Paul, namely, those to the Romans, Corinthians (2), and Galatians, the genuineness of which, after having been contested inch by inch, is now acknowledged even by the most adverse critics; and hence it results that from the contents of these four Epistles, coupled with what is said by the three Roman authors named above, we find ourselves possessed of sufficient materials to enable us, without the aid of the Gospel histories, to sketch an outline (rough, it is true, but still perfectly distinct and real) of the essential facts of the appearance on earth of our Lord Jesus as the Messiah, Christus, the Jewish ringleader, of his crucifixion and resurrection, and of his doctrine and its operation on his earliest followers in their religious faith and moral conduct; and as this outline corresponds at all material points with the more detailed narratives contained in the historical Gospels, it furnishes conclusive proof of the substantial truth of those narratives.

The absence of all mention of Jesus by contemporaneous Jewish writers has, indeed, been made an argument against the authenticity of his history, and even against the fact of his existence. Such an argument cannot, however, be at all maintained. In the first place, silence in itself proves nothing. 'De non ap

parentibus et de non existentibus eadem est ratio' may be a good legal maxim, but it only means that nothing can be treated as a fact unless and until its existence is based on evidence of some sort, even though that evidence may be but circumstantial or presumptive, and though the alleged fact should afterwards be disproved. But this is very different from the assumption, which has been so fruitful a source of error, that what is not apparent cannot exist, or could not ever have existed. The world, in its complacent self-sufficiency, is too ready to take for granted the ignorance of past ages, and to suppose the knowledge of the ancients to have been limited to what only we know them to have known, unmindful of the many causes there may have been to prevent the knowledge they really possessed from being handed down to us.

M. Renan states* that the schismatic School of Alexandrian *Vie de Jesus.'

Jews, the members of which devoted themselves to the study of Greek literature, was so completely detached from Jerusalem that no trace of its existence is to be met with in the Talmud or in the Jewish traditions. Still it would be unreasonable to infer from this silence that such a school did not exist. For instance, no one would think of founding upon it an argument against the personal existence of Philo. And, in like manner, it is not to be imagined that an individual who claimed, and by his followers was acknowledged, to be the Messiah of prophecy, and who is described by Roman historians of the first century as a notorious Jewish ringleader named Christus or Chrestus, should not have been of sufficient importance to be mentioned in the chronicles or other writings of the Jewish nation. On the contrary, the suppression by the Jews of all mention of the fact of the existence of Jesus Christ, that is to say Jesus the Messiah, affords the strongest presumptive proof not only of his personal existence, but of his having been known to them in that character; for it is a maxim of law that the suppression of evidence, like the destruction or mutilation of any written document, affords presumption that there was an interested motive for preventing the truth from being made manifest; and the fact that the Crucifixion of the Messiah Jesus was felt by the heads of the nation to be a national sin and disgrace, would have been a sufficient motive for their doing all in their power to suppress the evidence of this fact, and with it that of the very existence of Jesus himself. Dean Milman, when noticing the remarkable circumstance that the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, does not mention a single word of the incident of the Golden Calf made by Aaron at Mount Sinai, as recorded in the thirty-second chapter of Exodus, says, 'Josephus, jealous of the national honour, omits the whole scene'* And, in like manner, jealousy of the national honour would have prompted the Jewish scribes to omit all mention of Jesus the Messiah, as in fact Josephus himself did.

It will doubtless be alleged that in the received text of the Jewish historian there are two passages in which the name of *History of the Jews.'

Jesus actually occurs; but these passages are so manifestly the results of a 'pious fraud,' most clumsily executed by the early Christian clergy, that they would really not have been deemed worthy of notice here were it not for M. Renan's extraordinary advocacy of their authenticity.

In the one of these passages Jesus is described as a 'wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man;' and it is added, He was Christ,” Χριστος οὗτος ἦν * : in the other, James is spoken of as the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ,' 'Inσov tov Xeyoμevov Xpiorov t. These two passages the French scholar declares to be 'perfectly in the spirit of Josephus ;' and he adds, that if that historian made mention of Jesus at all, this is precisely the manner in which he would speak of him.' He admits, however, that a Christian hand has been at work on the former passage, by adding the words 'if it be lawful to call him a man;' because without that addition it would have been almost blasphemous; and that perhaps certain expressions have been modified or omitted, as for example the phrase Xploros cúros y, which, in the original, must have been Χριστος οὗτος ἐλεγετο.

To this it may be categorically replied that the passages in question are not at all in the spirit of Josephus, and that not only he, but no Jew of the period, would under any circumstances have spoken of our Lord in such terms. It is essential that this denial should be substantiated in detail. In the first place, then, M. Renan is altogether mistaken in assuming that the words if it be lawful to call him a man' were introduced for the reason that without them the passage would have been almost blasphemous. Josephus was a Jew who did not believe Jesus to be the Messiah or Christ; and, consequently, instead of speaking of him reverentially, he might rather have been expected to call Jesus himself a blasphemer, as the high-priest Caiaphas did ‡. And even had he been a convert to Christianity, it would not in the time of Josephus have been blasphemous to speak of Jesus as a man, inasmuch as he was so designated by his own disciples on frequent occasions §, and especially by St. Paul, who speaks of Antiq.' xviii. 3, 3. + Antiq.' xx. 9, 1.

*

Matth. xxvi. 65.

§ See Acts ii. 22, xiii. 38, xvii. 31; Phil. ii. 8; Hebr. viii. 3, x. 12, &c.

one man, Jesus the Messiah'*. In the next place, no Jew in the time of Josephus, whether a believer in our Lord or not, would have spoken of Him as Xpioros, as if this were a proper name. A believer would have said o Xploros-the Christ or Messiah; whilst an unbeliever would have spoken contemptuously of one Jesus of Nazareth, who pretended to be the Messiah, and was in consequence put to death by Pontius Pilate, much in the same way as our Lord is spoken of by Josephus's contemporary Tacitus. Further, Josephus could by no possibility have said of Jesus, as he is made to say, that 'he appeared to his disciples alive on the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold this and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him ;' for this would have been affirming both the fact of our Lord's resurrection, and also the writer's belief in his being the Messiah of prophecy. And, above all, the Jewish historian could not possibly have said of the believers in the Messiah, that the tribe (pvλov) of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.' For Josephus was a learned priest of the tribe of Levi, who lived in the next generation after the Crucifixion of Jesus, and apparently was born before that event; and therefore it is palpably absurd to imagine that he could have spoken of Jesus and his followers as if they formed a separate tribe,' like those of the Children of Israel, and would have said of them that they were 'not extinct to this day,' when in fact the Christian religion had then only just begun to take root.

It ought not, then, to be doubted for a single moment that the passages in question are interpolations of a comparatively late date, the language in which they are couched having been adopted by their Gentile Christian author, in order to give to them what he ignorantly imagined to be la couleur locale.' And as by that time the human nature of our Lord had become almost eclipsed by his divine nature, it is perfectly intelligible that the 'pious' interpolator, though unscrupulous in the commission of this fraud for the good of Holy Church,' should still have hesitated to speak of Jesus otherwise than as the Son of God; and so * Romans v. 15.

6

he eased his conscience by adding the words, if it be lawful to call him a man.'

Unhappily it is thus that what are designated Evidences of Christianity' have been concocted since the earliest ages. Were it not that the experience of our Courts of Justice shows that false evidence is oftentimes resorted to from a desire to corroborate facts that are true in themselves, the fabrication of such evidence would be calculated to raise the strongest presumption against a cause whose advocates had been so weak and so wicked as to resort to this dangerous expedient.

Rightly considered, the silence of Josephus respecting the existence of Jesus and his execution for having claimed to be the Messiah or Christ, ought to have been welcomed by the misguided Christian interpolator and his abettors as the strongest presumptive evidence in support of those facts, which jealousy for the national honour prompted the Jewish historian to suppress, in like manner as he suppressed the fact of the earlier sin of his nation in worshipping the golden calf.

We have among ourselves a similar instance of the suppression of an historical fact, on account of its having been looked on as a national disgrace, in the treatment to which the Protector Oliver Cromwell has been subjected. Although independent historians could not be prevented from making mention of him both personally and in connexion with the nation which during eleven years he governed not ingloriously (just as the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus bore testimony to the existence of our Lord Jesus), still, officially, that is to say in the annals of the legislature of the realm, the Protector is ignored. Charles the First ceased to reign in the year 1649, and his son Charles the Second, who during the following eleven years was a fugitive and resided abroad, is nevertheless alleged to have immediately succeeded his father on the throne; the year 1660, in which he returned to England, being recorded as the twelfth year of his reign in our statute books, which contain no traces of the Protector Cromwell, or of the laws passed by the British Parliament under his government, except in so far as the same laws were con