Dr. Mozley refers to the contemporary testimony "for certain great and cardinal Gospel miracles which, if granted, clear away all antecedent objection to the reception of the rest," and he says: "That the first promulgators of Christianity asserted, as a fact which had come under the cognizance of their senses, the Resurrection of our Lord from the dead, is as certain as anything in history."(1) What they really did assert, so far from being so certain as Dr. Mozley states, must, as we shall hereafter see, be considered matter of the greatest doubt. But if the general statement be taken that the Resurrection, for instance, was promulgated as a fact which the early preachers of Christianity themselves believed to have taken place, the evidence does not in that case present the broad distinction he asserts. The miracles recounted by St Athanasius and St. Augustine, for example, were likewise proclaimed with equal clearness, and even greater promptitude and publicity at the very spot where many of them were said to have been performed, and the details were much more immediately reduced to writing. The mere assertion in neither case goes for much as evidence, but the fact is that we have absolutely no contemporaneous testimony at all as to what the first promulgators of Christianity actually asserted, or as to the real grounds upon which they made such assertions. We shall presently enter upon a thorough examination of the testimony for the Gospel narratives, their authorship and authenticity, but we may here be permitted, so far to anticipate, as to remark that, applied to documentary evidence, Dr. Mozley's reasoning from the contemporaneous date of the testimony, and the character of {194}