Reanimated in other
respects by the extraordinary event, the priest returns home to his
wife, and she becomes a second Sarah.[63]
The original histories are adduced, and the parallels fully drawn
between them and the gospel narratives in order to show the mythical
character of the latter. The birth of John the Baptist is the mongrel
product of the Old Testament stories of the birth of Isaac, of Samson,
and of Samuel. Every event related by the evangelists is so strained as
to make it analogous to other occurrences in Jewish history. The murder
of the innocents by Herod is only a poetic plagiarism of the cruelty of
Nimrod and Pharaoh; the star which guided the shepherds, a memory of the
star promised in the prophecy of Balaam; Christ explaining the Bible
when twelve years old, a gloss upon the precocity of Moses, Samuel, and
Solomon; the increase of the loaves, a union of the manna in the
wilderness and the twenty loaves with which Elisha fed the people; water
changed into wine, a new version of the bitter waters made sweet; the
cross, a reminder of the brazen serpent; the scene in the Garden of
Gethsemane, the bloody sweat and the agony on the cross, poor copies
from the Lamentations of Jeremiah; and the two thieves, the nailed hands
and feet, the pierced side, the thirst, and the last words of Jesus, are
borrowed narratives from the sixty-ninth and twenty-second Psalms.
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