As I continue to rob graves of dead skeptics, I continue also to exhume forensic evidence that skeptical ideas are millennia older than the ones using them. The gaps in the fossil record of skeptical objections, unlike the Darwinian model, continue to be filled in with transitional forms. The ancient (sorry, Enlightenment!) critic Voltaire -- like all of his like-minded contemporaries, a deist, for atheism had yet to have Darwinianism to make it fashionable -- proves to have been the early version of many of our featured critics.

Like many critics, such as Acharya S, Voltaire scored some points against the church's bad behavior, especially regarding treatment of Jews (though in his comments on the OT and Israel, i.e., "why did [God] perform innumerable incomprehensible miracles in favor of this puny nation," he showed himself no less an anti-Semite at heart!); like many of our critics, he assumed that Ancient People were Stupid, argued by outrage, assumed his morals upon the text, and generally made a nuisance of himself speaking with authority on matters he knew nothing about. But more specifically, we recognize his tactics even today. In a series of questions under the persona of the renegade Zapata, Voltaire offered the precursor for today's critics and their "Have you stopped beating your wife?" lists of questions, which we last saw from a friend of Sam Gibson. (And as with Sam's friend, many of these questions are Golden Duh Award winners; to wit: "Can I figure out for myself whether the three angels to whom Sarah served a whole calf to eat, had bodies or if they borrowed them?" Or: "I am not enough of a chemist to explain away successfully the golden calf that Exodus says had been made in a single day..." Where it says a single day was all it took, I do not know, but presumably Voltaire and Steve Allen are now comparing notes on this objection, over drinks without ice.)

Or better yet: Peter could neither read nor write, so 1 and 2 Peter could not be his letters: "There is no reply to this, but I would like something more substantial." More substantial? No reply? What about the hiring and regular use of scribes in antiquity? What about Peter maybe learning to read and write in the intervening 20 years? Other objections needed time to be proven wrong: "I do not know of a single war among the Turks over religion." (No, they were too busy solidifying against common enemies; put them at peace, as they eventually were, and you have plenty of strife, inside and out.) Jesus was a tolerant sort, Volty tells us: He "uttered not a single word against the cult of the Romans by whom his country was surrounded." (He didn't have to: That the cults of the Romans were nothing but idolatry and false religion in practice was as much a given in Jewish territory as that Judaism was a superstition was given in Gentile territory!) From Voltaire, also, came Dennis McKinsey's argument that in John's Gospel, the crowd couldn't have reported a Temple complex still being built after 46 years (as noted, the main temple building was done in much less time, but construction on the complex continued up until 63 AD). Paul is dismissed, as he is by many, as a madman -- for the same reason that Hyam Maccoby and others don't follow Paul: they can't understand his use of Greco-Roman rhetorical techniques. And of course many of Volty's arguments are out of date: Against Paul he writes, "No Jew was a Roman citizen until Phillip and Decius [c. 244-257 AD]." That, of course, has been disproven by inscriptional and literary evidence for quite some time.

To his credit, Voltaire was smart enough to write very little about what he knew little of (the Bible) -- thus he is no major foe in and of himself. But his legacy has been felt, as with all of our Cemetery occupants, in the techniques and objections he has passed on to modern skeptics who accept his work uncritically.