those books
destroy each other.

The writer of the book of Mark says nothing about any meeting in
Galilee; but he says (xvi. 12) that Christ, after his resurrection,
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. [This belongs to the late addition to Mark, which
originally ended with xvi. 8.--Editor.] 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
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,
three score 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
reappeared that same evening, at the meeting of the eleven in Jerusalem.

This is the contradictory manner in which the evidence of this pretended
reappearance of Christ is stated: the only point in which the writers
agree, is the skulking privacy of that reappearance; 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 skulking? On the one hand, it is directly repugnant 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 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 testimony 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, supposing him to have been the writer of Corinthians xv.,
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 was 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.

I now come to the last scene, that of the ascension into heaven.--H