which Christ, God's son, was to die for the salvation of the sinners that God had created with apparently sinful desires.
Thomas Paine has pointed out that it is contrary to moral principles for one man to die for the sins of others, but that if Christ did die for the salvation of the sinners, they still sin and they still die. They still have sickness and wars and crimes. For all practical purposes Christ's death on the cross has been of no advantage to mankind.
It is plain that these ideas of the prophecy of the crucifixion and the death for the salvation of the world were later thoughts of the early founders of the Christian church, probably grown out of the tradition of the mythological story of Christ's death. Any other kind of a death, or none at all, or any other miracle would have the same effect as the crucifixion.
Of course, a supreme being with full power to do anything could just as easily have changed men so they would not be born in sin and subject to penalties for violating laws that most of them did not know of.
At any rate, the one sided story of Christ's crucifixion, told as it is in the Gospels, can easily arouse the sympathy and compassion of the average non-thinking, non-reasoning person. As told, it appears a great injustice.
Of course, there is the other side of this story. Here is a man who preached against the Scribes and the Pharisees, against the priests and the religious leaders of those times, who were virtually the rulers of the Jews. In other words, he set himself up against both the religious and the political power of his time.
Apparently he was doing more damage to the priests and rabbis than he was to the Roman rulers. Every place he went he cursed and denounced the religious leaders. It is natural that they would want to do away with such a man. They do it now in most countries and go as far as they can in America. If the crucifixion was supposed to be an event of great significance, there is no reason why it should have been executed in such a niggardly fashion. In the first place, Christ was apparently so little known that the authorities were unable to tell who he was and had to bribe someone to point him out. It does not speak very well for Christ's hold upon his followers, nor of his philosophy, that one of them, Judas, should have betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver. This follower must have considered him an impostor instead of the Son of God, and if he had believed that Christ was the Son of God, he most certainly never would have betrayed his Master for such an insignificant sum, or for any amount. If one of Christ's own immediate and appointed followers could have so much doubt, why should those who have received the information about the so-called God, second and third hand, and thousands of years later, be persecuted for having doubts?
As a matter of fact, the Bible itself tells how the disciples all forsook Christ when he was apprehended. In Matthew 5:6 it is reported -- "Then all of the disciples forsook Him and fled."
There is the story of Peter having followed "afar off" the crowd that took Christ before Pilate and then having denied that he knew Him. All this illustrates is the natural tendency of men to save their own skins.
Christ's own actions at, and before, the time of the crucifixion were nothing heroic, as we would expect in the case of a man who was willingly and gladly sacrificing himself for the future salvation of all mankind.
Here another discrepancy occurs. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Judas is reported to have earned his thirty pieces of silver by kissing Christ, as an evidence of who he was, but in John 18:4 Christ is reported to have asked whom they sought and to have told who he was, all of which indicates that the various books of the Bible were based upon oral traditions handed down, translated, interpolated and edited by various leaders of the church.
That Christ had had some knowledge that he was being sought by the authorities is evident by his statements a few days before his apprehension, and it is evident that he was hiding out because it wa