Coming to the Minor Prophets, twelve in number, the author holds that Hosea, Joel, Amos, Micah, Haggai, Zephaniah and Zechariah were well known prophets, concerning the date and authorship of whose books there is no grave doubt. Yet, he admits that there are manifest interpolations and additions to the Book of Zechariah. Of Nahum, Habakkuk, Malachi and Obadiah he admits that we know absolutely nothing, except what is written in their respective books, and the dates they were written can only be conjectured from their contents. Obadiah is composed of but one chapter of twenty-one verses, and almost identically the same thing is contained in Jeremiah xlix, 7-22. The identity is so great that our author assumes that one of them copied from the other, but which, he does not say. Of the Book of Jonah, he admits that it was not written by the prophet of that name mentioned in 2 Kings xiv, 25, nor for at least three hundred years after his time, notwithstanding he is evidently the same as that in the book. He insists, however, that no matter who wrote it, or when, the book is authentic and the story true; and as one of the principal proofs of this fact, he quotes Matt, xii, 39, 40. Thus I finished the Old Testament, considerably shaken in faith; but as the Old Testament belonged to a long past dispensation, I considered it of little value anyway, and approached the study of the New with the hope that all difficulties would be removed and all doubts made clear. If the New Testament was truly inspired of God and infallibly true, what difference did it make if the Old was doubtful and uncertain? It was "out of date" anyway. CHAPTER IV NEARER THE CRISIS Our author begins his "Introduction to the Study of the New Testament" with an account of the language and characters in which most of it was originally written, as he did the Old. These were Greek Uncials, all capital letters, without any space divisions between the words, and neither accent nor punctuation marks; that from these original manuscripts, down to the invention of printing, all copies were made by hand copying. The oldest existing manuscripts were made in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, and no two of these are exactly alike. During the succeeding centuries several thousand manuscript copies of all or parts of the New Testament were made that are still extant, _and no two exactly alike_! I also learned that there are still extant quite a number of ancient Versions of the New Testament, translated into different languages, all of which are more or less different from each other, not alone in the text, _but in the books recognized as authentic and canonical_.