There is, however, another passage which deserves to be mentioned. The Epistle has the following quotation: "Again, I will show thee how, in regard to us, the Lord saith, He made a new creation in the last times. The Lord saith: Behold I make the first as the last."(l) Even Tischendorf does not pretend that this is a quotation of Matth. xx. 16,(2) "Thus the last shall be first and the first last," [--Greek--] the sense of which is quite different. The application of the saying in this place in the first, and indeed in the other, Synoptic Gospels is evidently quite false, and depends merely on the ring of words and not of ideas. In xix. 30 it is quoted a second time, quite irrelevantly, with some variation: "But many first shall be last and last first" [--Greek--]. Now it will be remembered that at xx. 16 it occurs in several MSS. in connection with "Many are called but few are chosen," although the oldest codices omit the latter passage, and most critics consider it interpolated. The separate quotation of these two passages by the author of the Epistle, with so marked a variation in the second, renders it most probable that he found both in the source from which he quotes. We have, however, more than sufficiently discussed this passage. The author of the Epistle does not indicate any source from which he makes his quotation; and the mere existence in the first Synoptic of a proverbial saying {246} like this does not in the least involve the conclusion that it is necessarily the writing from which the quotation was derived, more especially as apocryphal works are repeatedly cited in the Epistle. If it be maintained that the saying is really historical, it is obvious that the prescriptive right of our Synoptic is at once excluded, and it may have been the common property of a score of evangelical works.