to pass. I do admit that it would have been the part of an impostor, who
wished his readers to believe that this book was written before the
event, when in truth it was written after it, to have suppressed any
such intimation carefully. But this was not the character of the authors
of the Gospel. Cunning was no quality of theirs. Of all writers in the
world, they thought the least of providing against objections. Moreover,
there is no clause in any one of them that makes a profession of their
having written prior to the Jewish wars, which a fraudulent purpose
would have led them to pretend. They have done neither one thing nor the
other; they have neither inserted any words which might signify to the
reader that their accounts were written before the destruction of
Jerusalem, which a sophist would have done; nor have they dropped a hint
of the completion of the prophecies recorded by them, which an
undesigning writer, writing after the event, could hardly, on some or
other of the many occasions that presented themselves, have missed of
doing.

4. The admonitions* which Christ is represented to have given to his
followers to save themselves by flight are not easily accounted for on
the supposition of the prophecy being fabricated after the event. Either
the Christians, when the siege approached, did make their escape from
Jerusalem, or they did not: if they did, they must have had the prophecy
amongst them: if they did not know of any such prediction at the time of
the siege, if they did not take notice of any such warning, it was an
improbable fiction, in a writer publishing his work near to that time
(which, on any, even the lowest and most disadvantageous supposition,
was the case with the gospels now in our hands), and addressing his work
to Jews and to Jewish converts (which Matthew certainly did), to state
that the followers of Christ had received admonition of which they made
no use when the occasion arrived, and of which experience then recent
proved that those who were most concerned to know and regard them were
ignorant or negligent. Even if the prophecies came to the hands of the
evangelists through no better vehicle than tradition, it must have been
by a tradition which subsisted prior to the event. And to suppose that
without any authority whatever, without so much as even any tradition to
guide them, they had forged these passages, is to impute to them a
degree of fraud and imposture from every appearance