Myth, magic, and morals : a study of Christian origins / by Fred. Cornwallis Conybeare. .

  • Conybeare, F. C. (Frederick Cornwallis), 1856-1924.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Myth, magic, and morals : a study of Christian origins / by Fred. Cornwallis Conybeare. <Issued for the Rationalist press association, limited>. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/402 (page 1)
    PAUL The late Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, once wrote to a lady who sought his opinion, that the Gospels are fragments of unknown age, full of incredible things; and few will to-day maintain the narratives, which survived among the Christians, of the life of the founder, Jesus of Nazareth, to be as full, accurate, and authentic as the supposed import- ance of their subject-matter demands. Of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many other teachers of antiquity, not to mention great military and political leaders, we can out of the records bequeathed to us construct lifelike pictures, can trace with certainty the gradual development of their minds and characters, and exhibit in detail their careers. Often we have their very letters and writings ; and coins and sculptures preserve to us the lineaments of their countenances. Yet of Jesus, whose birth is supposed to have opened a new era, not only for this earth, but for the entire universe, we know all too little; and we have not enough material to write a life of him, in the sense in which we write lives of Julius Caesar, of Cicero, of Augustus, and of many others who were nearly his contemporaries. But the Gospels are not the earliest Christian documents which we possess ; for the earliest of them —that of Mark—is nearly a generation later than the Epistles of Paul, of which several were written within