Christian worship, and he says
that "they were compiled by Christ's apostles and those who companied
with them." This exactly agrees with the fact that the first and the
fourth of our Gospels are attributed by the tradition of the Church to
apostles, while the second and the third are attributed to companions
of the apostles. The quotations which Justin makes show that these
Memoirs were our four Gospels. It has been thought that Justin perhaps
used some apocryphal Gospel in addition to our Gospels, but there is no
sufficient proof of this. We may explain that he uses the term
"Memoirs" in order to make himself intelligible to non-Christian
readers who would not understand the word "Gospel."

The _Shepherd_ of Hermas, which was written at Rome, probably about
A.D. 140, but perhaps earlier, uses expressions which imply an
acquaintance with all our Gospels, though none of them are directly
quoted. Moreover, the _Shepherd_, in depicting the Christian Church as
seated on a bench with four feet, probably refers to the four Gospels.
This would be in agreement with the allegorical style of the book, and
it gains support from the language of Origen and Irenaeus.

The testimony rendered to the authenticity of the Gospels by the
heretics who flourished between A.D. 130 and 170 is of importance. At
the beginning of this period, Basilides, the {13} great Gnostic of
Alexandria, who tried to replace Christianity by a semi-Christian
Pantheism, appears to have used Matt., Luke, and John. The fact that
they contain nothing which really supports his peculiar tenets, forms
an argument which shows that the genuineness of these documents was
then too well established for it to be worth his while to dispute it.
Marcion, whose teaching was half Gnostic and half Catholic, endeavoured
to revive what he imagined to be the Christianity of St. Paul, whom he
regarded as the only true apostle. He believed that Judaism was the
work of an inferior god, and he therefore rejected the whole of the Old
Testament, and retained only the Gospel written by St. Luke, the friend
of St. Paul, and ten of St. Paul's Epistles. Modern writers have
sometimes urged that Marcion's list of New Testament books proves that
all other parts of the New Testament were regarded as doubtful about
A.D. 140. But it is quite evident that Marcion, unlike those Gnostics
who adapted uncongenial books to their own systems by means of
allegorical explanations, cut out the b