Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason was published over two centuries ago, but it’s still a readable and enjoyable demolition of Biblical literalism. In its time, it provoked fury from the religious establishment. It will still upset some Christians today. He wrote it in the 1790s and issued it in three parts. He had to consider the first part finished when he was arrested in 1793 in the midst of France’s Reign of Terror. Like many other people that year, he was tried and convicted of treason, though such details as specifying the charges or having him present at his trial were omitted. He escaped the guillotine and died in 1809. By the end of his life, he was widely despised as a heretic, and only six people attended his funeral.

He is one of my top heroes of the American Revolution, and he’s best known to Americans as the author of Common Sense and The Crisis. Robert Ingersoll wrote a glowing essay on him. There’s good reason to believe he influenced Mark Twain as well.

Thomas Paine was a deist, not an atheist or agnostic. His aim wasn’t to destroy belief in God but to save it. His idea of God was a first cause, a creator who makes the world run but doesn’t intervene in human affairs, and he considered the Bible a gross slander against God. He and others like him have been partially successful; many Christians and Jews today don’t take a literal view of the Bible but believe in a general way in a benevolent deity. Others, like me, consider the deity unnecessary. I’m assuming that most of the people reading this either are non-religious or adhere to a liberal view of religion, so hopefully I’m not upsetting you too much.

My copy of The Age of Reason, published by Gramercy Books under the Library of Freedom imprint, includes only the first two parts. He delayed publication of Part III till 1807, but I don’t know why this edition omits it. Even the Project Gutenberg edition and the University of Colorado edition leave it out.

If you know me, you can guess this made me really determined to find out why Part III is suppressed even today. It didn’t take long to find a complete edition on ushistory.org. It’s short and fits in with the first two parts. There’s no reason to omit it.

According to his own statement, Paine wrote Part I without access to a Bible. In December 1793 he got wind that he would soon be arrested, and he finished the work in great haste. He managed to give the manuscript to a friend as he was being conveyed to prison. The circumstances of its creation make it even more impressive in some ways. He demolishes the notion of revealed religion and trusting in holy books. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite passage, but here’s one candidate:

But the Christian story of God the Father putting his son to death, or employing people to do it (for that is the plain language of the story) cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse — as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder; and to tell him that all this is a mystery is only making an excuse for the incredibility of it.”

Part II consists of a more detailed criticism of the Bible. He goes through most of the books, pointing out inconsistencies and moral horrors. He writes concerning Joshua:

As to the character of the book, it is horrid; it is a military history of rapine and murder, as savage and brutal as those recorded of his predecessor in villainy and hypocrisy, Moses; and the blasphemy consists, as in the former books, in ascribing those deeds to the orders of the Almighty.”

Paine makes some parts of the Bible more interesting than I realized. He argues that Jonah is an imported Gentile story. It’s certainly different from any other Biblical book, making its prophet look bad throughout. He runs away from his assigned duty. The Gentiles on the ship where he grabs a ride figure out that he’s the cause of the storm God has inflicted on him, but they try to avoid the necessity of throwing him overboard. They have to anyway, and a big fish swallows him alive. His mission is successful; Nineveh heeds his call to repentance and is spared. Instead of being pleased, he’s outraged. He wanted to see the city spectacularly destroyed. No other Biblical book makes a prophet look like such a jerk, and Paine thinks the intent was satirical.

Part III deals mostly with the Gospel writers’ practice of pulling lines of Hebrew scripture out of context and pretending they were prophecies of Jesus. That’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. More important is a passage close to the end addressing the vilest claim of evangelical Christianity: that you must believe in Jesus or be damned to eternity in Hell. He points out that if this were really God’s message, the creator of the universe could quickly and easily have made it known to everyone. Instead, if we believe that doctrine, millions of people have been damned simply for not having heard of Jesus.

Now as the eternal salvation of man is of much greater importance than his creation, and as that salvation depends, as the New Testament tells us, on man’s knowledge of, and belief in the person called Jesus Christ, it necessarily follows from our belief in the goodness and justice of God, and our knowledge of his almighty power and wisdom, as demonstrated in the creation, that ALL THIS, if true, would be made known to all parts of the world, in as little time at least, as was employed in making the world.

As scholarship, Paine’s treatment is outdated in many respects. He recognizes that the books of the Bible weren’t necessarily by the people whose names are on them and that other people compiled existing writings into their present form. More recent scholars, though, have looked in detail into the processes of compiling, translating, and copying before the printing press existed. They recognize better than Paine that there were many points at which the books could have been significantly altered, intentionally or accidentally.

Still, there are people who continue to believe that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. I didn’t imagine how widespread this was till I did a Web search. The top result in my search on “did Moses write Genesis” points to Answers In Genesis, which insists that Moses indeed wrote the first five books of the Bible, including the account of his own death and funeral, and he fatuously concluded Deuteronomy by saying of himself, “Since then, there has never been such a prophet in Israel as [me,] Moses.” Getting some people even to a kindergarten level of rational Biblical analysis is difficult.

Living in New Hampshire, a state where religious fanaticism isn’t a big problem, I often forget how far we haven’t come. Supposedly civilized countries such as Germany, Austria, and Italy still have blasphemy laws. The so-called European Court of Human Rights upheld Austria’s conviction of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff stating that Muhammad was a pedophile. Tradition states that he took a nine-year-old as one of his wives, so that sounds like orthodoxy rather than blasphemy to me. By handing down this decision, the court gave moral fuel to the murder gangs in Pakistan who kill alleged blasphemers. I wonder if some booksellers in Europe today are afraid of the legal consequences of carrying books like The Age of Reason. (I did once pick up a book called Gottlos Glücklich in Germany, though.)

Paine doesn’t show a lot of philosophical depth. His deism is a simple matter, which he takes as self-evident. He jumps from the existence of a God of Nature to a moral system without explanation. His description of the vastness of the universe is a pleasure to read. He posits that all the six planets (apparently he hadn’t heard of the discovery of Uranus in 1781) are inhabited, and their dwellers observe Earth just as we observe their worlds.

What’s significant about The Age of Reason is the fact that it was published. A couple of centuries earlier, writing such a book would have gotten its author burned at the stake. Others before Paine had pointed out the many absurdities in the Bible, but he wrote for a popular audience. He helped to tear down the tyranny of belief enforced by the jailer and the lynch mob. Writers like Robert Ingersoll and Mark Twain followed in his footsteps. Today we can say what we like — at least as long as we stay out of reach of the European Court of Human Rights.

Coming up next week: I’m finding Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi fascinating, so watch for an article on it next week. The hard part will be saying anything about it without spoilers. Probably I won’t do an article on Troubled Blood; I’m struggling through it to find out what enraged the book-burners, but the characters don’t appeal to me.