--“Reader, whoever
thou art, put thy trust in thy Creator, make use of the reason he endowed thee
with, and cast from thee all such fables.”—Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason Part III.
Why I Read This Book
This book has been on my radar
ever since I read a short biography of Thomas Paine a few years back. The author briefly mentioned
that after the American Revolution, Thomas Paine published a book called The Age of Reason in which Paine argued
that no reasonable person could believe in the Bible stories.
Naturally I
was curious. Having grown up religious,
I wanted to see what Paine’s arguments were, and see how well they
held-up.
I was also
curious to see what types of arguments were being made against the Bible in the
18th century. Nowadays science and
evolution have disproved the creation stories in the Bible, and modern
archeology has disproved much of the history in the Bible. But what were the arguments Paine could make
in the 1790s? How much of the Bible could
Paine refute just using his wits?
I became
further curious when I read Christopher Hitchens’ book God is not Great.
In his section on the Old Testament, Christopher Hitchens refers to
Thomas Paine’s arguments to show that Moses could not possibly have written the
first 5 books of the Bible traditionally ascribed to him.
More
recently, I was listening to Christine Hayes’ lectures on the Old Testament. On the subject of Mosaic
authorship, Christine Hayes said that various anachronisms in the Pentateuch began
to be noticed as early as the middle ages.
Hayes didn’t
mention Thomas Paine by name, but no doubt Paine would be drawing on traditions
of these earlier writers when he was making his own case against Mosaic
authorship.
This kind
of literary detective work intrigues me.
I’m not smart enough to do it on my own, but I enjoy following the
thought process of a mind sharper than my own.
And so I decided I wanted to read in full what Thomas Paine thought
about the Bible.
I didn’t
have any luck finding this book in bookstores, but since it long ago passed
into the public domain, it’s readily available on-line. I found several different websites that
hosted free copies.
For parts 1
and 2, I used this website [LINK] but there are numerous other
sites. For whatever reasons many of
these websites don’t include Part 3, but Part 3 contains some good arguments
and is also worth reading. Part 3 is available
here [LINK].
(Just out of curiosity, is this book
widely available in print? Has anyone
seen it in bookstores recently?)
The Review
Readability
Because this is such an old book,
I suppose the first comments should be on readability.
If you’re like me, you get intimidated
by old books. To modern sensibilities
they seem dry, boring, and written in archaic prose. Even novels from the 18th century novels can
be boring, so what chance does an 18th century treatise have?
The good news is that this book is
surprisingly easy to read. One of the
reasons Thomas Paine’s political works (Common
Sense, and The Rights of Man)
were so successful is that Thomas Paine had a reputation for writing in clear
direct language that the everyday working man could understand. The Age
of Reason is written in the same clear writing style, and it holds up well
even 200 years later.
For example, read this paragraph:
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous
debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness,
with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that
we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has
served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest
it, as I detest everything that is cruel. (From Part I)
Now that is
from a writer who knew how to pack his punches!
Overview
This book contains all the reasons
why Thomas Paine thinks that no reasonable person could possibly believe in the
Bible.
As with any
book that is a collection of arguments, it is difficult to speak in
generalities. To thoroughly review this
book would require going through and analyzing each argument by itself, because
some of Thomas Paine’s arguments work quite well, and some of his arguments are
pretty weak.
If one were
assessing Paine simply on the number of good arguments he makes, I would say he’s
batting at about 50%.
But of
course it’s never about percentages.
Paine’s bad arguments do not invalidate his good arguments. And if you
look at the strength of the valid arguments Paine does make, I think it is very
devastating against the Bible.
Plus,
because the Bible must be taken as an all-or-nothing package, Paine is playing
at a zero-sum game here. If he can
successfully argue against even one part of the Bible, then he is casting doubt
over the whole thing.
Paine
himself is writing from the perspective of a Deist. He believes that there is a supreme God who
created the Earth and everything in it, but he does not believe that this God
did any of the things attributed to him in the Bible. Furthermore, Paine believes we do God a
disservice to attribute to him all the cruel stories in the Bible.
“What can be greater blasphemy than to
ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty?” writes Paine
in Part II.
And then
later “Had the cruel and murderous orders
with which the Bible is filled, and the numberless torturing executions of men,
women and children, in consequence of those orders, been ascribed to some
friend whose memory you revered, you would have glowed with satisfaction at
detecting the falsehood of the charge, and gloried in defending his injured
name. Is it because ye [priests] are sunk in the cruelty of superstition, or
feel no interest in the honor of your Creator, that ye listen to the horrid
tales of the Bible, or hear them with callous indifference.”
Paine is
writing both to disprove the Bible, but also to try and prove that a benevolent
creator God does exist. In this respect,
he is not entirely in step with modern atheists like Christopher Hitchens, even
though Hitchens freely borrows from Paine’s analysis of the Bible.
Structure
The book
was originally published in 3 parts.
If you’re a
history nerd, one of the added interest bonuses of this book is that its
publishing history intersects with some of the major historical crises of Paine’s
life.
Thomas
Paine lived an interesting life because he was very influential in both the
American Revolution and also the French Revolution. Because of his reputation for fighting for
liberty in America and England, Thomas Paine was invited to France
to participate in their revolution.
However when the French Revolution started to eat its own children,
Paine was arrested and put in jail.
Robespierre wrote a note ordering Thomas Paine’s execution,
but because of an oversight Paine was never executed and later released from
jail.
Paine wrote
the first part of The Age of Reason right before his arrest in
Paris, and in
fact the first part ends with a brief note from Thomas Paine describing how he
has just been arrested, and that his jailors have agreed to help him send his
manuscript to the publishers anyway. (How
is that for a dramatic ending!)
The second part
of The Age of Reason was written
after Thomas Paine got released from jail and begins with a brief description
of what had happened to him. (In the
second part of The Age of Reason,
Paine uses Robespierre’s name as a shorthand for pure evil, much the way people
today would use Hitler’s name. For example when talking about the Old
Testament, Paine writes “There are
matters in that book, said to be done by the express command of God, that are
as shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice as anything
done by Robespierre.”)
The first
part of The Age of Reason was written
by Paine without access to an English Bible, because he was stuck in France
and he knew his arrest was imminent.
Paine is able to make some general comments about the nature of the
Bible in the first half, but he is not able to cite many particulars.
After he
was released from prison, Paine wrote the second half of The Age of Reason with a Bible by his side and examines the bible
stories much more thoroughly. He goes
back to reinforce many of the points he made in the first half, and because of
this there is some repetition in the work.
No doubt if
Paine had been able to work on and publish both parts together, a much smoother
draft could have been produced, but at the time he felt there was an urgency to
publish first because he wasn’t sure he would live to write the second
half. (As it is, I think the interesting
publishing history of the book makes up for any repetition.)
The 3rd
part of the book is made up of a list of responses and further thoughts. Again, Paine does revisit some of the same
arguments he made earlier, so there is some more repetition here, but it’s
still interesting and worth reading.
So, that’s
the structure of the book. Now, what did
I think of it? Where was Paine right, and
where was he wrong?
Obviously I’m
not going to go through and redline the whole book, but I’ll comment on some of
the things that caught my interest.
On Deism Versus
Christianity Versus Agnosticism
Paine wrote this book with the
dual purpose of combating Christianity, but also combating the rise of atheism
in France. Paine wanted to argue that reason showed that
the Bible was ridiculous, but also that the same reason showed their must be a
creator God. Furthermore Paine believed
that this creator God must be kind and benevolent, because he has created for
us a good earth and provided for our needs.
Paine also believed that an afterlife was very possible, because since this
God had the power to create us in one form, he must have the power to sustain
us in another form after we die.
As an
agnostic, my own view is that it’s possible that there is a benevolent creator
God, and an afterlife, but it is by no means certain. And I don’t believe Paine has proven this
creator God, so these sections of his book strike me as little more than
wishful thinking, and not really suitable for a book entitled The Age of Reason. (Fortunately for me, these sections make up
only a small part of the book.)
It is of
course important to judge Paine by the standards of his time. Modern scientific theories about the origin
of the universe and evolution did not yet exist, and so it was much more
difficult for Paine and his contemporaries to imagine a world without a God.
Paine essentially
argues the existence of God simply from the existence of the world. No man can create himself, Paine say, so
there must have been something that created us all.
It is an
old, old argument, and very simple, but it is no less powerful for being old
and simple, and to my mind the atheists have never satisfactorily answered
this. But it doesn’t definitively prove
the existence of God, because the God hypothesis creates just as many questions
as it solves. (Who is this God? Where did he come from? Who created God? Why did he create us? Why are we here? Why is there suffering? Why do we have to
die?) Religion of course was formed as
an attempt to answer some of these questions, but since Paine rejects religion,
it is not clear how he deals with all the problems of the God hypothesis.
Paine’s
assumption that the creator God must be benevolent also seems to me to be a
stretch. Nature appears to be designed
to be cruel. Almost every living thing
is designed to kill another living thing, and many animals suffer cruel and
painful deaths. Paine never even
addresses this.
It’s
possible this was less of an issue to him than it is to us. Paine was not ignorant of this, but it is a
lot more in our face in our time than it was in his. Because of nature documentaries, I now see
plenty of footage of animals killing each other everyday on TV. Among the
handful of channels on my cable package are The
Animal Planet, National Geographic,
and The Discovery Channel. Most of the shows are just clips of one unfortunate
animal getting eaten by another one, often with voice over narration that goes
something like, “Although it may seem cruel, this is how nature is designed…blah,
blah, blah.” After watching a half hour
of TV, I always come away with a much more pessimistic view of nature and its
creator.
Thomas Paine was an 18th century English
gentleman, and it’s easy to imagine him simply walking around outside, feeling
the warm sunshine on his face and enjoying the beauty of the plants. Perhaps it’s no wonder he had a much more
benevolent view of nature and its creator.
In terms of
Paine’s worldview, his God is not all that dissimilar to that of the Christian
church. Paine believes in a
monotheistic, benevolent, omnipotent creator God, and the probable immortality
of the soul. (Paine is perhaps more
influenced by Christianity than he would like to admit. It is interesting to wonder what his
worldview would have been if he had grown up in India.) Paine is essentially a Christian in terms of
worldview, he just doesn’t like the Bible stories.
There is,
to be fair, an element of reason in this.
The history of western religion is that mankind evolved from ridiculous
superstitions and the unbelievable gods of ancient myths to a belief in a
rational universe created and maintained by a single deity. Christianity has a day-to-day attitude that
reflects this modern outlook, but still retains many of the ancient myths from
a less rational time. Paine wants to
update religion by purging it of the ancient myths.
It is
entirely rational if you assume Paine’s point of view. Assuming
there is a benevolent God, that God can in no way be the God described in the
Bible.
The Difference
Between Revelation and Hearsay
Paine believes in God’s general
revelation through nature, but he disagrees with the idea of special revelation
to individuals.
Paine
explains himself so well on this argument that rather than trying to paraphrase
him, I’ll just quote from him:
Every national church or religion has
established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to
certain individuals. The Jews have their
Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the
Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.
Each of these churches show certain
books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was
given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God
came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say that their word of God (the
Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of these churches accuse the
other of unbelief; and for my own part I disbelieve them all.
As it is necessary to affix right
ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some
other observations on the word revelation.
Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated
immediately from God to man.
No one will deny or dispute the
power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that
something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other
person, it is revelation to that person only.
When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a
fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is
revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and
consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and
ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either
verbally or in writing. Revelation is
necessarily limited to the first communication—after this, it is only an
account of something which that person says was a revelation, made to him; and
although he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on
me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me,
and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
When Moses told the children of
Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of
God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority
for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some
historian telling me so. The
commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain
some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a
legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural
invention.
When I am told that the Koran was written
in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the
same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and therefore,
I have a right not to believe it.
When also I am told that a woman
called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any
cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an
angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such circumstance
requires a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not
even this—for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is
only reported by others that they said so—it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do
not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.
Paine
returns to this a few paragraphs later:
The resurrection and ascension, supposing
them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular demonstration, like
that of the ascension of a balloon or the sun at noon-day, to all Jerusalem at
least. A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof
and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility
of this last related act was the only evidence that could give sanction to the
former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because the evidence was
never given. Instead of this, a small
number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for
the whole world, to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called
upon to believe it. But it appears that Thomas did not believe the
resurrection, and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and
manual demonstration himself. So neither
will I, and the reason is equally good for me, and for every other person, as
for Thomas.
It is in vain to attempt to palliate
or disguise this matter. The story, so
far as it relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and
imposition stamped upon the face of it.
Who were the authors of it is as impossible to know, as it is for us to
be assured that the books in which the account is related were written by the
persons whose names they bear; the best surviving evidence we now have
respecting that affair is the Jews. They are regularly descended from the
people who lived in the times this resurrection and ascension is said to have
happened, and they say, it is not true.
It has long appeared to me a strange inconsistency to cite the Jews as a
proof of the truth of the story. It is
just the same as if a man were to say, I will prove the truth of what I have
told you by producing the people who say it is false. (From Part I).
And how do
we know the Bible is the word of God, Paine asks.
These books, beginning with Genesis and
ending with Revelation (which, by the by, is a book of riddles that requires a
revelation to explain it), are, we are told, the word of God. It is, therefore, proper to for us to know
who told us so, that we may know what credit to give to the report. The answer to this question is, that nobody
can tell, except that we tell one another so.
The case, however, historically appears to be as follows:
When the Church Mythologists
established their system, they collected all the writings they could find, and
managed them as they pleased. It is a
matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such of the writings as now
appear under the name of the Old and New Testament are in the same state in
which those collectors say they found them, or whether they added, altered,
abridged, or dressed them up.
Be this as it may, they decided by
vote which of the books out of the collection they had made should be the WORD
OF GOD, and which should not. They
rejected several; they voted others to be doubtful, such as the books called
the Apocrypha; and those books which had a majority votes, were voted to be the
word of God. Had they voted otherwise,
all the people, since calling themselves Christians, had believed otherwise—for
the belief of the one comes from the vote of the other. Who the people were that did all this, we
know nothing of; they called themselves by the general name of the Church, and
this is all we know of the matter.
Later Paine
adds: Did the book called the Bible excel
in purity of ideas and expressions all the books that are now extant in the
world, I would not take it for my rule of faith, as being the word of God,
because the possibility would nevertheless exits of my being imposed upon. But when I see throughout the greater part of
this book scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices and a
collection of the most paltry and contemptible lies, I cannot dishonor my
Creator by calling it by this name. (From Part 1).
Paine
presses the point several pages later in his discussion on miracles:
If we are to suppose a miracle to be
something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must
go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such a
miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very
easily decided, which is, is it more probable that nature should go out of her
course, or that a man should tell a lie?
We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we
have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same
time; it is therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle
tells a lie. (From Part I).
On Mosaic Authorship
of the Pentateuch
In the second part of The Age of Reason, Paine spends a great
deal of space arguing that Moses couldn’t possibly have written the first five
books of the Bible traditionally ascribed to him. Therefore we really don’t know who wrote the
Pentateuch, and therefore those books have no authority.
There are
really two questions here:
1) Did
Moses write the Pentateuch?
2) Does it
matter?
Paine was
not the first thinker to question Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and I
can only assume that at least some of this section is drawing on the ideas of
other writers before him. (Although
Paine never gives any credit to anyone else, and presents everything as his
own. Perhaps in the 18th century
intellectual plagiarism was not as big of a deal as it is today?)
Today we
know even more than Paine did. In the
late 19th century, German scholars would prove that the Pentateuch couldn’t
possibly have been written by Moses because it was a compilation of 4 different
sources edited together at a much later date—the JEDP theory (W). (For a clear and
understandable explanation of the JEDP theory, see the Old Testament lectures by Christine Hayes.)
Although
Paine’s writing is not up to date with the latest scholarship, it is
interesting because it shows what was known at the time. Paine (and the contemporaries he doesn’t give
credit to), even without the knowledge of the JEDP theory, are able to do a
fair amount of literary detective work to disprove Mosaic authorship.
To
summarize Paine’s arguments:
1) There is
no internal evidence inside the Pentateuch which would indicate Moses wrote it. Nowhere does the author identify himself as
Moses or refer to Moses in the first person.
2) The author of the Pentateuch writes about
Moses in a style which would be highly awkward if Moses was writing about
himself (for example the author of the Pentateuch calls Moses the greatest
prophet whoever lived, and also praises Moses's humility.)
3). There
are a lots of anachronisms in the Pentateuch in which the author refers to
events that took place after Moses died, or refers to place names that didn’t exist
in Moses’s day. (Not even the excuse of
prophecy can be used to excuse this, Paine says, because no one prophesizes in
the past tense.)
4). And finally the author of the Pentateuch
writes in a style that makes it obvious he is writing about events that took
place in the distant past.
(This is
only a short summary of Paine’s arguments.
To see him list several examples of each point, go and read his book.)
So Moses
couldn’t possibly have written the Pentateuch.
Despite the
fact that this was discovered hundreds of years ago, it may still come as a
shock to those of us who grew up in the church.
As a child, I was taught by both Sunday School teachers and Christian School teachers that Moses had written
the first five books of the Bible. I
would now like to go back and ask my old teachers if they had been knowingly
lying to me, or if they had just been ignorant of the fact that Mosaic authorship
had been disproved hundreds of years before.
I suspect
it is the latter. The last 200 years
have seen an explosion of Biblical scholarship, and virtually none of it has
filtered down to the average church goer, who are just as ignorant as they were
200 years ago.
At the
Christian universities, however, it is a different story.
My religion
professors at Calvin College were
well aware of the JEDP theory, and knew that Moses couldn’t have written the
Pentateuch. But it didn’t matter to
them. They believed that the books were
inspired by God, and it didn’t much matter which human vessel was responsible
for writing down the words.
After all,
the rest of the historical books in the Old Testament were written anonymously,
and Church tradition has accepted that they were written anonymously. Nobody knows who wrote the book of Judges,
for example, or 2nd Kings, and nobody is much bothered by it. So why should anyone care if the first five
historical books of the Bible are also written by an anonymous author?
Paine is
actually somewhat confused on this point, because after he gets done with the
Pentateuch, he then wastes time trying to prove that the book of Joshua couldn’t
possibly be written by Joshua, and that 1st and 2nd Samuel couldn’t possibly be
written by Samuel. But very few people
actually claimed that they were. The
book of Joshua is so titled because it focuses on the exploits of Joshua, not
because Joshua is supposed to have written it.
To be fair
to Paine, there are some Christian and Jewish traditions that do ascribe
authorship of the books of Joshua and Samuel to the historical Joshua and
Samuel. (Josephus, for example, believed
that 1&2 Samuel were written by Samuel, and that God gave him the power of
prophecy to predict what would happen after his death.) But this is not the mainstream view.
(Or at the
very least, this was not the view I was brought up with. Perhaps this view was more popular in Paine’s
day? Does anyone know?)
But even
Paine admits that books like Judges and Kings are anonymous on the face of it.
So, does it
even matter that Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, or is Paine just wasting
his time when he goes on for pages and pages on the subject?
Paine seems
to think it matters. He gives his
rationale before beginning on the examination:
But , before I proceed to this examination,
I will show wherein the Bible differs from all other ancient writings with
respect to the nature of the evidence necessary to establish its authenticity;
and this is the more proper to be done, because the advocates of the former
part of the Age of Reason, undertake to say, and they put some stress thereon,
that the authenticity of the Bible is as well established as that of any other
ancient book; as if our belief of the one could become any rule for our belief
in the other.
I know, however, but of one ancient
book that authoritatively challenges universal consent and belief, and that is
Euclid’s Elements of Geometry; and the reason is, because it is a book of
self-evident demonstration, entirely independent of its author , and of
everything relating to time, place, and circumstances. The matters contained in that book would have
the same authority they have now, had they been written by any other person, or
had the work been anonymous, or had the author never been known; for the
identical certainty of who was the author, makes no part of our belief of the
matters contained in the book. But it is
quite otherwise with respect to the books ascribed to Moses, to Joshua, to
Samuel, etc; these are books of testimony, and they testify of things naturally
incredible; and therefore, the whole of our belief as to the authenticity of
those books rests, in the first place, upon the certainty that they were
written by Moses, Joshua, and Samuel; secondly upon the credit we give to the
testimony. We may believe the first,
that is we may believe the certainty of the authorship, and yet not the
testimony; in the same manner that we may believe that a certain person gave
evidence upon a case and yet not believe the evidence that he gave. But if it should be found that the books
ascribed to Moses, Joshua and Samuel were not written by Moses, Joshua, and
Samuel, every part of the authority and authenticity of those books is gone at
once; for there can be no such thing as forged or invented testimony; neither
can there be anonymous testimony, more especially as to things naturally
incredible, such as that of talking with God face to face, or that of the sun
and moon standing still at the command of a man. The greatest part of the other ancient books
are works of genius; of which kind are those ascribed to Homer, to Plato, to
Aristotle, to Demosthenes, to Cicero, etc. Here, again, the author
is not essential in the credit we give to any of those works of genius, they
would have the same merit they have now, were they anonymous. Nobody believes the Trojan story,
as related by Homer, to be true—for it is the poet only that is admired, and
the merit of the poet will remain, though the story be fabulous. But, if we disbelieve the matters related by
the Bible authors (Moses, for instance), as we disbelieve the things related by
Homer, there remains nothing of Moses in our estimation, but an imposter. As to the ancient historians, from Herodotus
to Tacitus, we credit them as far as they relate things probable and credible,
and no farther; for if we do, we must believe the two miracles which Tacitus
relates were performed by Vespasian, that of curing a lame man and a blind man,
in just the same manner as the same things are told of Jesus Christ by his
historians. We must also believe the
miracle cited by Josephus, that of the sea of Pamphilia opening to let
Alexander and his army pass, as is related of the Red Sea in Exodus. These miracles are quite as well
authenticated as the Bible miracles, and yet we do not believe them; consequently
the degree of evidence necessary to establish our belief of things incredible,
whether in the Bible or elsewhere, is far greater than that which obtains our
belief to natural and probable things; and therefore the advocates for the
Bible have no claim to our belief of the Bible, because that we believe things
stated in other ancient writings; since we believe the things stated in these
writings no further than they are probable and credible, or because they are
self-evident, like Euclid…
Later Paine
adds: Take away from Genesis the belief
that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word
of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of
stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright
lies. The story of Eve and the serpent,
Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian tales, without the merit of
being entertaining; and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years
becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology (from
Part 2).
Paine’s not
wrong on this, but how far can the point be pushed?
It is
possible for Christians to lose the tradition that the Pentateuch was written
by Moses. As long as Christians believe
that the Pentateuch was still inspired by God, whichever human transcribed the
words doesn’t much matter.
But here’s
the thing: it is true that some books in the Old Testament were anonymous by
Church tradition, and some books were not, but all of these books derive their
divine authority from tradition. We have
only Church tradition as a basis for believing any of the Bible was inspired by
God. And part of that same tradition is
that Moses wrote the first 5 books under God’s inspiration. If you lose the tradition of Mosaic
authorship, then I think it calls into question the whole tradition, including
divine inspiration.
The basic
question is how can we really tell that the Bible, any part of the Bible, is
inspired by God.
And Paine’s
answer?
I quoted it before, but it’s worth repeating: The answer to this question is, that nobody
can tell, except that we tell one another so.
Other Highlights
Paine argues some points so well
that I’m tempted just to make the next section a list of long quotations.
But I won’t. The book is available on-line or in print for
anyone who wants to read it at length. I’ll
just briefly list what I thought were the highlights.
* Paine did a very good job of arguing how ridiculous the
idea of Satan is in Christian mythology, and pointing out the many
contradictions in how much power Satan appears to have under the Christian
system
* In Part II of the book, Paine has his Bible in hand and
systematically goes through the Bible in chronological order pointing out
everything which no reasonable person can believe. It’s a masterful tour-de-force.
* Paine also does a good job of pointing out all the
horrible stories collected in the Bible.
In particular, Paine recounts many of the divinely sanctioned massacres
in the Old Testament, such as in Numbers 31, when Moses orders all the captive
Midian woman and children killed, except for the Midian virgins who are divided
up among the soldiers for their personal use instead.
* Paine points out all the different contradictions between the 4 Gospels in their resurrection accounts, and shows that this is reason to doubt that the event ever occurred.
* Of the many stories Paine pokes holes in, I thought one of
the more devastating points was Paine’s take down of Matthew 27:50-53. The verses are as follows:
Jesus again gave a loud cry and breathed his
last. Then the curtain hanging in the Temple was torn in two
from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split apart, the graves broke
open and many of God’s people who had died were raised to life. They left the graves, and after Jesus rose
from death, they went into the Holy
City, where many people
saw them.
Paine
points out the many logical problems with these verses. If this really had happened, wouldn’t it have
been sort of a big deal? How come it was
never mentioned by any other writer? No
non-Christian source even mentions it, and of the 3 Gospels, only Matthew
bothers to write about it. And Matthew never mentions what became of these
people raised from the dead. Did they go
back into their graves, or did they pick up their lives where they had left
off?
Eventually
Paine concludes: It is an easy thing to
tell a lie, but it is difficult to support the lie after it is told.
* In Part III, Paine examines the Old Testament passages
that the Gospels use to try and connect Jesus’s life to old prophecies. Paine shows that these Old Testament verses
really had nothing to do with Jesus.
They have been taken out of context by the Gospel writers to mean
something the original authors never intended, and in some cases the Gospel
writers even altered the grammar or wording of these Old Testament passages to
change their original meaning. (Robin
Lane Fox argues this point as well in The
Unauthorized Version).
Furthermore
many of the so-called prophecies are completely unremarkable, even if applied
to Jesus. Most of the prophecies could
be about several people. For example, vague Old Testament passages about unnamed innocent people suffering are useless as prophecy. Innocent people suffer in every era, Paine argues, you don’t
need a prophecy to predict this. The
value of prophecy should be in predicting something that is unexpected. It does no good to predict something that
could happen to any common man.
As Paine
writes: They [the Gospel writers] tell us that Jesus rose from the dead, and
ascended into heaven. It is very easy to
say so; a great lie is as easily told as a little one. But if he had done so, those would have been
the only circumstances respecting him that would have differed from the common
lot of man; and, consequently, the only case that would apply exclusively to
him, as a prophecy, would be some passage in the Old Testament that foretold
such things of him. But there is not a passage
in the Old Testament that speaks of a person, who, after being crucified, dead,
and buried, should rise from the dead, and ascend into heaven. (from Part
III).
* Paine also highlights the absurdity of using the vehicle
of Jesus Christ as the salvation of the whole human race.
According
to the Bible, salvation for humans lies in the knowledge that Jesus was
crucified and then rose from the dead.
Consequently it is logical that after Jesus arose from the dead, he
would appear to as many people as possible to establish this fact so necessary
for salvation. But instead what does the
Bible record him as doing? After his
resurrection, Jesus hides away, appears only to his disciples, and making no
public appearances.
Furthermore,
the time it takes for the knowledge of Jesus to spread throughout the world is
incredibly inefficient. As Paine says:
The Old Testament tells us that God created
the heavens and the earth, and every thing therein, in six days. [...]
Now as the eternal salvation of man
is of much greater importance than his creation, and as that salvation depends,
as the New Testament tells us, on man’s knowledge of, and belief in the person
called Jesus Christ, it necessarily follows from our belief in the goodness and
justice of God, and our knowledge of his almighty power and wisdom, as
demonstrated in the creation, that ALL THIS, if true, would be made known to
all parts of the world, in as little time at least, as was employed in making
the world. To suppose the Almighty would
pay greater regard and attention to the creation and organization of inanimate
matter, than he would to the salvation of innumerable millions of souls, which
he himself had created, “as the image of himself” is to offer an insult to his goodness
and justice.
Now observe, reader, how the
promulgation of this pretended salvation by knowledge of, and a belief in Jesus
Christ went on, compared with the work of creation.
In the first place, it took longer
time to make a child than to make the world, for nine months were passed away
and totally lost in a state of pregnancy. [….] Secondly; several years of Christ’s life were lost in a state of human
infancy. […] Thirdly; Christ, as Luke asserts, was thirty years old before he began
to preach what they call his mission.
Millions of souls died in the mean time without knowing it. Fourthly; it
was above three hundred years from that time before the book called the New
Testament was compiled into a written copy, before which time there was no such
book. Fifthly; it was above a thousand years after that, before it could be
circulated; because neither Jesus nor his apostles had knowledge of, or were
inspired with the art of printing: and , consequently, as the means for making
it universally known did not exist, the means were not equal to the end, and,
therefore, it is not the work of God.
[…]
Now, had the news of salvation by Jesus
Christ been inscribed on the face of the Sun and the Moon, in characters that
all nations would have understood, the whole earth would have known it in
twenty-four hours, and all nations would have believed it; whereas, though it
is now almost two thousand years since, as they tell us, Christ came upon
earth, not a twentieth part of the people of the earth know any thing of it,
and among those who do, the wiser part do not believe it. (from Part III)
Where Paine Gets It
Wrong
Despite all the good arguments
Paine makes, there’s plenty he gets wrong as well.
There are
lots of factual mistakes in the book. (I’m
guessing that 18th Century printing presses didn’t have much of a fact checking
department, so if Paine got confused about something, there was probably no one
around to correct him.)
Many of
these small factual mistakes don’t actually affect Paine’s overall argument.
For
example, when arguing how inadequate human language is to God’s revelation, and
how much can be lost in translation, Paine says, But how was Jesus Christ to make anything known to all nations? He could speak but one language which was
Hebrew (from Part 1).
Actually
Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew, but either way the point still stands.
And there
were all sorts of other mistakes like this throughout the book.
Other
Mistakes:
*Paine doesn’t understand the term immaculate conception is used by Catholics to refer to the
conception of Mary, not the conception of Jesus.
* Paine doesn’t fully understand the difference between
Kings and Chronicles. He doesn’t
understand that the writer of Chronicles is intentionally writing about the
history of the Southern Kingdom only.
(Although Paine is right that the author of Chronicles and the author of
Kings often contradict each other.)
* Paine says, "The kingdom of Judah
followed the line of David, and the kingdom
of Israel that of Saul."
The Kingdom of Judah
did follow the line of David, but the Kingdom of Israel
was ruled by several different dynasties over its history. (All of Saul’s descendents were wiped out
under the reign of King David.)
* Paine doesn’t understand that the category of lesser prophets refers to the Prophets
about whom less is written, and is not supposed to mean that they are any
lesser in quality to the so-called greater Prophets.
* Paine doesn’t believe that any of the Gospels were written
by their supposed authors. This is
probably true (and modern scholarship supports him on this.) However Paine misunderstands who the supposed
traditional authors were. Paine mistakenly
thinks Luke and Mark were supposed to be members of the 12 disciples.
And some of
Paine’s mistakes aren’t even his fault.
A few of Paine’s theories have been disproved by scholarship that occurred
after his death, and that he couldn’t possibly have known about.
On the
account of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension, Paine writes that, "it was the necessary counterpart to the
story of his birth. His historians
having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to
take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have
fallen to the ground."
Actually,
it’s the other way around. The earliest
Christian documents, Paul’s letters, mentioned Jesus’s resurrection, but not
his birth. Likewise for the earliest
Gospel, Mark. It is only with the later
Gospels of Matthew and Luke that the nativity stories appear. Once the story of the resurrection was
established, the Gospel writers were obliged to invent a miraculous birth for
Jesus, not vice-versa.
However
Paine is not to blame for this. Although
all the pieces had been there, according to Robin Lane Fox in The Unauthorized Version, it was not
until the 19th century that scholars realized the nativity myths must have been
a later addition.
Likewise
the book of Daniel. (In an attempt to be
generous, Paine says the book of Daniel could possibly have been written by
Daniel himself, but modern scholarship has shown the book is written sometime
between 167 and 164 BC—see the Yale lectures.)
Also, in
the Yale lectures on the Bible, Christine Hayes talks about how 18th and 19th
century criticism of the Old Testament suffered from a Protestant bias. It was assumed, without any good evidence, that
the all the emphasis on priestly rites and rituals in the Old Testament was a
later corruption of religion.
Paine’s
writing also reflects that bias. Parts
of the Bible that Paine thinks fit with his Deist world view (such as Psalm 19,
and parts of Job) Paine asserts must be from an earlier tradition.
Perhaps the
most serious charge is that Paine, in his hatred of the Old Testament, will
occasionally get carried away and condemn not only the books of the Old
Testament, but the entire race from which this tradition came. I really hate to say this of Paine, but there
are one or two passages which make him sound anti-Semitic. “the Jews never prayed but when they were in
trouble, and never for anything but victory, vengeance and riches” Paine
writes at one point. And a little
further down the same page, Paine writes of the Pagans, "as far as we know to the contrary, they were a just and moral people,
and not addicted like the Jews, to cruelty and revenge."
Paine
becomes reluctant to give the Jews credit for anything good. Books of the Old Testament that seem to
glorify cruelty, Paine is happy to assign to the Jewish race. Books of the Old Testament that Paine
actually likes, such as Job, parts of Proverbs, and Jonah (which Paine suspects
is a written as a satire on the idea of prophets) he argues must have come from
a pagan tradition.
Christine
Hayes, in her lectures on the Old Testament, says that there is a contradiction
between the theological views of different books of the Bible (Job and Jonah do
contradict the views of the Deuteronimistic historian) but that this should be
taken as one part of the Hebrew tradition in dialogue with another part. Paine,
however, is unable to give the Jews credit for any redeeming scriptures.
Along the
same lines, Paine is far too happy to condemn the ancient Jewish Kings as
violent scoundrels, based on the account in Kings,
without fully realizing the nature of the Bible’s polemic. Paine has trouble
distinguishing between violence condemned by the Bible and violence condoned by
the Bible.
Granted, the
Old Testament presents a bizarre polemic.
Violence in support of the cult of Yahweh is praised, violence not
sanctioned by the cult of Yahweh is condemned.
But flawed
though this polemic is, one must at least take it for what it is.
So when
Paine complains that the book of Kings
glorifies Jehu’s slaughter of Ahab’s 72 descendants, he is correct. In the book of Kings, after Jehu has mercilessly wiped out all of Ahab’s relatives
and descendants, God says to Jehu : “You
have done to Ahab’s descendants everything I wanted you to do.” 2 Kings
10:30. (Not all of the Bible writers
were operating off of the same memo. The
writer of Hosea condemns Jehu for
exactly the same thing the writer of Kings
praises him for. But leaving that
contradiction aside for now….)
But Paine
is wrong to complain that the 2 Kings
records that King Menahim “smote the city
of Tiphsah, because they opened not the city to him, and all the women therein
that were with child he ripped up” because according to the polemic in Kings Menahim is one of the sinful
Kings, and the Bible is not condoning this violence, but simply recording it to
illustrate what a wicked King Menahim was.
Paine
claimed that the political rivalry between northern Israel
and southern Judah was
responsible for some of the partisan prophets who took Judah’s
side. And he’s not wrong about
this. (In her lectures on the Old
Testament, Christine Hayes emphasizes that the book of Kings was written with a pro-Southern bias, which is part of the
reason all the rulers of the Northern Kingdom of Israel come out looking so
bad.) However, some Old Testament
stories which are clearly set up to highlight the difference between Yahweh and
Baal prophets Paine confuses as a difference between Northern and Southern
prophets.
And one
final note—Paine claims that Vigilius was
condemned to be burned for asserting the antipodes, or in other words that the
earth was a globe, and habitable in every part where there was land.” However when I googled this, I found that
Paine had got his facts completely wrong [LINK HERE].
And there
were other mistakes, but I’ll stop my list here.
(I’m
curious, would a modern edition of this book have annotated some of these
mistakes? Has anyone read a recently
published edition of this book?)
Paine makes
a few mistakes in his writings, and so should perhaps be taken with a grain of
salt. But as I said before I do not
believe his bad arguments invalidate his good arguments. Paine deserves to be judged by his strongest
arguments, and not his weakest arguments.
Christopher Hitchens
and Thomas Paine
The late Christopher Hitchens,
both in print and in his debates, often praised Thomas Paine.
After
finishing this book, however, I’ve begun to think that Hitchens owes even more
to Paine then he acknowledged. Just
about all of the points Hitchens used in his debates appear to have their
origin in Paine.
For
example, in refuting the idea of Christ dying to redeem humanity, Hitchens
often used to talk about how monetary debts can be paid by someone else, but a
moral debt can never be assumed by another person. Guess what?
Turns out the point was made by Paine first.
Other
points Hitchens seems to have borrowed from Paine:
Like Paine,
Hitchens is fond of the Bible story of the dead rising from their graves at
Jesus’s crucifixion.
Like Paine,
Hitchens believes miracles can not prove religion, and that reports of miracles
from other people should be considered not as evidence but as hearsay.
Like
Paine, Hitchens says that religion combines mankind’s strange appearance of
humility with its boldest presumptions.
Like Paine,
Hitchens makes a distinction between writings which are self-evident, like Euclid, and religious
writings which rely on some mysterious type of belief in divine revelation for
their truth content.
Like Paine, Hitchens thinks it is ridiculous to take Isaiah's prophecy to King Ahaz of a virgin giving birth (young woman in Hebrew) and apply it to Jesus. because Isaiah is specifically talking about King Ahaz's own time and military situation.
Like Paine, Hitchens thinks it is ridiculous to take Isaiah's prophecy to King Ahaz of a virgin giving birth (young woman in Hebrew) and apply it to Jesus. because Isaiah is specifically talking about King Ahaz's own time and military situation.
I hate to
kick Hitchens now that he’s dead, but I’m now wondering if his
reputation as one of the brilliant new atheists might have been largely based
on just recycling arguments Thomas Paine made 200 years ago. (Also Christopher Hitchens wrote a book on
Thomas Paine back in 2007 (A), and I almost wonder
if this was the impetus for Hitchens to begin his anti-religion crusade when he
did.)
Other Notes
Because I’m
a slow reader, I’ve been working at this book for months before I got around to
writing this book review.
Link of the Day
Hitting Society With A Sledgehammer
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