. It was rejected also by the Encratites, and the Severians,
and I believe by the Marcionites. The Jewish Christians were the
oldest Christian Church, and they pronounced that the Book of Acts in
our Canon was written by a partizan of Paul's; and it will be
recollected that our Book of Acts is in fact, principally taken up in
recording the travels and preaching of Paul, and contains little
comparatively of the other Apostles. The Jewish Christians had a Book
of Acts different from ours. And besides the fact, that the oldest
Christian church, the mother church of Judea, with whom we should
expect to find the truth if any where, rejected the Acts, Chrysostom
Bishop of Constantinople, at the end of the 4th century, in a homily
upon this Book says, that "not only the author and collector of the
Book, but the Book itself was unknown to many." This mother church had
not only a book of Acts of the apostles different from ours, but also a
gospel of their own, called the gospel of the twelve apostles, which is
supposed by the learned in important particulars to differ from ours.
According to Augustine however, this gospel was publickly read in the
churches as authentick for 300 years. This gospel in the opinion of
Grabe, Mills, and other learned men, was written before the gospels now
received as canonical. See Toland's Nazarenus.

6. The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, those to the Ephesians, and
Colossians, are nearly proved to be apocryphal by Evanson, and about
the rest there are some suspicious circumstances. You refer the reader
of your Sermons in that note to Paley's Evidences, 9th chapter, for
evidence for the authenticity of the rest of the gospels; but if the
reader goes there he will find, that all the testimony Paley quotes for
the first 200 years after Christ except that of Papias, Irenaeus, and
Tertullian, (the value of whose testimony to the authenticity of the
gospels, has been considered in the 16th ch. of my work; and which may
further appear from these circumstances, that Irenaeus considered the
Book of Hermas an inspired Scripture as much as he did the four
gospels, and that Tertullian contended stoutly for the inspiration of
the ridiculous book of Enoch, one of the most stupid forgeries that
ever was seen,) the quotations and supposed allusions in the earlier
fathers are uncertain, since it is acknowledged by Dodwell, and also by
others, that it cannot be shown with any certainty, whether these
quotations a