Critical Examination of the Life of St. PaulAnnet, Peter
Religion
Critical Examination of the Life of St. Paul
Annet, Peter
Paul, the Apostle, Saint
Many theologians would make us regard the miraculous conversion and
apostleship of St. Paul as one of the strongest proofs of the truth of
Christianity. But in viewing the thing closely it appears that this
conversion, far from proving any thing in favour of this religion,
invalidates the other proofs of it, in fact, our doctors continually
assure us that the Christian religion draws its strongest proofs from
the prophecies of the Old Testament, whilst there is not in fact a
single one of these prophecies that can be literally applied to the
Messiah of the Christians. St. Paul himself willing to make use of these
oracles of the Jewish nation to prove the mission of Christ, is obliged
to distort them, and to seek in them a mystical, allegorical, and
figurative sense. On the other side, how can these prophecies made by
Jews and addressed to Jews, serve as proofs of the doctrine of St.
Paul, who had evidently formed the design of altering, or even of
destroying, the Jewish religion, in order to raise a new system on its
ruins? Such being the state of things, what real connection, or what
relation, can there be between the religious system of the Jews, and
that of St. Paul? For this Apostle to have had the right of making use of
the Jewish prophecies, it would have been necessary that he should have
remained a Jew; his conversion to Christianity evidently deprived him of
the privilege of serving himself, by having recourse to the prophecies
belonging to a religion that he had just abandoned, and the ruin of
which he meditated. True prophecies can only be found in a divine
religion, and a religion truly divine, can neither be altered, reformed,
nor destroyed: God himself, if he is immutable, could not change it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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