Not Paul, but Jesus · Jeremy Bentham
ARABIA-VISIT--MENTIONED BY PAUL, NOT ACTS.
_As to the religion of Jesus, true it is, that so long as it continued the religion of Jesus, all was good government, all was equality, all was harmony: free church, the whole; established church, none: monarchy, none; constitution, democratical. Constitutive authority, the whole community: legislative, the Apostles of Jesus_; executive, the Commissioners of the Treasury: not Lords Commissioners, appointed by a King Herod, but trustees or _stewards_; for such should have been the word, and not _deacons_,--_agents elected by universal suffrage_. In this felicitous state, how long it continued--we know not. What we do know, is--that, _in the fourth century_, _despotism_ took possession of it, and made an instrument of it. Becoming _established_, it became noxious,--preponderantly noxious. For, where _established_ is the adjunct to it, what does _religion_ mean? what but _depredation_, corruption, oppression, hypocrisy? _depredation_, _corruption_, _oppression_, _hypocrisy_--these four: with delusion, in all its forms and trappings, for support.
So pregnant is this same boasting passage--1 Cor. xv. 32, the labour it has thrown upon us, is not altogether at an end. By what it says of the resurrection, the memory has been led back, to what we have seen on the same subject, in one of Paul's Epistles to his Thessalonians: brought together, the two doctrines present a contrast too curious to be left unnoticed. Of the apparatus employed by him in his trade of _disciple-catcher_, his talk about the resurrection, was, it may well be imagined, a capital article. Being, according to his own motto, _all things to all men_, 1 Cor. ix. 22, whatever it happened to him to say on the subject, was dished up, of course, according to the taste of those he had to deal with. To some it was a _prediction_: for such, we have seen, was the form it assumed when the people to be wrought upon were the Thessalonians. To others, when occasion called, it was a statement concerning something _past_, or supposed to be past. On an occasion of this sort it was, that the name of Jesus, another article of that same apparatus, was of so much use to him.
True it is, that to the doctrine of the _general_ resurrection in time future, he had, it must be remembered, no need of declaring himself beholden to Jesus: at least, if on this point, the Acts' history is to be believed: for, of the Pharisees,--the sect to which Paul belonged--of the Pharisees, as compared with the other sect the Sadducees, it was the distinctive tenet. But, of the then future, the then past, as exemplified in the _particular_ case of Jesus, could not but afford very impressive circumstantial evidence. Of this momentous occurrence, there were the real Apostles, ready to give their accounts,--conformable, it may be presumed, to those we see given, as from them, by the four Evangelists. These accounts, however, would not suit the purpose of the self-constituted Apostle: in the first place, because they came from the real Apostles, with whom, as we have so often seen, it was a declared principle with him not to have had anything to do: in the next place, because the Apostles were too scrupulous: they would not have furnished him with witnesses enough. His own inexhaustible fund--his own invention,--was therefore the fund, on this occasion, drawn upon: and, accordingly, instead of the number of witnesses,--say _a score_ or two at the utmost--he could have got from the Apostles,--it supplied him with _five hundred_: five hundred, _all at once_: to which, if pressed, he could have added any other number of percipient witnesses whatsoever, provided only that it was at _different_ times they had been such.
So much for explanation: now for the announced contrast. Whoever the people were, whom he had to address himself to,--they had contracted, he found, a bad habit: it was that of _eating and drinking_. Reason is but too apt to be seduced by, and enlisted in the service of her most dangerous enemy--_Appetite_. Not only did they eat and drink; but they had found, as it seemed to them, _reason_ for so doing. They ate and drank--why? because they were to die after it. "Let us eat and drink," said the language we have seen him reproaching them with, 1 Cor. xv. 32. "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." The case is--that, in pleasure, in whatever shape they see her,--all men, to whose ambition supernatural terrors supply an instrument of dominion, behold their most formidable rival. Against such a rival, wonderful indeed it would be, if their hostility were not proportionable. No morality accordingly do they acknowledge, that does not include, with or without other things, hatred,--with or without contempt, of pleasure. Such, too, as is their morality, such is their law. Death is scarce severe enough, for a pleasure, which they either have, or would be thought to have, no relish for. So at least says what they teach: but, teaching how to act is one thing; acting accordingly, another. Thus we all see it is, in so many instances: and thus, without much danger of injustice, we may venture to suppose it may have been, in that of the self-constituted Apostle.
Not so Jesus: no harm did he see in eating and drinking, unless with the pleasure it produced greater pain. With this reserve, no harm,--for anything that appears in any one of the four histories we have of him,--no harm did he see in anything that gives pleasure. What every man knows--and what Jesus knew as well as any man--for neither in words nor in acts did he deny it--is,--that happiness, at what time soever experienced,--happiness, to be anything, must be composed of pleasures: and, be the man who he may, of what it is that gives pleasure to him, he alone can be judge. But, to return to eating and drinking. Eating and drinking--he gives his men to understand--even he, holy as he is, should not have had any objection to, had it not been for this same resurrection of his, which he was telling them of: eating and drinking--a practice, to which, notwithstanding this resurrection of his, and so much as he had told them of it, he had the mortification to find them so much addicted. So much for his _Corinthians_. It was, as we see, _for want_ of their paying, to what he was thus telling them about the resurrection, that attention, to which it was so well entitled,--that _they_ still kept on in that bad habit. But his _Thessalonians_--they too, as we have seen, had got the same bad habit. Well: and what was it that gave it them? What but their paying too much attention to this same resurrection of his, dished up in the same or another manner, by the same inventive and experienced hand. In conclusion, on laying the two cases together, what seems evident enough is--that, in whatever manner served up to them, his resurrection, whatever it was, was considerably more effectual in making people eat and drink, than in weaning them from it.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.