volume, entitled _Miscellanies of Religious
Criticism_.[105]

Protestantism, according to Scherer, has a right to free inquiry. Once
give it the Bible as authority, and you drive it back to Catholicism.
This is what has already been done by Protestants, whose religion has
numbered its days. Authority has been its ruin, and now it has no
liberty. The Evangelists contradict each other in many instances. The
Apostles failed to quote the Old Testament correctly. Their gross errors
are sufficient of themselves to overthrow all the claims of Scripture to
authority. It is not certain that the Gospel of John is authentic; that
the discourses of Jesus are correctly reported; that Jesus taught his
consubstantiality with the Father; that the divinity of Christ involves
his omniscience; that Christ had any intention to decide questions of
criticism and canonicity; that he believed in the inspiration of the Old
Testament; that he acknowledged the divinity of the Canticles and
Ecclesiastes; or that, if he sanctioned the inspiration of the Old
Testament, he did the same thing concerning the New.

The New Testament, says Scherer, is full of errata. It contains
different records of the same facts. Take as an example the conversion
of Saul, of which there are three accounts in the Acts. The discourses
of Christ are described in different contexts; the same discourses are
not related in similar words; and there is no exactness in the
narratives. There are differences in the Gospels, affecting the ideas
and actions of Jesus, which sometimes amount to positive contradictions.
They exist also between the first three Gospels and that of John. The
last Evangelist gives a very different account of many points in the
history of the passion and resurrection of Christ, especially in respect
to the last Supper and the chronology of the whole passion-week. Christ
announced his second coming as near at hand. Hence he, or the
Evangelists in reporting him, were grossly in error. There are, in a
word, serious objections to accepting the New Testament as
authoritative; because we find in it the use of the Septuagint;
quotations from the Old Testament in a sense not intended in the
original; influence of Jewish traditions; Rabbinical arguments;
uncertainty in reports of the discourses of Christ; contradictions
between different accounts of the same facts; errors in chronology and
history; and Messianic hopes and expectations not in accordance with
exter