LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. A
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius “IT

The Age of Reason
Thomas Paine





LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO.
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius Jt

The Age of Reason
Thomas Paine

*

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS

GIRARD, KANSAS



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



THE AGE OF REASON

I believe in the equality of man; and I be-

lieve that religious duties consist in doing

justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make

our fellow creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe

many other things in addition to these, I shall,
in the progress of this work, declare the things

I do not believe, and my reasons for not believ-
ing them.

I do hot believe in the creed professed by

the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by
the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by

the Protestant church, nor by any church that

I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether

Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me
no other than human inventions, set up to ter-
rify and enslave mankind, and monopolize

power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn
those who believe otherwise; they have the
same right to their belief as I have to mine.
But it is necessary to the happiness of man,

that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidel-

ity does not consist in believing, or in disbe-

lieving; it consists in professing to believe

what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mis-

chief, if I may so express it, that mental lying



4 THE AGE OF REASON

has produced in society. When a man has so
far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of

his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief

to things he does not believe, he has prepared

himself for the commission of every other crime.

He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake
of gain, and, in order to qualify himself for

that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we
conceive anything more destructive to morality
than this?

The adulterous connection of church and

state, wherever it had taken place, whether

Jewish, Christian or Turkish, had so effect-

ually prohibited, by pains and penalties, every

discussion upon established creeds, and upon

first principles of religion, that until the sys-

tem of government should be changed, those

subjects oould not be brought fairly and openly

before the world
;
but that whenever this should

be done, a revolution in the system of religion

would follow. Human inventions and priest-
craft would be detected; and man would return
to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief

of one God, and no more.

Every national church or religion has estab-

lished itself by pretending some special mis-

sion from God, communicated to certain indi-

viduals. 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 those churches show certain books,

which they call revelation
,
or the wrord of God.

The Jews say that their word of God was given



THE AGE OF REASON 5

by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians

say, that their word of God came by divine in-

spiration; and the Turks say, that theij- word

of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel

from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse

the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I
disbelieve them all.*******

It has often been said, that anything may be
proved from the Bible, but before anything can

be admitted as proved by the Bible, the Bible

itself must be proved to be true; for if the

Bible be not true, or the truth of it be doubtful,

it ceases to have authority, and cannot be

admitted as proof of anything.

It has been the practice of all Christian

commentators on the Bible, and of all Chris-

tian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible

on the world as a mass of truth, and as the

word of God; they have disputed and wrangled

and anathematized each other about the sup-

posable meaning of particular parts and pas-

sages therein; one has said and insisted that

such a passage meant such a thing; another

that it meant directly the contrary; and a
third, that it means neither one nor the other,

but something different from both; and this

they call understanding the Bible.

Now instead of wasting their time, 'and heat-
ing themselves in fractious disputations about

doctrinal points drawn from the Bible, these
men ought to know, and if they do not, it is
civility to inform them, that the first thing

to be understood is, whether there is sufficient



6 THE AGE OF REASON

authority for believing the Bible to be the

word of God, or whether there is not.

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, by Carrier, by Joseph le Bon,

in France, by the English government in the

East Indies, or by any other assassin in modern

times. When we read in the books ascribed to
Moses, Joshua, etc., that they (the Israelites)

came by stealth upon whole nations of people,

who, as the history itself shows, had given

them no offense; that they put all those nations

to the sioord; that they spared neither age nor

infancy ; that they utterly destroyed men , women
and children; that they left not a soul to

breathe; expressions that are repeated over

and over again in those books, and that too

with exulting ferocity; are we sure these things
are facts? Are we sure that the Creator of
man commissioned these things to be done?
Are we sure that the books that tell us so were
written by his authority?

It is not the antiquity of a tale that is any

evidence of its truth; on the contrary, it is a

symptom of its being fabulous; for the more

ancient any history pretends to be, the more

it has the resemblance of a fable. The origin

of every nation is buried in fabulous tradition,

and that of the Jews is as much to be sus-

pected as any other. To charge the commission

of acts upon the Almighty, which in their own

nature and by every rule of moral justice, are

crimes as all assassination is, and more es-



THE AGE OF REASON 7

peeialty the assassination of infants, is mat-

ter of serious concern. The Bible tells us that

those assassinations were done by the express

command of God. To believe, therefore, the
Bible to be true, we must unbelieve all our be-
lief in the moral justice of God; for wherein

could crying or smiling infants offend? And
to read the Bible without horror, we must undo

everything that is tender, sympathizing, and

benevolent in the heart of man. Speaking for

myself, if I had no other evidence that the

Bible was fabulous, than the sacrifice I must

make to believe it to be true, that alone would
be sufficient to determine my choice.
But in addition to all the moral evidence

against the Bible, I will in the progress of this

work produce such other evidence, as even a
priest cannot deny; and show, from that evi-

dence, that the Bible is not entitled to credit,

as being the word of God.

I begin with what are called the five books

of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers
and Deuteronomy. My intention is to show
that those books are spurious, and that Moses

is not the author of them; and still further,

that they were not written in the time of

Moses, nor till several hundred years after-

wards; that they are no other than an at-

tempted history of the life of Moses, and of

the times in which he is said to have lived,

and also of the times prior thereto, written by

some very ignorant and stupid pretenders to
authorship, several hundred years after the

death of Moses, as men now write histories of
things that happened, or are supposed to have



3 THE AGE OF REASON

happened, several hundred or several thou-

sand years ago.

The evidence that I should produce in this
case is from the books themselves, and I will

confine myself to this evidence only. Were I

to refer for proof to any of the ancient authors

whom the advocates of the Bible call profane
authors, they would controvert that authority

as I controvert theirs; I will, therefore* meet

them on their own ground, and oppose them
with their own weapon; the Bible.

In the first place, there is no affirmative evi-

dence that Moses is the author of those books;

and that he is the author is altogether an un-

founded opinion, got abroad nobody knows how.

The style and manner in which those books
are written give no room to believe, or even

to suppose, they were written by Moses; for it

is altogether the style and manner of another

person speaking of Moses.

But, granting the grammatical right that

Moses might speak of himself in the third

person, because any man might speak of him-
self in that manner, it cannot be admitted as

a fact in those books that it is Moses who
speaks without rendering Moses truly ridicu-

lous and absurd. For example, Numbers, chap,

xii, ver. 3: “Now the man Moses was very
meek

,
above all men ichich were on the face of -

the earthy If Moses said this of himself, in-

stead of being the meekest of men he was one
of the most vain and arrogant of coxcombs;

and the advocates of those books may now take
which side they please, for both sides are

against them: if Moses was not the author, the



THE AGE OF REASON 9

books are without authority; and if he was

the author, the author was without credit, be-

cause to boast of meekness is the reverse of

meekness, and is a lie in sentiment.

In Deuteronomy, the style and manner of

writing marks more evidently than in the for-

mer books that Moses is not the writer. The

manner here used is dramatical: the writer

opens the subject by a short introductory dis-

course, and then introduces Moses in the act

of speaking, and, when he has made Moses
finish his harangue, he (the writer) resumes

his own part, and speaks till he brings Moses
forward again, and at last closes the scene with

an account of the death, funeral and character

of Moses.

Having thus shown, as far as grammatical

evidence applies, that Moses was not the writer

of those books, I will, after making a few ob-
servations on the inconsistencies of the writer

of the book of Deuteronomy, proceed to show
from the historical and chronological evidence

contained in those books, that Moses, teas not
,

because he could not he, the writer of them;

and consequently, that there is no authority

for believing, that the inhuman and horrid
butcheries of men, women and children, told in
those books, were done, as those books say they

were, at the command of God. It is a duty
incumbent on every true Deist, that he vindi-

cate the moral justice of God against the calum-
nies of the feible.

The writer of the book of Deuteronomy, who-
ever he was (for it is an anonymous work),



10 THE AGE OF REASON

is obscure, and also in contradiction with him-

self, in the account he has given of Moses.

After telling that Moses went to the top of

Pisgah (and it does not appear from any ac-

count that he ever came down again) he tells

us, that Moses died there in the land of Moab,

and that he buried him in a valley in the land

of Moab; but as there is no antecedent to the

pronoun he, there is no knowing who he was

that did bury him. If the writer meant that

he (God) buried him, how should he (the

writer) know it? or why should we (the read-

ers) believe him? since we know not who the

writer was that tells us so, for certainly Moses

could not himself tell where he was buried.

The writer also tells us, that no man know-

eth where the sepulcher of Moses is unto this

clay
,
meaning the time in which this writer

lived; how then should he know that Moses

was buried in a valley in the land of Moab?

for as the writer lived long after the time of

Moses, as is.evident from his using the expres-

sion of unto this clay, meaning a great length

of time after the death of Moses, he certainly

was not at his funeral; and on the other hand,

it is impossible that Moses himself could say,

that no man knoweth where the sepulcher is

unto this day. To make Moses the speaker

would be an improvement on the play of a

child that hides himself and cries, Nobody can

find me; nobody can find Moses.

This writer has nowhere told us how he

came by the speeches which he has put into

the mouth of Moses to speak, and, therefore,

we have a right to conclude, that he either



THE AGE OF REASON 11

composed them himself, or wrote them from

oral tradition. One or the other of these is

the more probable, since he has given, in the

fifth chapter, a table of commandments, in

which that called the fourth commandment is
different from the fourth commandment in the
twentieth chapter of Exodus. In that of Exo-

dus, the reason given for keeping the sev-

enth day is “because (says the commandment)

God made the heavens and earth in six days,
and rested on the seventh”; but in that of

Deuteronomy, the reason given is that it was

the day on which the children of Israel came

out of Egypt, and therefore
,
says this com-

mandment, the Lord thy God commanded thee
to keep the Sabbath day. This makes no men-

tion of the creation, nor that of the coming

out of Egypt. There are also many things
given as laws of Moses in this book, that are

not to be found in any of the other books;

among which is tljat inhuman and brutal law,
chap. xxi. ver. 18, 19, 20, 21, which authorizes

parents, the father and the mother, to bring

their own children to have them stoned to
death for what it is pleased to call stubborn-

ness. But priests have always been fond of

preaching up Deuteronomy, for Deuteronomy
preaches up tithes; and it is from this book,

chap, xxv, ver. 4, they have taken the phrase,

and applied it to tithing, that thou shalt not

muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn

;

and that this might not escape observation, they

have noted it in the table of contents at the

head of the chapter, though it is only a single

verse of less than two lines. O! priests! priests!



12 THE AGE OF REASON

ye are willing to be compared to an ox, for

the sake of tithes. Though it is impossible for

us to know identically who the writer of Deu-

teronomy was, it is not difficult to discover

him professionally , that he was some Jewish

priest, who lived, as I shall show in the course

of this work, at least three hundred and fifty

years after the time of Moses.

I come now to speak of the historical and

chronological evidence. The chronology that

I shall use is the Bible chronology; for
I

mean not to go out of the Bible for evidence

of anything, but to make the Bible itself prove

historically and chronologically, that Moses is

not the author of the books ascribed to him.

It is, therefore, proper that J inform the reader

(such an one at least as may not have the

opportunity of knowing it), that in the larger

Bibles, and also in some smaller ones, there

is a series of chronology printed in the margin

of every page, for the purpose of showing how

long the historical matters Stated in each
page

happened, or are supposed to have happened,

before Christ, and, consequently, the distance

of time between one historical circumstance

and another.

I begin with the book of Genesis. In
the

14th chapter of Genesis, the writer gives an ac-

count of Lot being taken prisoner in a battle

between the four kings against five, and carried

off, and that when the account of Lot being

taken came to Abraham, he armed all his house-

hold and marched to rescue Lot from thfe cap-

tors; and that he pursued them unto Dan (ver.

14).



THE AGE OF REASON 13

To show in what manner this expression of

pursuing them unto Dan applies to the case in
question, I will refer to two circumstances, the

one in America, the other in France. The city
now called New York, in America, was origin-
ally New Amsterdam; and the town in France,
lately called Havre Marat, was before called

Havre de Grace. New Amsterdam was changed
to New York in the year 1664; Havre de Grace
to Havre Marat in 1793. Should, therefore, any

writing be found, though without date, in

which the name of New York should be men-
tioned, it would be certain evidence that such

a writing could not have been written before,

and must have been written after New Amster-
dam was changed to New York, and conse-
quently not till after the year 1664, or at least

during the course of that year. And, in like

manner, any dateless writing with the name
of Havre Marat, would be certain evidence

that such a v/riting must have been written
after Havre de Grace became Havre Marat,
and consequently not till after the year 1793,
or at least during the course of that year.

I now come to the application of those cases,
and to show that there was no such place as
Han, till many years after the death of Moses;
and, consequently, that Moses could not be the

writer of the book of Genesis, where this ac-
count of pursuing them unto Dan is given.
The place that is called Dan in the Bible was

originally a town of the Gentiles, called Laish;

and when the tribe of Dan seized upon this
town, they changed its name to Dan, in com-
memoration of Dan, who was the father of that
tribe, and the great grandson of Abraham.



14 THE AGE OF REASON

To establish this in proof, it is necessary to
refer from Genesis to the 18th chapter of the

book called the Book of Judges. It is there
said (ver. 27) that they (the Danites) came

unto Laish to a people that icere quiet and se-

cure, and they smote them with the edge of the

sivord (the Bible is filled with murder) and

burned the city with fire; and they built a

city (ver. 28), and dwelt therein , and they

called the name of the city Dan , after the name
of Dan

,
their father , howbeit the name of the

city was Laish at the first.

This account of the Danites taking posses*

sion of Laish and changing it to Dan is placed

in the Book of Judges immediately after the

death of Samson. The death of Samson is said

to have happened 1120 years before Christ,

and that of Moses 1451 before Christ, and,

therefore, according to the historical arrange-

ment, the place was not called Dan till 331
years after the death of Moses.

There is a striking confusion between the

historical and the chronological arrangement

in the Book of Judges. The five last chapters,

as they stand in the book, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,

are put chronologically before all the preceding

chapters; they are made to be 28 years before
the 16th chapter, 266 before the 15th, 245 be-

fore the 13th, 195 before the 9th, 90 before the

4th, and 15 years before the first chapter. This

shows the uncertain and fabulous state of the

Bible. According to the chronological arrange-

ment, the taking of Laish and giving it the

name of Dan is made to be 20 years after the
death of Joshua, who was the successor of



THE AGE OF REASON 15

Moses; and by the historical order as it stands

in the book, it is made to be 306 years after

the death of Joshua, and 331 after that of

Moses; but they both exclude Moses from be-

ing the writer of Genesis because, according

to either of the statements, no such place as

Dan existed in the time of Moses; and there-

fore the writer of Genesis must have been

some person vrho lived after the town of

Laish had the name of Dan; who that person
was nobody knows; and consequently the Book
of Genesis is anonymous and without authority.

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 ser-

pent, and of 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 or nine hundred years becomes

as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of

the Mythology.

Besides the character of Moses, as stated

in the Bible, is the most ‘horrid that can be

imagined. If those accounts be true, he was

the wretch that first began and carried on

wars on the score, or on the pretense, of re-

ligion, and under that mask, or that infatu-

ation, committed the most unexampled atroci-

ties that are to be found in the history of any

nation, of which I will state only one instance.

When the Jewish army returned from one



16 THE AGE OF REASON

of their murdering and plundering excursions,

the account goes on as follows, Numbers, chap,

xxxi, ver. 13:

“And Moses, and Eleazer the priest, and all

the princes of the congregation, went forth to

meet them without the camp; and Moses was

wroth with the officers of the host, with the

captains over thousands, and captains over

hundreds, which came from the battle; and

Moses said unto them, ‘Have ye saved all the
loomen alive? behold, these caused the children

of Israel, through the council of Balaam, to

commit trespass against the Lord, in the mat-

ter of Peor, and there was a plague among the
congregation of the Lord. Now, therefore,

kill every male among the little ones, and kill

every ivoman that hath known a man by lying
with him ; but all the women-children that

have not known a man by lying ivith him
keep alive for yourselves

Among the detestable villains that in any
period of the world have disgraced the name
of man, it is impossible to find a greater than

Moses, if this account be true. Here is an or-

der to butcher the boys, to massacre the

mothers, and debauch the daughters.

After this detestable order follows an account

of the plunder taken, and the manner of

dividing it; and here it is that the profaneness

of priestly hypocrisy increases the catalogue

of crimes. Verse 37, “And the Lord's tribute

of the sheep was six hundred and three score

and fifteen; and the beeves was thirty and six

thousand, of which the Lord's tribute was

three score and twelve; and the asses were



THE AGE OP REASON 17

thirty thousand, of which the Lord’s tribute
was three score and one; and the persons were
thirty thousand, of which the Lord’s tribute
was thirty and two.” In short, the matters
contained in this chapter, as well as in many
other parts of the Bible, are too horrid for
humanity to read, or for decency to hear; for
it appears, from the 35th verse of this chapter,
that the number of women-children consigned
to debauchery by the order of Moses was thirty-
two thousand.

People in general know not what wickedness
there is in this pretended wrord of God. Brought
up in habits of superstition, they take it for
granted that the Bible is true, and that it is
good, they permit themselves not to doubt of it
and they carry the ideas they form of the
benevolence of the Almighty to the book which
they have been taught to believe was written
by his authority. Good heavens! it is quite an-
other thing; it is a book of lies, wickedness,
and blasphemy, for what can be greater blas-
phemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man
to the orders of the Almighty!

.

But to return to my subject, that of show-
ing that Moses is not the author of the books
ascribed to him, and that the Bible is spurious.
The two instances I have already given would
be sufficient, without any additional evidence,
to invalidate the authenticity of any book
that pretended to be four or five hundred years
more ancient than the matters it speaks of, or
refers to, as facts; for in the case of pursuing
them unto Dan

,
and of the Icings that reigned

over the children of Israel
,
not even the flimsy



IS THE AGE OP REASON

pretense of prophesy can be
pleaded. The ex-

pressions are in the preter tense,
and it won d

he downright idiotism to say
that a man could

prophesy in the preter tense.

Joshua, according to the
first chapter of

Joshua, was the immediate successor
of Moses;

he was, moreover, a military
man, which Moses

was not, and he continued as
chief of the peo-

ple of Israel 25 years;
that is, from the time

Moses died, which, according
to the Bible

chronology, was 1451 years before
Christ, until

1426 years before Christ, when
according to the

same chronology, Joshua died.
If, therefore,

we find in this book, said to have
been writ-

ten by Joshua, reference to
facts done after

the death of Joshua, it is
evidence that Joshua

could not be the author;
and also- that the

book could not have been written
till after the

time of the latest fact which it
records. As to

the character of the book, it
is horrid, it is a

military history of rapine and
murder, as sav-

age and brutal as those recorded
of his prede-

cessor in villainy and hypocrisy,
Moses? and

the blasphemy consists, as in the
former books,

in ascribing those deeds to
the order of the

Almighty.

In the first place, the book of
Joshua, as

is the case in the preceding
books, is written

in the third person; it
is the historian or

Joshua that speaks, for it would
have been ab-

surd and vain-glorious that Joshua
should say

of himself, as is said of
him in the last verse

of the sixth chapter, that* “ftis
fame was noised

throughout M the country.” I now come more
immediately to the proof.



the age of reason 19
In the 24th chapter, ver. 31, it is said, “that

Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua,
and all the days of the elders that overlived
Joshua.’ Now, in the name of common sense
can it be Joshua that relates what people had
one after he was dead? This account must

not only have been written by some historian
that lived after Joshua, but that lived also
after the elders that outlived Joshua.
There are several passages of a general mean-

mg with respect to time, scattered throughout
the book of Joshua, that carries the time in
which the book was written to a distance from
me time of Joshua, but without marking by
exclusion any particular time, as in the pas-
sage above quoted. In that passage, the time
that intervened between the death of Joshua
and the death of the elders, is excluded descrip-
tively and absolutely, and the evidence sub-
stantiates that the book could not have been
written till after the death of the last.
But though the passages to which I allude,

and which I am going to quote, do not desig-
nate any particular time by exclusion, they

a time fa
.

r more distant from the davs
of Joshua than is contained between the death
of Joshua and the death of the elders. Such
is the passage, chap, x, ver. 14; where after
giving an account that the sun stood still upon
Cxibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon,
at the command of Joshua (a tale only fit to
amuse children), the passage says, “And there
was no day like that, before it, nor after it
that the Lord hearkened to the voice of a
man.



20 the age of reason

This tale of the sun
standing still upon

Mount Gibeon, and the moon
in the valley of

Ajalon is one of those fables
that detects itself.

Such a circumstance could
not have happene

•without being known all over
the world One-

half would have wondered
why the sun did not

rise and the other why it
did not set; and

the ’tradition of it would
have been universal

whereas there is not a nation
in the world that

knows anything about it. But
why must the

moon stand still? What occasion
could there

be for moonlight in the
daytime, and that too

while the sun shined? As a
poetical £'gure >

the whole is well enough;
it is akin to that in

the song of Deborah and
.Barak; The stars in

their courses fought
against Sisera, but it is

inferior to the figurative
declaration of Ma-

homet to the persons who came
to expostulate

with him on his going on.
Wert ™ou .said h^

to come to me with the sun
in thy right hand

and the moon in thy left, it
should not >alter

mu career. For Joshua to
have exceeded Ma

hom“, he’’should have put
the sun and moom

one in each pocket, and
carried them as Guy

Faux carried his dark lantern,
and taken them

out to shine as he might
happen to want them.

In enumerating the
several exploits of

Joshua, and of the tribes,
and of the places

which they conquered or
attempted it is sa ,

chap xv ver. 63, “As
for the Jebusites,

the

inhabitants of Jerusalem,
the children o

Judah could not drive them
out; but the Jebu-

sites dwell with the children
of Judah at

Jerusalem unto this day."
The question upon

this passage is, at
what tjme did the Jebu



THE AGE OF REASON 21

sites and the children of Judah dwell together

at Jerusalem? As this matter occurs again in

the first chapter of Judges, I shall reserve my
observations till I come to that part.

Having thus shown from the book of Joshua

itself, without any auxiliary evidence what-

ever, that Joshua is not the author of that

book, and that it is anonymous, and conse-

quently without authority, I proceed, as be-

fore mentioned, to the book of Judges.

The book of Judges is anonymous on the

face of it; and, therefore, even the pretense

is wanting to call it the word of God; it has

not so much as a nominal voucher; it is alto-
gether fatherless.

In the first chapter of Judges, the writer,

after announcing the death of Joshua, proceeds

to tell what happened between the children of

Judah and the native inhabitants of the land

of Canaan. In this statement, the writer, hav-

ing abruptly mentioned Jerusalem in the 7th

verse, says immediately after, in the 8th verse,

by way of explanation, ‘‘Now that the children
of Judah had fought against Jerusalem, and

taken it.' 1 consequently this book could not

have been written before Jerusalem had been

taken. The reader will recollect the quotation
I have just before made from the 15th chapter
of Joshua, ver. 63, where it said that the Jehu-

sites dicell with the children of Judah at Jeru-
salem unto this day, meaning the time when
the book of Joshua was written.

The evidence I have already produced, to
prove that the books I have hitherto treated

of were not written by the persons to whom



22 THE AGE OF REASON

they are ascribed, nor till many years after

their death, if such persons ever lived,, is al-

ready so abundant, that I can afford to admit

this passage with less weight than I am en-

titled to draw from it. For the case is that

so far as the Bible can be credited as an his-

tory, the city of Jerusalem was not taken till

the time of David; and, consequently, the book

of Joshua, and of Judges, were not written till

after the commencement of the reign of David,

which was 370 years after the death of Joshua.

The name of the city, that was afterwards

called Jerusalem, was originally called Jebus,

or Jebusi, and was the capital of the Jebusites.

The account of David’s taking this city is given

in 2 Samuel, chap, v., ver. 4, &c.; also in 1

Chron., chap, xiv., ver. 4, &c. There is no men-

tion in any part of the Bible that it was ever

taken before, nor any account that favors such

an opinion. It is said, either in Samuel or in

Chronicles, that they utterly destroyed men ,

women and children ; that they left not a soul

to breathe , as is said of their other
conquests;

and the silence here observed implies that it

was taken by capitulation, and that the Jebu-

sites, the native inhabitants, continued to
live

in the place after it was taken. The account,

therefore, given in Joshua that the Jebysites

dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem

unto this day, corresponds to no other
time

than after the taking of the city of David.

Having now shown that every book in the

Bible, from Genesis to Judges, is without au-

thenticity, I come to the book of Ruth, an idle,

bungling story, foolishly told, nobody knows



THE AGE OP REASON 23

by whom, about a strolling country girl creep-

ing slyly to bed to her cousin Boaz. Pretty

stuff indeed to be called the word of God!

It is, however, one of the best books in the

Bible, for it is free from murder and rapine.

I come next to the two books of Samuel,

and to show that those books were not writ-

ten by Samuel, nor till a great length of time

after the death of Samuel; and that they are,

like all the former books, anonymous and with-

out authority.

To be convinced that these books have been

written much later than the time of Samuel,
and, consequently, not by him, it is only nec-

essary to read the account which the writer

gives of Saul going to seek his father’s asses,

and of his interview with Samuel, of whom
Saul went to inquire about those lost asses,

as foolish people now-a-days go to a conjurer

to inquire after lost things.

The writer, in relating this story of Saul,

Samuel and the asses, does not tell it as a

thing that had just then happened, but as an

ancient story in the time the writer lived; for

he tells it in the language or terms used at

the time that Samuel lived, which obliges the

writer to explain the story in the terms or lan-

guage used in the time the writer lived.

Samuel, in the account given of him, in the

first of these books, chap, ix., is called the seer;

and it is by this term that Saul inquires after

him, ver. 11, “And as they (Saul and his serv-

ant) went up the hill to the city, they found

young maidens going out to draw water; and

they said unto them, Is the seer here?” Saul



24 , THE AGE OP REASON

then went according to the direction of these

maidens, and met Samuel without knowing

him, and said unto him, ver. 18, “Tell me, I

pray thee, where the seer's house is? and Sam-

uel answered Saul and said, I am the seer."

As the writer of the book of Samuel relates

these questions and answers, in thq language

or manner of speaking used in the time they

are said to have been spoken; and as that man-

ner of speaking was out of use when this au-

thor wrote, he found it necessary, in order to

make the story understood, to explain the

terms in which these questions and answers

are spoken; and he does this in the 9th verse,

where he says, “before-time, in Israel, when

a man went to inquire of God, thus he spake,

Come, let us go to the seer; for he that is now

called a prophet, was before-time called a seer.”

This proves, as I have before said, that this

story of ’Saul, Samuel and the asses, was an

ancient story at the time the book of Samuel

was written, and consequently Samuel did not

write it, and that that book was without au-

thenticity. v
But if we go further into those books the

evidence is still more positive that Samuel fs

not the writer of them; for they relate things

that did not happen till several years after the

death of Samuel. Samuel died before Saul; for

the 1st Samuel, chap, xxviii, tells that Saul,

and the witch of Endor conjured Samuel up

after he was dead; yet the history of the mat-

ters contained in those books is extended

through the remaining part of Saul's life, and

to the latter end of the life of David, who sue-



THE AGE OP REASON 25

ceeded Saul. The account of the death and
burial of Samuel (a thing which he could not

write himself) is related in the 25th chapter

of the first book of Samuel; and the chron-

ology affixed to this chapter makes this to

be 1060 years before Christ; yet the history

of this first book is brought down to 1056 years
before Christ; that is, till the death of Saul,

which was not till four years after the death

of Samuel.

The second book of Samuel begins with an

account of things that did not happen till four

years after Samuel was dead; for it begins

with the reign of David, who succeeded Saul,
and it goes on to the end of David’s reign,

which was forty-three years after the death of

Samuel; and, therefore, the books are in them-

selves positive evidence that they were not

written by Samuel.

I have now gone through all the books in the
first part of the Bible/to which the names of

persons are affixed, as being the authors of

those books, and which the church, styling

itself the Christian church, have imposed upon

the world as the writings of Moses, Joshua and

Samuel; and I have detected and proved the

falsehood of this imposition. And now, ye
priests, of every description, who have preached
and written against the former part of the

Age of Reason , what have ye to say? Will ye,

with all this mass of evidence against you and

staring you in the face, still have the assurance

to march into your pulpits, and continue to

impose these books on your congregation, as

the work of inspired penmen
,
and the word of



26 THE AGE OF REASON

God, when it is as evident as demonstration

can make truth appear, that the persons who,
ye

say, are the authors, are not the
authors, and

that ye know not who the authors are?
What

shadow of pretense have ye now to produce
for

continuing the blasphemous fraud? What have

ye still to offer against
1

the pure and moral

religion of Deism, in support of your
system

of falsehood, idolatry and pretended
revelation

.

Had the cruel and murderous orders,
with

which the Bible is filled, and the
numberless

torturing executions of men, women and chil-

dren, in consequence of those
orders, been

ascribed to some friend, whose memory
you

revered, you would have glowed with
satis-

faction at detecting the falsehood of
the charge,

and gloried in defending his injured
fame. It

is because ye are sunk in the cruelty
of super-

sition, 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
indil-

erence. The evidence I have produced,
and

shall still produce in the course of
this work,

to prove that the Bible is without
authority,

will, whilst it wounds the stubbornness
of a

priest, relieve and tranquilize the
minds of

millions; it will free them from all those
hard

thoughts of the Almighty which priestcraft
and

the Bible had infused into their
minds, and

which stood in everlasting opposition
to all

their ideas of his moral justice
and benevo-

lence.

I come now to the two books of Kings,
and

the two books of Chronicles. Those
books are

altogether historical, and are chiefly
confined



THE AGE OF REASON 27

to the lives and actions of the Jewish kings,

who in general were a parcel of rascals; but

these are matters with which we have no more
concern, than we have with the Roman em-
perors, or Homer’s account of the Trojan war.

Besides which, as those works are anonymous,

and as we know nothing of the writer or of
liis character, it is impossible for us to know

what degree of credit to give to the matters re-

lated therein. Like all other ancient histories,

they appear to be a jumble of fable and fact,

and of probable and of improbable things;

but which, distance of time and place, and

change of circumstances in the world, have

rendered obsolete and uninteresting.

The chief use I shall make of those books
w'ill be that of comparing them with each

other, and with other parts of the Bible, to

show the confusion, contradiction and cruelty

in this pretended word of God.

The first book of Kings begins with the

reign of Solomon, which, according to the Bible

chronology, was 1015 years before Christ; and

the second book ends 588 years before Christ,

being a little after the reign of Zedekiah, whom
Nebuchadnezzar, after taking Jerusalem and

conquering the Jews, carried captive to Baby-

lon. The two books include a space of 427

years.

The two books of Chronicles are a history of

the same times, and, in general, of the same

persons, by another author; for it would be

absurd to suppose that the same author wrote

the history twice over. The first book of

Chronicles (after giving the genealogy from



28 THE AGE OF REASON

Adam to Saul, which takes up the first nine

chapters) begins with the reign of David;
and

the last book ends as in the last book of
Kings,

soon after the reign of Zedekiah,
about 588

years before Christ. The two last verses of the

last chapter bring the history 52
years more

forward, that is, to 536. But these verses
do

not belong to the book, as I shall shew
when I

come to speak of the book of Ezra.

The two books of Kings, besides the history

of Saul, David and Solomon, who reigned
over

all Israel, contain an abstract of the
lives of

seventeen kings and one queen, who are styled

Kings of Judah, and of nineteen, who are. styled

Kings of Israel; for the Jewish nation,
im-

mediately on the death of Solomon, split
into

two parties, who chose separate kings, and
who

carried on most rancorous wars against
each

other.

Those two books are little more than a
his-

tory of assassinations, treachery
and wars. The

• cruelties that the Jews had accustomed
them-

selves to practice on the Canaanites,
whose

country they had savagely invaded
under a pre-

tended gift from God, they afterwards
prac-

ticed as furiously on each other.
Scarcely half

their kings died a natural death,
and, in some

instances, whole families were destroyed
to se-

cure possession to the successor,
who, after a

few years, and sometimes only a
few months,

or less, shared the same fate. In
the tenth

chapter of the second book of Kings an
account

is given of two baskets full of
children’s heads,

seventy in number, being exposed
at the en-

trance of the city; they were the
children of



THE AGE OF REASON 20

Ahab, and were murdered by the orders of

Jehu, whom Elisha, the pretended man of God,
had anointed to be king over Israel, on pur-

pose to commit this bloody deed, and assas-

sinate his predecessor. And in the account of
the reign of Manaham, one of the kings of

Israel who had murdered Shallum, who had
reigned but one month, it is said, Kings, chap,

xv, ver. 16, that Manaham smote the city of
Tiphsah, because they opened not the city to

him, and all the ivomen that icere therein that

were with child they ripped up.

Could we permit ourselves to suppose that
the Almighty wrould distinguish any nation of
people by the name of His chosen peojrte, we

must suppose that people to have been an ex-

ample to all the rest of the world of the purest

piety and humanity, and not such a nation of

ruffians and cut-throats as the ancient Jews

v/ere; a people who, corrupted by and copying

after such monsters and imposters as Moses

and Aaron, Joshua, Samuel and David, had

distinguished themselves above all others, on

the face of the known earth, for barbarity and
wickedness. If we will not stubbornly shut
our eyes and steel our hearts, it is impossible

not to see, in spite of all that long established

superstition imposes upon the mind, that that

flattering appellation of His chosen people is

no other than a lie the priests and leaders of

the Jews had invented, to cover the baseness

of their own characters, and which Christian
priests, sometimes as corrupt and often as

cruel, have professed to believe.

The two books of Chronicles are a repetition



30 THE AGE OF REASON

of the same crimes; but the history is broken

in several places by the author leaving out the

reign of some of their kings; and in this, as

well as in that of Kings, there is such a fre-

quent transition from kings of Judah to kings

of Israel, and from kings of Israel to kings of

Judah, that the narrative is obscure in the*

reading. In the same book the history some-

times contradicts itself; for example, in the

second book of Kings, chap, i., ver. 8, we are
told, but in rather ambiguous terms, that, after

the death of Ahaziah, King of Israel, Jehoram,

or Joram, (who was of the house of Ahab),

reigned in his stead in the second year of Je-

horam, or Joram, son of Jehoshaphat, King of

Judah; and in chap; viii., ver. 16, of the same
book, it is said, and in the fifth year of Joram,

the son of Ahab, king of Israel, Jehoshaphat

being then king of Judah, began to reign; that

is, one chapter says Joram of Judah began to

reign in the second year of Joram of Israel;
and the other chapter says, that Joram of Israel

beg?/.: to reign in the fifth year of Joram of

Judah.

Several of the most extraordinary matters

related in one history, as having happened dur-

ing the reign of such and such of their kings,

are not to be found in the other, in relating the

reign of the same king; for example, the two

first rival kings, after the death of Solomon,

were Rehoboam and Jeroboam; and in 1 Kings,

chap. xii. and xiii., an account is given of Jero-

boam making an offering of burnt incense, and

that a man who is there called a man of God,
cried out against the altar, chap, xiii, ver. 2:



THE AGE OP REASON 31

“0 altar, altar, thus saith the Lord: Behold,

a child shall be born to the house of David,

Josiah by name, and upon thee shall he offer

the priests of the high places, and burn incense

upon thee; and men’s bones shall be burnt upon

thee.” Verse 4: “And it came to pass, when
king Jeroboam heard the saying of the man
of God, which had cried against the altar in

Bethel, that he put forth his hand from the

altar, saying, Lay hold on him. And his hand,
which he put out against him, dried up so

that he could not pull it again to him .”

One would think that such an extraordinary

case as this (which is spoken of as a judg-

ment), happened to the chief of one of the

parties, and that at the first moment of the
separation of the Israelites into two nations,

would, if it had been true, have been recorded

in both histories. But though men, in latter

times, have believed all that the prophets have

said unto them , it does not appear these proph-

ets or historians believed each other, they know
each other too well.

A long account is also given in Kings about
Elijah. It runs through several chapters, and

concludes with telling, 2 Kings, chap, ii., ver.

11: “And it came to pass as they (Elijah and

Elisha) still went on, and talked, that, behold,

there appeared a chariot of fire and horses of

fire , and parted them both asunder, and Elijah

went up by a whirlwind into heaven .” Hum!
this the author of Chronicles, miraculous as

the story is, makes no mention of, thougn ne

mentions Elijah by name; neither does he say

anything of the story related in the second



32 THE AGE OF REASON

chapter of the same book of Kings, of a parcel

of children calling Elisha 'balcl head , bald

head; and that this man of God , ver. 24,

“turned back, and looked upon them, and

cursed them in the name of the Lord; and

there came forth two she bears out of the

wood, and tore forty and two children of them.
,,

Hie also passes oyer in silence the story told,

2 Kings, chap, xiii, that when they were bury-

ing a man in the sepulchre, where Elisha had

been buried, it happened that the dead man,

as they were letting him down, (ver. 21*5,

“touched the bones of Elisha, and he (the dead

man) revived , and stood upon his feet” The

story does not tell us whether they buried the

man notwithstanding he revived and stood

upon his feet, or drew him up again. Upon all

these stories the writer of Chronicles is as

silent as any writer of the present day, who did

not choose to be accused of lying , or at least

of romancing, would be about stories of the

same kind.

In my observation on the Book of Genesis,

I have quoted a passage from the 36th chapter,

verse 31, which evidently refers to a time after

that kings began to reign over the children of

Israel; and I have shown that as this verse is

verbatim the same as in Chronicles, chap, i,

verse 43, where it stands consistently with the

order of history, which in Genesis it does not,

that the verse in Genesis, and a great part of

the 36th chapter, have been taken from Chron-

icles; and that the book of Genesis, though it

is placed first in the Bible and ascribed to

Moses, has been manufactured by some un-







THE AGE OF REASON 33

known person, after the Book of Chronicles

was written, which was not until at least eight

hundred and sixty years after the time of

Moses.

The evidence I proceed by to substantiate

this is regular, and has in it but two stages.

First, as I have already stated, that the passage

in Genesis refers itself for time to Chronicles;

secondly, that the Book of Chronicles, to which

this passage refers itself, was not begun to be

written until at least eight huqdred and sixty

years after the time of Moses. To prove this,

we have only to look into the thirteenth verse
of the third chapter of the first Book of Chron-

icles, where the writer, in giving the genealogy

of the descendants of David mentions Zede-

kiah; and it was in the time of Zedekiah, that

Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, 588

years before Christ, and consequently more
than 860 years after Moses. Those who have
superstitiously boasted of the authority of the

antiquity of the Bible, and particularly of the

books ascribed to Moses, have done it without

examination, and without any authority than

that of one credulous man telling it to another;
for, so far as historical and chronological evi-

dence applies, the very first book in the Bible is

not so ancient as the book of Homer, by more

than three hundred years, and is about the same

age with JEsop’s Fables.

I am not contending for the morality of
Homer; on the contrary, I think' it a book of

false glory; tending to inspire immoral and

mischievous notions of honor; and with re-

spect to iEsop, though the moral is in general



34 THE AGE OF REASON

just, the fable is often cruel; and* the cruelty

of the fables does more injury to the heart,

especially in a child, than the fnoral does good

to the judgment.

1 The only thing that has any appearance of

certainty in the Book of Ezra, is the time in

which it was written, which was immediately

after the return of the Jews from the Babylon-

ian captivity, about 536 years before Christ.

Ezra (who, according to the Jewish commen-

tators, is the same person as is called Esdras

in the Apocrypha) was one of the persons who
returned, and who, it is also probable, wrote

the account of that affair. Nehemial^ whose

book follows next to Ezra, was another of the

returned persons; and who, it is also probable,

wrote the account of the same affair, in the

book that bears his name. But those accounts

are nothing to us, nor to any other persons,

unless it be to the Jews, as a part of the his-

tory of their nation; affd there is just as much
of the word of God in those books as there

is in any of the histories of France, or Rapin’s

history of England, or the history of any other

country.

But even in matters of historical record,

neither of those writers are to be depended

upon. In the second chapter of Ezra, the

writer gives a list of the tribes and families,

and of the precise number of souls of each

that returned from Babylon to Jerusalem; and

this enrollment of the persons so returned ap-

pears to have been one of the principal objects

for writing the book, but in this there is an



THE AGE OF REASON 35

error that destroys the intention of the under-

taking.

The writer begins his enrollment in the fol-

lowing manner, chap, ii, ver. 3: “The chil-

dren of Parosh, two thousand one hundred

seventy and four.” Ver. 4: “The children of

Shephatiah, three hundred seventy and two.”

And in this manner he proceeds through all

the families ;and in the 64th verse he makes a

total, and says, the whole congregation to-

gether was forty and two thousand three hun-

dred and three score .

But, whoever will take the trouble of casting

up the several particulars, will find that the

total is but 29,818; so that the error is 12,542.

What certainty, then, can there be in the Bible
for anything?

Nehemiah, in like manner, gives a list of the

returned families, and of the number of each
family. He begins, as in Ezra, by saying, chap,
vii., ver. 8: “The children of Parosh, two

thousand three hundred and seventy-two”; and

so on through all the families. The list differs
in several of the particulars from that of Ezra.

In the 66th verse, Nehemiah makes a total,
and says, as Ezra had said: “The whole con-

gregation together was forty and two thousand
three hundred and three score.” But the par-

ticulars of this list make a total of but 31,089,
so that the error here is 11,271. These writers

may do well enough for Bible-makers, but not
for anything where truth and exactness is

necessary. The next book in course is the

book Esther. If Madam Esther thought it any
honor to offer herself as a kept mistress to



"36 THE AGE OF REASON

Aliasuerus, or as a rival to Queen Vashti, who
had refused to come to a drunken king, in the
midst of a drunken company, to be made a
show of, (for the account says they had been
drinking 'seven days, and were merry,) let

Esther and Mordecai look to that, it is no busi-

ness of ours—at least, it is none of mine; be-
sides which the story has a great deal the

appearance of being fabulous, and is also anony-

mous. I pass on to the book of Job.

The book of Job differs in character from

all the books we have hitherto passed over.
Treachery and murder make no part of this
book; it is the meditations of a mind strongly

impressed with- the vicissitudes of human life,
and by turns sinking under and struggling

against the pressure. It is a highly wrought

composition, between willing submission and

involuntary discontent, and shows man, as he

sometimes is, more disposed to be resigned

than he is capable of being. Patience has but a

small share in the character of the person of

whom the book treats, on the contrary, his grief
is often impetuous, but he still endeavors to

keep a guard upon it, and seems determined,

in the midst of accumulating ills, to impose

upon himself the hard duty of contentment.

I have spoken in a respectful manner of the

book of Job in the former part of the Age of
Reason, but without knowing, at that time,

what I have learned since; which is that, from

all the evidence that can be collected, the book

of Job does not belong to the Bible.

I have seen the opinion of two Hebrew com-

mentators, Abenezra and Spinoza, upon this



THE AGE OF REASON 37

subject; they both say that the book of Job

carries no internal evidence of being a Hebrew

book; that the genius of the composition, and

the drama of the piece, are not Hebrew; that

it has been translated from another language

into Hebrew, and that the author of the book

was a Gentile; that the character represented

under the name of Satan (which is the first
and only time this name is mentioned in the
Bible) does not correspond to any Hebrew

idea; and that the two convocations which 'the

Deity is supposed to have made of those whom
the poem calls sons of God, and the familiarity

which this supposed Satan is stated to have

with the Deity,, are in the same case.

It may also be observed that the book shows
itself to be the production of a mind cultivated
in science, which the Jews, so far from being

famous for, were very ignorant of, the allu-

sions to the objects of natural philosophy ar£

frequent and strong, and are of a different

cast to anything in the books known to be
Hebrew. The astronomical names, Pleiades,
Orion and Arcturus, are Greek and not Hebrew
names, and it does not appear from anything

that is to be found in the Bible, that the Jews

knew anything of astronomy, or. that they
studied it; they had no translation of those

names into their own language, but adopted
the names as they found them in the poem.

That the Jews clid translate the literary pro-

ductions of the Gentile . nations into the

Hebrew language, and mix them with their
own. is not a matter of doubt; the thirty-first

chapter of Proverbs is an evidence of this; it



38 THE AGE OF REASON

is there said, ver. 1, The word of King Lemuel,
the prophet which his mother taught him.

This verse stands as a preface to the proverbs

that follow, and which are not the proverbs

of Solomon, but of Lemuel; and this Lemuel

was not one of the kings of Israel, nor of

Judah, but of some other country, and conse-
quently a Gentile. The Jews, however, have

adopted his proverbs, and as they cannot give

any account who the author of the book of Job
was, or how they came by the book; and as it
differs in writing from the Hebrew writings,
and stands totally unconnected with every

other book and chapter in the Bible, before it,

and after it, it has all the circumstantial evi-

dence of being originally a book of the Gentiles.

The Bible-makers, and those regulators of

time, the chronologists, appear to have been at

a loss where to place or how to dispose of the
book of Job; for it contains no one historical

circumstance, nor allusion to any, that might

serve to determine its place in the Bible. But

it would not have answered the purpose of

these men to have informed the world of their
ignorance; and, therefore, they have affixed it

to the area of 1520 years before Christ, which

is during the time the Israelites were in Egypt,

and for which they have just as much author-
ity and no more than I should have for saying

it was a thousand years before that period.

The probability, however, is, that it is older

than any book in the Bible; and it is the only

one that can be read without indignation and

disgust. •

We know nothing of what the ancient Gen-



THE AGE OF REASON 39

tile world (as it is called) was before the time

of the Jews, whose practice has been to calum-

niate and blacken the character of all other

national and it is from the Jewish accounts

that wTe have learned to call them heathens.

But, as far as we know to the contrary, they

were a just and moral people, 1 and not ad-

dicted, like the Jews, to cruelty and revenge,

but of whose profession of faith we are unac-

quainted. It appears to have been their custom

to personify both virtue and vice by statues

and images, as is done now-a-days both by stat-

uary and by painting; but it does not follow

from this, that they worshiped them any more

than we do. I pass on to the. book of Psalms ,
of which it is not necessary to make much
observation. Some of them are moral, and

others are very revengeful; and the greater

part relate to certain local circumstances of

the Jewish nation at the time they were writ-

ten, with which we have nothing to do. It is,
however, an error or an imposition to call them

the Psalms of David; they are a collection,

as song books are now-a-days, from different

song writers, who lived at different times. The
137th Psalm could not have been written till

more than 400 years after the time of David,

because it wTas written in commemoration of

l Editor’s Note: Knowledge obtained by recent
excavations has proven Paine correct in this sur-
mise. Joseph McCabe has proven, in his Morals in
Ancient Babylon (Little Blue Book No. 1076), Re-
ligion and Morals in Ancient Egypt (1077), and
Life and Morals in Greece and Rome (1078), that
the ancient Gentile world was indeed moral and
just.



40 THE AGE OF REASON

an event, the captivity of the Jews in Babylon,
which did not happen till that distance of time.
' lBy the rivers of Babylon we sat doivn; we
wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged
our harps upon the willows, in the midst there-

of; for there they had carried us away captive ,
required of us a song , saying , Sing us one of

the songs of Zion” As a man would say to an
American, or to a Frenchman, or to an Eng-

lishman, Sing us one of your American songs,

or of your French songs, or of your English

songs. This remark with respect to the time

this Psalm was written, is of no other use

than to show (among others already mention-

ed) the general imposition the world has been

under, with respect to the authors of the Bible.

No regard has been paid to time, place and
circumstance; and the names of persons have

been affixed to the several books, which it was

as impossible they should write, as that a

man should walk in procession at his own
funeral.

The book of Proverbs. These, like the

Psalms, are a collection, and that from authors

belonging to other nations than those of the

Jewish nation, as I have shown in the observa-

tions upon the book of Job; besides which some

of the proverbs ascribed to Solomon did not

appear till two hundred and fifty years after

the death of Solomon; for it is, said in the 1st

verse of the 25th chapter,
u
These are also prov-

erbs of Solomon , ivhich the men of Hezekian ,
king of Judah , copied out.” It was two hun-

dred and fifty years from the time of Solomon

to the time of Hezekiah. When a man is fa-



THE AGE OF REASON 41

mous and his name Is abroad, he is made the
putative father of things he never said or did:

and this, most probably, has been the case with

Solomon. It appears to have been the fashion

at that day to make proverbs, as it is now to
make jest-books, and father them upon those
who never saw them.

The book of Ecclesiastes
,
or the Preacher ,

is also ascribed to Solomon, and that with

much reason, if not with truth. It is written
as the soltary reflections of a worn-out de-

bauchee, such as Solomon was, who looking
back on scenes he can no longer enjoy, cries

out. All is vanity

!

A great deal of the meta-
phor of the sentiment is obscure, most prob-

ably by translation; but enough is left to show

they were strongly pointed in the original.

From what is transmitted to us of the char-
acter of Solomon, he was witty, ostentatious,
dissolute, and at last melancholy. He lived
fast, and died, tired of the world, at the age of

fifty-eight years.

The books called the books of the Prophets,
fill up all the remaining parts of the Bible;

they are sixteen in number, beginning with

Isaiah and ending' with Malachi. Of these six-

teen prophets, all of whom, except the three

last, lived within the time the books of Kings

and Chronicles wrere written; two only, Isaiah

and Jeremiah, are mentioned in the history of

thosS books. I shall begin with those two, re-

serving wrhat I have to say on the general

character of the men called prophets to another
part of the w^ork.



42 THE AGE OF REASON

Whoever will take the trouble of reading the
book ascribed to Isaiah, will find it one of the

most wild and disorderly compositions ever

put together; it has neither beginning, middle,

nor end; and, except a short historical part,

and a few sketches of history in two or three

of the first chapters, is one continued, inco-

herent, bombastical rantr full of extravagant

metaphor without application, and destitute of

meaning; a school-boy would scarcely have

been excusable for writing such stuff; it is

(at least in translation) that kind of compo-

sition and false taste that is properly called

prose run mad.

I have already shown, in the instance of the

two last verses of Chronicles, and the three

first in Ezra,1 that the compilers of the Bible

mixed and confounded the writing of different

authors with each other, which alone, were

there no other cause, is sufficient to destroy

the authenticity of any compilation, because

it is more than presumptive evidence that the

compilers are ignorant who the authors were.

A very glaring instance of this occurs in the
book ascribed to Isaiah. The latter part of the

44th chapter, and the beginning of the 45th, so

far from having been written by Isaiah, could

only have been written by some person who

lived at least an hundred and fifty years after

Isaiah was dead.

These chapters are a compliment to Cyrus ,

who permitted the Jews to return to Jerusa-
lem from the Babylonian captivity, to rebuild

Jerusalem and the temple, as is stated in Ezra.



THE AGE OP REASON 43

The last verse of the 44th chapter, and the

beginning of the 45th, are in the following

words:
“That saith of Cyrus , he is my shep-

herd
,
and shall perform all my pleasure; even

saying to Jerusalem
,
thou shalt he built; and

to the temple thy foundations shall be laid;

thus saith the Lord to his anointed to Cyrus
,

ichose right hand I have holden to subdue

nations before him
,
and I will loose the loins

of king to open before him the two-leaved

gates
,
and the gate shall not be shut; I will

go before thee” etc.

What audacity of church and priestly ig-
norance it is to impose this book upon the

world as the writing of Isaiah, when Isaiah,
according to their own chronology, died soon
after the death of Hezekiah, which was 698
years before Christ, and the decree of Cyrus,

in favor of the Jews returning to Jerusalem

was, according to the same chronology, 536

years before Christ; which was a distance of

time between the two of 162 years. I do not

suppose that the compilers of the Bible made
these books, but rather that they picked up

some loose anonymous essays, and put them

together under the names of such authors as

best suited their purpose. They have en-

couraged the imposition, which is next to in-

venting it; for it was imposible but they must

have observed it.

When we see the studied craft of the scrip-
ture-makers, in making every part of this

romantic book of school-boy’s eloquence bend

to the monstrous idea of a Son of God, begot-



44 THE AGE OF REASON

ten by a ghost on the body of a virgin, there

is no imposition we are not justified in sus-
pecting them of. Every phase and circum-

stance are marked with the barbarous hand of

superstitious torture, and forced into mean-

ings it was impossible they could have. The

head of every chapter, the top of every page,

are blazoned with the names of Christ and the

Church, that the unwary reader might suck

in the error before he began to read.

Behold a virgin
2
shall conceive

,
and hear a

son. Isaiah, chap vii. ver. 14, has been interpret-

ed to mean the person called Jesus Christ, and
his mother Mary, and has been echoed through

Christendom for more than a thousand years;

and such has been the rage of this opinion,

that scarcely a spot in it bpt has been stained

with blood and marked with desolation in

consequence of it. Though it is not my in-
tention to enter into controversy on subjects

of this kind, but to confine myself to show

that the Bible is spurious; and thus, by tak-

ing away the foundation, to overthrow at once
the whole structure of superstition raised

thereon;
.
I will, however, atop a moment to

expose the fallacious application of this passage.

Whether Isaiah was playing a trick with

Ahaz, king of Judah, to whom this passage is
spoken, is no business of mine; I mean only

to show the misapplication of the passage, and

2 Editor’s Note: Joseph McCabe has pointed out
in his Forgery of the Old Testament (Little Blue
Book No. 1066), p. 49, that the Hebrew text was
wrongly translated. He says, “the Hebrew word
is not ‘virgin’ but ‘girl,’ and conception by a girl
was not miraculous in ancient JudeaV'



43THE AGE OF REASON

that it has no more reference to Christ and

his mother, than it has to me and my mother.

The story is simply this:

The king of Syria and the king of Israel

(I 'have already mentioned that the Jews were

split into two nations, one of which was called

Judah, the capital of which was Jerusalem and

the other Israel) made war jointly against

Ahaz, king of Judah, and marched their armies

toward Jerusalem. Ahaz and his people became

alarmed, and account says, verse 2, "Their

hearts were moved as the trees of the wood are

moved with the icind

In this situation of things, Isaiah addresses

himself to Ahaz, and assures him in the name

of the Lord (the cant phrase of all the
proph-

ets) that these two kings should not suc-

ceed against him ; and to satisfy Ahaz that

this should be the case, tells him to ask a

sign. This, the account says, Ahaz declined

doing; giving as a reason that he would not

tempt the Lord; upon which Isaiah, who is

the speaker, says, ver. 44, “Therefore the Lord

himself shall give you a sign: behold a virgin

shall conceive and bear a son ,” and the 16th

verse says,
“And before this child shall Jcnow

to •refuse the evil and chuse the good , the

land which thou abhorrest or dreadest (mean-

ing Syria and the kingdom of Israel) shall

be forsaken of both her kings.” Here then

was the sign, and the time limited for the

completion of the assurance or promise; name-

ly, before this child should know to refuse the

evil and chuse the good.

Isaiah having committed himself thus far,



46 THE AGE OF REASON

it became necessary to him, in order to avoid
the imputation of being a false prophet, and
the consequence thereof, to take measures to

make this sign appear. It certainly was not a
difficult thing, in any time of the world, to

find a girl with child, or to make her so; and
perhaps Isaiah knew of one beforehand; for I
•do not suppose the prophets of that day were

any more to be trusted than the priests of

this, be that, however, as it may, he says in

the next chapter, ver. 2, “And I took unto

me faithful witness to record, Uriah the priest,
and Zechariah the son of Jeberechiah, and I

went unto the prophetess
,
and she conceived

and hare a son”

Here then is the whole story, foolish as it

is, of this child, and this virgin; and it is

upon the barefaced perversion of this story,

that the book of Matthew, and the impudence

and sordid interests of priests in later times,

have founded a theory which they call the

gospel; and have applied this story to signify

the person they call Jesus Christ, begotten,

they say, by a ghost, whom they call holy, on
the body of a woman, engaged in marriage,

and afterwards married, whom they call a vir-
gin, 700 years after this foolish story was told;

a theory which, speaking for myself, I hesitate

not to believe, and to say, is as fabulous and

false as God is true.

But to show the imposition and falsehood

of Isaiah, we have only to attend to the se-
quel of this story; which, though it is passed

over in silence in the book of Isaiah, is related

in the 28th chapter of the second Chronicles;



THE AGE OF REASON 47

and which is, that instead of these two kings

failing in their attempt against Ahaz, king of

Judah, as Isaiah had pretended to foretell in

the name of the Lord, they succeeded; Ahaz

-was defeated and destroyed; a hundred and

twenty thousand of his people were slaught-

ered; Jerusalem was plundered, and two hun-

dred thousand women, and sons and daugh-

ters, carried into captivity. Thus much for
this lying prophet and imposter Isaiah, and

the book of falsehoods that bears his name.

I pass on to the book of Jeremiah. This

prophet, as he is called, lived in the time

that Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem, in

the reign of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah;

and the suspicion was strong against him, that

he -was a traitor in the interest of Nebuchad-

nezzar. Everything relating to Jeremiah shows

him to have been a man of an equivocal char-
acter; in his metaphor of the potter and the

clay, chap, xvii., he guards his prognostications

in such a crafty manner, as always to leave

himself a door to escape by, in case the event

should be contrary to what he had predicted.

In the 7th and 8th verses of that chapter,

he makes the Almighty to say, “At what in-

stant I shall speak concerning a nation, and

concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull

down, and destroy it: if that nation, against

whom I have pronounced, turn from their
evil, I will repent me of that evil that I thought
to do unto them/’ Here was a proviso against

one side of the case: now for the other side.

Verses 9 and 10, “And what instant I shall

speak concerning a nation and concerning a



48 THE AGE OF REASON

kingdom, to build and to plant it, if it do
evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice:
then I will repent me of the good wherewith
I said I would benefit them.

,,

Here is a pro-

viso, against the other side; and, according

to his plan of prophesying, a prophet could

never be wrong, however mistaken the Al-

mighty might be. This sort of absurd subter-

fuge, and this manner of speaking of the Al-
mighty, as one would speak of a man, is con-

sistent with nothing but the stupidity of the

Bible.

As to the authenticity of the book, it is only
necessary to read it in order to decide posi-

tively, that, though some passage recorded

therein may have been spoken by Jeremiah,
he is not the author of the book. The his-

torical parts, if they can be called by that

name, are in the most confused condition; the

same events are several times repeated, and

that in a manner different, and sometimes in

contradiction to each other; and this disorder

runs even to the last chapter, where the his-

tory, upon which the greater part of the book

has been employed, begins anew, and ends

abruptly. The book has all the appearance of
being a medley of unconnected anecdotes, re-

specting persons and things of that time, col-

lected together in the same rude manner as if

the various and contradictory accounts, that

are to be found in a bundle of newspapers, re-

specting persons and things of the present

day, were put together without date, order, or

explanation. I will give two examples of this

kind.



49THE AGE OF REASON

It appears, from the account of the 37th
chapter, that the army of Nebuchadnezzar,
which is called the army of the Chaldeans, had
besieged Jerusalem some time; and on their
hearing that the army of Pharaoh, of Egvpt,
was marching against them they raised the
siege, and retreated for a time. It may here
be proper to mention, in order to understand
this confused history, that Nebuchadnezzar
bad besieged and taken Jerusalem, during the
reign of Jehoakim, the predecessor of Zede-
kiah; and that it was Nebuchadnezzar who
had made Zedekiah king, or rather viceroy:
and that this second siege, of which the book
of Jeremiah treats, was in consequence of the
revolt of Zedekiah against Nebuchadnezzar.
This will in some measure account for the
suspicion that affixes itself to Jeremiah of be-
ing a traitor, and in the interest of Nebuchad-
nezzar; whom Jeremiah calls, in the 43d chap,
ver. 10, the servant of God.

The 11th verse of this chapter, (the 37th),
says, “And it came to pass, that, when the
army of the Chaldeans was broken up from
Jerusalem, for fear of Pharaoh’s army, that
Jeremiah went forth out of Jerusalem, to go
(as this account states) into the land of Ben-
jamin to separate himsblf thence in the midst
of the people; and when he was in the gate
of Benjamin a captain of the ward was there,
whose name was Irijah; and he took Jere-
miah, the prophet, saying, Thou fallest away
to the Chaldeans; then Jeremiah said, It is
false, I fall not away to the Chaldeans.” Jere-
miah being thus stopped and accused, was,



50 THE AGE OP REASON

after being examined, committed to prison, on

suspicion of being a traitor, where he remained,

as is stated in the last verse of this chapter.

But the next chapter gives an account of the

imprisonment of Jeremiah, which has no con-

nection with this account, but ascribes his im-

prisonment to another circumstance, and for

which we must go back to the 21st chapter.

It is there stated, ver. 1, that Zedekiah sent

Pashur, the son of Malchiah, and Zephaniah,

the son of Maaseiah, the priest, to Jeremiah to

inquire of him concerning Nebuchadnezzar,

whose army was then before Jerusalem; and

Jeremiah said to them, ver. 8: “Thus saith

the Lord, Behold I set before you the way of

life, and the way of death; he that abideth in

this city shall die by the sword, and by the

famine, and by the pestilence; but he that

goeth out and falleth to the Chaldeans that

besiege you, he shall live* and his life shall

be unto him for a prey.”

This interview and conference breaks off

abruptly at the end of the 10th verse of the

21st chapter; and such is the disorder of this

book that we have to pass over sixteen chap-

ters, upon various subjects, in order to come

at the continuation and event of this confer-

ence, and this brings us to the first verse of

the 38th chapter as I have just mentioned.

The 38th chapter opens with saying: “Then

Shaptiah, the son of Mattan; Gedaliah, the

son of Pashur and Jucal, the son of Shele-

miah; and Pushur, the son of MsJchiah, (here

are more persons mentioned than in the 21st

chapter), heard the words that Jeremiah spoke



THE AGE OP REASON 51

unto the people, saying, Thus saith the Lord
r

He that remaineth in this city shall die by
the sword

,
by the famine, and by the pesti-

' Knee; but he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans
shall live; for he shall have his life for a
prey, and shall live; (which are the words of
the conference), therefore, (say they to Zede-
kmh), we beseech thee, let us put this man
to death, for thus he weakeneth the hands of
the men of war that remain in this city

,
and

the, hands of all the people in speaking such
words unto them; for this man seeketh not
the welfare of the people

, but the hurt"

;

and
at the 6th verse it is said: “Then they took

MalcM
1

ah
,,,

int° a dungeoE of

These two accounts are different and con-
tradictory. The one ascribes his imprison-
ment to his attempt to escape out of the city;
the other to his preaching and prophesying in
the city; the one to his being seized by the
guard at the gate; the other to his being ac-
cused before Zedekiah, by the conferees.

In the next chapter (the 39th) we have an->
other instance of the disordered state of this
book; for notwithstanding, the siege of the
city by Nebuchadnezzar has been the subject
of several of the preceding chapters, particu-
arly the 37th and 38th, the 39th chapter be-
gins as if not a word had been said upon the
subject, and as if the reader was to be in-
formed of every particular respecting it, for
it begins with saying, ver. 1: “in the ninth-
year of Zedekiah

,
king of Judah, in the tenth

month, came Nebuchadnezzar
,
king of Baby-



52 THE AGE OF REASON

Ion , and all his army against Jerusalem , and

besieged it,” etc., etc.

It is not possible that any one man, and

more particularly Jeremiah, could have been

the writer of this book. The errors are such

as could not have been committed by any per-

son sitting down to compose a work. Were I,

or any other man, to write in such a disor-

dered manner, nobody would read what was

written; and everybody would suppose that the

writer was in a state of insanity. The only

way, therefore, to account for this disorder,

is, "that the book is a medley of detached un-

authenticated anecdotes, put together by some

stupid book-maker, under the name of Jere-

miah; because many of them refer to him, and

to the circumstances of the times he lived in.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

The New Testament, they tell us, is founded

upon the prophesies of the Old; if so, it must

follow the fate of its foundation.

As it is nothing extraordinary that a woman

should be with child before she is married, and

that the son she might bring forth should be

executed, even unjustly, I see no reason for not

believing that such a woman as Mary, and such

a man as Joseph, and Jesus, existed; their mere

existence is a matter of indifference about which

there is no ground either to believe or to disbe-

lieve, and which comes under the common head

of It may be so; and what then? The probabil-

ity, however, is that there were such persons,

or at least such as resembled them in part of



THE AGE OF REASON 53

the circumstances, because almost all romantic

stories have been suggested by some actual cir-

cumstance; as the adventures of Robinson

Crusoe, not a word of which is true, were sug-

gested by the case of Alexander Selkirk.

It is not the existence, or non-existence, of the

persons that I trouble myself about; it is the

fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testa-
ment, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised

thereon, against which I contend. The story,

taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene.

It gives an account of a young woman engaged
to be married, and, while under this engage-

ment, she is, to speak plain language, debauched

by a ghost, under the impious pretense (Luke,

chap, i., ver. 35) that “the Holy Ghost shall

eome upon thee, and the power of the Highest

shall overshadow thee.” Notwithstanding which

Joseph afterwards marries her, cohabits with

her as his wife, and in his turn rivals the ghost.

This is putting the story into intelligible lan-

guage, and, when told in this manner, there is
not a priest but must be ashamed to own it.

(Mary, the supposed virgin mother of Jesus,

had several other children, sons and daughters.

See Matt., chap, xiii., 55, 56.)

Obscerftty in matters of faith, however,

wrapped up, is always a token of fable and

imposture; for it is necessary to our serious

belief in God, that we do not connect it with

stories that run, as this does, into ludicrous

interpretations. This story is, upon the face

of it, the same kind of story as that of Jupiter

and Leda, or Jupiter and Europa, or any of



54 THE AGE OF REASON

the amorous adventures of Jupiter; and shows,

as is already stated in the former part of the

Age of Reason , that the Christian faith is built

upon the heathen mythology.

As the historical parts of the New Testa-
ment, so far as concerns Jesus Christ, are

confined to a very short space of time, less

than two years, and all within the same coun-

try, and nearly in the same spot, the discord-

ance of time, place and circumstance, which

detects the fallacy of the books of the Old

Testament, and proves them to be impositions,

cannot be expected to be found here in the

same abundance. The New Testament com-
pared with the Old, is like a farce of one act,

in which there is not room for very numerous

violations of the unities. There are, however,

some glaring conditions, which, exclusive of

the fallacy of the pretended prophesies, are

sufficient to show the story of Jesus Christ to

be false.

I lay it down as a position which cannot be
controverted, first, that the agreement of all

the parts of a story does not prove that story

to be true, because the parts may agree, and
the whole may be false; secondly, that the
disagreement of the parts of a story proves

the whole cannot be true. The agreement does

not prove truth, but the disagreement proves

falsehood positively.

The history of Jesus Christ is contained in

the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark,

Luke and John. The first chapter of Matthew

begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ,



THE AGE OF REASON 55

and in the third chapter of Luke there is given

a genealogy of Jesus Christ. Did these two

agree, it would not prove the genealogy to be

true, because it might, nevertheless, be a fabri-

cation; but as they contradict each other in

every particular, it proves falsehood absolutely.

If Matthew speaks truth, Luke speaks false-

hood; and as there is no authority for believing

one more than the other, there is no authority

for believing either; and if they cannot be

believed even in the very first thing they say,

and set out to prove, they are not entitled to

be believed in anything they say afterwards.

Truth is an uniform thing; and as to inspira-

tion and revelation were we to admit it, it is
impossible to suppose it can be contradictory.

Either, then, the men called apostles are im-
posters, or the books ascribed to them have

been written by other persons, and fathered

upon them, as is the case with the Old Testa-

ment.

The book of Matthew gives, chap, i., ver. 6, a
genealogy by name from David, up through
Joseph, the husband of Mary, to Christ; and

makes there to be twenty-eight generations.
The book of Luke gives also a genealogy by
name from Christ, through Joseph, the hus-
band of Mary, down to David, and makes there
to be forty-three generations; besides which,

there are only the two names of David and
Joseph that are alike in the two lists.

The story of the angel announcing what the
church calls the immaculate conception is not

so much as mentioned in the books ascribed
to Mark and John, and is differently related



56 THE AGE OP REASON

in Matthew and Luke. The former says the

angel appeared to Joseph; the latter says it

was to Mary; hut either, Joseph or Mary, was

the worst evidence that could have been thought

of; for it was others that should have testified

for them , and not they for themselves. Were

any girl that is now with child to say, and
even to swear it, that she was gotten with child

by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would

she be believed? Certainly she would not.

Why then are we to believe the same thing of
another girl whom we never saw, told by no-
body knows who, nor when, nor where? How
strange and inconsistent is it, that the same

circumstances that would weaken the belief

even of a probable story, should be given as a

motive for believing this one, that has upon

the face of it every token of absolute impossi-

bility and imposture?

The story of Herod destroying all the chil-
dren under two years old, belongs altogether

to the book of Matthew; not one of the rest

mentions anything about it. Had such a cir-
cumstance been true, the universality of it

must have made it known to all the writers;
and the thing

,
would have been too striking

to have been omitted by any. The writer tells
us, that Jesus escaped this slaughter, because

Joseph and Mary were warned by an angel
to flee with him into Egypt! hut he forgot to
make any provision for John who was then
under two years of age. John, however, who
staid behind, fared as well as Jesus, who fled;
and, therefore, the story circumstantially belies

itself.



THE AGE OF REASON 57

THE ACCOUNT OF THE CRUCIFIXION

The book ascribed to Matthew says, “There

was darkness over all the land from the sixth

hour unto the ninth hour—that the veil of the
temple was rent in twain from the top to the

bottom—that there was an earthquake—that
the rocks rent—that the graves opened, that
the bodies of many of the saints that slept
arose and came out of their graves after the

resurrection, and went into the holy city and

appeared unto many/’ Such is the account this

dashing writer of the book of Matthew gives,

but in which he is not supported by the writers

of the other books.

The writer of the book ascribed to Mark, in

detailing the circumstances of the crucifixion,

makes no mention of any earthquake, nor of

the rocks rending, nor of the graves opening,

nor of the dead men walking out. The writer
of the book of Luke is silent also upon the

same points. And as to the writer of the book
of John, though he details all the circumstances

of the crucifixion down to the burial of Christ,
he says nothing about either the darkness—the
veil of the temple—the earthquake—the rocks
—the graves nor the dead men.

It is an easy thing to tell a lie, but it is dif-

ficult to support the lie after it is told. The

writer of the book of Matthew should have

told us who the saints were that came to life
again, and went into the city, and what be-

came of them afterwards, and who it was that



58 THE AGE OP REASON

saw them; for he is not hardy enough to say
that he saw them himself; whether they came
out naked and all in natural buff, he-saints

and she-saints; or whether they came full

dressed, and where they got their dresses;

whether they went to their former habitations,

and reclaimed their wives, their husbands, and

their property, and how they were received;
whether they entered ejectments for the re-

covery of their possessions, or brought actions

of crim. con. against the rival interlopers;

whether they remained on earth, and followed

their former occupation of preaching or work-

ing; or whether they died again, or went back

to their graves alive, and buried themselves.

Strange, indeed, that an army of saints

should return to life and nobody know who
they were, nor who it was that saw them, and
that not a word more should be said upon the

subject, nor these saints have anything to tell

us! Had it been the prophets who (as we are
told) had formerly prophesied of these things,

they must have had a great deal to say. They

could have told us everything, and we should

have had posthumous prophesies, with notes

and commentaries upon the first, a little bet-

ter, at least, than we have now. Had it been
Moses, and Aaron, and Joshua, and Samuel

and David, not an unconverted Jew had re-

mained in all Jerusalem. Had it been Jchii
the Baptist, and the saints of the time then

present, everybody would have known them,
and they would have out-preached and out-

famed all the other apostles. But, instead of

this, these saints are made to pop up, like



THE AGE OF REASON 59

Jonah’s gourd in the night, for no purpose at

all but to wither in the morning.

STORY OF THE RESURRECTION

The writer of the book of Matthew relates

that the angel that was sitting on the stone

at the mouth of the sepulchre said to the two

Marys, chap, xxviii., ver. 7: “Behold, Christ

is gone before you into Galilee, there ye shall

see. him; lo, I have told you.” And the same
w’riter at the next two verses, (8, 9,) makes

Christ himself to speak to the same purpose

to these women immediately after the angel
had told it to them, and that they ran quickly

to tell it to the disciples; and at the 16th verse

it is said, “Then the eleven disciples went away
to Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had

appointed them; and when they saw him, they
worshiped him.”

But the writer of the book of John tells us

a story very different to this; for he says,

chap, xx., ver. 19. “Then the same day, at

evening, being the first day of the week, (that

is, the same day that Christ is said to have

risen.) when the doors were shut, where the
disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews,

came Jesus and stood in the midst of them.”

According to Matthew, the eleven were march-

ing to Galilee, to meet Jesus in a mountain, by

his own appointment, at the very time when,
according to John, they were assembled in

another place, and that not by appointment,

but in secret, for fear of the Jews.



6G THE AGE OF REASON

The writer of the book of Luke contradicts

that of Matthew more pointedly than John

does; for he says expressly that the meeting

was in Jerusalem
,
the evening of the same day

that he (Christ) rose, and that the eleven were

there. See Luke, chap. xxiv. ver. 13, 33.

Now, it is not possible, unless we admit these
supposed disciples the right of willful lying,

that the writer of these books could be any of

the eleven persons called disciples; for if, ac-

cording to Matthew, the eleven went into Gali-

lee to meet Jesus in a mountain by his own
appointment, on the same day that he is said

to have risen, Luke and John must have been

two of that eleven; yet the writer of Luke says

expressly, and John implies as much, that the

meeting was that same day, in a house in Jeru-

salem; and, on the other hand, if according

to Luke and John, the eleven were assembled

in a house in Jerusalem, Matthew must have

been one of that eleven; yet Matthew says the

meeting was in a mountain in Galilee, and con-

sequently the evidence given in those books de-

stroys each other.

The writer of the book of Mark says nothing
about any meeting in Galilee; but he says,

chap. xvi. ver. 12; that Christ, after his resur-

rection, appeared in another form to two of

them, as they walked into the country, and

that these two told it to the residue, who would
not believe them. Luke also tells a story, in
which he keeps Christ employed the whole of

the day of this pretended resurrection, until

the evening, and which totally invalidates the



61THE AGE OF REASON
*

account of going to the mountain in Galilee.

He says, that two of them, without saying
which two, went that same day to a village

called Emmaus, threescore furlongs (seven
miles and a half) from Jerusalem, and that

Christ, in disguise, went with them, and stayed

with them unto the evening, and supped with

them, and then vanished out of their sight,

and re-appeared that same evening at the meet-

ing of the eleven in Jerusalem.

This is the contradictory manner in which
the evidence of this pretended re-appearance

of Christ is stated; the only point in which

the writers agree, is the skulking privacy of

that re-appearance;' for whether it was in the

recess of a mountain in Galilee, or in a shut-up

house in Jerusalem, it was still skulking. To

what cause then are we to assign this skulk-
ing? On the one hand, it is directly repug-

nant to the supposed or pretended end—that
of convincing the world that Christ was risen;

and, on the other hand, to have asserted the

publicity of it, would have exposed the writers

of those books to the public detection, and,

therefore, they have been under the necessity

of making it a private affair.

As to the account of Christ being- seen by

more than five hundred at once, it is Paul only

who says it, and not the five hundred who say

it for themselves. It is, therefore, the testi-

mony of but one man, and that too of a man,

who did not, according to the same account,

believe a word of the matter himself, at the

time it is said to have happened. His evidence



62 THE AGE OF REASON

supposing him to have been the writer of the
15th chapter of Corinthians, where this account

is given, is like that of a man who comes into
a court of justice to swear, that what he had

sworn before is false. A man may often see
reason, and he has, too, always the right of

changing his opinion; but this liberty does

not extend to matters of fact.

SCIENCE AND REVEALED RELIGION

The most detestable wickedness, the most
horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that

have afflicted the human race, have had their
origin in this thing called revelation, or re-

vealed religion. It has been the most dis-

honorable belief against the character of the

Divinity, the most destructive to morality, and

the peace and happiness of man, that ever was

propagated since man began to exist. It is
better, far better, that we admitted, if it were
possible, a thousand devils to roam at large,

and preach publicly the doctrine of devils, if

there were any such, than that we permitted
one such imposter and monster as Moses,

Joshua, Samuel, and the Bible prophets, to

come with the pretended word of God in his

mouth, and have credit among us.

Whence arose all the horrid assassinations

of whole nations of men, women and infants,
with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody

persecutions, and tortures unto death, and re-

ligious wars, that since that time have laid

Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they,



THE AGE OF REASON 63

but from this impious thing* called revealed

religion, and this monstrous belief, that God
has spoken to man? The lies of the Bible have
been the cause of the one, and the lies of the

Testament of the other.

It has been by wandering from the immu-
table laws of science, and the right use of rea-
son, and setting up an invented thing called
revealed religion, that so many wild and blas-
phemous conceits have been formed of the Al-
mighty. The Jews have made him the assassin
of the human species, to make room for the
religion of the Jews. The Christians have
made him the murderer of himself, and the
founder of a new religion, to supersede and
expel the Jewish religion. And to find pre-
tense and admission for these things, they
must have supposed his power and his wisdom
imperfect, or his will changeable; and the
changeableness of the will is the imperfection
of the judgment. The philosopher knows that
the laws of the Creator have never changed
with respect either to the principles of science,
or the properties of matter. Why, then, is it
supposed they have changed with respect to
man?

I here close the subject. I have shown in
all the foregoing parts of this work that the
Bible and Testament are impositions and for
geries, and I leave the evidence I have produced
in proof of it to be refuted, if anyone can do
it; and I leave the ideas that are suggested
in the conclusion of the work to rest on the



64 THE AGE OF REASON

mind of the reader; certain as I am, that when

ODinions are free, either in matters of govern-

ment or* "religion, truth will finally and power-

fully prevail.





E. HALDEMAN-JULTOS

Editor

LITTLE BLUE BOOKS