When Peter asked the manner of John's death, the Savior replied, "'If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?' {125} "Then went this saying abroad among the brethren that that disciple should not die." Peter, James and John were the chosen among the chosen, upon whom the Savior bestowed special favor. Peter was a man of great energy, fitted to be a leader in the church and in society. John possessed a deep, affectionate nature, which made him the dearest of the Savior's three chosen friends. Of James we know very little. He seems to have been of a quiet, earnest, meditative turn. He presided over the church at Jerusalem until the year forty-four of our era, when he sealed his testimony with his blood, being the first of that glorious band of apostolic martyrs. Such were the chief actors in New Testament times. The great facts of their lives are corroborated both by Jewish and heathen writers, and admitted to be true by the most eminent of modern infidels, such as Volney, Straus and Renan. Christianity did not take its rise in an obscure corner of the earth. On the other hand, from the very first it attracted the attention of the good, the wise and the learned, and aroused the opposition of the wicked, though they were powerful kings and potentates of the earth. Yet, in spite of all, it has won its way, both in ancient times and at the present day among the honest in heart by the simplicity, grandeur and harmony of its truths. We must, therefore, accept the New Testament as a whole. We cannot accept the writings of one, and say they are true, and reject the writings of {126} another, teaching the same doctrine, and say it is false. Neither can we accept the gospel and reject the epistles, for there is not a doctrine of the gospel which is not taught in the very first of them, that written by Matthew. He who writes forgeries must needs be well posted in the matter of names, dates and places, or else he will contradict some well-known facts and so expose his forgery to the world. Men who write falsehoods do not write as follows: "Now, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother, Philip, tetrarch of Iturea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanius tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiphas being high priests, the word of God came unto John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness." Here, in one sentence, are twenty historical, geographical, political and family references, every one of which can be proven true by the statements of cotemporaneous secular writers. Infidels have utterly failed in their attempts to disprove one of the hundreds of such statements in the New Testament.