production by the third Synoptist, but like the rest of his work is merely a composition based upon earlier written narratives.(1) Ewald, for instance, assigns the whole of the first chapters of Luke (i. 5--ii. 40) to what he terms "the eighth recognizable book."(2) However this may be, the fact that other works existed at an earlier period in which the history of Zacharias the father of the Baptist was given, and in which not only the words used in the Epistle were found but also the martyrdom, is in the highest degree probable, and, so far as the history is concerned, this is placed almost beyond doubt by the Protevangclium Jacobi which contains it. Tischendorf, who does not make use of this Epistle at all as evidence for the Scriptures of the New Testament, does refer to it, and to this very allusion in it to the martyrdom of Zacharias, as testimony to the existence and use of the Protevangelium Jacobi, a work whose origin he dates so far back as the first three decades of the second century,(3) and which he considers was also used by Justin, as Hilgenfeld had already observed.(4) Tischendorf and Hilgenfeld, therefore, agree in affirming that the reference to Zacharias which we have quoted, indicates acquaintance with a different Gospel from our third Synoptic. Hilgenfeld rightly maintains that the Protevangelium Jacobi in its present shape is merely an {202} altered form of an older work,(1) which he conjectures to have been the Gospel according to Peter, or the Gnostic work [------],(2) and both he and Tischendorf show that many of the Fathers(3) were either acquainted with the Protevangelium itself or the works on which it was based. The state of the case, then, is as follows: We find a coincidence in a few words in connection with Zacharias between the Epistle and our third Gospel, but so far from the Gospel being in any way indicated as their source, the words in question are connected with a reference to events unknown to our Gospel, but which were indubitably chronicled elsewhere. As part of the passage in the epistle, therefore, could not have been derived from our third Synoptic, the natural inference is that the whole emanates from a Gospel, different from ours, which likewise contained that part In any case, the agreement of these few words, without the slightest mention of the third Synoptic in the epistle, cannot be admitted as proof that they must necessarily have been derived from it and from no other source. {203} CHAPTER X. PTOLEMÆUS AND HERACLEON--CELSUS--THE CANON OF MURATORI--RESULTS.