The Truth About Jesus : Is He a Myth?: IllustratedMangasarian, M. M. (Mangasar Mugurditch)
Religion
The Truth About Jesus : Is He a Myth?: Illustrated
Mangasarian, M. M. (Mangasar Mugurditch)
Jesus Christ -- Historicity; Rationalism
Once more; if we peruse carefully and critically the writings of Paul,
the earliest and greatest Christian apostle and missionary, we find
that he is not only ignorant of the gospel stories about the birth and
miracles of Jesus, but he is equally and just as innocently ignorant
of the _teachings_ of Jesus. In the gospels Jesus is the author of the
Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, the Parable of the Prodigal
Son, the Story of Dives, the Good Samaritan, etc. Is it conceivable
that a preacher of Jesus could go throughout the world to convert
people to the teachings of Jesus, as Paul did, without ever quoting
a single one of his sayings? Had Paul known that Jesus had preached a
sermon, or formulated a prayer, or said many inspired things about
the here and the hereafter, he could not have helped quoting, now and
then, from the words of his master. If Christianity could have been
established without a knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, why, then,
did Jesus come to teach, and why were his teachings preserved by
divine inspiration? But if a knowledge of these teachings of Jesus is
indispensable to making converts, Paul gives not the least evidence
that he possessed such knowledge.
But the Apostle Paul, judging from his many epistles to the earliest
converts to Christianity, which are really his testimony, supposed to
have been sealed by his blood, appears to be quite as ignorant of a
Jesus who went about working miracles,--opening the eyes of the
blind, giving health to the sick, hearing to the deaf, and life to the
dead,--as he is of a Jesus born of a virgin woman and the Holy Ghost.
Is not this remarkable? Does it not lend strong confirmation to the
idea that the miracle-working Jesus of the gospels was not known in
Paul's time, that is to say, the earliest Jesus known to the churches
was a person altogether different from his namesake in the four
evangelists. If Paul knew of a miracle-working Jesus, one who could
feed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes--who could command the
grave to open, who could cast out devils, and cleanse the land of the
foulest disease of leprosy, who could, and did, perform many other
wonderful works to convince the unbelieving generation of
his divinity,--is it conceivable that either intentionally or
inadvertently he would have never once referred to them in all his
preaching? Is it not almost certain that, if the earliest Christians
knew of the miracles of Jesus, they would have been greatly surprised
at the failure of Paul to refer to them a single time? And would not
Paul have told them of the promise of Jesus to give them power to work
even greater miracles than his own, had he known of such a promise.
Could Paul really have left out of his ministry so essential a chapter
from the life of Jesus, had he been acquainted with it? The miraculous
fills up the greater portion of the four gospels, and if these
documents were dictated by the Holy Ghost, it means that they were too
important to be left out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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