_Clement of Alexandria_ was a pupil of Pantaenus, and his successor as head of the catechetical school at Alexandria in Egypt. He was of heathen origin, born probably about the middle of the second century, and died about A.D. 220. He had a philosophical turn of mind, and after his conversion to Christianity made extensive researches under various teachers, as he himself tells us, in Greece, in Italy, in Palestine, and other parts of the East. At last he met with Pantaenus in Egypt, whom he preferred to all his other guides, and in whose instructions he rested. The testimony of Clement to the universal and undisputed reception by the churches of the four canonical gospels as the writings of apostles or apostolic men, agrees with that of Tertullian. And it has the more weight, not only on account of his wide investigations, but because, also, it virtually contains the testimony of his several teachers, some of whom must have known, if not the apostles themselves, those who had listened to their teachings. In connection with the testimony of the above-named writers, we may consider that of the _churches of Lyons and Vienne_ in Gaul, in a letter addressed by them to "the churches of Asia and Phrygia," which Eusebius has preserved for us, (Hist. Eccl., 5. 1,) and which describes a severe persecution through which they passed in the reign of Antoninus Verus, about A.D. 177. In this they say: "So was fulfilled that which was spoken by our Lord, 'The time shall come in which whosoever killeth you shall think that he doeth God service.'" In speaking again of a certain youthful martyr, they first compare him to Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, affirming, in the very words of Luke, that he "had walked in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless," (Luke 1:6;) and then go on to describe him as "having the Comforter in himself, the Spirit, more abundantly than Zacharias," where they apply to the Holy Spirit a term peculiar to the apostle John. Here, then, we have indubitable testimony to the fact that the gospel of John, as well as of Luke, was known to the churches of Gaul in the west and Asia Minor in the east in the days of Pothinus, bishop of these churches, who suffered martyrdom in this persecution. But Pothinus was ninety years old, so that his knowledge of these gospels must have reached back to the first quarter of the second century, when many who had known the apostles were yet living.