The
last Evangelist gives a very different account of many points in the
history of the passion and resurrection of Christ, especially in respect
to the last Supper and the chronology of the whole passion-week. Christ
announced his second coming as near at hand. Hence he, or the
Evangelists in reporting him, were grossly in error. There are, in a
word, serious objections to accepting the New Testament as
authoritative; because we find in it the use of the Septuagint;
quotations from the Old Testament in a sense not intended in the
original; influence of Jewish traditions; Rabbinical arguments;
uncertainty in reports of the discourses of Christ; contradictions
between different accounts of the same facts; errors in chronology and
history; and Messianic hopes and expectations not in accordance with
external events. What right have we, therefore, to accept as infallible
that in which we find such an admixture of error? It is the duty of
religious science to reconcile revelation with the growing requirements
of human thought, and to smooth over the transition from the dogma of
the past to that of the future.
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