should come "the blood of Zecharias the son of Barachias
whom ye slew between the Temple and the altar." Now, I believe
that it is recorded in Josephus' history, that the Jews slew this
Zecharias in the time of the Jewish war, about forty years after
Jesus is represented as saying, that they had killed him already.
Of course Jesus never could have said this, nor would a Jew
acquainted with the times, as Matthew must have been, have
been guilty of such an anachronism. The writer of that Gospel
must therefore, have been a Gentile, and not Matthew. The same
mistake is made by Luke xi. 51.

On turning his attention to the external evidence in favour of the
authenticity of the Gospels, the difficulties and objections
accumulate. He will find, that they are not mentioned by any writer
earlier than the latter half of the second century, after the birth of
Jesus. The first writers who name the four Gospels, were
Irenaeus, and Tertullian.[fn9] The competency of the testimony of
these Fathers of the church, as to the genuineness of these
books, is invalidated by the fact, (See Middleton's Free Enquiry)
that they admitted the principle of the lawfulness of pious frauds,
and from their having acted upon this principle, in having asserted
in their writings, as from their personal knowledge, things which
were certainly false; (See the work above referred to) while their
capability to distinguish the genuine writings of the Apostles, from
the numerous forgeries in their names that appeared about the
same time that the four Gospels begin to be mentioned, is
rendered suspicious by the fact, that they also give their sanction
as Divine Scriptures, to books notoriously apocryphal; for instance
the book of Enoch and the Sybilline Oracles.[fn11] The testimony
of the Fathers who succeeded them is liable to the same
objections, with this aggravation that its value diminishes more
and more, as the distance of the ages in which they flourished
increases, from that of Jesus Christ.

Thirdly, He will find that these Gospels were never received by the
Mother Church of Jerusalem and Judea, founded by the Apostles.
The Jewish Christians, the countrymen of Jesus, who one would
think had the best means of knowing the real history, and real
doctrines of Jesus and his Apostles, uniformly rejected not only
these Gospels, but all the other books of the New
Testament.[fn12] They were also rejected, by several sects of
Christians who flourished in the e