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Evidences of Christianity by William Paley

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It is made out also, I think, with sufficient evidence, that both the
teachers and converts of the religion, in consequence of their new
profession, took up a new course of life and behaviour.

The next great question is, what they did this FOR. That it was for a
miraculous story of some kind or other, is to my apprehension extremely
manifest; because, as to the fundamental article, the designation of the
person, viz. that this particular person, Jesus of Nazareth, ought to be
received as the Messiah, or as a messenger from God, they neither had,
nor could have, anything but miracles to stand upon. That the exertions
and sufferings of the apostles were for the story which we have now, is
proved by the consideration that this story is transmitted to us by two
of their own number, and by two others personally connected with them;
that the particularity of the narrative proves that the writers claimed
to possess circumstantial information, that from their situation they
had full opportunity of acquiring such information, that they certainly,
at least, knew what their colleagues, their companions, their masters
taught; that each of these books contains enough to prove the truth of
the religion; that if any one of them therefore be genuine, it is
sufficient; that the genuineness, however, of all of them is made out,
as well by the general arguments which evince the genuineness of the
most undisputed remains of antiquity, as also by peculiar and specific
proofs, viz. by citations from them in writings belonging to a period
immediately contiguous to that in which they were published; by the
distinguished regard paid by early Christians to the authority of these
books; (which regard was manifested by their collecting of them into a
volume, appropriating to that volume titles of peculiar respect,
translating them into various languages, digesting them into harmonies,
writing commentaries upon them, and, still more conspicuously, by the
reading of them in their public assemblies in all parts of the world)
by an universal agreement with respect to these books, whilst doubts
were entertained concerning some others; by contending sects appealing
to them; by the early adversaries of the religion not disputing their
genuineness, but, on the contrary, treating them as the depositaries of
the history upon which the religion was founded; by many formal
catalogues of these, as of certain and authoritative writings, published
in different and distant parts of the Christian world; lastly, by the
absence or defect of the above-cited topics of evidence, when applied to
any other histories of the same subject.

These are strong arguments to prove that the books actually proceeded
from the authors whose names they bear (and have always borne, for there
is not a particle of evidence to show that they ever went under any
other); but the strict genuineness of the books is perhaps more than is
necessary to the support of our proposition. For even supposing that, by
reason of the silence of antiquity, or the loss of records, we knew not
who were the writers of the four Gospels, yet the fact that they were
received as authentic accounts of the transaction upon which the
religion rested, and were received as such by Christians at or near the
age of the apostles, by those whom the apostles had taught, and by
societies which the apostles had founded; this fact, I say, connected
with the consideration that they are corroborative of each other's
testimony, and that they are further corroborated by another
contemporary history taking up the story where they had left it, and, in
a narrative built upon that story, accounting for the rise and
production of changes in the world, the effects of which subsist at this
day; connected, moreover, with the confirmation which they receive from
letters written by the apostles themselves, which both assume the same
general story, and, as often as occasions lead them to do so, allude to
particular parts of it; and connected also with the reflection, that if
the apostles delivered any different story it is lost; (the present and
no other being referred to by a series of Christian writers, down from
their age to our own; being like-wise recognised in a variety of
institutions, which prevailed early and universally, amongst the
disciples of the religion;) and that so great a change as the oblivion
of one story and the substitution of another, under such circumstances,
could not have taken place: this evidence would be deemed, I apprehend,
sufficient to prove concerning these books, that, whoever were the
authors of them, they exhibit the story which the apostles told, and for
which, consequently, they acted and they suffered.

If it be so, the religion must be true. These men could not be
deceivers. By only not bearing testimony, they might have avoided all
these sufferings, and have lived quietly. Would men in such
circumstances pretend to have seen what they never saw; assert facts
which they had no knowledge of; go about lying to teach virtue; and,
though not only convinced of Christ's being an impostor, but having seen
the success of his imposture in his crucifixion, yet persist in carrying
it on; and so persist, as to bring upon themselves for nothing, and with
a full knowledge of the consequence, enmity and hatred, danger and
death?


=========================================

OF THE DIRECT HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

PROPOSITION II.

CHAPTER I.

Our first proposition was, That there is satisfactory evidence that many
pretending to be original witnesses of the Christian miracles, passed
their lives in labours, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undertaken
and undergone in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and
solely in consequence of their belief of the truth of those accounts;
and that they also submitted, from the same motives, to new rules of
conduct.

Our second proposition, and which now remains to be treated of, is, That
there is NOT satisfactory evidence, that persons pretending to be
original witnesses of any other similar miracles have acted in the same
manner, in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely
in consequence of their belief of the truth of those accounts.

I enter upon this part of my argument, by declaring how far my belief in
miraculous accounts goes. If the reformers in the time of Wickliffe, or
of Luther; or those of England in the time of Henry the Eighth, or of
Queen Mary; or the founders of our religious sects since, such as were
Mr. Whitfield and Mr. Wesley in our times--had undergone the life of
toil and exertion, of danger and sufferings, which we know that many of
them did undergo, for a miraculous story; that is to say, if they had
founded their public ministry upon the allegation of miracles wrought
within their own knowledge, and upon narratives which could not be
resolved into delusion or mistake; and if it had appeared that their
conduct really had its origin in these accounts, I should have believed
them. Or, to borrow an instance which will be familiar to every one of
my readers, if the late Mr. Howard had undertaken his labours and
journeys in attestation, and in consequence of a clear and sensible
miracle, I should have believed him also. Or, to represent the same
thing under a third supposition; if Socrates had professed to perform
public miracles at Athens; if the friends of Socrates, Phaedo, Cebes,
Crito, and Simmias, together with Plato, and many of his followers,
relying upon the attestations which these miracles afforded to his
pretensions, had, at the hazard of their lives, and the certain expense
of their ease and tranquillity, gone about Greece, after his death, to
publish and propagate his doctrines: and if these things had come to our
knowledge, in the same way as that in which the life of Socrates is now
transmitted to us through the hands of his companions and disciples,
that is, by writings received without doubt as theirs, from the age in
which they were published to the present, I should have believed this
likewise. And my belief would, in each case, be much strengthened, if
the subject of the mission were of importance to the conduct and
happiness of human life; if it testified anything which it behoved
mankind to know from such authority; if the nature of what it delivered
required the sort of proof which it alleged; if the occasion was adequate
to the interposition, the end worthy of the means. In the last ease, my
faith would be much confirmed if the effects of the transaction
remained; more especially if a change had been wrought, at the time, in
the opinion and conduct of such numbers as to lay the foundation of an
institution, and of a system of doctrines, which had since overspread
the greatest part of the civilized world. I should have believed, I say,
the testimony in these cases; yet none of them do more than come up to
the apostolic history.

If any one choose to call assent to its evidence credulity, it is at
least incumbent upon him to produce examples in which the same evidence
hath turned out to be fallacious. And this contains the precise question
which we are now to agitate.

In stating the comparison between our evidence, and what our adversaries
may bring into competition with ours, we will divide the distinctions
which we wish to propose into two kinds,--those which relate to the
proof, and those which relate to the miracles. Under the former head we
may lay out of the case:--

I. Such accounts of supernatural events as are found only in histories
by some ages posterior to the transaction; and of which it is evident
that the historian could know little more than his reader. Ours is
contemporary history. This difference alone removes out of our way the
miraculous history of Pythagoras, who lived five hundred years before
the Christian era, written by Porphyry and Jamblicus, who lived three
hundred years after that era; the prodigies of Livy's history; the
fables of the heroic ages; the whole of the Greek and Roman, as well as
of the Gothic mythology; a great part of the legendary history of Popish
saints, the very best attested of which is extracted from the
certificates that are exhibited during the process of their
canonization, a ceremony which seldom takes place till a century after
their deaths. It applies also with considerable force to the miracles of
Apollonius Tyaneus, which are contained in a solitary history of his
life, published by Philostratus above a hundred years after his death;
and in which, whether Philostratus had any prior account to guide him,
depends upon his single unsupported assertion. Also to some of the
miracles of the third century, especially to one extraordinary instance,
the account of Gregory, bishop of Neocesarea, called Thaumaturgus,
delivered in the writings of Gregory of Nyssen, who lived one hundred
and thirty years after the subject of his panegyric.

The value of this circumstance is shown to have been accurately
exemplified in the history of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the order of
Jesuits. (Douglas's Criterion of Miracles, p. 74.) His life, written by a
companion of his, and by one of the order, was published about fifteen
years after his death. In which life, the author, so far from ascribing
any miracles to Ignatius, industriously states the reasons why he was
not invested with any such power. The life was republished fifteen years
afterwards, with the addition of many circumstances which were the
fruit, the author says, of further inquiry, and of diligent examination;
but still with a total silence about miracles. When Ignatius had been
dead nearly sixty years, the Jesuits, conceiving a wish to have the
founder of their order placed in the Roman calendar, began, as it should
seem, for the first time, to attribute to him a catalogue of miracles
which could not then be distinctly disproved; and which there was, in
those who governed the church, a strong disposition to admit upon the
slenderest proofs.

II. We may lay out of the case accounts published in one country, of
what passed in a distant country, without any proof that such accounts
were known or received at home. In the case of Christianity, Judea,
which was the scene of the transaction, was the centre of the mission.
The story was published in the place in which it was acted. The church
of Christ was first planted at Jerusalem itself. With that church others
corresponded. From thence the primitive teachers of the institution went
forth; thither they assembled. The church of Jerusalem, and the several
churches of Judea, subsisted from the beginning, and for many ages;
received also the same books and the same accounts as other churches
did. (The succession of many eminent bishops of Jerusalem in the first
three centuries is distinctly preserved; as Alexander, A.D. 212, who
succeeded Narcissus, then 116 years old.)

This distinction disposes, amongst others, of the above-mentioned
miracles of Apollonius Tyaneus, most of which are related to have been
performed in India; no evidence remaining that either the miracles
ascribed to him, or the history of those miracles, were ever heard of in
India. Those of Francis Xavier, the Indian missionary, with many others
of the Romish breviary, are liable to the same objection, viz. that the
accounts of them were published at a vast distance from the supposed
scene of the wonders. (Douglas's Crit. p. 84.)

III. We lay out of the case transient rumours. Upon the first
publication of an extraordinary account, or even of an article of
ordinary intelligence, no one who is not personally acquainted with the
transaction can know whether it be true or false, because any man may
publish any story. It is in the future confirmation, or contradiction,
of the account; in its permanency, or its disappearance; its dying away
into silence, or its increasing in notoriety; its being followed up by
subsequent accounts, and being repeated in different and independent
accounts--that solid truth is distinguished from fugitive lies. This
distinction is altogether on the side of Christianity. The story did not
drop. On the contrary, it was succeeded by a train of action and events
dependent upon it. The accounts which we have in our hands were composed
after the first reports must have subsided. They were followed by a
train of writings upon the subject. The historical testimonies of the
transaction were many and various, and connected with letters,
discourses, controversies, apologies, successively produced by the same
transaction.

IV. We may lay out of the case what I call naked history. It has been
said, that if the prodigies of the Jewish history had been found only in
fragments of Manetho, or Berosus, we should have paid no regard to them:
and I am willing to admit this. If we knew nothing of the fact, but from
the fragment; if we possessed no proof that these accounts had been
credited and acted upon, from times, probably, as ancient as the
accounts themselves; if we had no visible effects connected with the
history, no subsequent or collateral testimony to confirm it; under
these circumstances I think that it would be undeserving of credit. But
this certainly is not our case. In appreciating the evidence of
Christianity, the books are to be combined with the institution; with
the prevalency of the religion at this day; with the time and place of
its origin, which are acknowledged points; with the circumstances of its
rise and progress, as collected from external history; with the fact of
our present books being received by the votaries of the institution from
the beginning; with that of other books coming after these, filled with
accounts of effects and consequences resulting from the transaction, or
referring to the transaction, or built upon it; lastly, with the
consideration of the number and variety of the books themselves, the
different writers from which they proceed, the different views with
which they were written, so disagreeing as to repel the suspicion of
confederacy, so agreeing as to show that they were founded in a common
original, i. e. in a story substantially the same. Whether this proof be
satisfactory or not, it is properly a cumulation of evidence, by no
means a naked or solitary record.

V. A mark of historical truth, although only a certain way, and to a
certain degree, is particularity in names, dates, places, circumstances,
and in the order of events preceding or following the transaction: of
which kind, for instance, is the particularity in the description of St.
Paul's voyage and shipwreck, in the 27th chapter of the Acts, which no
man, I think, can read without being convinced that the writer was
there; and also in the account of the cure and examination of the blind
man in the 9th chapter of St. John's Gospel, which bears every mark of
personal knowledge on the part of the historian. (Both these chapters
ought to be read for the sake of this very observation.) I do not deny
that fiction has often the particularity of truth; but then it is of
studied and elaborate fiction, or of a formal attempt to deceive, that
we observe this. Since, however, experience proves that particularity is
not confined to truth, I have stated that it is a proof of truth only to
a certain extent, i. e. it reduces the question to this, whether we can
depend or not upon the probity of the relater? which is a considerable
advance in our present argument; for an express attempt to deceive, in
which case alone particularity can appear without truth, is charged upon
the evangelists by few. If the historian acknowledge himself to have
received his intelligence from others, the particularity of the
narrative shows, prima facie, the accuracy of his inquiries, and the
fulness of his information. This remark belongs to St. Luke's history.
Of the particularity which we allege, many examples may be found in all
the Gospels. And it is very difficult to conceive that such numerous
particularities as are almost everywhere to be met with in the
Scriptures should be raised out of nothing, or be spun out of the
imagination without any fact to go upon.*

_________

* "There is always some truth where there are considerable
particularities related, and they always seem to bear some proportion to
one another. Thus, there is a great want of the particulars of time,
place, and persons in Manetho's account of the Egyptian Dynasties,
Etesias's of the Assyrian Kings, and those which the technical
chronologers have given of the ancient kingdoms of Greece; and,
agreeably thereto, the accounts have much fiction and falsehood, with
some truth: whereas Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, and
Caesar's of the War in Gaul, in both which the particulars of time,
place, and persons are mentioned, are universally esteemed true to a
great degree of exactness." Hartley, vol. ii. p. 109.
_________


It is to be remarked, however, that this particularity is only to be
looked for in direct history. It is not natural in references or
allusions, which yet, in other respects, often afford, as far as they
go, the most unsuspicious evidence.

VI. We lay out of the case such stories of supernatural events as
require, on the part of the hearer, nothing more than an otiose assent;
stories upon which nothing depends, in which no interest is involved,
nothing is to be done or changed in consequence of believing them. Such
stories are credited, if the careless assent that is given to them
deserve that name, more by the indolence of the hearer, than by his
judgment: or, though not much credited, are passed from one to another
without inquiry or resistance. To this case, and to this case alone,
belongs what is called the love of the marvellous. I have never known it
carry men further. Men do not suffer persecution from the love of the
marvellous. Of the indifferent nature we are speaking of are most vulgar
errors and popular superstition: most, for instance, of the current
reports of apparitions. Nothing depends upon their being true or false.
But not, surely, of this kind were the alleged miracles of Christ and
his apostles. They decided, if true, the most important question upon
which the human mind can fix its anxiety. They claimed to regulate the
opinions of mankind upon subjects in which they are not only deeply
concerned, but usually refractory and obstinate. Men could not be
utterly careless in such a case as this. If a Jew took up the story, he
found his darling partiality to his own nation and law wounded; if a
Gentile, he found his idolatry and polytheism reprobated and condemned.
Whoever entertained the account, whether Jew or Gentile, could not avoid
the following reflection:--"If these things be true, I must give up the
opinions and principles in which I have been brought up, the religion in
which my fathers lived and died." It is not conceivable that a man
should do this upon any idle report or frivolous account, or, indeed,
without being fully satisfied and convinced of the truth and credibility
of the narrative to which he trusted. But it did not stop at opinions.
They who believed Christianity acted upon it. Many made it the express
business of their lives to publish the intelligence. It was required of
those who admitted that intelligence to change forthwith their conduct
and their principles, to take up a different course of life, to part
with their habits and gratifications, and begin a new set of rules and
system of behaviour. The apostles, at least, were interested not to
sacrifice their ease, their fortunes, and their lives for an idle tale;
multitudes beside them were induced, by the same tale, to encounter
opposition, danger, and sufferings.

If it be said, that the mere promise of a future state would do all
this; I answer, that the mere promise of a future state, without any
evidence to give credit or assurance to it, would do nothing. A few
wandering fishermen talking of a resurrection of the dead could produce
no effect. If it be further said that men easily believe what they
anxiously desire; I again answer that in my opinion, the very contrary
of this is nearer to the truth. Anxiety of desire, earnestness of
expectation, the vastness of an event, rather causes men to disbelieve,
to doubt, to dread a fallacy, to distrust, and to examine. When our
Lord's resurrection was first reported to the apostles, they did not
believe, we are told, for joy. This was natural, and is agreeable to
experience.

VII. We have laid out of the case those accounts which require no more
than a simple assent; and we now also lay out of the case those which
come merely in affirmance of opinions already formed. This last
circumstance is of the utmost importance to notice well. It has long
been observed, that Popish miracles happen in Popish countries; that
they make no converts; which proves that stories are accepted when they
fall in with principles already fixed, with the public sentiments, or
with the sentiments of a party already engaged on the side the miracle
supports, which would not be attempted to be produced in the face of
enemies, in opposition to reigning tenets or favourite prejudices, or
when, if they be believed, the belief must draw men away from their
preconceived and habitual opinions, from their modes of life and rules
of action. In the former case, men may not only receive a miraculous
account, but may both act and suffer on the side, and, in the cause,
which the miracle supports, yet not act or suffer for the miracle, but
in pursuance of a prior persuasion. The miracle, like any other argument
which only confirms what was before believed, is admitted with little
examination. In the moral, as in the natural world, it is change which
requires a cause. Men are easily fortified in their old opinions, driven
from them with great difficulty. Now how does this apply to the
Christian history? The miracles there recorded were wrought in the midst
of enemies, under a government, a priesthood, and a magistracy decidedly
and vehemently adverse to them, and to the pretensions which they
supported. They were Protestant miracles in a Popish country; they were
Popish miracles in the midst of Protestants. They produced a change;
they established a society upon the spot, adhering to the belief of
them; they made converts; and those who were converted gave up to the
testimony their most fixed opinions and most favourite prejudices. They
who acted and suffered in the cause acted and suffered for the miracles:
for there was no anterior persuasion to induce them, no prior reverence,
prejudice, or partiality to take hold of Jesus had not one follower when
he set up his claim. His miracles gave birth to his sect. No part of
this description belongs to the ordinary evidence of Heathen or Popish
miracles. Even most of the miracles alleged to have been performed by
Christians, in the second and third century of its era, want this
confirmation. It constitutes indeed a line of partition between the
origin and the progress of Christianity. Frauds and fallacies might mix
themselves with the progress, which could not possibly take place in the
commencement of the religion; at least, according to any laws of human
conduct that we are acquainted with. What should suggest to the first
propagators of Christianity, especially to fishermen, tax-gatherers, and
husbandmen, such a thought as that of changing the religion of the
world; what could bear them through the difficulties in which the
attempt engaged them; what could procure any degree of success to the
attempt? are questions which apply, with great force, to the setting out
of the institution--with less, to every future stage of it.

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