I defy any living soul to refute Thomas Paine’s arguments. I have read answers to them, and attempts at refutation; but none succeed–all sink into the ground.
Errors of the Christian Religion (1832) | G. W. M. Reynolds
The Wandering Jew’s Tale | G.W.M. Reynolds
Originally written by G.W.M. Reynolds and published in The Monthly Magazine in 1837: List awhile, and I will tell / Crimes that caus’d a doom so fell / I Know, then, that as we led afar / The Saviour unto Golgotha, / Where, as the ban of all our race, / The cross was rear’d tow’rds heay’n’s face.
Eugene Sue’s Epic Socialist Novel “The Mysteries of the People” (1848): “The Iron Collar” and “The Silver Cross” | Stephen Basdeo
“this carpenter of Nazareth has an audacity that passes all bounds; he respects nothing, nothing; yesterday ’twas the law, authority, he attacked in their representatives; to-day ‘tis the rich against whom he excites the dregs of the populace. Has he not dared to pronounce these execrable words: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
The Virgin and the Outlaw
In the earliest medieval poems, Robin Hood is devoted to the Virgin Mary. While this may seem odd, many thieves in medieval Europe had an attachment to her.
‘By god that dyed on a tree’: Crux Simplex in “A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode” (c.1450)?
In the 16th century there was an understanding among some thinkers that Christ may have died on a simple wooden stake or tree, rather than a two beam cross, and similarly the Geste of Robyn Hode makes reference to “Cryst that dyed on a tree”.