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164
MYTHOLOGY
and walked about the garden; that Adam hid under a tree; that Cain fled from the face of God? The wise reader may well ask what the face of God is, and how any one could get away from it? Nor 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 such narratives abound. How 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 find in the Gospels any number of cases similar to the above" (quoted from the History of The New Testament Criticism, by F. C. Conybeare, pp. 9 and 10.)
Read historically the Bible, like the Vedas, can only yield a harvest of contradictions and absurdities. Even the genuineness of the Bible as an historical record is open to question. Impartial Biblical scholars, professing Christianity, have found themselves forced to regard certain portions of the Old and the New Testaments as simple forgeries (Encyclo. Britannica, art. Bible). I have ne time to point out to you the contradictions in the Holy Bible, but here is an abridged extract from a learned article which summarises a few of them (see The Theosophist, Vol. xxxv. p. 396) :
"The gospels constantly contradict each other and S. John's is so different from the other three that a division has been made by all scholars between it and what are called the three synoptic Gospels...... Apart from the fact that S. John's way of speaking of the Christ is very different
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