Justin Martyr lived at Rome in the reign of the Antonines and wrote a _Defence of the Christians_. Yet he makes no mention of “St. Peter the first bishop.” He had never heard of him. Irenæus, however, did not hesitate to say anything to advance the gospel, and accordingly boldly asserts that Peter and Paul founded the church at Rome; overlooking their reciprocal animosity, and the fact that the Epistle of Paul to the Romans addresses the “saints,” but makes no mention of a church. Claudius had banished the Jews from Rome for their turbulent conduct under the instigations of Chrestos, and the emperors Trajan and Adrian seem to have known of Christians only from information which they had derived solely from the provinces in the East. But all this made no difficulty for Irenæus. This French prelate also declared that the ministry of Jesus lasted upward of ten years; also that he lived to be an elderly man. The anachronisms and bad geography of the Gospels are notorious, but they do not compare with the absurdities of Irenæus. He invented the name _Antichrist_, and hurled it with ferocious rage whenever he had been assailed and hard pushed in controversy. He was never so much in his element as when quarrelling; and his designation of Irenæus (a man of peace) is one of the most stupendous misnomers ever heard of. We have alluded to the fact that passages had been interpolated into the Epistles of Paul. The object was to harmonize the Logos of Philo and his school with the Christ or Chrêstos of the apostle. It would have been a futile attempt if it had been made when Paul was castigating the Corinthian Christians in regard to Apollos. A dead man’s words, however, can be mutilated and perverted without his resistance. We accordingly find the sturdy Hebrew diction of the apostle interlarded with Gnostic utterances, and new epistles purporting to have been written by him which give a different complexion to his doctrines. The _pleroma_ or fulness which is treated of in the Epistle to the Ephesians was taken bodily from the Gnostics. The pre-existence of Christ as the Creator of the world was asserted in a spurious document purporting to be a letter from him to the Colossians, and interpolations of a corresponding nature were made in the genuine Corinthian Epistles. Thus in the famous chapter on the resurrection we find the following sentiment of Philo in an amplified form: “Man, being freed by the _Logos_ (or Word) from all corruption, shall be entitled to immortality.”