his conduct had been
misrepresented, Augustus issued a decree reducing
Judea to a Roman Province and commanding an
enrolment, or register, to be made of
every person’s estate, dignity, age, employment, and
office. The making of this enrolment was confided to Cyrenius or Quirinius, a Roman Senator, who was
collector of the imperial revenue; but Herod having
sent his trusty minister, Nicholas of Damascus, to
Rome, the latter found means to undeceive the
emperor, and soften his angers in consequence of
which the actual operation of the decree was
suspended. Eleven years afterwards, however, it was
carried into effect, on the deposition and
banishment of Archelaus (Herod’s son and successor)
for maladministration, by Augustus, upon the
complaint of the Jews, who, weary of the tyranny of
the Herodian family, requested that Judaea might be
made a Roman Province. Cyrenius was now sent as
President of Syria, with an armed force, to
confiscate the property of Archelaus, and to
complete the census, to which the Jewish people
submitted.
It
was this establishment of the assessment or taxing
under Cyrenius which was necessary to complete the
Roman census, to which the Evangelist alludes in the
parenthetical remark occurring in Luke ii. 2., which
may be more correctly written and translated thus :
It came to pass in those days, that is, a few days
before our Saviour’s birth, that there went out a
decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the land [of
Judea, Galilee, Idumea, &c. under Herod’s dominion ]
should be enrolled preparatory to a census or
taxing, (‘The taking itself was first made when
Cyrenius was Governor of Syria:) and all went to be
enrolled, every one to his own city.’
In
addition to this, I would suggest that this
enrolment might properly be called the first one of
Cyrenius, governor of Syria, though he was not then
governor. If I say a given battle was the first
battle of the late President or the United States, I
do not mean that General Taylor was, at the time of
this battle, President.
<<293>>
To
be silent is not necessarily to contradict. You
yourself are aware, that you have not a single
positive contradiction in history to the murder of
the children in Bethlehem. Herod was very capable of
such a bloody deed. Voltaire, whose illustrious
example you follow in reproaching Christian sacred
history with fables and fabrications, seems to have
been so anxious to wound Christianity deeply on this
point, that he would make the children born annually
in the little village of Bethlehem more numerous
than those in either Paris or London.
In your letter you bring prominently forward Luke
iii. 1, 2, and I will give this a prominent place in
my reply. “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of
Tiberius Caesar, 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.”
May we invite you now to mark candidly the impress
of historical verity on every one of these six
points. We now stand near, or in, the twenty-eighth
or twenty-ninth year of the life of Christ.
Reckoning this number of years back from the
fifteenth of Tiberius, we may place the birth of
Christ in the forty-second year of Augustus, and,
therefore, according to both sacred and profane
history, in the time of Herod. We have the authority
of Josephus, that in the fifteenth year of Tiberius,
Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and had been
governor probably more than two years. (See Jos.
Ant. xviii. 2, 2, and 4, 2. We have, farther, his
testimony that Herod was tetrarch of Galilee. (Ant.
xviii. 2, 3.) We have farther the most explicit
authority of Josephus, that Philip, Herod’s brother,
was not only at this time, hut long before, and some
years after, the tetrarch of Trachonitis, Gaulonitis,
and of the nation of the Bataneans. ( Ant. xviii.
-1, 6.) The Iturea of Luke may be here expressed by
one or both of the other names. You lay your
principal objection against the fifth point, Lysa-raids
the tetrarch of Abilene. Your first assertion is
that Lysanias was never a ruler of Abilene :
Josephus flatly contradicts you in his using the
expression, Abila of Lysanias.” (Ant. xix. 5, 1.)
Josephus farther gives Luke an important corrobora-<<294>>tion
on this very point, in alleging that the Emperor
Caius gave Agrippa Major the tetrarch of Lysanias,
which must have occurred about seven years after the
time when, according to Luke, Lysanias was tetrarch
of Abilene. (Ant. xviii. 6, 10.) You make a great
mistake in identifying this Lysanias with the
Lysanias, son of Ptolemy, who was put to death
thirty-six years before Christ. The expression,
“Anna and Caiaphas being high priests, means merely
that these two high priests were living when the
given history occurred, and this is according to
Josephus. When you assert the stupidity displayed in
asserting that two men were high priests at the same
time, you ought not to forget that some duties
peculiar to the high priesthood were performed by
two men: the high priest had his
סגן.
Now, candidly, is it not very remarkable that
Josephus confirms Luke so materially in all the six
points!
Mark vii. 31: “And again, departing from the coasts
Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the sea of Galilee,
through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis.” This
verse stands so in my English Bible, and is a
correct translation of the Greek. Any good map will
show you how, in going directly from Tyre or Sidon
to the sea of Galilee, he passed through the borders
of Decapolis. By some unaccountable means you have
got this verse to read so:
“He came unto the sea of Galilee and came unto the
coasts of Judea beyond Jordan.”
Excuse me, if I dismiss such a mistake with nothing
more than a smile. You determine from this, that the
Evangelists were so ignorant they did not know that
Samaria was between Galilee and Judea; but John
tells us that Jesus going from Judea to Galilee, had
to pass through Samaria. What a pity that you have
not been able to assist the Evangelists! you could
have taught them both to quote better, and to
describe better!
On
the quotations of the New Testament from the Old,
let me first present some leading principles. In the
Hebrew Bible the same composition is very seldom
presented in the same language. The variations are
innumerable, and while some few may be the mistakes
of copyists, the majority are evidently designed.
The Decalogue itself is not the same in Exodus and
<<295>>Deuteronomy. The passage common to Isaiah and
Micah is not, in all its words, the same in both
prophets. The one great song of David, the crowning
composition of all his life, is very different as
recorded in 2 Samuel xxii., and in Psalm xviii.
Words are changed by the introduction of different
letters, the meaning in some instances is different
and there are even whole lines in one place which
are left out in the other. If the lath Psalm were in
the New Testament, instead of being where it is, you
would say that there is no such a Psalm in the Book
of Samuel. Every orthodox Jew will say that it was
the will of God that these variations should be
made, or that the very same thing should be recorded
differently. The design of the Spirit of inspiration
was to give us thoughts rather than words. The Old
Testament as well as the New, is, in its appropriate
nature, spirit rather than letter.
The free Spirit of inspiration and truth teaches us,
by these variations in the Old Testament, that its
freedom was never bound by the iron chains of verbal
forms. A most sublime principle lies at the
foundation of these variation. Who, in view of this
subject, does not exclaim, variety and unity,
variety in expression, unity in spirit, unity in the
essence, variety in the manifestation!—this is
godlike! Now you would certainly expect that one who
believes in the “Identity of Judaism and
Christianity” of the Old Testament and the New,
would rejoice to find passages varied in the New,
from the original, just as they are varied in the
Old,—to find in both Testaments the same freedom in
all quotations. Grant us the same sublime principle
for the New Testament which you recognise in the
Old, and all your quibbles about incorrect
quotations evaporate instantly.
Matthew does not say it was written by the prophets,
“He shall be called a Nazarene,” but that it was
said by the prophets. How do we know that there was
not a traditionary saying on the subject? It seems
to me most probable that Matthew had in view the
predictions of several prophets, that the Messiah
should be despised, and that he considered them
partially fulfilled: in the fact that Jesus obtained
the opprobrious name, Nazarene.
You must know that, in the quotation of Matthew and
Luke, <<296>>from the 40th chapter of Isaiah, the
words in the wilderness may be connected either with
the preceding, or with the following, and that,
since in the Hebrew the little Zakeph separates the
preceding word from them, and the great Zakeph
separates them from what follows, the Hebrew and the
Greek correspond. Perhaps you mean to show your
adroitness in making a distinction between a voice
crying and a voice of one crying: very well; —full
credit to your philological and philosophical
acumen. You cannot find any such a verse in Isaiah
as “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Had
you read a little farther, you would have found the
verse which has been translated thus, “All the ends
of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.”
(Isaiah lii. 10.)
In
every age there has been great variety in the
pronunciaton of the Hebrew, and its spelling with
foreign letters. The Ephraimites could not pronounce
like the other tribes. Your criticism on the Greek
spelling of one Hebrew word in the New Testament
cannot militate much against the truth of the
statement there made. The word itself is a curiosity
for the museum of the philologist, rather than to be
ridiculed. It is not stated in the Acts, as you
insinuate, that the Hebrews voluntarily exposed
their children: all that is implied is, that they
were severely treated in being forced to see their
children exposed to death. See the original.
The ridiculous mistakes which you find in Acts may
not be so ridiculous after all. Stephen evidently
meant to mention both Hebron and Sychem as the
burying-place of the fathers; hence his expressions
are to be applied partly to one and partly to the
other. Your whole objection is, that he makes the
matter confused and contradictory, in endeavouring
to combine the two. There may have been good reason
for all this brevity and confusion in his address to
the august council, as he was about to be stoned to
death. There is solemnity in his broken, confused,
unfinished expressions, rather than ground for
ridicule.
I
have now gone over all the important points of your
letter. except the question in relation to the
virgin. My letter is already too long to admit the
introduction of this discussion, and
<<
297>>I would rather recommend you to Dr. Alexander’s
Commentary on Isaiah, which, if you do not possess
it, I hope you will receive from the Rev. Dr. J. N.
Campbell of Albany, to whom I would be glad in this
way to introduce you.
Though the answers which I have given to your
difficulties, appear to me satisfactory, I dare not
say that I can answer all the objections which you
may present. In every system of truth, both in the
natural world and in the moral, there are in
explicable points.
Yours, most truly,
M. R. MILLER.
New York, August 16, 1850.
NOTE BY THE EDITOR.—Mr. Miller is not unanswerable;
but we leave Dr. Wise to answer him; and if he do
not, we will do so ourself. But for his future
papers, we must remind Mr. M. to confine himself to
his subject, without making appeals or personal
allusions; the argument gains nothing by
overwhelming an opponent with questions which will
place him in an unpleasant light before the public.
At least, this is our method of thinking, and we act
up to it when we argue. |
