Yet, on the other hand, "the one-year ministry would solve many difficulties. It is the only scheme which reconciles S. Luke, S. Matthew, and S. John. Not improbably it is true: the more I consider it, the more attractive it appears." [134] Such, evidently, was the view of the Christian and other Gnostics. But Irenæus, the first Father to handle the problem, declared for a ministry of about twenty years, founding not only on the quotation in John, "Thou art not yet fifty years old," but on the fact that "all the elders who had known John the disciple of the Lord in Asia witness that he gave them this tradition." [135] On the other hand, in Mr. Wright's opinion, "ten years is the utmost length to which we can stretch the ministry without throwing overboard S. Luke's chronology altogether." [136] Yet Bishop Westcott declared concerning the record of Irenæus that, "however strange it may appear, some such view is not inconsistent with the only fixed historical dates which we have with regard to the Lord's life, the date of His birth, His baptism, and the banishment of Pilate." Thus turns the kaleidoscope of the tradition of which Harnack has latterly affirmed the "essential rightness, with a few important exceptions." It is hardly necessary to point out that the "oral" hypothesis, like the "documentary" and that of scattered logia, is more compatible with the negative than with the affirmative answer on the question of historicity. Contradictions and anomalies irreconcilable with the assumption of a real historical process present not difficulty but confirmation to the theory of a fictitious production, whether documentary or oral, to establish a transforming cult, supplying a quasi-historical basis where none such existed. Contradictory episodes and dicta stand for diverging sects and movements. Save for incidental concessions, all the traditionist schools alike ignore the grounds for inferring a long-continued modification of the Gospels at many hands; though, when Celsus late in the second century alleged the common practice of interpolation, Origen could only explain that it was the work of heretics. Such a procedure is for the rational critic only the natural continuance of the method of formation.