Pensees was published 6 or 7 years after Pascal died,in 1662. Twenty years after the first publications, Pensees was translated into English. The book was a record of Pascal’s thoughts. Why should anyone care what Pascal thought? Anyone brilliant enough to invent whole new fields of mathematics that included Statistics and Probability Theory sees and understands things that others of us do not.
He applied his mathematical breakthroughs to the most important problem that every human has, getting our soul into Heaven. He realized that salvation that would provide all the joy every soul was capable of having for all the time to come. The way he figured the odds in the “lottery of life”, every soul on earth would be making the smart decision by deciding to be a faithful, obedient Roman Catholic.
We may still be puzzled today by what Pascal saw as “The Jewish Problem”: “For thousands of years, faithful Jews wrote down Book after Book of what God told the prophets about the coming Messiah. It was dangerous. Many of the prophets were hated by political and religious leaders.
It was expensive, as well. Every time new holy writings had to be produced, sheep had to be raised, killed, and skinned. The skins had to be prepared. Ink had to be made. Scribes had to be paid, fed, and housed. For thousands of years, the Jews sacrificed money and effort to provide accurate transcriptions of the prophets’ words. The prophets passed on over three hundred direct mentions and precise descriptions of the Messiah.”
Pascal was puzzled. “Those are facts. The problem arises when we realize that all those Jews went to all that trouble for all those centuries to let us know where The Messiah would be born, who His family would be, and what He would do in His life. They even described His Death and Resurrection. Then, when He came, fulfilling every jot and tittle of the prophets’ predictions, the Jews who don’t gratuitously insult Him studiously ignored Him. Figuring this out is a very difficult problem.”
