The Age of Reason Thomas Paine (beach read TXT) 📖

brought him before Saul, with the head of the Philistine in his hand; and Saul said unto him, Whose son art thou, thou young man? And David answered, I am the son of thy servant, Jesse, the Betblehemite,” These two accounts belie each other, because each of them supposes Saul and David not to have known each other before. This book, the Bible, is too ridiculous for criticism. ↩

I know not what is the Hebrew word that corresponds to the word “seer” in English;94 but I observe it is translated into French by Le Voyant, from the verb voir “to see,” and which means the person who sees, or the seer. ↩

I have read in an ancient Persian poem (Saadi, I believe, but have mislaid the reference) this phrase: “And now the whale swallowed Jonah: the sun set.” —⁠Conway ↩

The story of Abraham and the Fire-worshipper, ascribed to Franklin, is from Saadi. (See my Sacred Anthology, p. 61.) Paine has often been called a “mere scoffer,” but he seems to have been among the first to treat with dignity the book of Jonah, so especially liable to the ridicule of superficial readers, and discern in it the highest conception of Deity known to the Old Testament. —⁠Conway ↩

Mary, the supposed virgin, mother of Jesus, had several other children, sons and daughters. See Matthew 13:55⁠–⁠56. ↩

From the birth of David to the birth of Christ is upwards of 1,080 years; and as the lifetime of Christ is not included, there are but twenty-seven full generations. To find therefore the average age of each person mentioned in the list, at the time his first son was born, it is only necessary to divide 1,080 by 27, which gives forty years for each person. As the lifetime of man was then but of the same extent it is now, it is an absurdity to suppose, that twenty-seven following generations should all be old bachelors, before they married; and the more so, when we are told that Solomon, the next in succession to David, had a house full of wives and mistresses before he was twenty-one years of age. So far from this genealogy being a solemn truth, it is not even a reasonable lie. The list of Luke gives about twenty-six years for the average age, and this is too much. ↩

According to John, (19:14) the sentence was not passed till about the sixth hour (noon), and consequently the execution could not be till the afternoon; but Mark (15:25) says expressly that he was crucified at the third hour, (nine in the morning). ↩

The Bishop of Llandaff, in his famous Apology, censured Paine severely for this insinuation against Mary Magdalene, but the censure really falls on our English version, which, by a chapter-heading (Luke 7), has unwarrantably identified her as the sinful woman who anointed Jesus, and irrevocably branded her. —⁠Conway ↩

Mark says “a young man,” and Luke “two men.” —⁠Conway ↩

This belongs to the late addition to Mark, which originally ended with 16:8. —⁠Conway ↩

The last nine verses of Mark being ungenuine, the story of the ascension rests exclusively on the words in Luke 24:51, “was carried up into heaven,”⁠—words omitted by several ancient authorities. —⁠Conway ↩

The former part of The Age of Reason has not been published two years, and there is already an expression in it that is not mine. The expression is: “The book of Luke was carried by a majority of one voice only.” It may be true, but it is not I that have said it. Some person who might know of that circumstance, has added it in a note at the bottom of the page of some of the editions, printed either in England or in America; and the printers, after that, have erected it into the body of the work, and made me the author of it. If this has happened within such a short space of time, notwithstanding the aid of printing, which prevents the alteration of copies individually, what may not have happened in a much greater length of time, when there was no printing, and when any man who could write could make a written copy and call it an original by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John?95 ↩

I have taken these two extracts from Boulanger’s Life of Paul, written in French; Boulanger has quoted them from the writings of Augustine against Fauste,96 to which he refers. ↩

Boulanger in his Life of Paul, has collected from the ecclesiastical histories, and the writings of the fathers as they are called, several matters which show the opinions that prevailed among the different sects of Christians, at the time the Testament, as we now see it, was voted to be the word of God. The following extracts are from the second chapter of that work:

The Marcionists (a Christian sect) asserted that the evangelists were filled with falsities. The Manichaeans, who formed a very numerous sect at the commencement of Christianity, rejected as false all the New Testament, and showed other writings quite different that they gave for authentic. The Corinthians, like the Marcionists, admitted not the Acts of the Apostles. The Encratites and the Sevenians adopted neither the Acts, nor the Epistles of Paul. Chrysostom, in a homily which he made upon the Acts of the Apostles, says that in his time, about the year 400, many people knew nothing either of the author or of the book. St. Irene, who lived before that time, reports that the Valentinians, like several other sects of the Christians, accused the scriptures of being filled with imperfections, errors, and contradictions. The Ebionites,