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A Series of Letters, in Defence of Divine Revelation: In Reply to Rev. Abner Kneeland's Serious Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Same. To Which is Added, a Religious Correspondence, Between the Rev. Hosea Ballou, and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Buckminster and Rev. Joseph Walton, Pastors of Congregational Churches in Portsmouth, N. H.Ballou, Hosea

Religion

A Series of Letters, in Defence of Divine Revelation: In Reply to Rev. Abner Kneeland's Serious Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Same. To Which is Added, a Religious Correspondence, Between the Rev. Hosea Ballou, and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Buckminster and Rev. Joseph Walton, Pastors of Congregational Churches in Portsmouth, N. H.

Name: A Series of Letters, in Defence of Divine Revelation: In Reply to Rev. Abner Kneeland's Serious Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Same. To Which is Added, a Religious Correspondence, Between the Rev. Hosea Ballou, and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Buckminster and Rev. Joseph Walton, Pastors of Congregational Churches in Portsmouth, N. H.
Author: Ballou, Hosea

Ballou, Hosea

Revelation; Universalism -- Doctrines

You answer, no. But then ask; if this wonderful story was not written
some considerable time after that period to which the dates of the
writings are assigned, and such large additions made that the whole
appears entirely different from what was really true?

This brings me to consider the third particular selected for
consideration, out of your epistle.

3dly. In allusion to the supposed controversy between the Unitarians
and Trinitarians, you think I ought to have considered the
circumstance of the destruction of the Jews by the Romans, as giving a
favourable opportunity for the fabricating the books of the
evangelists, and of giving them success in the world, as the old
pharisees and rulers of the Jews were principally cut off in that
awful destruction of their nation and city.

You will observe that by your suggestion you leave the first section
of the argument to which you refer, in which no book or books were
used, and notice only the last section in which you were indulged, for
sake of the argument, in the supposition that the gospels were not
written until after the destruction of Jerusalem, nor propagated on
the miracles on which the gospels have founded it. Here, sir, have I
not an occasion of some little complaint? If you really thought that
the gospels were, none of them, written in the life time of the
apostles, and considered it safe to predicate an argument on this
ground, why should you withhold the proof of this fact? Why did you
not inform me of the authority by which your argument is supported in
your own mind? And furthermore, why do you try to get away from the
argument as stated in its first form, without showing its want of
force, or without allowing its merit? By conducting arguments in this
way, in room of converguing them to some definite point of conclusion,
they are diverged indefinitely, and the mind seems bewildered without
an object.

However, I am disposed to follow you, and will now endeavour to shew
the probability of the gospel's having been written even before the
destruction of Jerusalem.

The following passages are quoted from Paley's evidences from page 106
and on--

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