the intellects of those great men who converted the world
to Christianity were satisfied with arguments so imaginative as these;
they must have had other closer and more accurate grounds for their
decision; but the mere employment of such figures as evidence in any
sense, shows the enormous difference between their modes of reasoning
and ours, and illustrates the difficulty of deciding at our present
distance from them how far their conclusions were satisfactory.

Of the Gospels separately the history is immediately lost in legend.

The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the well-known words
of Papias, a writer who in early life might have seen St. John. The
works of Papias are lost--a misfortune the more to be regretted because
Eusebius speaks of him as a man of very limited understanding, [Greek:
panu smikros ton noun]. Understanding and folly are words of
undetermined meaning; and when language like that of Irenaeus could seem
profound it is quite possible that Papias might have possessed
commonplace faculties which would have been supremely useful to us. A
surviving fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the
discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one interpreted them as
he could. Pantaenus, said by Eusebius to have been another contemporary
of the apostles, was reported to have gone to India, to have found there
a congregation of Christians which had been established by St.
Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this Hebrew Gospel.
Origen repeats the story, which in his time had become the universal
Catholic tradition, that St. Matthew's was the first Gospel, that it was
written in Hebrew, and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish
converts. Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was
rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the Church had to say;
and what had become of that Hebrew original no one could tell.

That there existed _a_ Hebrew Gospel in very early times is well
authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or
Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome
thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's
translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that
it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not
have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have
been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew