's Gospel. In
one instance, indeed, it gave the right reading of a text which has
perplexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to suspect that
that Gospel in its present form could not have existed before the
destruction of Jerusalem. The Zachariah the son of Barachiah said by St.
Matthew to have been slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown
to Old Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a
Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly in the manner
described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the same words are found with this
slight but important difference, that the Zachariah in question is there
called the son of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person
whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chronicles. The later
translator of St. Matthew had probably confused the names.

Of St. Mark's Gospel the history is even more profoundly obscure.
Papias, again the highest discoverable link of the Church tradition,
says that St. Mark accompanied St. Peter to Rome as his interpreter; and
that while there he wrote down what St. Peter told him, or what he could
remember St. Peter to have said. Clement of Alexandria enlarges the
story. According to Clement, when St. Peter was preaching at Rome, the
Christian congregation there requested St. Mark to write a Gospel for
them; St. Mark complied without acquainting St. Peter, and St. Peter
when informed of it was uncertain whether to give or withhold his
sanction till his mind was set at rest by a vision.

Irenaeus, on the other hand, says that St. Mark's Gospel was not written
till after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. St. Chrysostom says that
after it was written St. Mark went to Egypt and published it at
Alexandria; Epiphanius again, that the Egyptian expedition was
undertaken at the express direction of St. Peter himself.

Thus the Church tradition is inconsistent with itself, and in all
probability is nothing but a structure of air; it is bound up with the
presence of St. Peter at Rome; and the only ground for supposing that
St. Peter was ever at Rome at all is the passage at the close of St.
Peter's First Epistle, where it pleased the Fathers to assume that the
'Babylon' there spoken of must have been the city of the Caesars. This
passage alone, with the wild stories (now known to have originated in
the misreading of an inscription) of St. Peter's conflict with Simon
Magus in the presence of the emperor, form toge