Note 18 — ON THE MEANING OF THE WORD RELIGION; HOW, AND FOR WHAT PURPOSE, SO MANY RELIGIONS HAVE BEEN INTRODUCED INTO THE WORLD.

We find nothing more divine in the morality of Jesus Christ than what can be drawn from the works of ancient authors; for this reason, perhaps every text in his code of morals is either borrowed from their’s or is an imitation of it. St. Augustine18 acknowledges that in one of the so-called heathen writers, he discovered the whole of the commencement of the gospel according to St. John. We must remark also, that this apostle was so much accustomed to plunder others, that he has not scrupled to pillage from the prophets their enigmas and visions, for the purpose of composing his Apocalypse. Again, whence arises that agreement between the doctrines of the Old and New Testament and those of Plato, unless the Rabbis and others who composed the Jewish Scriptures had stolen from that distinguished man. The account of the creation of the world given in his Timaeus, is much more satisfactory than that recorded in the book of Genesis; and it will not do to say that Plato, in his tour through Egypt, had read the books of the Jews, since, by the confession of St. Augustine, king Ptolemy had not ordered them to be translated till long after the philosopher had left the country.