Epistle to the Romans

By Voltaire

Voltaire (1694 - 1778) was a humanist and was very much against the traditions and teaching of the Roman Catholic Church of the eighteenth century. He believed passionately in the separation of church and state. This essay is a strongly worded criticism against the teaching of St Paul as expressed in his epistle to the Romans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2021
• ISBN: 4064066317010

Voltaire

Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778)a French philosopher and an author who was as prolific as he was influential. In books, pamphlets and plays, he startled, scandalized and inspired his age with savagely sharp satire that unsparingly attacked the most prominent institutions of his day, including royalty and the Roman Catholic Church. His fiery support of freedom of speech and religion, of the separation of church and state, and his intolerance for abuse of power can be seen as ahead of his time, but earned him repeated imprisonments and exile before they won him fame and adulation.

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Voltaire

Epistle to the Romans

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4064066317010

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Epistle to the Romans (Voltaire)

Table of Contents

article I.

Illustrious Romans, it is not the Apostle Paul who has the honour of addressing you. It is not that worthy Jew who was born at Tarsus, according to the Acts of the Apostles, and at Giscala accord- ing to Jerome and other fathers; a dispute that has led some to believe that one may be born in two different places at the same time, just as there are among you certain bodies which are created by a few Latin words, and are found in a hundred thousand places at the same time.^

It is not the bald, hot-headed man, with long and broad nose, black eyebrows, thick and continuous, and broad shoulders and crooked legs,^ who, having carried off the daughter of his master Gamaliel, and being subsequently dissatisfied with her, divorced

1 A shaft at the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. —J. M.

2 See the Acts of St. Thecla, written in the first century by a disciple of St. Paul, and recognised as authentic by Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Gregory of Nazianzum, St. Ambrose, etc.

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her 1; and, in pique, if we may believe contemporary Jewish writers, put himself at the head of the nascent body of the Christians.

It is not that St. Paul who, when he was a serv- ant of Gamaliel, had the good Stephen, the patron of deacons and of those who are stoned, slain with stones, and who, while it was done, took care of the cloaks of the murderers — a fitting employment for a priest's valet. It is not he who fell from his horse, blinded in midday by a heavenly light, and to whom God said in the air, as he says every day to so many others: Why persecutest thou me? It is not he who wrote to the half-Jewish, half- Christian shopkeepers of Corinth: Have we not power to eat and to drink . . . and to lead about a sister or a wife? Who goeth to war any time at his own charge? 2 By those fine words the Reverend Father Menou, Jesuit and apostle of Lor- raine, profited so well that they brought him, at Nancy, eighty thousand francs a year, a palace, and more than one handsome woman.

It is not he who wrote to the little flock in Thes- salonica that the universe was about to be de- stroyed, and on that account it was not worth