God and His Book/Chapter 7

by Saladin

CHAPTER VII.

Palimpsests—Asses, etc., with Four Hides—Specimen of a Palimpsest—Christianity Charged with the Loss of Certain Greek and Roman Classics—Diodorus Siculus Lost that we might have an Account of the Virgin Mary's Milk—Divine Fiddle-faddling.

"The costliness of writing materials gave rise to a peculiar usage. From the leaves of an ancient work the original writing was erased, more or less effectively. They were then employed as the material for another work, the latter being written over the former. Such MSS. are called palimpsests—'written again' after erasure. The original writing, which is often the sacred text, can, in general, be deciphered, especially by the aid of certain chemical applications. Some of our most precious MSS. are of this character."^[1] After all the bother he put the Holy Ghost to in begetting a son and then writing four different and conflicting accounts of his life, the Lord allowed these accounts to be rubbed off the sheep-skin till portions of them cannot be read except with great difficulty, and certain of them cannot be read at all. To be able to read what the Lord has written the devout have now to resort to chemistry, a science which, for ages, the Church banned and persecuted and abhorred. Of old it was, Work out your salvation with fear and trembling; now it is, Work out your salvation with fear and chemistry.

The saints whom God appointed to preserve and perpetuate his volume may have been rich in grace, but they were poor in pence. To have preserved and transmitted his book so that we might have thoroughly depended upon it, and have found "salvation" in it quite easily and with flying colours, he should have contrived to make parchment much cheaper than it was in the days of the copying saints. In his wisdom and omnipotence he might have accomplished this by giving each calf and each sheep, say, four skins, instead of only one. Skin No. I. might have been flayed off, and the gospel of Matthew written upon it. This executed, the sheep could have been brought in from the green pastures and still waters and persuaded with a knife to give skin No. 2, that on it might be transcribed the gospel of Mark; and so on till the fully-transcribed gospels of Luke and John had accomplished our skinny salvation. The ass, too, might have been enticed to give up his pachydermatous envelope to the sacred purpose of gospel-writing. The ass yielding up his hide for such a purpose would have had something peculiarly graceful and appropriate in it.

Jehovah, very likely, sees all this now as clearly as I do, and I will not be so ungracious as to insist upon giving him advice after the event. All I say is that, if he had been graciously pleased to make parchment cheaper, we should have had more copies than we have of his divine and exceedingly correct Word, and several of the scraps and tatters upon which depends "England's greatness" would have been much more legible and could have been deciphered with a probability more closely approaching certainty. Parchment was so dear and scarce that skins upon which gospels had been written by the saints had matter which was certainly not gospel scrawled overlhem by persons who were certainly not saints. To give the reader not versed in textual criticism some idea of what I mean, I subjoin a fac simile of a fragmentary MS.^[2] of the sixth century, and which is to be seen in the British Museum: —

I could readily enough forgive those who scrubbed out the "lively oracles" in order to write in their place higher-class compositions than those of Bath-Kol; but I extend little mercy to the memory of those who erased the writings of Greek or Roman John Smith in order to make room for the crudities, silly fables, and mendacious puerilities of the Hebrew Jehovah. "Since the twelfth century the Greeks, sunk in ignorance, took it into their heads to erase the writings of old parchment MSS. and to write ecclesiastical treatises in them; and thus, to the unspeakable detriment of the republic of letters, such authors as Polybius, Dio, Diodorus Siculus, and some others, who are quite lost, were metamorphosed into prayer-books and homilies."^[3]

However gratifying this may be to an illiterate saint, it is a fact replete with humiliation, regret, and pain to every scholar and votary of polite learning. None except the most brainless of the elect can rejoice that, instead of the lost books of Livy, we have a foolish prayer to some stupid saint and a platitudinarian homily by some canonised blackguard. To none except the most fanatical followers of the Lamb can it be anything else than a subject for regret that, instead of the works of Polybius, we have an account of the miracles that were worked by the many heads of John the Baptist that were possessed by different abbeys. To all except the truly devout it must be a shameful admission that, in place of the writings of Uio and Diodorus Siculus, we have accounts of the different bottles of the Virgin Mary's milk, of the casket that contained her chemise, of that inestimable relic a finger of the Holy Ghost, of Christ's tooth which was preserved in the monastery of St. Medard, and the navel string of his birth, and even the prepuce of his circumcision, which were duly preserved and venerated. It does not tend to reconcile the scholar to the Galilean, this horrid Christian babblement about prayers and homilies and heads and milk and chemises and teeth and navel-strings and prepuces, instead of Livy and Diodorus Siculus, and other irretrievably-lost treasures of the classics of poetic Greece and conquering Rome.

I accuse the " Holy Scriptures," not only of a perversion and waste of good brains, but of wasting the time of those who had no brains, and who might, instead of making the following tables, have been profitably employed in some honest calHng like sweeping the street, feeding hogs, or driving a jack-ass. Here is a specimen of the kind of work they executed instead:—

 

א	Aleph	occurs in the Hebrew Bible	42,377 times
ב	Beth	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	38,218 times„
ג	Gimel	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	29,537 times„
ד	Daleth	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	32,530 times„
ה	He	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	47,554 times„
ו	Vau	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	76,922 times„
ז	Zain	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	22,867 times„
ח	Cheth	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	23,447 times„
ט	Teth	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	11,052 times„
י	Yod	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	66,420 times„
כ	Caph	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	48,253 times„
ל	Lamed	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	41,517 times„
מ	Mem	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	77,778 times„
נ	Nun	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	41,696 times„
ס	Samech	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	13,580 times„
ע	Ain	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	20,175 times„
ף	Pe	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	22,725 times„
צ	Tsaddi	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	21,882 times„
ק	Koph	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	22,972 times„
ר	Resh	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	22,147 times„
ש	Shin	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	32,148 times„
ת	Tau	occurs in the Hebrew Bible„	59,343 times„

Books in	the O.T.	39	In the N.T.	27	Total	66
Chapters	the O.T.„	929	In the N.T.„	260	Total„	1,189
Verses	the O.T.„	23,214	In the N.T.„	7,959	Total„	31,173
Words	the O.T.„	592,439	In the N.T.„	181,253	Total„	773,692
Letters	the O.T.„	2,728,800	In the N.T.„	838,380	Total„	3,567,180

Apocrypha.

Chapters	183
Verses	6,081
Words	252,185

Old Testament.

• The middle book is Proverbs
• The middle chapter is Job xxix.
• The middle verse is 2 Chronicles, xx. chapter, between verses 17 and 18.
• The least verse is 1 Chronicles i. 25.

New Testament.

• The middle book is 2 Thessalonians.
• The middle chapter is between Romans xiii. and xiv.
• The middle verse is Acts xvii. 17.
• The least verse is John xi. 35.

 

• Ezra vii. 21 has all the letters in the alphabet, except j.
• 2 Kings xix. and Isaiah xxxvii. are alike.
• The word and occurs in the Old Testament 35,543 times.
• The same word occurs in the New Testament 10,684 times.
• The word Jehovah occurs 6,855 times.

 

Holy creatures, with their upper storey untenanted, actually spent so many hours a day for years in divine fiddle-faddling like the above. Great shall be their reward in heaven. They have established a claim to aspire to the dignity of brushing the boots of the Holy Ghost.

 

1. Barrows' "Introduction to the Study of the Bible," p. 29.
2. * Part of Luke xx. 9, 10: " A certain man planted a vineyard and let it forth to husbandmen, and went into a far country for a long time. And at the season." The faint and half-erased gospel is partially covered with Syrian writing of the ninth or tenth century.
3. Jortin's "Ecclesiastical History," vol. iii., pp. 324–5, quoting from Montfaucon, " Mem. de l'Acad.," ix., 325.