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those related in Pagan story, that if they admit them to have been perforined, they must admit Christianity to be true; hence they have fabricated a kind of deistical axiom-that no human testimony can establish the credibility of a miracle.-This, though it has been an hundred times refuted, is still insisted upon, as if its truth had never been questioned, and could not be disproved.

You proceed to examine the authenticity of the Bible; and you begin, you say, with what are called the five books of Moses-Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Your intention, you profess, is too show that these books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them; and still farther, that they were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterwards; that they are no other than an attempted history of the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said to have lived, and also of the times prior thereto, written by some very ignorant and stupid pretender to authorship, several hundred years after the death of Moses."-In this passage, the utmost force of your attack on the authority of the five books of Moses, is clearly stated. You are not the first who has started this difficulty; it is a difficulty, indeed, of modern date; having not been heard of, either in the synagogue, or out of it, till the twelfth century. About that time Aben Ezra, a Jew of great erudition, noticed some passages (the same that you have brought forward) in the first five books of the Bible, which he thought had not been written by Moses, but inserted by some person after the death of Moses. But he was far from maintaining, as you I do, that these books were written by some ignorant and stupid pretender to authorship, many hundred years after the death of Moses. Hobbes contends, that the books of Moses are so called, not from their having been written by Moses, but from their containing an account of Moses. Spinoza supported the same opinion; and Le Clerc, a very able theological

critic of the last and present century, once entertained the same notion. You see that this fancy has had some patrons before you the merit or the demerit, the sagacity or the temerity, of having asserted that Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch, is not exclusively yours. Le Clerc, indeed, you must not boast of. When his judgement was matured by age, he as ashamed of what he had written on the subject in his younger years; he made a public recantation of his error, by annexing to his commentary on Genesis, a Latin dissertation concerning Moses the author of the Pentateuch, and his design in composing it. If, in your future life, you should chance to change your opinion on the subject, it will be an honour to your character to emulate the integrity, and to imitate the example, of Le Clerc. The Bible is not the only book which has undergone the fate of being reprobated as spurious, after it had been received as genuine and authentic for many ages. It has been maintained, that the history of Herodotus was written in the time of Constantine; and that the Classics are forgeries of the thirteenth or fourteenth century These extravagant reveries amused the world at the time of their publication, and have long since sunk into oblivion. You esteem all prophets to be such lying rascals that I dare not venture to predict the fate of your book.

Before you produce your main objections to the genuineness of the books of Moses, you assert-" that there is no affirmative evidence that Moses is the author of them."-What! no affirmative evidence? In the eleventh century, Maimonides drew up a confession of faith for the Jews, which all of them at this day admit; it consists of only thirteen articles, and two of them have respect to Moses; one affirming the authenticity, the other the genuineness of hi books. -The doctrine and prophecy of Moses is true-The law that we have was given by Moses.-This is the faith of the Jews at present, and has been their faith ever since the destruction of their city and temple;

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it was their faith in the time when the authors of the New Testament wrote; it was their faith during their captivity in Babylon; in the time of their kings and judges; and no period can be shown, from the age of Moses to the present hour, in which it was not their faith.-Is this no affirmative evidence? I cannot desire a stronger. Josephus, in his book against Appion, writes thus-"We have only twoand-twenty books which are to be believed as of divine authority, and which comprehend the history of all ages; five belong to Moses, which contain the original of man, and the tradition of the succession of generations down to his death, which takes in a compass of about three thousand years." Do you consider this as no affirmative evidence? Why should I mention Juvenal, speaking of the volume which Moses had written? Why enumerate a long list of profane authors, all bearing testimony to the fact of Moses being the leader and the lawgiver of the Jewish nation? and, if a lawgiver, surely a writer of the laws. But, what says the Bible? In Exodus it says "Moses wrote all the words of the Lord, and took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people."-In Deuteronomy it says-" And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of is law in a book, until they were finished (this surely imports the finishing a laborious work), that Moses commanded the Levites which bare the ark of the covenant of the Lord, saying, Take this book of the law, and put it into the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee." This is said in Deuteronomy, which is a kind of repetition or abridgement of the four preceding books; and it is well known that the Jews gave the name of the Law to the first five books of the Old Testament. What possible doubt can there be that Moses wrote the books in question? I could accumulate many other passages from the Scriptures to this purpose; but if what I

have advanced will not convince you that there is affirmative evidence, and of the strongest kind, for Moses's being the author of these books, nothing that I can advance will convince you.

What if I should grant all you undertake to prove (the stupidity and ignorance of the writer excepted) ? What if I should admit that Samuel, or Ezra, or some other learned Jew composed these books from public records many years after the death of Moses? Will it follow that there is no truth in them? According to my logic, it will only follow that they are not genuine books; every fact recorded in them may be true, whenever, or by whomsoever, they were written. It cannot be said that the Jews had no public records; the Bible furnishes abundance of proof to the contrary. I by no means admit that these books, as to the main part of them, were not written by Moses; but I do contend, that a book may contain a true history, though we know not the author of it, or though we may be mistaken in ascribing it to a wrong author.

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The first argument you produce against Moses being the author of these books, is so old, that I do not know its original author; and it is so miserable an one, that I wonder you should adopt it. "These books cannot be written by Moses, because they are written in the third person-it is always, The Lord said unto Moses, or Moses said unto the Lord. This," you say, " is the style and manner that historians use in speaking of the persons whose lives and actions they are writing." This observation is true, but it does not extend far enough; for this is the style and manner, not only of historians writing of other persons, but of eminent men, such as Xenophon and Josephus, writing of themselves. If general Washington should write the history of the American war, and should, from his great modesty, speak of himself in the third person; would you think it reasonable that, two or three thousand years hence, any person should on that account

contend, that the history was not true? Cæsar writes of himself in the third person-it is always, Cæsar made a speech, or a speech was made to Cæsar: Cæsar crossed the Rhine, Cesar invaded Britain; but every school-boy knows, that this circumstance cannot be adduced as a serious argument against Cæsar's being the author of his own Commentaries.

But Moses, you urge, cannot be the author of the book of Numbers, because he says of himself" that Moses was a very meek man, above all the men that were on the face of the earth." "If he said this of himself, he was," you say, "a vain and arrogant coxcomb (such is your phrase!), and unworthy of credit —and if he did not say it, the books are without authority." This your dilemma is perfectly harmless; it has not an horn to hurt the weakest logician. If Moses did not write this little verse; if it was inserted by Samuel, or any of his countrymen, who knew his character and revered his memory, will it follow, that he did not write any other part of the book of Numbers? Or if he did not write any part of the book of Numbers, will it follow that he did not write any of the other books of which he is usually reputed the author? And if he did write this of himself, he was justified by the occasion which extorted from him this commendation. Had this expression been written in a modern style and manner, it would probably have given you no offence. For who would be so fastidious as to find fault with an illustrious man, who being calumniated by his nearest relations, as guilty of pride and fond of power, should vindicate his character by saying, My temper was naturally as meek and unassuming as that of any man upon earth? There are occasions in which a modest man who speaks truly, may speak proudly of himself, without forfeiting his general character; and there is no occasion, which either more requires or more excuses this conduct, than when he is repelling the foul and envious aspersions of those who both knew his character, and had experienced his kindness;

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