It is impossible to fix the dates of the New-Testament books except approximately. There is a great diversity of opinion. The earliest were probably written in the last half of the first century, and the latest certainly in the last quarter of the second century. Certain it is that no evidence can be found of the existence of our four Gospels until the latter part of the second century, about one hundred and fifty years after the alleged death of Jesus. It is therefore true what Prof. Robertson Smith, D. D., the learned Scotch Presbyterian minister, asserts, that our four Gospels are “unapostolic digests of the second century.” From the Apostolic Epistles we learn nothing of the life and teachings of Jesus. With Paul, Christ was an _idea_ rather than a _person_. Not a syllable do we find in his writings of the miraculous birth of Jesus, no reference to the Sermon on the Mount, much less to the miracles ascribed to him. He rather boasted that he had learned nothing of him from his disciples, but what he knew he had received at the time of his own miraculous conversion. He dwells upon the _death_ and spiritual _resurrection_ of Jesus, not upon his _life_; and the only _words_ of Jesus quoted by Paul, “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” are not found at all in the Gospels. All that Paul ever claimed to know about Jesus as a person he learned in a vision, and it is to be taken for what it is worth. We are absolutely driven to the Gospels for information regarding the alleged founder of Christianity, his birth, his life, his teachings, and his death. And here the fact should be faced that Jesus never wrote anything about himself, his mission, or his doctrines. We should not even know that he had learned the art of writing but for the incident mentioned in one of the Gospels (John 8:6) that on a certain occasion he stooped down and wrote in the sand; and now our learned New Versionists come along and snatch this from us by declaring that the beautiful story about the kind treatment of the woman taken in adultery is an interpolation not found in the best early MSS., so that we are not even sure that Jesus wrote anything even with his finger in the sand, or that he even knew how to write! Nobody pretends that Jesus ever directed his disciples or any one else to write down what he said and did, but, on the other hand, he often forbade his disciples to tell what he said and did; and much of what he is reported to have said was so obscure that the disciples themselves continually misunderstood him. Two reasons have been assigned for this omission of Jesus to write himself or to commission others to write down his sayings. The first is, that he said nothing which could not be found in then existing writings (as can easily be shown), and the second is, that he was so sure that the world was about to be destroyed, and that his own kingdom would so soon be set up and established upon the general ruin, that it was useless to write