the witnesses, is contradicted by the whole history of New Testament literature. Whilst the most uncritically zealous assertors of the antiquity of the Gospels never venture to date the earliest of them within a quarter of a century from the death of Jesus, every tyro is aware that there is not a particle of evidence of the existence of our Gospels until very long after that interval,--hereafter we shall show how long;--that two of our synoptic Gospels at least were not, in any case, composed in their present form by the writers to whom they are attributed; that there is, indeed, nothing worthy of the name of evidence that any one of these Gospels was written at all by the person whose name it bears; that the second Gospel is attributed to one who was not an eye-witness, and of whose identity there is the greatest doubt even amongst those who assert the authorship of Mark; that the third Gospel is an avowed later compilation,(1) and likewise ascribed to one who was not a follower of Jesus himself; and that the authorship of the fourth Gospel and its historical character are amongst the most unsettled questions of criticism, not to use here any more definite terms. This being the state of the case it is absurd to lay such emphasis on the contemporaneous date of the testimony, and on the character of the witnesses, since it has not even been determined who those witnesses are, and two even of the supposed evangelists were not personal eye-witnesses at all.(2) Surely the testimony of Athanasius regarding the miracles of St. Anthony, and that of Augustine regarding 1 Luke i. 1--4. 2 We need scarcely point out that Paul, to whom so many of the writings of the New Testament are ascribed, and who practically is the author of ecclesiastical Christianity, not only was not an eye-witness of the Gospel miracles but never even saw Jesus. {195}