 pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of Angels?"
That Christ believed that he would be saved is also evident by his lamentation in Matthew 27:46 -- "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice saying: 'Eli, Eli, lame Sabachthani.' That is to say 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'"
Now this may well be the mythological or the traditional story of a man, possibly a paranoiac (as stated by the eminent psychiatrist, Wm. Hirsch), who opposed the activities of the Jewish rabbis of his time, and who preached against them, incurring their enmity, and later being crucified at their behest by the civil authorities, who endeavored to keep the people they were governing in hand, by satisfying the religious elements of the land. As long as the religious rulers of a country can be appeased, and as long as they can have their own advantages, they tend to keep the people docile before foreign rulers. This is a method of governing people which has long been used by the British government, which in India and Africa and all of its far flung possessions permits its priests, preachers, and religious leaders to continue on with all of their fees and advantages as long as they do not interfere with the civil or military government.
But to claim the story of the crucifixion as the heroic death of a supreme being, or his son, or the third part of the trinity, is ridiculous.
Christ's Sayings Are
Garbled and Conflicting
It is said that the Bible is "all things to all men." Many rascals and many pious frauds use the Bible as a pretext for carrying on their activities. It is said that during two or three years Christ preached to the people, and many of his purported sayings are quoted in the Gospels, but judging from the conflicting philosophy, and the various reports of the sayings (which might have been made by a number of men), there is no consistency in them. Here we will examine many of the conflicting and garbled statements which have been the cause of confusion among Christian followers for two thousand years. Because of the differences in his statements, the different times and the different versions of them, as reported by the four Apostles, different Christian sects which have followed either one or the other phases have been in conflict for centuries.
It is probably true that in the early centuries of the church, before the days of printing, many churches had differing copies of various books of both the Old and the New Testament. Much of the material was handed down at first by oral tradition, and only later was it written. The copies would not be exact and the men who made the copies could change them to suit their own ideas, and as the manuscripts were passed from hand to hand, they were changed and edited and interpolated and translated until there are now hundreds of religious sects, each believing that the others are wrong, and each having a different idea of the Testaments they follow.
Added to all this is the change in the meaning of words and their interpretation in the Bible, each preacher, priest and religious leader interpreting them to suit his own needs, and their followers understanding them according to their own degree of intelligence, or lack of it.
In the fifth Chapter of Matthew, Christ appealed to the poor and poverty stricken, giving the impression that those who were successful and powerful would not go to Heaven, as was promised to the poor.
This is the typical talk of political demagogues who hope to get a large following by promising something to the lower classes.
Then he says: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy but to fulfill." Contrast this with his statement that he "did not come to bring peace but a sword and to set brother against brother and daughter against daughter and father against mother."
He says "neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel" but that "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father, which is in Heaven.
In the next cha