Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

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REDEMPTION
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we conciliate with this tenet of their entire inspiration the existence in the Bible of such tales as that of Lot and his daughters, of Abraham prostituting first one wife and then another, of a succession of at least three days and nights before the sun was created ? Who he asks, will be found idiot enough to believe that God planted trees in Paradise like any husbandman; that he set up in it visible and palpable tree-tranks, labelled the one Tree of Life,' and the other Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,' both bearing real fruit that might be masticated with corporeal teeth; that he went and walked about the garden; that Adam hid under a tree; that Cain fied from the face of God? The wise reader, he remarks, may well ask what the face of God is, and how anyone could get away from it? Nor, he continues, is the Old Testament only full of such incidents, as no one regardful of good sense and reason can suppose to have really taken place or to be sober history. In the Gospels equally, he declares, such narratives abound; and as an example he instances the story of Devil plumping Jesus down on the top of a lofty mountain, from which he showed him all the kingdoms of the earth and their glory. How, he asks, can it be literally true, how a historical fact, that from a single mountain top with fleshly eyes all the realms of Persia, of Scythia, and of India could be seen adjacent and at once? The careful reader will, he says, find in the Gospels any number of cases similar to the above."
Origen nevertheless believed that a major portion of the Bible could be relied upon as history. He said :
“The passages in Scripture which bear a spiritual sense and no other are considerably outnumbered by those which stand good as history. Let no one suspect us of asserting that we think none of the Scriptural narratives to be historically true, because we suspect that some of the events related never really happened."
The truth, however, seems to be that history plays no important part in the teaching of religion proper, since it is only the record of events in the life of a nation, and since religion deals not with nations but individuals primarily. To a limited extent, certainly, history is also a valuable guide, inasmuch as it enables us to observe the working out of what might be termed