Eusebius, in his "Ecclesiastical History," admits the existence of many spurious gospels and epistles, and some writings put forward by him as genuine, such as the correspondence between Jesus and Agbaras, have since been rejected as fictitious. It is not an unfair presumption from this that many of the most early Christians considered the then existing testimonies insufficient to prove the history of Jesus, and good reason is certainly afforded for carefully examining the whole of the evidences they have bequeathed us. On p. 48, Dr. Teschendorf quotes Irenæus, whose writings-belong to the extreme end of the second century, as though that Bishop must be taken as vouching the four Gospels as we now have them. Yet, if the testimony of Irenaeus be-reliable ("Against Heresies," Book III., cap. i.) the Gospel attributed to Matthew was believed to have been composed in Hebrew, and Irenæus says that as the Jews desired a Messiah of the royal line of David, Matthew having the same desire to a yet greater degree, strove to give them full satisfaction. This may account for some of the genealogical curiosities to which we have drawn attention, but hardly renders Matthew's Gospel more reliable; and how can the suggestion that Matthew wrote in Hebrew prove that Matthew penned the first Gospel, which has only existed in Greek? Irenæus, too, flatly contradicts the Gospels by declaring that the ministry of Jesus extended over ten years and that Jesus lived to be fifty years of age ("Against Heresies," Book II., cap. 22).