Man, as known to us theologically and geologically

Front matter

MAN,

AS KNOWN TO US THEOLOGICALLY AND GEOLOGICALLY.

LONDON !

Part II

Having I hope, sufficiently shown in the foregoing part of my work, that in the opinion of St. Paul, Christianity is so entirely founded upon the Mosaic history as to admit of no separation, and that of course the credit of Moses is at the bottom of every thing connected with the faith of a Christian, I purpose next, without departing from the chapter originally selected for discussion, to show how regularly the truth of the Mosaic history may be proved from St. Paul's reference to it.

The world is already in possession of a most valuable work by a living prelate, purporting to be a treatise expressly on the " Records of the Creation" to which, of course, nothing remains to be added in proof either of the moral attributes of the Deity, of the credibility of the Jewish History, or, as a necessary consequence, of that of their great leader and legislator, as it is usual to call him.

But I know not that the records of the new creation, have ever been so directly or effectually brought forward in confirmation of the records of the old creation (if I may so speak), as to place both on exactly the same footing, not merely as regards Jews or Christians, but the whole race of man. That is, man, in all places and all countries ; man as the only rational inhabitant of this earthly globe, but above all, man as the fallen, but restorable image of God; the subject

MOSES WROTE ONLY HISTORICALLY.

of all God's mercies in the great and stupendous mystery of redemption ; for it never should be overlooked or forgotten, that Christianity is, as a sensible writer has well observed, essentially the religion of fallen beings.

Since the science of geology has become so attractive, and consequently so fashionable, and new theories of the earth, or at the least, new expositions of terrestrial phenomena, are superseding each other in rapid succession, we are continually in the way of being told that Moses was no philosopher; that it is not reasonable to look to him for any resolution of existing difficulties, or as a referee upon subjects purely scientific. All this may be true, and yet, without being a philosopher, he may be found to have given us information far more to be relied on, than all the systems of mere philosophy extant, whether old or new.

For, it remains to be seen, whether as an historian, he has not given proofs of a knowledge of things altogether supernatural, considering the circumstances in which he must have been placed ; and if this be the case with him, as the historian of man, and of human concerns, it must lead to a strong presumption, that he cannot, in any instance, greatly have misled us in regard to the history of the earth. The latter topic must, however, be reserved for future consideration.

I now, therefore, return to that celebrated chapter of the Bible, the fifteenth of St. Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians.

I consider it must have been a degree of inspiration or supernatural light, that could alone have enabled, or rather emboldened, the apostle to write as he did write in this chapter, to the people of Corinth. For

c 5

34 ADAM UNKNOWN TO THE CORINTHIANS.

it is now time to observe more particularly, how confidently he tells them, not only, that " as by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead ;" but that, " as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." In the former declaration there is no distinct mention of Adam. That he was " the man" by whom came death, is well enough understood by ourselves without any mention of the name, and might have been well enough understood by the Jews who dwelt at Corinth, where indeed there was a synagogue. But this could be no great help to St. Paul ; for whatever his countrymen might know or think of a first man, or a first Adam, their prejudices, generally speaking, must have operated strongly against the apostle, as to the second Adam, or in other words, as to the character our Saviour sustained upon earth.

In one sense, indeed, the Jews, however adverse to St. Paul's account of our Saviour, as the second Adam, must have been a help to him ; Corinth was not so far from Jerusalem, as to. favour any imposition, with regard to the appearance, life, acts, &c. of our Saviour. It must have been easy for them to ascertain the leading facts of the case, (especially having Jews on the spot to refer to) — had the Corinthian Jews been able to deny positively that any such person as Christ had appeared in Judea, worked miracles, been put to death, and appeared alive again to many competent witnesses, they would no doubt have done so ; ignorant they could not be of these things ; all the dispersed Jews carried on a continual correspondence with Jerusalem, and many visited it every year. The apostle Peter was yet alive, and probably many of those to whom he had appealed as eye-witnesses of the

TRYING SITUATION OF ST. PAUL AT CORINTH. 35

resurrection, in his memorable address preserved in the Acts of the Apostles, chap. ii.

Had St. Paul converted no Jew at Corinth, the very facts on which he rested his whole argument or doctrine might have been brought into question, but the conversion of Crispus, " with all his house," Acts xviii. 8, a person who was actually " chief ruler of the synagogue," was sufficient to show, that the facts of our Saviour's appearance, life, miracles, &c. were held to be indisputable even by those who, upon the common prejudice against our Lord's pretensions to the Messiahship, were otherwise so violent in their opposition to the apostles' preaching ; so violent, indeed, as even to provoke the Greeks themselves to take part with St. Paul, and induce Gallio, the Roman Deputy, to dismiss with disdain, the accusation brought against him, pp. 14 — 17.

Paul's situation at Corinth indeed was for some time most trying, and that he actually needed a divine impulse, to encourage him to bear up against the disadvantages of it, is plain from Acts xviii. 9, 10, not only the rudenesses and violence of the unbelieving- Jews, but the learning, comparative politeness, and grandeur of many of the Gentile inhabitants of the city, had such an effect upon him, that he did not hesitate to acknowledge, that at first he was amongst them in " fear," in " weakness," and " much trembling," 1 Cor. ii. 3.

It remains to be shown how very much the view taken of Christianity by the apostle in this particular chapter, must have run counter to the prejudices of his Gentile auditors, as well as to those of his own countrymen the Jews. The second Adam only was the stumbling-block to the latter, but to the

c 6

GREEK VERSION OF THE BIBLE.

former, the first Adam, if we take into account the exact state of the Gentile world, in point of knowledge as well as other things, in St. Paul's days, must have been little less than a subject of mockery.

The apostle's expression, " as in Adam all die," was not merely a confirmation of the Jewish Scriptures, but virtually an abolition of all conflicting records. It was not merely the establishment of a divine doctrine, but of the only true history and chronology of this habitable globe. It was to tell the proudest and vainest people upon earth, that they were little better than outcasts from the Israel of God, and had but one common ancestor with the despised Jews, a circumstance which it may be reasonably concluded, they were fully prepared to resent ; for, if they knew any thing of Adam, it must have been through the Greek Version, well known by the name of the Septuayint, which was itself so ill received by the Greeks in general when it first appeared, as to be the very occasion of the publication, in the same language, of the extravagant computations of time past in the histories of Egypt and Chaldsea by Manetho and Berosus. It has been reasonably enough conjectured by the learned, that these histories being made public in the Greek tongue at the very period when the Jewish Scriptures were translated into that language at Alexandria, were expressly intended to invalidate, and render ridiculous in the eyes of the world, the chronology of the Jews ; indeed, so prone were the Greeks to magnify their own antiquity — to pretend that their history reached beyond all records, and that in fact they had sprung from the earth, that they cared not for any pretensions on the part of other nations. Thus, Herodotus could easily be brought to speak of myriads of years, as

ADAM HEAD OF THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE. 37

in fact he often does, and as well as Lis countryman Plato, bear to be told in Egypt of dynasties of kings reigning for ten, twenty, and twenty-three thousand years ; which latter was the exact period assigned by the priests of that country, in their communications with Diodorus to the succession of their kings from Osiris to Alexander the Great.

So notorious, indeed, was the vanity of the Greeks, that though the coincidence in point of time, between the version of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Egyptian and Chaldsean histories, has led to the supposition, that the chronology of the Jews was chiefly aimed at, yet others have thought that Manetho and Berosus, the authors, or rather first manufacturers of such marvellous antiquities, both wrote in Greek, to mortify their masters ; the Babylonians and Egyptians being at that time under the dominion of the Greeks.

Be this as it may, it is of great importance to the credit both of St. Paul and Moses, to know, that such jealousies existed at the time I am writing of, as will hereafter appear.

For it is very evident, that if the human race did not begin as Moses has represented ; if Adam were not, as the Jewish records assert, the first and very head of the whole race of man, it was in the power of any nation, by extravagant computations, fabricated records, &c, to carry back the age of the world, or commencement of sublunary affairs, to any point on which they should choose to fix. In the uncertainty to which those must have been liable, who either knew nothing of Adam, or disputed the history of Moses as preserved amongst the Jews, they had it manifestly at their option to make the world ten thousand, or ten thousand times ten thousand years

YUGS OR AGES OF THE HINDUS.

older. And indeed where no such check has prevailed, they appear to have made full use of this liberty, for the very highest of the numbers I have mentioned have been exceeded by some. I should be afraid to mention the amount of the Hindu computation of one thousand fifty millions of years, if such extravagancies had not afforded to learned persons a clue, whereby to resolve, and bring into a wonderful agreement, the antiquities or rather pretended antiquities, of many nations; the latest and fullest application of this clue being reserved for persons scarcely yet cold in their graves. Of the nature of this clue some idea may be formed, from a reference to the Hindu computation just mentioned. The chronology of the Hindus is principally divided into four ages, all of an extravagant length ; the largest period extending to the immense amount of nearly two millions of years ; the second and third ages together, more than two millions of years ; and the fourth or present age, is, by their accounts, to last upwards of four hundred thousand years.

Now, it is certainly remarkable, that making every allowance that could be claimed for the antiquity of the astronomical tables of the Hindus, on which such extravagant computations are supposed to depend, they do not appear, as historical records, to carry us back further than to such a period as might well be brought into agreement with the Scripture chronology. I do not say into exact agreement, nor is the agreement to be traced directly ; but yet into a degree of conformity not at all to be expected, if the world be either so old as the Hindu records pretend, or, which is more remarkable, at all older than the Mosaic era of creation, according to the largest Scriptural computation exm. bailly's opinion of them.

tantj I mean that of the Septuagint. According to this computation, the commencement of the fourth Hindu age, in which we are supposed to be at present, does not carry us beyond the era of the Noachic deluge, which era, according to the common copies of the LXX, is 3028 before Christ, and Mr. Bailly, who entered largely into the subject, had fixed the commencement of the fourth Hindu age at 3102 b. c. And as every Indian age is supposed to be terminated by a deluge, all this part of their chronology and history is strictly postdiluvian. The first two ages are entirely set aside as fabulous 1 : we have, therefore, only the two last ages for the history of man, amounting according to the Hindu computation, to 864,000 years added to what is expired of the supposed current age ; but as the former is held by Mr. Bailly to have consisted, as was common, of lunar years, or years of months, upon reduction they are brought down to 2400 solar years, which added to 3102, the years supposed to have elapsed from the commencement of the fourth age to the Christian era, make in all 5502 years; leaving a difference of only six years between this account and one computation of the LXX. There is a computation indeed extant which brings it within two years ; viz. 5500, the computation of Julius Africanus, Theophanes, Eutychius, and others. All this I had much more fully explained in my Bampton Lecture, now out of print.

It would be most unreasonable to suppose it at all probable that St. Paul could have known any thing of the artificial manner, in which some of the tables and computations I am speaking of, have been

1 In fact sixteen out of eighteen were discarded by M. Bailly.

APION'S MISSION TO ROME.

constructed and put together, and yet if any of these reckonings, Egyptian, Chaldean, Phoenician, Indian, or Chinese, could have been supported by facts, his mention of Adam, as the progenitor of the whole human race, would and must have betrayed the weakness of his cause, especially to the proud and disputatious Greeks, whose reputation for learning was so great at that very time, that the Pagan world in general was, as Josephus, complains, notoriously disposed much rather to trust to their bold assertions, than to the sacred oracles of the despised Jews.

It was but a short time before St. Paul wrote his first Epistle to the Corinthians, that the celebrated grammarian, Apion (or Apianus), had been expressly dispatched on a mission to Rome from Alexandria, to lay a complaint against the Jews, before Caligula, in which it seems, from the learned and able reply of Josephus, to have been one of his chief objects, to dispute the alleged importance and antiquity of the Jewish nation. Here then is a case in point. It must have been a most critical time for St. Paul to fix upon, in which to introduce the name of Adam, as of the protoplast (to use a term of those very ages) or progenitor of mankind. The time of Adam, when once the attention of the Gentile nations could be sufficiently drawn to the fact, was established by the Septuagint or Greek version of the Old Testament, which, to say the least, had assigned, comparatively, so very low an era, for the origin of man (to say nothing of the earth at present) as naturally to excite surprise, if not absolute contempt. It was as much as to say, in short, in the face of computations or assumptions reaching back to thousands and thousands of years, or even of ages (for so they have

ALL NATIONS " OF ONE BLOOD."

been sometimes called) that the true history of man extended no farther back than to about four or five thousand years at the utmost.

But "Indeed, St. Paul had openly proclaimed the same truths before the Areopagites at Athens, noted as it was, above all the other cities of Greece, for its devotion to religion, as we are told by Josephus, and perhaps I might add Sophocles ; justly apprehending that an ignorance of the true origin of man, lay at the bottom, as it were, of their polytheism, he particularly exhorted the Athenians to consider that they were all derived from one stock, and all equally " the offspring" of one God ; as certain even of their own poets, Aratus for instance, Paul's own countryman, or Cleanthes (see Doddridge) had said : — " God," says the apostle, " hath made of one blood, all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath appointed the bounds of their habitation ;" which latter clause would seem to bear a strong reference to the system of local and tutelary deities, the very essence, as it were, of polytheism ; especially, if we adopt the reading of the Septuagint, Deut. xxxii. 8, 9, which would run thus, "when the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of his angels."

Some critics, I know, omit the word " blood," Acts xvii. 26, but this only seems to make the case stronger ; for if the true reading be, 6< God has made of one, all nations of men," that one must, in the view of the apostle, have been Adam, which would confirm all that we have been saying.

We must surely see in all this, the more than human courage and confidence of the apostle. Plato,

MOSES UNCONTRADICTED.

in his Timseus, had laid it down as a maxim, that it was difficult to find the author and creator of the Universe, and if found, impossible (probably from the inveteracy of polytheism) to discover him to all the world ; and yet we have an apostle of the crucified Jesus, boldly discoursing of the one true and holy God, in the very sanctuary, as it were, of polytheism ; for so Athens was certainly accounted, and as St. Paul himself probably meant to insinuate, when he told them that he perceived they were, " in all things too superstitions" ^eKridai/uLovecFTEpovg, which perhaps has been better rendered 4 exceedingly addicted to the worship of invisible powers.'

Considering then, that in the judgment of most wise persons, the history of man is, as Paul represented it to be ; that the Hebrew or Scripture chronology, is, at this moment, admitted to be the surest guide we have, and that after all the researches that have been made on the globe, as we are now able to affirm, nothing of authentic history has been discovered to invalidate (as far as regards man at least) the Mosaic account of the origin of things, we may well conclude ; we may indeed be certain, that nothing less than divine inspiration, could have given St. Paul confidence enough to insist upon so low an era for the origin of man, or to point out Adam as the head and progenitor of the whole human race, to the polished nations of Greece and Rome ; the risk of contradiction must have been too great. The expression so often referred to, " as in Adam all die," does so expressly carry us back to the Mosaic history, that there we are bound to make our stand. If St. Paul were right in his theology, Moses must have been correct in point of history, and both together

GENTILE COMPUTATIONS.

conspire to give us such a view of sublunary events and transactions, as will be found, I should think, to exceed in interest all that can be possibly supplied from other sources, as to the connection subsisting between heaven and earth, or in fact, between God and man.

We may not suppose that St. Paul knew nothing of the extravagant computations of the Gentile nations, because we have three remarkable instances of their being known to persons as nearly as possible, his contemporaries ; Cicero just before him, and Diodorus Siculus, having referred to the Chaldean records for a computation of, at the least 470,000 years, and Josephus in his Tract against Apion, having cited both Manetho and Berosus, authors particularly implicated in the charge of falsification and premeditated perplexities.

It must be very evident that St. Paul as well as Moses, if uninspired, must have written at great hazard of contradiction, ignorant as he must have been of many unexplored regions of the globe ; for in some of those regions, had the human race been older than he asserts, it could not but be possible, that more ancient records might come to be discovered, or some descendants of a pre-adamitical race be found : how much of the globe St. Paul might know we cannot pretend, nor is it necessary to ascertain : but it is rather remarkable, that we could nearly ascertain what he could not know, that is, what still remained to be explored. Two of the most diligent geographers of antiquity having been, as nearly as could be, the contemporaries of Paul, I speak of Strabo and Dionysius, whose works are well known, and from whom we have certainly derived as much geographical knowledge as could at that time be supplied, and it seems, as far as Strabo is con-

ON THE BOOK OF GENESIS.

cerned, to amount to this ; the parts he describes were bounded on the north by the Baltic, on the east by the Ganges, on the south by the mouth of the river Senegal, and on the west by Spain. All the rest of the globe he seems himself to have acknowledged to be terra incognita, of which nothing but falsehoods had been reported to him.

This is sufficient to show that it must have been at very great hazard of contradiction, while so much of the globe was yet unknown, that St. Paul could have ventured to refer the most learned people of Europe, the Greeks and the Romans, to the Jewish records for the only true history of the world ; and the observation would apply still more strongly to Moses; had the latter not been inspired, I do not say he could not have written what he has delivered, of the origin of the earth and of man, but this I do say, in which I have the support of Grotius and many others, that he could not have written it without such probability of contradiction and exposure, when the parts of the globe unknown to him should come to be explored, that it seems to be almost a moral impossibility, knowing all that we now know of the inhabited regions of the globe, and the absolute failure of all authentic conflicting or contradictory records, that any thing short of Divine inspiration could have supplied him with the information contained in the Book of Genesis. The most surprising, and yet the most credible book extant, all things considered, more credible certainly from the very extraordinary confirmation it received from our Saviour and his apostles, the apostle to the Gentiles particularly. For to what did this confirmation, let me ask, amount? No less than to a second inspired or Divine assurance, that the true history of st. luke's agreement with st. paul. 45

the earth and of man, in their connection with each other, is only to be found in the Jewish records ; thereby over-ruling and superseding all the fond conceits of the Egyptians, Chaldseans, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, by revealing to them this great truth, that the progenitor of the whole human race was Adam, that Adam, by whose disobedience sin entered into this portion of the universe, and death by sin.

And as St. Paul (it may be added), thus ventured to speak of Adam, to the most polished of the Gentile nations, so did his companion, St. Luke, in the Gospel which he wrote, for the use of the Gentiles in Egypt and Greece, carry back the genealogy of the Saviour of the ivorld to the first man; a remarkable coincidence when duly considered, whether that Gospel was written before St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians or long after, as seems to be the more general opinion. If before, it was a fit preparation for St. Paul's account of things ; if after, a strong and very direct confirmation of it. St. Matthew's genealogy, designed for the Jews, ascends no higher than to the legal descent of the Messias from Abraham and David, in accordance with their prophecies and expectations; St. Luke, on the contrary, carries back the genealogy through his mother to Adam, that the Gentiles might be sure that he was that " seed of the woman," who was to " bruise the serpent's head," and become the propitiation for the sins of the whole world.

It may still be asked, what efTect had St. Paul's account of matters on the learned Greeks ? for on the unlearned, impressions may be made, especially religious impressions, by statements little calculated to stand the test of severe criticism. An appeal to feelwhite's bampton lecture.

ings is very different from an appeal to facts. We see, however, that Christianity makes her appeal to both. The most enthusiastic may find in Christianity enough to satisfy their fondest expectations, while in point of history she defies contradiction.

Removed as we are from the Mosaic era of the creation by as many perhaps as six or seven thousand years, and from the commencement of the Christian era, by more than eighteen hundred, it is easy to say (though indeed these periods of time are nothing to what we shall have to speak of, when treating of the modern geological histories of the earth), but it is easy to say, that in such a lapse of years as the above amount to, so many ancient records must have perished and been lost, that it is absurd to expect, that in our days, any questions relating to the origin of the earth or of man can be satisfactorily decided. That St. Paul being a Jew, naturally adopted the chronology of the Hebrews, without overmuch inquiry or examination, and made converts only of those who were incompetent to such researches: I shall hope to be able to show that nothing could be farther from the truth.

The first answer I shall give, will be merely to copy the following eloquent description of the state of things from Professor White's very celebrated Bampton Lecture.

" At the time when Christ appeared, the Roman empire had reached the meridian of its glory. It was the illustrious period, when power and policy receiving aid from learning and science, and embellishments from the orators and the poets, gave law to the world, directed its taste, and even controlled its opinions. It was the age when inquiry was awake and

1-2

ACCOUNT OF THE GENTILE WORLD, 47 active on every subject that was supposed to be of curious or useful investigation, whether in the natural or the intellectual world. It was, in short, such an age as imposture must have found in every respect the least auspicious to its designs ; especially, such an imposture as Christianity, if it had deserved the name."

Another author has observed of the writers of the New Testament, that they " lived in an age abundant with authors, full of most important historic circumstances, wrote in a language whose authors, if we only reckon from Homer to his commentator, Eustathius, occupy the vast space of twenty centuries ; its subject is connected with the whole range of ancient history, sacred and profane, is interwoven closely with the records of the most civilized period of the classical age, and above all, is continued by a regular series of writers in the same language down to within four centuries of our own times."

We may now then proceed to consider how far St. Paul may be said to have met with the support of the learned of the Gentile world, principally as an historian ; or, the maintainer, in so accomplished, learned, and inquisitive an age, of the extraordinary fact, that the whole human race began with Adam, as Moses had represented.

And first, it is certainly remarkable, that St. Paul's beloved companion and fellow labourer, St. Luke, was born and bred a Gentile, and if lie became a Jew, before he was converted to Christianity, as some think, it is plain that he must early and easily have been brought to discard the prejudices of Gentilism, for the true history contained in the Hebrew Scriptures; he, as well as St. Paul, has been judged to

THEOPHILUS ANTIOCHENUS.

have possessed higher worldly qualifications and knowledge than the other apostles, and to have been therefore specially raised up, to assist in forming the new Church and society of Gentile converts l .

But I have a few very strong cases to produce of a perfect acquiescence of learned Grecians in all that Paul asserted ; a perfect assent, not only to the doctrines he taught, but to the chronology of the Bible.