Christianity and Science - 1874 Author:Andrew Preston Peabody Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. GENUINENESS OF THE GOSPELS.—TESTIMONY OF CHRISTIAN FATHERS. — OF HERETICS. OF ENEMIES. — RULES OF EVIDENCE. — AUTHENTICITY OF THE GOSPELS. —... more » THEIR AUTHORS COMPETENT WITNESSES. — THE GOSPELS COMPLEMENTING AND INTERPRETING ONE ANOTHER. TN my last Lecture I sought to prove the antiquity of the Gospels. I showed you that we have reason to believe that they could not have been written later than the apostolic age; that is, that they are undoubtedly works of the first Christian century. We will now consider the proof that they were written by the men whose names they bear. The first question that suggests itself is, Why should we not believe that the Gospels were written by these men ? We have precisely the same reason for so believing that we have for our belief in authorship generally. When we find an author's name attached to a book with the earliest mention of it, and that name remains so attached from generation to generation without its rightful use being once called in question, the probability is little less than certainty that the name properly belongs to it. Thus, although there is no quotation or mention of the " Theogony " or of the " Works and Days " until some four hundred years from the time when they were written, becausewhen mention of them is first found they are spoken of as Hesiod's, and no doubt is expressed as to their authorship in the age when such reasons for doubt as there might have been could not have grown obsolete, classical scholars have consented to call them Hesiod's, with a unanimity broken only by certain extremists of that class of critics whose fundamental canon is that " things are not what they seem." The Histories of Herodotus and Thucydides are known to be theirs only on this ground ; and the case is the same with most...« less