received by them all. Besides, had the books been forged for any particular purpose, they would have been made more favourable to that purpose than they appear to be.

Notwithstanding this well-known state of things, Mr. Evanson says, "From what St. Luke and other writers inform us, there is no doubt but the orthodox church, if she had chosen to preserve them, might, at this hour, have had forty instead of four different Gospels; and many of them much more deserving her regard than three of those she hath thought fit to select and save from the general wreck, in which the writings of the primitive Christians have been involved."

This is advanced by Mr. Evanson from mere imagination, without even the appearance of any authority, so that it requires no refutation at all. Let Mr. Evanson enumerate these forty Gospels,† and shew that any of them was deserving of so much credit as any of the four that are now received. Origen must have been a better judge in this respect than Mr. Evanson, and, according to Eusebius, he says, "As I have learned by tradition concerning the four Gospels, which alone are received without dispute by the whole church of God under heaven." Accordingly, in whatever estimation the few spurious Gospels that we read of were held by some for a time, they sunk into universal discredit, and are lost, while the four are retained to this day, and will, I doubt not, continue to be respected as they now are, notwithstanding any attempt to discredit them. In fact, it is evident from the writings of Mr. Jones and Dr. Lardner, to which Mr. Evanson ought to have paid some attention, that there never were more than two or three of those spurious Gospels, and that the credit they had was only with a few, and that of short duration,

Dissonance, p. 112. (P.) Ed. 2, p. 141.

+ "Luke," says Mr. Evanson," assures us, many had written evangelical histories before the date of his own, that is, within the first thirty years after our Saviour's death. What number then shall we understand by many? When I consider that Christian churches were before that time founded at Jerusalem, in Samaria, Phenice, Syria, in every province of Asia Minor, and in many cities of Macedonia and Greece, I cannot think twenty too large a number to be intended by Luke; and, as the very same motives that had induced those authors to write their Gospels continued to operate afterwards, it appears to me not unreasonable to suppose, that in the course of the next forty or fifty years, sixteen more were written in different places, to which if we add the canonical four, my supposed forty will be accounted for; and we have not yet reckoned the Gospel of Peter, nor the two Gospels according to the Hebrews, nor the Gospel of the Simoniaus, nor that according to the Egyptians, nor the traditions of Matthias, all which were extant in the second century." Letter, pp. 26, 27. See Toland's Amyntor, annexed to his "Life of John Milton," 1761, pp. 165–175.

Lardner, VI. p. 28. (P.)

It is not probable that any spurious Gospels would be written, whatever were the views of the writers, till some genuine ones had got established credit. As to those that Luke refers to, he does not censure them as spurious, but only as imperfect; and there can be no doubt but that, of transactions of such importance, there would, from the earliest times, be many accounts, more or less accurate, in circulation among Christians.

Mr. Evanson may say, that the learned orthodox Christians were more assiduous in imposing upon the world with respect to the fabrication of books favourable to their purpose, than the Unitarians were in guarding against their impositions. But the Christian world was never without learned Unitarians, from the earliest times to those of Photinus; and in the age in which Mr. Evanson says that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John, were written, the majority of Christian bishops were, no doubt, Unitarian; so that any attempt to impose upon them books unfavourable to their sentiments, would have been in vain.

Mr. Evanson cannot say that the Unitarians might have made remonstrances on the subject, but that, their writings being lost, we have no means of knowing what they were: for though writings may be lost, yet, if they occasion any discussion, arguments, or at least traces of the opinions supported by them, will not be lost. Thus we can easily collect the arguments of the Gnostics, the Unitarians, and the Arians, of ancient times, from the writings of their antagonists, though all their own are perished. If, therefore, the Unitarians, or any other denomination of Christians, had ever complained that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, or John, were spurious, we could not but have heard that they did so, and should also have known, though indirectly, the objections they made to them. Let Mr. Evanson account, if he can, for the absolute, and almost instant rejection of the Gospel of Peter,* and the universal reception of those of Matthew, Mark, and John, without supposing the latter to be genuine, and the other not.

Mr. Evanson seems to think there is no evidence for the authenticity of the books that he rejects from the canon of the New Testament besides that of the orthodox Christians, by whom he means those who corrupted the gospel, and who wished to transmit their peculiar opinions and practices to posterity. But, besides overlooking the consideration

* See Amyntor, p. 166; Lardner, II. pp. 248, 249.

that, since the gospel was first preached by the apostles, they who corrupted it must, of course, at first, have been few, and therefore that the great majority, who held it as it had been delivered to them, would have effectually prevented any such imposition; and also the farther consideration, that they who can be supposed to have forged books for the purpose above-mentioned were by no means agreed among themselves, and therefore would never have favoured one another's impositions; I say, besides overlooking these obvious considerations, he seems to have forgotten, that we have, in an indirect way, but by no means liable to any just suspicion, the testimony of those who are called heretics, and also that of the Heathens, to the authenticity of these books. It is true that their own writings are perished; but by means of their adversaries, we know what they did write, and what they thought, on every important subject. And there is reason to conclude that they admitted the authenticity of all the four Gospels, as well as that of some; and probably of all the Epistles of Paul that are objected to by Mr. Evanson.

The Cerinthians, who were probably some of the earliest Gnostics, contemporary with John and the other apostles, must have known, according to Epiphanius, the Gospel of Matthew, because he says they adopted part of it. * And I would observe, that the rejection of the whole, or part, of a book, by the Gnostics, did not imply that they thought it spurious, but only that they did not approve of it, and especially that they did not choose to make use of it in their churches. Marcion, who lived in the beginning of the second century, mentioned the Gospel of Matthew, as well as that of Luke, the Epistle to the Hebrews, with those of Peter and James, and ten Epistles of Paul; for he criticised them, and published new editions of them for the use of his disciples. †

The Ebionites I am far from considering as heretics, since, in my opinion, they were the genuine Jewish Christians; but they formed a body of Christians distinct from the Gentiles, who considered them as, on that account, heretics. Though they did not make use of any Gospel besides that of Matthew, with some variations, it is never said that they rejected the others; and it is certain that they knew of the Epistles of Paul, since they objected to the doctrine of them, and disliked him much on that account.

• Michaelis's Introd. I. p. 36. (P.)

↑ Ibid. p. 38. (P.)

Had there been any apparent cause of doubting the authenticity of the four Gospels, it could not have been unknown to the learned Heathens who wrote against Christianity; and they would, no doubt, have availed themselves of it, as affording a suspicion that the things recorded in them never happened. But it is evident that Celsus, who wrote in the beginning of the second century, Porphyry, the most learned of all the opposers of Christianity, and Julian, the most inveterate of them, considered the books of the New Testament in general as no forgeries. * Also, so early as the time of Celsus, there appear to have been many variations in different copies of them, which implies that they had been often copied, and therefore had existed a considerable time.

Mr. Evanson says, this "is very far from being, in any degree, a proof of the point in question. They were all much too great masters of argument not to see how greatly that very concession was in their favour."† But why, then, did they not make use of it for that purpose? He adds, " And were not the author of these pages convinced, as he really is, upon better and firmer grounds, of the truth and divine authority of the revelation by Jesus Christ; and had he an inclination to prejudice the gospel in the opinion of thinking men; he cannot imagine a stronger argument than might be drawn against it, from the objectionable, contradictory passages contained in those books, on a supposition that they were all actually written by its first and most authoritative teachers." But if Christianity had been in any real danger from this quarter, it must have appeared long before this time. For the four Gospels were from the first as open to examination and objection as they are now; and if the contradictions were such as could never be discovered before, they could not be very glaring ones, or such as the Christian world had any thing to apprehend from. Whatever be the views of Mr. Evanson, other persons, as quicksighted as he, would not have spared Christianity on this

account.

Mr. Evanson speaks in general terms of the corrupt Christianity of those who, in his opinion, forged the three Gospels, and the epistles that he objects to. § But he should have

* See Lardner, VIII. pp. 10–15, 18, 207—219, 394–410.

+ Dissonance, p. 2. (P.)__ Ed. 2, pp. 18, 19.

Ibid. pp. 2, 3. (P.) Ed. 2, p. 19.

Ş Romans, Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, and the Epistles of James, Peter, John, and Jude. See supra, p. 358.

stated what those corruptions were, and have shewn the probability of the persons to whom he ascribes the fabrication of them, having written them in that particular manner. He will not, for instance, pretend that they were favourers of the doctrine of transubstantiation who wrote those books, notwithstanding some passages in them are alleged in support of that doctrine, because it is certain that no such doctrine was entertained in so early an age, Now the greatest corruption of Christianity, and one that in Mr. Evanson's opinion, as well as my own, is the foundation of most of the rest, was the exaltation of the person of Jesus Christ to the rank of a superangelic being, or of God. But there was no opinion of this nature in the period to which Mr. Evanson is confined besides that of the Gnostics, who never had it in their power to impose any books on the rest of the Christian world. And if any Trinitarians, of whom history gives no account, had been concerned in the fabrication of those books, they would never have made them so favourable as they now are to the Unitarian doctrine.

Would any other than a strict Unitarian have made our Saviour uniformly speak of himself as nothing more than a man, as he always does in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John; to say, that of himself he could do nothing, but that the Father within him did the works? Or when, in a figurative sense, he spake of his being one with the Father, would he have explained it of such an union as subsisted between himself and his disciples, and between them all and God? Also the epistles that Mr. Evanson rejects are all Unitarian.

Submitting these remarks to your candid attention,
I am Sir, &c.

LETTER III.

Of the Preference given by Mr. Evanson to the Gospel of Luke. DEAR SIR,

HAVING considered what Mr. Evanson has advanced on the subject of the evangelical history in general, I shall add a few observations on his reasons for giving so decided a preference, as he does, to the Gospel of Luke; and to me it appears to be perfectly arbitrary, without any proper evidence, external or internal, in favour of its superior authenticity.

He says, that "the histories of Luke were certainly first