But soon the need would arise. One after another the Apostles and their companions would pass away, and Christ’s immediate “coming” would now be less and less sanguinely anticipated. The great mass of the earliest Christians were either Jews or proselytes to the Jewish religion; but now the Gentiles, who had come to Christ without first passing through the Law of Moses, would become the majority in the Church; and for them the Old Testament would not have the same pre-eminent title as “Writing” or “Scripture.” For these Gentiles too the old Rabbinical prejudice against committing the teaching of the Church to writing would have no weight. Now therefore in several churches simultaneous efforts would be made to write down the traditions current amongst the brethren; and hence we find St. Luke prefacing his own Gospel with the remark that he was induced to attempt this task because “many” others had attempted it. St. Luke could hardly have written thus if one authentic and apostolic document already occupied the ground and stood pre-eminent in the Church as the written record of Christ’s life by an eye-witness. That there was no such document, known to St. Luke, we may also infer from his acknowledgment of his obligations to those who were “eye-witnesses and ministers of the word.” It says that he shapes his narrative “as they handed down the tradition” for that is the meaning of his word not “as they _wrote_ the tradition.” You must have noticed that the extant titles of the Gospels declare them to have been written not “by,” but “according to” their several authors. The explanation (which has not been successfully impugned) is that, even in the later times in which their titles were given, the old belief continued, that the men who compiled them did no more than commit to writing their version of a tradition already current. They did not compose, they reported, the tradition; the Gospel was supposed to be the same in all Churches, but here “according to” one version or writer, there “according to” another. The Apostles, being with one or two exceptions mere fishermen and unlearned men, ignorant of letters, could not very well be supposed to be authors of written compositions; but St. Matthew, being a tax-gatherer, would necessarily be an expert writer, and therefore one of the earliest traditions committed to writing would be naturally attributed to his penmanship. But the evidence for St. Matthew’s authorship appears, when tested, to be extremely slight. It was the universal belief of the early Church that the Gospel according to St. Matthew was originally written in Hebrew, and Jerome has quoted, as coming from the Hebrew original, a passage not found in our Greek Gospel of St. Matthew. Even when this Gospel is quoted by the earliest writers, it is frequently quoted inexactly, and never connected by them with the name of St. Matthew as the author. We ought not to infer from these