St. Ignatius, in his Epistle to the Smyrnians,(168) has inserted in it a passage relative to the appearance of our Lord to his apostles after his resurrection, not found in the Canonical Gospels, and we should not know whence he had drawn it, had not St. Jerome noticed the fact and recorded it.(169) St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of the Gospel of the Hebrews in the same terms as he speaks of the writings of St. Paul and the books of the Old Testament.(170) Origen, who makes some quotations from this Gospel, does not, it is true, range it with the Canonical Gospels, but he speaks of it with great respect, as one highly esteemed by many Christians of his time.(171) In the fourth century, no agreement had been come to as to the value of this Gospel. Eusebius tells us that by some it was reckoned among the Antilegomena, that is, among those books which floated between the Canonical and the Apocryphal Gospels.(172) The Gospel of St. Matthew and the Gospel of the Hebrews were not identical. It is impossible to doubt this when we examine the passages of the latter quoted by ecclesiastical writers, the majority of which are not to be found in the former, and the rest differ from the Canonical Gospel, either in details or in the construction of the passages which correspond. Did the difference extend further? This is a question it is impossible to answer positively in one way or the other, since we only know those passages of the Gospel of the Nazarenes which have been quoted by the early Fathers.(173) But it is probable that the two Gospels did not differ from each other except in these passages; for if the divergence was greater, one cannot understand how St. Jerome, who had both under his eyes, could have supposed one to have been the Hebrew original of the other. And if both resembled each other closely, it is easy to suppose that the ecclesiastical writers who quoted from the Nazarene Gospel, quoted only those passages which were peculiar to it. Let us now examine the principal fragments of this Gospel that have been preserved. There are some twenty in all, and of these only two are in opposition to the general tone of the first Canonical Gospel. With one of these I shall begin the series of extracts. “_And straitway_,” said Jesus, “_the Holy Spirit [my mother] took me, and bore me away to the great mountain called Thabor_.”(174)