A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and EssaysBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and Essays
Bradlaugh, Charles
Free thought
In a pamphlet like the present it is impossible to give any statement
and analysis of the various hypotheses as to the origin of the human
race. I frankly admit that my only wish and intent is, to compel people
to examine the bible record for themselves, instead of making it their
fetich, bowing down before it without thought. I am inclined to the
opinion that the doctrine of a plurality of sources for the various
types of the human race is a correct one; that wherever the conditions
for life have been found, there also has been the degree of life
resultant on those conditions. My purpose in this essay is not to
demonstrate the correctness of my own thinking, but rather to illustrate
the incorrectness of the Geneiacal teaching. Were Adam and Eve our
first parents? On the one hand an answer in the affirmative to this
question can be obtained from the bible, which asserts Adam and Eve
to be the first man and woman made by God, and fixes the date of their
making about 6,000 years, little more or less, from the present time. On
the other hand, it seems to me that science emphatically declares man to
have existed on the earth for a far more extended period; affirms that,
as far as we can trace man, we find him in isolated groups, diverse in
type, till we lose him in the ante-historic period; and, with nearly
equal distinctness, denies that the various existing races find their
common parentage in one pair. It is only on the first point that
I attack the bible chronology of man's existence. I am aware that
compilations based upon the authorized version of the Old Testament
Scriptures are open to objection, and that while from the Hebrew
1,656 years represent the period from Adam to the Deluge generally
acknowledged, the Samaritan Pentateuch only yields for the same period
1,307 years, while the Septuagint version furnishes 2,242 years; there
is, I am also informed, on the authority of a most erudite Egyptologist,
a fatal objection to the Septuagint chronology--_i. e._, that it makes
Methusaleh outlive the flood.*
The deluge occurred, according to the Septuagint, in the year of
the world 2,242, and, by adding up the generations previous to
Methusaleh's--
Adam..............................................230
Seth..............................................205
Enos..............................................190
Cainan............................................170
Malaleel..........................................165
Jared.............................................162
Enoch.............................................165
.................................................1287
* Sharpe's History of Egypt, page 196.
--we shall find that he was born in the year of the world 1,287. He
lived 969 years, and therefore died in 2,256. But this is fourteen years
after the deluge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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