on to
Christianity made extensive researches under various teachers,
as he himself tells us, in Greece, in Italy, in Palestine, and
other parts of the East. At last he met with Pantaenus in Egypt,
whom he preferred to all his other guides, and in whose
instructions he rested. The testimony of Clement to the
universal and undisputed reception by the churches of the four
canonical gospels as the writings of apostles or apostolic men,
agrees with that of Tertullian. And it has the more weight, not
only on account of his wide investigations, but because, also,
it virtually contains the testimony of his several teachers,
some of whom must have known, if not the apostles themselves,
those who had listened to their teachings.

In connection with the testimony of the above-named writers, we
may consider that of the _churches of Lyons and Vienne_ in Gaul,
in a letter addressed by them to "the churches of Asia and
Phrygia," which Eusebius has preserved for us, (Hist. Eccl., 5.
1,) and which describes a severe persecution through which they
passed in the reign of Antoninus Verus, about A.D. 177. In this
they say: "So was fulfilled that which was spoken by our Lord,
'The time shall come in which whosoever killeth you shall think
that he doeth God service.'" In speaking again of a certain
youthful martyr, they first compare him to Zacharias, the father
of John the Baptist, affirming, in the very words of Luke, that
he "had walked in all the commandments and ordinances of the
Lord blameless," (Luke 1:6;) and then go on to describe him as
"having the Comforter in himself, the Spirit, more abundantly
than Zacharias," where they apply to the Holy Spirit a term
peculiar to the apostle John. Here, then, we have indubitable
testimony to the fact that the gospel of John, as well as of
Luke, was known to the churches of Gaul in the west and Asia
Minor in the east in the days of Pothinus, bishop of these
churches, who suffered martyrdom in this persecution. But
Pothinus was ninety years old, so that his knowledge of these
gospels must have reached back to the first quarter of the
second century, when many who had known the apostles were yet
living.

5. These testimonies, let it be carefully remembered, apply not to one
part of Christendom alone, but to all its different and distant
divisions; and