Textual criticism has been employed to discredit the true dates of the present gospels; and the most exaggerated descriptions have been given of the frequent transcription of the text and its great corruption in the second century. The process of corruption in the course of frequent transcription has been transferred even to the first century. It is true that the gospels at the end of that century exhibited a text which bears marks of transcription, interpolation, and addition; but they were not the complete works as we have them now, being then but in progress, except the fourth. The assumption that “advanced corruption” existed in the present text of the synoptists as early as the first century is gratuitous; unless the process by which they were gradually built up is so called. No attempt to get a long history behind the canonical gospels at the close of the first century out of “advanced corruption” can be successful. It is attested by no Christian writer of the century; and those in the first half of the second, both heretical and orthodox, did themselves treat the text in a manner far short of its implied infallibility. The various readings with which they had to do, do not carry up _the canonical gospels_ far into the first century. The transcription, enlargement, and interpolation of the materials which make up the body of them, must not be identified with the corruption of their _completed texts_, in order that the latter may be relegated to an early period; for the synoptists did not come forth full-blown, each from the hand of a single person. The old Latin version or versions used by Tertullian and the interpreter of Irenæus, have been pressed into the same service, but in vain.