Christian fiction; Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600 -- Fiction
These, many of them, cannot even conceive how they can worship Christ at
the right hand of God, or the Son in the bosom of the Father in heaven,
unless they first believe in Him as miraculously manifested on earth.
Not being able to accept Him as miraculous, they reject Him as a Saviour.
To them this book specially appeals, endeavouring to shew, in a general
and popular way—on psychological, historical, and critical grounds—how
the rejection of the claim made by most Christians that their Lord is
miraculous, may be compatible with a frank and full acceptance of the
conclusion that He is, in the highest sense, divine.
Detailed proofs this volume does not offer. These will be given in a
separate volume of “Notes,” shortly to be published. This will be of a
technical nature, forming Part VII of the series called Diatessarica.
The present work merely aims at suggesting such conceptions of history,
literature, worship, human nature, and divine Being, as point to a
foreordained conformation of man to God, to be fulfilled in the Lord
Jesus Christ, of which the fulfilment may be traced in the Christian
writings and the Christian churches of the first and second centuries.
It also attempts, in a manner not perhaps very usual, to meet many
objections brought against Christianity by those who assert that its
records are inadequate, inaccurate, and contradictory. Instead of
denying these defects, the author admits and emphasizes them as being
inseparable from earthen vessels containing a spiritual treasure, and
as (in some cases) indirectly testifying to the divinity of the Person
whom the best efforts of the best and most inspired of the evangelists
inadequately, though honestly, portray. Specimens of these defects are
freely given, shewing the modifications, amplifications, and (in some
case) misinterpretations or corruptions, to which Christian tradition was
inevitably exposed in passing from the east to the west during a period
of about one hundred and thirty years, dating from the Crucifixion.
These objects the author has endeavoured to attain by sketching an
autobiography of an imaginary character, by name Quintus Junius Silanus,
who in the second year of Hadrian (A.D. 118) becomes a hearer of
Epictetus and a Christian convert, and commits his experiences to paper
forty-five years afterwards in the second year of Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus and Lucius Verus (A.D. 163).
EDWIN A. ABBOTT.
_Wellside, Well Walk, Hampstead._
_28 Aug. 1906._
_SUMMARY_
_Quintus Junius Silanus, born 90 A.D., goes from Rome at the suggestion
of his old friend Marcus Æmilius Scaurus, to attend the lectures of
Epictetus in Nicopolis about 118 A.D._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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