Jesus In India — Page 70
60 JESUS IN INDIA years? Another defect that these Gospels suffer from is that some references they give of earlier books are wrong. They could not even write down the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah, correctly. From the Gospels, it appears that these noble people were rather naive to the extent that some mistook Jesus, the Messiah, for a ghost. And from the earliest times these Gospels have been open to the charge that they have not been able to preserve the purity of their texts, particularly when there were many other books too which were compiled as Gospels. Thus there is no solid reason why all the statements of those books should be rejected, and why all that is contained in the Gospels, generally so-called, should be admitted as true. We do not think that the other Gospels could contain such unfounded exaggerations as are to be found in the present four Gospels. It is strange that while on the one hand, it is said in these books that Jesus, the Messiah, was a righteous per- son and that his character was without blemish, yet on the other hand, such charges are heaped upon him as are not at all befitting the station and eminence of a righteous person. For example, the Israelite prophets, in accordance with the teaching of the Torah, undoubtedly had hundreds of wives each at a time in order that they might thereby produce a whole generation of righteous peo- ple. But you will never have heard that any prophet had ever set such an example of permissiveness that he should allow a wan- ton and lascivious woman, a noted sinner of the city, to touch his body with her hands, to let her rub oil-her sin's earnings-on his head and to stroke his feet with her hair; that he allowed all this to be done by an unchaste young woman, and did not so much as tell her to stop it. One is saved from giving way to sus- picion, which naturally arises on seeing such a spectacle, only by