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
quotations mention, is discernible enough. The frequent references
made to that chief assassin and impostor Moses, and to the men called
prophets, establishes this point; and, on the other hand, the church
has complimented the fraud, by admitting the Bible and the Testament
to reply to each other. Between the Christian-Jew and the
Christian-Gentile, the thing called a prophecy, and the thing prophesied
of, the type and the thing typified, the sign and the thing signified,
have been industriously rummaged up, and fitted togeth