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REDEMPTION.
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criticism of the pagan fable' of the miraculous conception of Jesus ultimately brought him into conflict with the Church. He wrote (see the History of the New Testament Criticism, pp. 91 and 92):
"In no one apostolic Epistle, in no one discourse recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, is the history of Jesus previous to John's baptism, hinted at even in the most distant manner. On the contrary, that baptism is repeatedly referred to and mentioned as the proper commencement of evangelical instruction; and when the eleven apostles proceeded to elect a twelfth, to supply the place of Judas, the only qualification made essentially requisite in the candidates was their having been eye-witnesses to our Lord's ministry from the baptism of John to his Ascension. These two (the first two] chapters of Luke are the daring fiction of some of the easy working interpolators, as Origen calls them, of the beginning of the second century, from among the pagan converts, who, to do honour as they deemed it to the author of their newly embraced religion, were willing that his birth should, at least, equal that of the pagan heroes and demigods, Bacchus and Hercules, in its wonderful circumstances and high descent; and thereby laid the foundation of the succeeding orthodox deification of the man Jesus, which, in degree of blasphemous absurdity, exceeds even the gross fables of pagan superstition."
Of the more recent writers, Professor Haeckel sums up his conclusions on the subject in the following words (The Riddle of the Universe, Chapter XVII):
“We have no authority in support of the gospel-narratives until more than a century after the death of Christ. No one who is acquainted with the growth of legends in an Oriental atmosphere can place the least reliance on documents of so late a date..... The most cherished beliefs of Christian tradition are being totally abandoned. The story of the miraculous birth of Christ is rejected by the leading Christian scholars of Germany, and by an increasing number of scholars in England, as belonging to the latest and least reliable strata of Biblical narrative-in other words, as a late and worthless interpolation. The resurrection and the ascension are now meeting the same fate. The New Testament is being broken
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