Argument

The Age of Reason Objection Defeater

Intro

In the 1790s Thomas Paine wrote a book that taught ordinary readers how to doubt the Bible. The Age of Reason said that a revelation is only a revelation to the one person who receives it, and gossip to everyone else. It said Moses could not have written the books of Moses, since they describe his death. It said the Gospels contradict each other, that Matthew twisted a prophecy of Isaiah, and that the Old Testament pins horrible crimes on God. Its answer was that the only true word of God is the world itself, which no one can forge. The book was cheap and clear, and its arguments still circulate, usually without Paine's name on them.

Think of a house inspector who finds a newer porch on an old farmhouse and declares the whole house was built last year. Paine found some real porches. A few lines in the books of Moses were added later, and the Jewish tradition said so long before he did. But a later porch does not make a new house, and a careful look shows Paine's other charges fail, often on his own words. He admitted that Jesus lived, taught and was crucified, though he knew it only from the "hearsay" he rejected. He admitted the Gospel writers did not work together, which is what makes their agreement count. And to prove that creation is God's only word he quoted a psalm that goes on to praise God's written law.

The first replies came within two years, from Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, from the scientist Joseph Priestley, and from the American statesman Elias Boudinot. This page takes Paine's main charges one at a time: his case at full strength, the classic reply, and what later scholarship adds.

◎ See this page's graph and discover linked topics →

Cheatsheet

The 30-second reply. Paine caught a few later notes in the Torah, and Bishop Watson granted them in 1796: "A small addition to a book does not destroy either the genuineness or the authenticity of the whole book." Everything else Paine needs runs into his own admissions. He believed Jesus existed and was crucified, which he learned from the same "hearsay" he calls worthless. He concluded that the Gospel writers each wrote "separately and individually for himself," which makes their agreement on the empty tomb independent testimony. And the psalm he quoted to prove that creation is God's only word goes straight on to say "The law of Jehovah is perfect."

The 7 fast facts:

1. The hearsay argument was answered within a year. Joseph Priestley pointed out that on Paine's rule Paine "may give credit to nothing but what he sees himself, in which case his faith will be reduced to a very small compass indeed."
2. Paine conceded what he knew only by testimony. "That such a person as Jesus Christ existed, and that he was crucified... are historical relations strictly within the limits of probability" (The Age of Reason, Part I).
3. The late notes were flagged long before Paine. The Talmud (Bava Batra 14b-15a) records the view that Joshua wrote the last eight verses of the Torah, the account of Moses' death. Ibn Ezra noticed other such passages in the twelfth century, and Watson says so in his reply.
4. Genesis 14 updates its own place names in the open. The same chapter that says "as far as Dan" also says "Bela (the same is Zoar)," "the vale of Siddim (the same is the Salt Sea)" and "En-mishpat (the same is Kadesh)" (Genesis 14:2, 3, 7, ASV).
5. Paine's direction of copying is backwards. He claimed the Edomite king list in Genesis 36 was taken from 1 Chronicles 1. Critical scholars, who usually date Chronicles to the fourth century BC, hold that the Chronicler copied Genesis.
6. Paine himself ruled out collusion. "The writers, whoever they were, have not acted in concerted imposition, but each writer separately and individually for himself, and without the knowledge of the other" (The Age of Reason, Part II).
7. The "virgin" reading of Isaiah 7:14 is pre-Christian and Jewish. The Septuagint, translated by Jews before Jesus was born, renders almah as parthenos. Matthew follows it.

The 4 strongest counter-moves:

• "Where did you learn that Jesus was a real man who taught good morals?" From the Gospels, through the chain of testimony Paine says obliges no one. Either testimony can ground belief, or Paine's Jesus goes too.
• "Is a later editor's note evidence that the main text is late?" A modern edition of an old history that updates a place name is still an edition of an old history. Watson made exactly this point with Paine's own example of Havre-de-Grace renamed Havre-Marat.
• "Did the Gospel writers collude or not?" Paine said not. Then the four accounts are independent witnesses who agree on the core: the burial, the women, the empty tomb on the first day of the week.
• "Read Psalm 19 to the end." Paine printed Addison's paraphrase of it as his proof text for creation-only revelation. The psalm's second half praises the written law of God.

Concessions to make freely (Grant / Now collect):

• Grant: Moses did not write the account of his own death in Deuteronomy 34. Now collect: Jewish tradition said so more than a thousand years before Paine, which shows a tradition open about its seams, not one hiding them. Eight verses of epilogue do not make five books anonymous.
• Grant: Genesis 36:31, "before there reigned any king over the children of Israel," most naturally reads as written after Israel had kings. Watson granted it. Now collect: Paine's own theory, that Genesis copied Chronicles and is younger than Homer, is rejected by the critics he would cite, and a nine-verse insertion is evidence of editing, not of fabrication.
• Grant: the Gospels do not carry authors' signatures and differ in detail. Now collect: Paine himself concluded the writers did not collude, and he accepted the crucifixion on their word.
• Grant: Isaiah 7:14 gave a sign to the house of David in the days of Ahaz. Now collect: Isaiah's oracle came true ("It shall not stand," Isaiah 7:7, ASV), so the passage Paine chose to prove Isaiah a false prophet shows the opposite, as Watson argued; and Matthew's "fulfilled" is the same word he uses for Hosea 11:1, which shows he is reading typologically, not misreading.
• Grant: Watson's defence of Numbers 31 as "good policy, combined with mercy" will not do. Now collect: Paine's "debauch the daughters" is not in the text either; Israel's own law for captive women forbade selling them or treating them as slaves (Deuteronomy 21:14); and Paine's moral outrage borrows a standard his distant deist God cannot supply.

What NOT to defend:

• Do not claim Moses wrote every word of the Pentateuch, including Deuteronomy 34. No careful defender, ancient or modern, needs that.
• Do not lean on Watson's suggestion that the Dan of Genesis 14:14 is a river formed by "Jor" and "Dan." That etymology of the Jordan is now generally treated as a folk etymology.
• Do not repeat Watson's "good policy" defence of Numbers 31. Use the judicial-context case instead; see Numbers 31 Midianite War Objection Defeater.
• Do not insist on one harmonization of the genealogies as certain. Several ancient solutions exist; the point is that a difference is not a contradiction.
• Do not call Paine an atheist. He was a deist, and his own profession of faith opens Part I.

The closing line. Paine found a few newer porches on an old house and announced the house was built yesterday. The house is still standing, and Paine kept living in parts of it: the Jesus he admired, the morality he preached, the psalm he quoted. He could not hold on to those and throw away the record that gave them to him.

In full

Defeater for the objection: "The Bible is not revelation. Revelation, even if granted, is revelation only to its first recipient and hearsay to everyone else. The books are not by the authors tradition names: the Pentateuch narrates Moses in the third person and records his death, and it uses names and facts (Dan, the kings of Israel) from centuries after him; the historical books were written long after their events. The Gospels contradict one another in their genealogies and resurrection narratives, which proves their writers were not eyewitnesses. The New Testament misapplies Old Testament texts such as Isaiah 7:14. The Old Testament attributes atrocities to God, as in Numbers 31. The only true word of God is the creation, which cannot be forged or altered." (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I 1794, Part II 1795, with the 1807 Examination of the Passages in the New Testament, Quoted from the Old often printed as Part III.) Paine is profiled at Thomas Paine, and his deism at Deism.

Paine's case was not new, and his early critics said so. Watson traced the authorship questions through Ibn Ezra, Spinoza and Hobbes, and the miracle argument parallels David Hume's "Of Miracles" (1748). What was new was the audience. Moncure Conway, introducing his edition of Paine's writings, notes that thirty-six replies were catalogued in the British Museum. The three answered here are Richard Watson, An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine (1796), ten letters answering Part II point by point; Joseph Priestley, the Unitarian minister and chemist, whose Answer to Mr. Paine's Age of Reason (first printed at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, 1794; London 1795) answered Part I; and Elias Boudinot, former president of the Continental Congress and director of the United States Mint, whose The Age of Revelation, or the Age of Reason Shewn to Be an Age of Infidelity (Philadelphia 1801) was addressed to his daughter, Susan V. Bradford, with a preface dated December 1795.

The defeat structure is charge by charge, with reciprocal concession. Paine is right on a small number of particulars and the reply grants them at once. Each grant then collects something larger, and in this case the collections are unusually strong because many of them are Paine's own sentences. Three moves recur:

1. Genuineness is not authenticity. Watson's distinction: a book is genuine if written by the person to whom it is ascribed, and authentic if it relates matters of fact as they really happened. A late note can touch the first question without touching the second, and Watson argues that "a book may contain a true history, though we know not the author of it."
2. A difference in detail is not a falsehood in substance. "The relation of a fact differs essentially from the demonstration of a theorem" (Watson, Letter VII). One missing step ruins a proof. A missing or differing detail does not ruin testimony to an event.
3. The objector's own commitments. Paine believed in the historical Jesus, in a moral law, in a wise Creator and in life after death. Each belief either depends on the testimony he rejects or needs more than his deism can supply.

Grammar and hermeneutics

Several of Paine's charges turn on how particular texts read. They can be weighed on grammar and genre before any theology is brought in.

Hebrew, the Pentateuch charges.

• Genesis 14 glosses its own place names. The chapter repeatedly pairs an old name with a newer one by a parenthetical pronoun: Bela hi' Tsoʿar, "Bela (the same is Zoar)" (14:2); "the vale of Siddim (the same is the Salt Sea)" (14:3); "En-mishpat (the same is Kadesh)" (14:7); "the vale of Shaveh (the same is the King's Vale)" (14:17). Genesis 23:2 does the same: "Kiriath-arba (the same is Hebron)" (ASV). The text openly carries a reader-updating layer. "Pursued as far as Dan" (14:14), using the later name of Laish (Judges 18:29; Joshua 19:47), fits that layer. Paine's own analogy proves the same thing: a dateless book that says "Havre-Marat" proves only that someone, author or later editor, wrote after 1793.
• Genesis 36:31 is a terminus clause. Lifnei melokh-melekh livnei Yisra'el, "before there reigned any king over the children of Israel," most naturally presupposes that Israel later had kings, and Watson granted it. Some conservative readers take it instead as looking ahead to the promise "kings shall come out of thee" (Genesis 17:6; 35:11, ASV). Either way the clause is about one list of Edomite kings. It is not a dating formula for Genesis.
• Deuteronomy 34 announces its own vantage point. It narrates Moses' death in the third person, and it says "no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day" (34:6) and "there hath not arisen a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses" (34:10, ASV). ʿAd hayyom hazzeh, "unto this day," and "since" are retrospective markers. The chapter tells the reader it was written after Moses. Concealment would look different.
• Numbers 12:3 is a narrator's aside. "Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men that were upon the face of the earth" (ASV) is a verbless clause opened by waw and the subject, the standard Hebrew form for a parenthetical comment interrupting narrative (the KJV prints it in parentheses). ʿAnaw means humble or lowly. In context it explains why Moses does not answer Aaron and Miriam and God does. Whether Moses or a later hand wrote the aside, it does not touch the rest of the book, which is the point Watson pressed.
• Third-person self-narration is an ancient convention. Caesar's Gallic War, Xenophon's Anabasis and Josephus's Jewish War all narrate their authors in the third person. Paine's "style and manner that historians use in speaking of the person whose lives and actions they are writing" is also the style of men writing about themselves, which was Watson's first reply.

Hebrew, the moral and prophetic charges.

• Numbers 31:18. "Keep alive for yourselves" is hachayu lakhem, the Hiphil imperative of chayah, "preserve alive." The verb is one of sparing, not of sexual use, and the next verse requires the soldiers to purify "ye and your captives" (31:19, ASV), which brings the captives inside Israel's ritual life. The text does not say what "for yourselves" entailed. Israel's own statute on captive women (Deuteronomy 21:10-14) requires a month of mourning, marriage rather than concubinage, and release if the marriage fails: "thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not deal with her as a slave" (21:14, ASV). Paine's "debauch" is an inference he supplies.
• Isaiah 7:14 is a birth announcement addressed to a dynasty. Hinneh ha-ʿalmah harah weyoledet ben uses the same announcement formula as the angel's words to Hagar (Genesis 16:11) and to Manoah's wife (Judges 13:5). The sign is given lakhem, "to you" plural, after "Hear ye now, O house of David" (7:13, ASV), so it is not a private sign to Ahaz alone, though 7:16 does turn to Ahaz in the singular. ʿAlmah is a young woman of marriageable age; see H5959 - almah. The Septuagint, a pre-Christian Jewish translation, renders it parthenos.

Greek, the Gospel charges.

• Matthew signals that his genealogy is schematic. He announces three sets of fourteen generations (Matthew 1:17) and compresses the royal line: "Joram begat Uzziah" (1:8, ASV) skips Ahaziah, Joash and Amaziah, who are listed in 1 Chronicles 3:11-12. Egennēsen, "begat," can link a man to a descendant, as Hebrew genealogies regularly do. Paine's average of forty years per generation, built on Matthew's count, is arithmetic on a list whose author told readers it was arranged. Watson made the correction in 1796.
• Both genealogies break their own pattern at Joseph. Matthew's chain of "begat" stops at Joseph, "the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus" (1:16, ASV), where "of whom" is ex hēs, feminine singular, pointing to Mary. Luke writes "being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph" (3:23, ASV), hōs enomizeto. Both writers flag that Joseph's line is legal, not biological, which is what their birth narratives say.
• John 20:2 undoes "Mary Magdalene came alone." John names only Mary at the tomb (20:1), but her report is in the plural: "we know not where they have laid him" (20:2, ASV), ouk oidamen. The Greek fits the other Gospels' group of women. Watson argued the same from ordinary usage: naming the principal person in a party does not deny the others.
• "Fulfilled" is a wider word than "predicted." Matthew's hina plērōthē, "that it might be fulfilled" (1:22), is the same formula he uses for Hosea 11:1, "Out of Egypt did I call my son" (Matthew 2:15, ASV). Hosea's verse is about Israel's exodus, and Matthew can read it. He is reading Israel's story as pattern and type, not claiming every cited verse was a forecast with no other referent. Charging him with misunderstanding the original context applies the wrong genre to him.

Hermeneutical point. Paine reads the Bible the way a hostile lawyer reads a contract: every editorial note is a forgery, every difference in detail is perjury, and every typological citation is a lie. Ancient texts were not composed for that reading. Updated names, appended notes, schematic genealogies and typological fulfilment were known conventions, and the texts mark them openly: "the same is," "unto this day," "as was supposed," "fourteen generations."

Argument structure

Form

Defensive. The page is a set of eight local defeaters, each pairing a classic eighteenth-century reply with later scholarship, plus a reductio running through all of them: the principles Paine uses against the Bible would also remove beliefs he held and asserted in the same book. Soundness is classical. The load-bearing replies were made in 1795-1801 and still stand. Modern work sharpens them (genre studies of ancient biography, the epistemology of testimony, comparative genealogy) but does not change their shape.

The conclusion is modest by design. The page does not show the Bible is true. It shows The Age of Reason gives no good reason to think it false. The positive case lies elsewhere: Minimal Facts Argument, Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch, NT Authorship and Eyewitness Apologetics.

C1, "Revelation is hearsay to everyone but the first person"

Paine at full strength

• "It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it" (The Age of Reason, Part I, ch. 2).
• "It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing."
• Applied to the virgin birth: Joseph and Mary wrote nothing themselves, so the report "is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence."

The classic reply

1. Priestley: the rule swallows everything. "On this principle, it is not incumbent on Mr. Paine to believe what any person may tell him, and he may give credit to nothing but what he sees himself, in which case his faith will be reduced to a very small compass indeed. His pretence to a contradiction in terms is a mere quibble" (Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, Part III, printed in An Answer to Mr. Paine's Age of Reason, 1795).
2. Priestley: the distinction Paine draws is granted and harmless. He concedes that a revelation made to Moses or to Christ is not, strictly, a revelation to us. But if there is good reason to believe it was made to them, and it concerns all people, then all people "will find themselves under an equal obligation to respect it." The question is the evidence, not the label.
3. Boudinot: these are not secret reports. To the "hearsay upon hearsay" charge he replies that the facts were related by Jesus's chosen disciples, "not in a secret history, or in a corner; not for their private or personal advantage in this life, but at the risk of their reputation, peace, comfort, and even of their lives" (The Age of Revelation, 1801).

Modern scholarship

1. Testimony is a basic source of knowledge. C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford 1992), argues that knowledge cannot be rebuilt from personal observation alone: an individual cannot check, by his own senses, most of what he rationally believes, from geography to history to science. Paine's rule is a form of the reductionism Coady criticizes.
2. The New Testament presents itself as testimony and invites testing. Luke states a method (Luke 1:1-4); Paul says most of the five hundred witnesses "remain until now" (1 Corinthians 15:6, ASV); Paul tells a king "this hath not been done in a corner" (Acts 26:26, ASV). See The Bible Is Just Second-Hand Sources Objection Defeater.

Anticipated objections

1. "Ordinary testimony is fine for ordinary events. A revelation is an extraordinary claim, and testimony cannot carry it."
2. "Priestley was a Unitarian who denied the Trinity. He is a poor ally for orthodox Christians."
3. "Paine only accepted the crucifixion because it is ordinary. That is consistent, not a concession."

Rebuttals

1. That is a different argument, the Humean one about miracles, and Paine makes it separately. The hearsay argument claims a contradiction in terms, which Priestley rightly calls a quibble. Once the claim becomes "the evidence is insufficient," the debate moves to the evidence. See Argument from Miracles.
2. Priestley's theology does not affect his logic, and the point stands without him. It is stronger for coming from a man who rejected much of orthodoxy and still saw that Paine's rule proves too much.
3. Then Paine has granted that the Gospel testimony is good enough to establish facts about Jesus, and the remaining question is whether its testimony to the resurrection is weaker. That is a question about evidence, not about hearsay as such.

Grant / Now collect

• Grant: a revelation reaches later generations through testimony and documents, not directly.
• Now collect: Paine wrote that "such a person as Jesus Christ existed, and that he was crucified... are historical relations strictly within the limits of probability," and called him "a virtuous and an amiable man." Every one of those beliefs came to Paine at second hand, from the documents in dispute. If second-hand testimony obliges no one, Paine's Jesus disappears with the Church's.

C2, "Moses did not write the books of Moses"

Paine at full strength

• Third person. "It is always, the Lord said unto Moses, or Moses said unto the Lord," which is "the style and manner that historians use in speaking of the person whose lives and actions they are writing."
• The meekness dilemma. If Moses wrote Numbers 12:3 of himself, "he was one of the most vain and arrogant coxcombs"; if not, the books are without authority.
• The death of Moses. Deuteronomy 34 records his death and burial, and its "unto this day" shows the writer "lived long after the time of Moses."
• Dan. Abram pursues "unto Dan" (Genesis 14:14), but Laish was renamed Dan only after the conquest (Judges 18:29), so "Moses could not be the writer of the book of Genesis."
• The Edomite kings. Genesis 36:31 "could only have been written after the first king began to reign over them," and Paine concludes that "this part of Genesis is taken from Chronicles, and that Genesis is not so old as Chronicles."

The classic reply (Watson, Letters II and III)

1. Third person is a convention, not a confession. It is "the style and manner, not only of historians writing of other persons, but of eminent men, such as Xenophon and Josephus, writing of themselves." "Caesar writes of himself in the third person," and every schoolboy knows it is no argument against his authorship of his Commentaries.
2. The meekness dilemma "has not a horn to hurt the weakest logician." If someone else inserted "this little verse," it does not follow that Moses wrote no other part of Numbers. If Moses wrote it, he wrote it while answering a slander from Aaron and Miriam, an occasion that excuses a man for speaking well of himself.
3. A later editor is not a later author. On Dan, Watson turns Paine's own example: a later editor of an old history of France might write "Havre-Marat" for "Havre-de-Grace" without making the history new.
4. The concession on Edom. "I admit this inference, but I deny its application. A small addition to a book does not destroy either the genuineness or the authenticity of the whole book." Watson grants that the nine verses of Edomite kings may have been inserted later.
5. Affirmative evidence. Against Paine's claim that there is no positive evidence for Mosaic authorship, Watson cites the texts in which Moses writes (Exodus 24:4; Deuteronomy 31:9, 24), Josephus's Against Apion on the five books of Moses, and the unbroken Jewish ascription.
6. Genuineness is not authenticity. Even if a later scholar had compiled the books from public records, "every fact recorded in them may be true." "I by no means admit, that these books, as to the main part of them, were not written by Moses; but I do contend, that a book may contain a true history, though we know not the author of it."

Modern scholarship

1. Editorial updating is the normal history of ancient texts. Updated place names, added notes and epilogues are documented across ancient Near Eastern literature. Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans 2003), argues that the Pentateuch's legal and covenant forms fit the second millennium BC, while allowing that later scribes updated the text.
2. The Jewish tradition was never naive. The Babylonian Talmud (Bava Batra 14b-15a) records a dispute over the last eight verses of the Torah, with one view that Joshua wrote them and another that Moses wrote them in tears at God's dictation. Paine announced as a discovery what the tradition had discussed openly for well over a thousand years.
3. The direction of copying runs the other way. Critical scholarship treats 1 Chronicles 1 as dependent on Genesis, not the reverse, and dates Chronicles among the latest books of the Hebrew Bible. Paine's further claim that Genesis is younger than Homer and Aesop has no defender in the field.
4. The source-critical successor to Paine's view has itself fractured. The Documentary Hypothesis that followed Paine is now contested from within critical scholarship over the number, date and extent of its sources. See Documentary Hypothesis and Moses Did Not Write the Torah Objection Defeater.

Anticipated objections

1. "Watson conceded the point. Once you admit insertions, you cannot say where they stop."
2. "Calling the hard verses 'editorial' is special pleading. Every inconvenient verse becomes an insertion."
3. "Third-person narration by Caesar is a literary choice. Moses would have had no reason to make it."

Rebuttals

1. The extent of later editing is a question for evidence, verse by verse. That is how every ancient text is studied. Admitting that Thucydides has scribal errors does not make the whole of Thucydides doubtful. The burden is to show the main text is late, and anachronisms in a handful of notes do not do it.
2. The editorial reading is not invented for convenience; the texts mark it themselves ("the same is," "unto this day," "there hath not arisen a prophet since"). Special pleading would be calling unmarked central material editorial in order to save it. The defence here does the opposite: it concedes exactly the marked material.
3. Josephus and Xenophon had reasons, and so would a leader writing an account of a nation's founding in which God, not the narrator, is the central actor. In any case the question is whether the convention existed, and it did.

Grant / Now collect

• Grant: Deuteronomy 34, Genesis 36:31-39 and the "Dan" of Genesis 14:14 likely reflect a hand later than Moses.
• Now collect: the tradition flagged its own seams before Paine, which is the opposite of the concealment his case needs. Paine's own explanation (Genesis copied from Chronicles, younger than Homer, written by "some very ignorant and stupid pretender") is rejected by modern critics. And as Watson said, even an anonymous history can be true. Paine needed the books to be fiction, and late notes do not show that.

C3, "Joshua, Samuel and the histories were written long after the events"

Paine at full strength

• Paine argues in Part II that Joshua, Judges, Samuel and the other histories "were not written by the persons to whom they are ascribed," pointing to "unto this day" notes, references to later events, and the confused chronology of Judges, whose last five chapters, he notes, are out of chronological order.

The classic reply (Watson, Letter IV)

1. "Unto this day" fits a writer late in his own life. Joshua lived years after Ai burned; "what absurdity is there in saying, Ai is still in ruins"? Watson compares a man who saw the heads of rebels set on poles at Temple Bar in 1745 saying, twenty years later, that they are there to this day.
2. Citing sources is evidence of history. On Joshua 10:13's appeal to the book of Jasher: "No author in his senses would have appealed, in proof of his veracity, to a book which did not exist." It proves at least that the writer and his readers knew the book.

Modern scholarship

1. Compiled histories rest on older sources. The books of Kings name their sources repeatedly ("the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel"), and Joshua and Samuel draw on older material. Later compilation is not invention. See Josiah Wrote the Bible Objection Defeater.
2. Thematic arrangement is not confusion. Judges 17-21 is widely read as an appendix arranged by theme, with its refrain "In those days there was no king in Israel." Paine read a thematic appendix as a chronological blunder.

Anticipated objections

1. "If the books are compiled late, they are not eyewitness history."
2. "The book of Jasher could itself have been legend."

Rebuttals

1. They are not eyewitness memoirs, and nothing in the defence requires that. Livy and Tacitus are not eyewitnesses to most of what they narrate either. The question is the quality of the sources, which these books name.
2. Possibly, and Watson does not claim more than he shows: the citation proves the writer believed the account and that his readers knew the source. That is what a historian citing sources looks like.

Grant / Now collect

• Grant: the historical books reached their final form after the events they narrate, in some cases long after.
• Now collect: so did nearly every ancient history, and these name their sources. "Written later" is a fact about composition; Paine needed "made up," and that requires an argument he never gives.

C4, "The genealogies contradict, so neither can be believed"

Paine at full strength

• Matthew gives twenty-eight generations from David to Jesus through Joseph; Luke gives forty-three; only David and Joseph coincide in that stretch.
• "If Matthew speaks truth, Luke speaks falsehood; and if Luke speaks truth, Matthew speaks falsehood," and if they cannot be believed "in the very first thing they say," they deserve no belief "in any thing they say afterwards."
• Matthew's list, spread over more than a thousand years, makes every father about forty at his first son's birth, so "it is not even a reasonable lie."

The classic reply (Watson, Letter VII)

1. Testimony is not geometry. "The relation of a fact differs essentially from the demonstration of a theorem." Two Welsh historians tracing a man's descent to Cadwallon by different branches would not be disbelieved about his life.
2. Two truths, two lines. "Matthew speaks truth, and Luke speaks truth, though they do not speak the same truth; Matthew giving the genealogy of Joseph, the reputed father of Jesus, and Luke giving the genealogy of Mary." Watson adds that other explanations exist, and that public registers would have exposed a fabricated pedigree at once.
3. The arithmetic omits the omissions. Matthew passes over three kings between Joram and Uzziah; restore them and Paine's forty-year average falls.

Modern scholarship

1. Ancient genealogies make arguments. Marshall D. Johnson, The Purpose of the Biblical Genealogies (Cambridge 1969), shows that biblical genealogies select, compress and arrange for legal and theological purposes.
2. More than one ancient solution is on record. Julius Africanus (Letter to Aristides, preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 1.7) explained the two lists by levirate marriage; others take Luke's as Mary's line. The codex treats these at Two Genealogies Contradiction Objection Defeater.

Anticipated objections

1. "The Mary-line theory is a late invention to save the text."
2. "Even if harmonizable, inspired authors should not need harmonizing."

Rebuttals

1. It is one option among several, and the defence does not depend on it. Africanus's levirate solution is early third century. The point is that two lists with different purposes and different lines of descent are not a contradiction in the logical sense Paine needs, whichever solution is right.
2. Inspiration is a claim about the truth of what is affirmed, not about modern genealogical format. Matthew tells his reader the list is arranged in fourteens; reading it as a complete register is the reader's error, not the author's.

Grant / Now collect

• Grant: the two genealogies differ, and no single harmonization is certain.
• Now collect: both writers flag that Joseph is the legal father only (ex hēs in Matthew 1:16; "as was supposed" in Luke 3:23), and Matthew flags his compression. Paine's "reasonable lie" rests on reading an arranged list as a census, which the text itself warns against.

C5, "The resurrection accounts contradict, so the writers were not eyewitnesses"

Paine at full strength

• Mark has the women arrive at sunrise and John "while it was yet dark"; Luke names several women and John, on Paine's reading, Mary Magdalene alone.
• "If four men are eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses to a scene, they will without any concert between them, agree as to time and place."
• So "the writers cannot have been eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of the matters they relate," and the books were not written by the apostles.

The classic reply (Watson, Letter VIII)

1. All agree on the day and the early hour. "What court of justice in the world would set aside this evidence, as insufficient to substantiate the fact of the women's having gone to the sepulchre, because the witnesses differed as to the degree of twilight which lighted them on their way?"
2. John does not say "alone." Mary "might, for any thing you have proved, or can prove to the contrary, have been accompanied by all the women mentioned by Luke." Naming the principal person in a party is ordinary.
3. Grant the worst case and the fact survives. Watson is willing to admit, for argument's sake, that some differences may be irreconcilable, and asks whether that destroys the testimony to the event itself.
4. On Mary Magdalene. Paine insinuated that she "might be upon the stroll." Watson called it "an illiberal, indecent, unfounded calumny." Conway, Paine's own editor, later blamed the insinuation on the English Bible's chapter heading identifying her with the sinful woman of Luke 7, an identification the text never makes.

Modern scholarship

1. Independent witnesses diverge in detail. Studies of eyewitness testimony find that independent accounts of one event regularly differ in peripheral detail while agreeing on the core, and that verbatim agreement suggests copying. Paine's model of eyewitnesses who agree on everything describes collusion, not witness.
2. The Gospels are ancient biographies. Richard Burridge, What Are the Gospels? (Cambridge 1992, 2nd ed. 2004), places them in the genre of Greco-Roman bios. Michael Licona, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? (Oxford 2017), shows that the compositional techniques of ancient biographers, such as compression and spotlighting one figure, account for many of the differences Paine lists.
3. The eyewitness question is open, not closed. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006, 2nd ed. 2017), argues that the Gospels preserve named eyewitness testimony. See Richard Bauckham, Anonymous Gospels Objection Defeater, The Resurrection Accounts Contradict Objection Defeater.

Anticipated objections

1. "Watson's courtroom analogy cuts both ways. Courts do throw out witnesses who contradict each other."
2. "Licona's 'compositional devices' just means the Gospel writers changed facts."
3. "You still have not shown who wrote them."

Rebuttals

1. Courts discount witnesses who contradict one another on the material fact. They do not discount witnesses who agree on the material fact and differ on peripheral details; that pattern is taken as a mark of independence. All four accounts agree on the material facts here: the first day of the week, women at the tomb, the tomb found empty.
2. The devices are those used by Plutarch and other biographers whose works historians rely on. Shaping a narrative is not inventing its events, and the same historians who use Plutarch do not call him a fabricator.
3. Authorship is a separate argument, made at Anonymous Gospels Objection Defeater. This charge claimed the contradictions prove non-eyewitness authorship, and that inference fails whoever the authors were.

Grant / Now collect

• Grant: the four accounts differ in time of day, number of women, and the angels.
• Now collect: Paine's own second conclusion: "the writers, whoever they were, have not acted in concerted imposition, but each writer separately and individually for himself, and without the knowledge of the other." Four independent writers who agree that the tomb was found empty on the first day of the week are exactly what a historian hopes to find. Paine cannot use the differences to rule out collusion and then treat the agreement as if it came from collusion.

C6, "Matthew misapplied Isaiah 7:14"

Paine at full strength

• Isaiah's sign was given to Ahaz during the Syro-Ephraimite war, with a time limit: before the child knows good from evil, the two hostile kings will be gone (Isaiah 7:16).
• So the passage "has no more reference to Christ and his mother, than it has to me and my mother."
• Paine goes further: Isaiah "was playing a trick," arranged the pregnancy, and was a false prophet because Ahaz was defeated anyway. Paine's 1807 Examination extends the charge to other New Testament citations.

The classic reply (Watson, Letter V)

1. The oracle came true. Rezin and Pekah planned to depose the house of David and "set up a king in the midst of it, even the son of Tabeel" (Isaiah 7:6, ASV). The oracle said "It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass" (7:7, ASV). The son of Tabeel never reigned. "This very instance proves, that he was a true prophet, and no impostor."
2. Defeated is not destroyed. Ahaz lost battles, but the plot against his dynasty failed, which was the thing promised.
3. Restraint. Watson declined to give a short explanation of Matthew's use, calling the passage "too important to be handled superficially by any one."

Modern scholarship

1. The "virgin" reading is Jewish and pre-Christian. The Septuagint renders ʿalmah as parthenos, and Matthew follows it. See Isaiah 7-14 Was Mistranslated Objection Defeater and Almah vs Bethulah Objection Defeater.
2. The child theme does not end in chapter 7. Isaiah 8 and 9 carry it forward to the child whose name is "Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6, ASV), a figure no ordinary birth in Ahaz's court fits.
3. Matthew reads typologically. His use of Hosea 11:1 in Matthew 2:15 shows he knows a text can have a first referent and still be "fulfilled" in Jesus. Raymond Brown's The Birth of the Messiah (1977) is the standard treatment of Matthew's formula citations.

Anticipated objections

1. "Typology is a get-out clause. Any verse can be made to 'point to' Jesus."
2. "The Septuagint's parthenos can mean simply 'young woman,' as in Genesis 34."

Rebuttals

1. Typology has controls: the pattern has to exist in the original text, and the later event has to fit it in more than one way. Matthew's argument rests on a sign to the house of David, a child named "God with us," and the dynasty's survival, all of which are in Isaiah. It is not arbitrary.
2. Possibly in rare cases, but it is the ordinary Greek word for a virgin, and the translators chose it here over other words for a young woman. The fuller treatment is at the Isaiah 7:14 defeater linked above.

Grant / Now collect

• Grant: Isaiah 7:14 had a meaning for the house of David in Ahaz's own day.
• Now collect: Paine chose this passage to prove Isaiah a false prophet, and the oracle he chose came true. The "virgin" reading he blamed on Christian bias was a Jewish translator's choice before Christianity existed, and Matthew's "fulfilled" works the same way for Hosea, where no one thinks he misunderstood the original.

C7, "Numbers 31 makes Moses a monster"

Paine at full strength

• After the war on Midian, Moses orders the boys and the married women killed and the girls kept alive (Numbers 31:17-18).
• "Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters."
• From the thirty-two thousand girls of Numbers 31:35 Paine concludes that thirty-two thousand were "consigned to debauchery by the order of Moses," and that "the religion that tortures all her social ties is a false religion."

The classic reply (Watson, Letter III)

1. The judicial context. The Midianites, "through the counsel of Balaam," had drawn Israel into the worship of Baal-peor, and twenty-four thousand Israelites died in the plague (Numbers 25:9; 31:16). Moses acted on a command, so attributing murder to him is like attributing it to a judge who passes sentence.
2. Slavery, not debauchery. "The women-children were not reserved for the purposes of debauchery, but of slavery; a custom abhorrent from our manners, but every where practised in former times."
3. Take the whole account or explain the selection. Paine accepts the chapter's figures as true; Watson asks him to accept the rest, including the report that the army lost not one man (Numbers 31:49).
4. The weak point. Watson also calls the order "good policy, combined with mercy," on the ground that the boys might have become avengers. That defence is not repeated here.

Modern scholarship

1. Context, scope and convention. Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? (Baker 2011), and Copan with Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker 2014), argue from the judicial setting, the limited scope of the campaign (Midian is a major power again in Judges 6-8), and ancient Near Eastern war rhetoric. See Paul Copan, Numbers 31 Midianite War Objection Defeater, Canaanite Conquest Objection Defeater and Canaanite Conquest and Herem.
2. The captive law governs. Deuteronomy 21:10-14 sets the terms for captive women in Israel: mourning, marriage, release, and a ban on sale or enslavement. See Mosaic Law.

Anticipated objections

1. "Copan's 'hyperbole' reading cannot apply here: the chapter counts the captives."
2. "Slavery is no better than debauchery. Watson's correction makes it worse."
3. "Deuteronomy 21 is a different text. You cannot assume it governed Midian."

Rebuttals

1. Correct that the rhetoric argument is weakest in this chapter, and the page does not lean on it here. The case rests on the judicial context of Numbers 25 and on the captive law, not on reading the numbers as hyperbole.
2. Watson's word "slavery" reflects his own era's assumptions; the Mosaic statute on captive women forbids treating them as slaves (Deuteronomy 21:14). The point that matters against Paine is narrower: his "debauch" is not in the text.
3. Within the narrative both belong to the same generation at the plains of Moab, and Deuteronomy 21 is Israel's own law for exactly this situation. Reading Numbers 31 without the statute that regulates it is the less natural reading, not the more neutral one.

Grant / Now collect

• Grant: Numbers 31 is among the hardest texts in Scripture, and Watson's "good policy" defence fails.
• Now collect: Paine's charge of mass debauchery is his inference, not the text, and it ignores the law that forbade it. Paine's own standard, that a religion which "tortures all her social ties is a false religion," assumes a binding moral order and the equal worth of every mother and child. That is a biblical inheritance, and it is not grounded by a Creator who never speaks or acts. See Moral Argument.

C8, "The creation is the only word of God"

Paine at full strength

• "THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD: And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man" (Part I, ch. 9).
• Human language is "local and changeable," while creation "cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered," and it "reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God."

The classic reply (Watson, Letter X)

1. Deism has difficulties too. Watson lists them: an uncaused cause, a Being outside time, omniscience and human freedom, the existence of evil under a good Creator, and others, "the contemplation of which has driven not a few from deism to atheism, just as the difficulties in revealed religion have driven yourself, and some others from Christianity to deism."
2. Neither religion should be dropped for its difficulties. Watson's conclusion is that difficulties attend both natural and revealed religion and are not a reason to abandon either.

Modern scholarship

1. Christianity agrees that creation speaks. "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1, ASV), and God's "everlasting power and divinity" are "clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made" (Romans 1:20, ASV). See General Revelation and Natural Theology.
2. Creation shows power and wisdom, not forgiveness. A guilty person can read God's existence in the world. Whether and how God forgives cannot be read there, which is why Christianity holds that general revelation needs special revelation to complete it. See Deism vs the Christian God.

Anticipated objections

1. "A book can be forged. A sunset cannot. Paine's point about corruption stands."
2. "Paine's hope of life after death is a private hope, not a claim."

Rebuttals

1. Creation cannot be forged, but it can be misread, and every reading of it is done by people in a human language. Paine's own reading of creation reached him through Newtonian science, itself testimony and texts. The written word can be checked by manuscripts; see The Bible Has Been Recopied and Changed Objection Defeater.
2. He states it as the second line of his creed: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life." Nothing in a creation that speaks only of power and order promises it. Christianity grounds the same hope in a God who has acted in history, above all in raising Jesus.

Grant / Now collect

• Grant: the creation is a true and universal revelation of God, as Paine says.
• Now collect: to illustrate it, Paine printed Joseph Addison's paraphrase of Psalm 19 ("The spacious firmament on high"). The psalm he chose moves from "There is no speech nor language" (19:3) straight to "The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul: The testimony of Jehovah is sure, making wise the simple" (19:7, ASV). His proof text puts the two books of God side by side, and Paine kept only the first.

Master objections to the whole argument

MO1: "Watson conceded the Edomite kings and could not answer Moses' death. The traditional case collapsed in 1796."

• What collapsed was a claim no one needs: that Moses wrote every word, including the epilogue. Watson defended the main body of the books and said so explicitly. The Talmud had already said the same about Deuteronomy 34.
• Reciprocal collect: if a few late notes refute a book's age, every edited ancient text is a forgery. Paine accepted Homer's antiquity, while the Homeric text was edited and standardized long after its composition.

MO2: "Modern critical scholarship has vindicated Paine. Nobody in the academy thinks Moses wrote the Torah."

• The academy has not vindicated Paine's specifics. Genesis is not held to have copied Chronicles; Isaiah is not held to have staged a pregnancy; Genesis is not held to be younger than Homer and Aesop. And the documentary model that followed Paine is itself fractured. See Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch.
• Reciprocal collect: an objector who appeals to modern scholarship has to take its verdicts on Paine's claims as well, including that many of them are wrong.

MO3: "Watson, Priestley and Boudinot are two centuries old. Why answer an old book with old books?"

• Because the objections circulating today are Paine's, often word for word: hearsay, Moses' death, contradictory genealogies, Isaiah 7:14, Numbers 31. An argument is not refuted by its age. Watson's distinction between genuineness and authenticity is still how historians handle anonymous and edited sources.
• Reciprocal collect: if age discredits the replies, it discredits Paine first.

MO4: "Harmonizing is special pleading. You would never do this for the Quran or for Homer."

• Classicists harmonize Polybius, Livy and Plutarch on the battles they describe in common, and Roman historians handle the differing accounts of Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio the same way. Reconciling sources is ordinary historical method. Refusing to reconcile them only when the subject is the Bible is the special pleading.
• Reciprocal collect: Paine himself treated the Gospel differences as evidence of independent authorship. That is a harmonizing judgment, and a correct one.

MO5: "Even if the Bible survives, Paine's deism is the cleaner position: God without the baggage."

• Watson's tenth letter lists deism's own difficulties, and later history bears him out: the freethought movement that revived Paine's reputation in the next century, led by Robert Ingersoll, settled into agnosticism rather than deism. A God who made the world and never acts in it gives no ground for the hope of life after death Paine professed, or for the moral law he applied to Moses. See Deism vs the Christian God.
• Reciprocal collect: if the objector's God is known only from creation, he must say what creation tells him about justice, mercy and the afterlife. Paine affirmed all three.

Tactical notes

Opening lines:

• "Paine is worth taking seriously, so let's take him one charge at a time. Some of what he says is right, and I'll grant it. Then let's see what each grant costs him."
• "Before Moses and Isaiah: did Jesus exist, and was he crucified? Paine said yes. How did he know?"
• "Which do you want to start with, Moses' death or the empty tomb? Paine is right about one of them and wrong about the other."

Deployment order:

• Lead with the hearsay charge (C1) when the objector is philosophical, because Paine's own concession about Jesus ends it quickly.
• Lead with the Pentateuch (C2) when the objector is textual, and concede Deuteronomy 34 first. Conceding early takes away the "gotcha" and makes the later rebuttals credible.
• Hold Numbers 31 (C7) for last and handle it at length on its own page. Do not try to settle it in a sentence.

Traps to avoid:

• Do not defend Watson where he is weak. His Dan-as-river suggestion and his "good policy" defence are not needed and hand the objector an easy win.
• Do not call Paine an atheist. He would be the first to correct you, and the correction costs credibility.
• Do not mock him. Paine was a brave, plain-spoken man who asked real questions. Polemical on the position, tender on the person.
• Do not let a concession become a rout. Every grant on this page has a collect attached. Make the collect in the same breath.

Closing lines:

• "Paine was right that a few lines in the Torah are later than Moses. The rabbis said so first. He was wrong that this makes the Bible a fiction, and he showed it himself every time he quoted the Gospels about the good man Jesus."
• "If testimony cannot tell us anything, then Paine cannot tell us anything either. We are reading him second-hand."

Live-cite kit

Scripture:

• Genesis 14:2, 3, 7, 17, the "(the same is ...)" glosses that update place names in the open.
• Deuteronomy 34:6, 10, "unto this day" and "there hath not arisen a prophet since," the epilogue marking its own date.
• Exodus 24:4 and Deuteronomy 31:9, "Moses wrote," cited by Watson as affirmative evidence.
• Isaiah 7:6-7, the plot to enthrone the son of Tabeel and the oracle "It shall not stand."
• Isaiah 9:6, the child called "Mighty God."
• Matthew 1:16-17 and Luke 3:23, the feminine ex hēs, the schematic fourteens, and "as was supposed."
• Matthew 2:15 with Hosea 11:1, Matthew's typological "fulfilled."
• John 20:2, "we know not," Mary Magdalene was not alone.
• Deuteronomy 21:14, "thou shalt not deal with her as a slave."
• Psalm 19:1, 7, the heavens and the law in one psalm.
• 1 Corinthians 15:6, most of the five hundred "remain until now."

Scholarly:

• Richard Watson, An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine (1796), the point-by-point reply to Part II.
• Joseph Priestley, An Answer to Mr. Paine's Age of Reason (Northumberland 1794; London 1795), the reply to Part I's hearsay argument.
• Elias Boudinot, The Age of Revelation (Philadelphia 1801), testimony given "at the risk of their reputation, peace, comfort, and even of their lives."
• Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 14b-15a, the last eight verses of the Torah.
• Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans 2003).
• C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford 1992).
• Richard Burridge, What Are the Gospels? (Cambridge 1992, 2nd ed. 2004).
• Michael Licona, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? (Oxford 2017).
• Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans 2006, 2nd ed. 2017).
• Marshall D. Johnson, The Purpose of the Biblical Genealogies (Cambridge 1969).
• Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker 2014).

Aphorism:

• "A later porch does not make a new house."
• "The relation of a fact differs essentially from the demonstration of a theorem." (Watson)
• "If testimony obliges no one, Paine's own Jesus goes with the Church's."
• "Paine proved the Gospel writers did not collude. Thank him, and count the witnesses."

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

• Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (2006). Open Library
• Elias Boudinot, The Age of Revelation, Or, The Age of Reason Shewn to be an Age of Infidelity (1801). Open Library
• Richard A. Burridge, What are the Gospels? (1992). Open Library
• Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? (2011). Open Library
• Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (2014). Open Library
• Marshall D. Johnson, The purpose of the Biblical genealogies: with special reference to the setting of the genealogies of Jesus (1969). Open Library
• K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003). Open Library
• Michael R. Licona and Craig A. Evans, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (Oxford University Press, 2017). doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190264260.001.0001
• Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (1794). Open Library

See also

• Thomas Paine, the life, the deism, and the reception of The Age of Reason
• Richard Watson (Bishop of Llandaff), author of the classic reply
• Deism and Deism vs the Christian God, the position Paine argued from
• David Hume, whose miracle argument Paine's parallels
• The Bible Is Just Second-Hand Sources Objection Defeater, the modern form of the hearsay charge
• Moses Did Not Write the Torah Objection Defeater and Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch, the Pentateuch charge at length
• Documentary Hypothesis, the source theory that followed Paine
• Josiah Wrote the Bible Objection Defeater, the late-composition charge against the histories
• Two Genealogies Contradiction Objection Defeater, Matthew and Luke on the line of Jesus
• The Resurrection Accounts Contradict Objection Defeater and Bible Contradictions Objection Defeater, divergence in detail and agreement on the core
• Anonymous Gospels Objection Defeater, who wrote the Gospels
• Isaiah 7-14 Was Mistranslated Objection Defeater and Almah vs Bethulah Objection Defeater, Isaiah 7:14
• Numbers 31 Midianite War Objection Defeater and Canaanite Conquest Objection Defeater, the moral charges
• General Revelation, what creation shows of God and what it does not
• Argument from Miracles, the reply to the probability argument against miracles