e seen and heard
declare we unto you." Such is their language. We must either take it as
truth, or reject it as falsehood. It is utter nonsense to talk of the
intense subjectivity of the Jewish mind, and the belief of the apostles
that the Messiah would do wonders when he came, and the powerful
impressions produced by the teaching of Jesus on their minds. We are not
talking about impressions on their minds, but about impressions produced
on their eyes, and ears, and hands. Did these men tell the truth when
they told the world that they did eat and drink with Jesus after he rose
from the dead, or did they lie? That is the question.

3. It is a hard matter to lie well. A liar has need of a good memory,
else he will contradict himself before he writes far. And he needs to be
very well posted up in the matters of names, dates, places, manners and
customs, else he will contradict some well-known facts, and so expose
his forgery to the world. Therefore writers of forgeries avoid all such
things as much as possible, and as surely as they venture on
specifications of that sort they are detected. A man who is conscious of
writing a book of falsehoods does not begin on this wise: "Now in the
fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being
Governor of Judea, and Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother
Philip Tetrarch of Iturea and of the regions of Trachonitis, and
Lysanias Tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiphas being high priests, the
Word of God came unto John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness."
Here in one sentence are twenty historical, geographical, political, and
genealogical references, every one of which we can confirm by references
to secular historians. The enemies of the Lord have utterly failed in
their attempts to disprove one out of the hundreds of such statements in
the New Testament. The only instance of any _public political event_
recorded in the gospel, said not to be confirmed by the fragments of
secular history we possess, is Luke's account of a census of the Roman
Empire, ordered by Augustus Caesar. Were it so that Luke stood alone in
his mention of this, surely his credit as a historian would be as good
for this fact, as the credit of Tacitus, when he states matters of which
Suetonius makes no mention, or of Pliny, when he relates things not
recorded by Tacitus. But we can account for the want of corroborative
history in this instance, when we know that all the history of