hinder absolute accuracy from being
maintained. Much time must necessarily have elapsed, before such
familiarity with the genuine accounts of our Lord's sayings and doings
grew up, as would prevent mistakes being made and disseminated in
telling or in writing.

The Gospels were certainly not written till some thirty years after the
Ascension. More careful examination seems to place them later rather
than earlier. For myself, I should suggest that the three first were not
published long before the year 70 A.D. at the earliest; and that St.
Matthew's Gospel was written at Pella during the siege of Jerusalem
amidst Greek surroundings, and in face of the necessity caused by new
conditions of life that Greek should become the ecclesiastical language.
The Gospels would thus be the authorized versions in their entirety of
the stories constituting the Life of our Lord; and corruption must have
come into existence, before the antidote was found in complete documents
accepted and commissioned by the authorities in the Church.

I must again remark with much emphasis that the foregoing suggestions
are offered to account for what may now be regarded as a fact, viz., the
connexion between the Western Text, as it is called, and Syriac remains
in regard to corruption in the text of the Gospels and of the Acts of
the Apostles. If that corruption arose at the very first spread of
Christianity, before the record of our Lord's Life had assumed permanent
shape in the Four Gospels, all is easy. Such corruption, inasmuch as it
beset the oral and written stories which were afterwards incorporated in
the Gospels, would creep into the authorized narrations, and would
vitiate them till it was ultimately cast out towards the end of the
fourth and in the succeeding centuries. Starting from the very
beginning, and gaining additions in the several ways described in this
volume by Dean Burgon, it would possess such vigour as to impress itself
on Low-Latin manuscripts and even on parts of the better Latin ones,
perhaps on Tatian's Diatessaron, on the Curetonian and Lewis manuscripts
of the fifth century, on the Codex Bezae of the sixth; also on the
Vatican and the Sinaitic of the fourth, on the Dublin Palimpsest of St.
Matthew of the sixth, on the Codex Regius or L of the eighth, on the St.
Gall MS. of the ninth in St. Mark, on the Codex Zacynthius of the eighth
in St. Luke, and a few others. We on our side admit that the corruption
is old even thoug