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pbilus and others from the truth , by pretending that they had been eyewitnesses of the falsehoods which they recorded . The other Evangelists make no such display of their credibility , for this reason , that they wrote in circumstances where it was not necessary .
The case is evidently so . Luke published his Gospel in Egypt , where many spurious gospels were in circulation , the authors of which , as we may reasonably suppose , had never seen the blessed Jesus , yet pretended to have been in the number of his
disciples , and to have witnessed the fictions recorded by them . The Evangelist glances at their pretensions in this respect , when he says that the things about which many attempted to write " had been fulfilled among them /* that is , among the Jewish believers in Judea , and not among pretended believers in Egypt .
I was anxious to see what Boehmert has said about the disputed passage in Josephus ; and I confess that the yiew given of his work has greatly disappointed me . I earnestly hoped that the writer had discovered the true
character of the Jewish historian with regard to Christianity : but he has not ; all , then , that lie says , or can sav , resolves it 3 elf into this , —A testiinony to the miracles , the divine wisdom , the love of truth , the
resurrection of Jesus ; in short , to the justness of his claims as the Messiah , came from the hands of a man who himself did not believe in those miracles , who himself did not accede to those claims . Is this credible ? No ; whatever any writer , however learned , acute or
profound , may say in support of a proposition so absurd , must all necessarily fall , like a dead weight , to the ground . But reverse the case : prove , as it may be proved with absolute certainty , that Josephus , in his works , is the
historian , is the apologist , of the gospel , and all the objections to the authenticity of the controverted paragraph , become a heap of rubbish to be flung on the sand . When this is proved , such considerations as Bcehmert may
have adduced , will appear pleasing characteristics of the truth , and will have their full weight . When Echsloedt and others talk of the passage being an interpolation inserted in Josephus , at the end of the third cen-
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tury , they talk like children about whatMthey do not understand . Josephus was a writer in the hands not only of the Christians , but of their enemies—the Pagans on one hand , the Jews on the other ; and could a forger interpolate copies in the possession of innumerable foes ? Could It be
inserted in all the copies possessed even by the Christians , without being * noticed and exposed by adversaries wno were learned , able , and ever on the watch to detect forgeries in the opponents they cordially hated ? If the passage were a forgery , then the books
of Josephus , in the hands of the Jews at least , were without it . Some copies , some versions , at least , would have come down to posterity without the disputed testimony . But no copy , no version , no manuscript , was ever found that did not contain the account which
the Jewish historian g'ives of Jesus Christ . The writer of the disputed passage , whoever he might be , was an Edionite , or , as we should now say , an Unitarian . What he asserts of Jesus , is but a syllabus of the Gospel of
Matthew , beginning * in substance with the third , and ending with the twentyeighth chapter . The contents of the first two , respecting our Lord ' s miraculous birth , he passes over as foreign to his true history ; and not content with this negative testimony , he brings
forward , In the context , the men who taught his divinity and supernatural birth , as wicked in every respect . On the other hand , in the third . century and afterwards , the belief of these
Pagan dogmas was universal ; and those who deny the genuineness of this passage , call upon us to believe , that a forger in those times foisted into the works of Josephus a paragraph calculated to set aside his own
sentiments ; and that Eusebius and the ecclesiastical writers who succeeded him , concurred in the cheat , with no other prospect than the overthrow of those tenets which they considered essential to the Christian faith . This
view of the question places the adversaries of the disputed testimony in their proper light . The objections which they urge , and on which they insist as on a solid rock , become at one glance a heap of sand ; and the objectors themselves , like what we read of the wife of Lot , struck with
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Dr . J . Jones on Phtlo , Josephus , False Gospels ' , Src . 207
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1825, page 207, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2535/page/15/
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