In regard to this testimony of the "divine Irenaeus," as he is called, Godfrey Higgins says: "The church has been guilty of the oversight of letting this passage from Irenaeus escape. One of the earliest, most respected, and most quoted of its ancient bishops, saints and martyrs, tells us in distinct words that Jesus was not crucified under Herod and Pontius Pilate, but that he lived to be turned fifty years of age. This he tells us on the authority of his master, St. Polycarp, also a martyr, who had it from St. John himself, and from all the old people of Asia" (Anacalypsis). Of this testimony and its consequences, Judge Waite, in his "History of Christianity" (pp. 329, 330) says: "It must be remembered that Irenaeus had been a companion of Polycarp and others who had seen John, and that he was speaking of what had come to his personal knowledge from the elders in Asia. If, then, Irenaeus tells the truth, the evidence in favor of the fact is almost overwhelming. If, on the other hand, he would deliberately falsify in a matter of this importance, what is his testimony worth as to the origin of the four gospels? Against this evidence, we have only the silence of the gospels. But if the silence of the Synoptics is consistent with a ministry of three or four years, why is not the further silence of all the gospels consistent with a ministry of twenty years? "How would such a theory affect the received chronology concerning Christ? The date of the crucifixion at not later than A. D. 36, or when Christ was, by the received chronology, forty years old, is settled by the fact, that in that year, Pontius Pilate was removed from his government.... If, then, it be accepted as a historical fact that Christ was about fifty years old at this crucifixion, the date of his birth would have to be set back at least ten years." Every line of these accounts of the trial and crucifixion of Christ bears the ineffaceable stamp of fiction. There was no Christ to crucify, and Jesus of Nazareth, if he existed, was not crucified as claimed. For more than fifteen centuries an inoffensive, industrious and moral people have been persecuted, robbed and butchered by Christians, because their forefathers are said to have slain a mythical God. Supposing that from the myth of Prometheus had sprung a popular religion, which, in its day, had, like the religions of Osiris, Bacchus, Krishna and Christ, overspread the earth. Then think of the devotees of this religion massacring the Hellenists because Zeus had crucified Prometheus! How long must our mythology, with all its attendant evils, rule and curse the world? How long must an innocent people suffer for an alleged crime that was never committed? CHAPTER VII. THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 400 How long did Jesus say he would remain in the grave? "For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew xii, 40).