nslate a scrap of Latin, especially if it has been translated
a thousand times before; but is there any amongst them that can write
poetry like Homer, or science like Euclid? The sum total of a parson's
learning, with very few exceptions, is a, b, ab, and hic, haec, hoc;
and their knowledge of science is, three times one is three; and this is
more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at the time,
to have written all the books of the New Testament.

As the opportunities of forgery were greater, so also was the
inducement. A man could gain no advantage by writing under the name of
Homer or Euclid; if he could write equal to them, it would be better
that he wrote under his own name; if inferior, he could not succeed.
Pride would prevent the former, and impossibility the latter. But with
respect to such books as compose the New Testament, all the inducements
were on the side of forgery. The best imagined history that could have
been made, at the distance of two or three hundred years after the time,
could not have passed for an original under the name of the real
writer; the only chance of success lay in forgery; for the church wanted
pretence for its new doctrine, and truth and talents were out of the
question.

But as it is not uncommon (as before observed) to relate stories of
persons walking after they are dead, and of ghosts and apparitions of
such as have fallen by some violent or extraordinary means; and as the
people of that day were in the habit of believing such things, and of
the appearance of angels, and also of devils, and of their getting into
people's insides, and shaking them like a fit of an ague, and of their
being cast out again as if by an emetic--(Mary Magdalene, the book of
Mark tells us had brought up, or been brought to bed of seven devils;)
it was nothing extraordinary that some story of this kind should get
abroad of the person called Jesus Christ, and become afterwards the
foundation of the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Each writer told a tale as he heard it, or thereabouts, and gave to his
book the name of the saint or the apostle whom tradition had given as
the eye-witness. It is only upon this ground that the contradictions in
those books can be accounted for; and if this be not the case, they are
downright impositions, lies, and forgeries, without even the apology of
credulity.

That they have been written by a sort of half Jews, as the foregoing
quot