e most distinguished of the
Jewish prophets--Nahum and Jonah--were both Galileans.

See reference in the Epistles to "_Saints_," a religious order, owing
its origin to the popes. Also, references to the distinct orders of
"_Bishops_," "_Priests_," and "_Deacons_," and calls to a monastic life;
to fasting, etc., when, the titles of "Bishop," "Priest," and "Deacon"
were given to the Essenes--whom Eusebius calls Christians--and, as is
well known, _monasteries_ were the abode of the Essenes or Therapeuts.

See the words for "_legion_," "_aprons_," "_handkerchiefs_,"
"_centurion_," etc., in the original, not being Greek, but Latin,
written in Greek characters, a practice first to be found in the
historian Herodian, in the third century.

In Matt. xvi. 18, and Matt. xviii. 17, the word "_Church_" is used, and
its _papistical_ and infallible authority referred to as then existing,
which is known not to have existed till ages after. And the passage in
Matt. xi. 12:--"From the days of John the Baptist until _now_, the
kingdom of heaven suffereth violence," etc., could not have been written
till a very late period.

Luke ii. 1, shows that the writer (whoever he may have been) lived long
after the events related. His dates, about the fifteenth year of
Tiberius, and the government of Cyrenius (the only indications of time
in the New Testament), are manifestly false. The general ignorance of
the four Evangelists, not merely of the geography and statistics of
Judea, but even of its language,--their egregious blunders, which no
writers who had lived in that age could be conceived of as
making,--prove that they were not only no such persons as those who have
been willing to be deceived have taken them to be, but that they were
not Jews, had never been in Palestine, and neither lived at, or at
anywhere near the times to which their narratives seem to refer. The
ablest divines at the present day, of all denominations, have yielded as
much as this.[463:1]

The Scriptures were in the hands of the clergy only, and they had every
opportunity to insert whatsoever they pleased; thus we find them full of
_interpolations_. Johann Solomo Semler, one of the most influential
theologians of the eighteenth century, speaking of this, says:

"The Christian doctors never brought their sacred books before
the common people; although people in general have been wont
to think otherwise; during the first ages, they were in the
han