Our guest now repaired to one of our golf courses where, during the
interval of a few hours, the fresh air, the sunshine, and exercise
dispelled the mental nausea which the reading of the Old Testament had
occasioned in him. Returning to his quarters, he is approached by one of
the Christian Brethren and the New Testament is placed in his hands with
these remarks, "The Christian recognizes that in the Old Testament the
Jews have given to the Christian world its greatest heritage." The fact
that in exchange for this priceless heritage, the Christians have given
to the Jews a series of persecutions unequaled in the annals of human
warfare is explained by the quality of the Brotherhood of Man that
naturally manifests itself after a complete conversion to the Bible's
precepts. The Old Testament contains the first revelations of God; the
New Testament, the last revelations. Our Christian Brother "forgets" to
remind the visitor that the difference of opinion regarding these two
Testaments of God has caused more sorrow, bloodshed, harm, devilment,
misery, and devastation than any other single item in the life and
history of the human race.
The Martian is hard pressed to reconcile the fact that Mohammedanism six
hundred years after the appearance of Christianity triumphed over
Christianity in a great portion of the earth's surface; yet he is
informed that Christianity is _the_ religion of God, that Allah made the
Mohammedans, Jehovah the Jews, the Trinity the Christians, and the rest
of the believers were illegitimate children of the above gods, was the
only conclusion he could reach. In a few moments the myth of Christ
begins to unfold itself before his eyes in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Apocalypse. He finds,
"The so-called Messianic texts which are supposed to prefigure Jesus in
the Old Testament have all been either misunderstood or deliberately
misinterpreted. The most celebrated is that in Isaiah VII, 14, which
predicts that a virgin shall bear a son, Emmanuel, but the word, Al-mah,
which the Septuagint rendered "virgin" means in Hebrew a young woman,
and this passage merely deals with the approaching birth of a son to the
king or the prophet himself. This error of the Septuagint is one of the
sources of the legend relating to the virginal birth of Jesus. As early
as the second century A.D. the Jews perceived it and pointed it out to
the Greeks, but the Church knowingly persisted in the false reading, and
for over fifteen centuries she has clung to her error."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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