s;
and it is wholly impossible now really to prove who wrote those
documents, or precisely when and how they originated: besides
that, the obvious discrepancies in the accounts, and the utterly
uncritical credulity and unscientific modes of investigation which
satisfied the writers, destroy their value as witnesses in any
severe court of reason." And in reply, although we may claim that
there is sufficient evidence to satisfy an humble Christian,
previously inclined to such a faith, that the New Testament
documents were written by the persons whose names they bear, and
that their accounts are true, yet we cannot pretend that there is
sufficient evidence effectually to convince a critical inquirer
that there is no possibility of ungenuineness and unauthenticity.
In the second place, such a person will say, "Many fabulous
miracles have been eagerly credited by contemporaries of their
professed authors, and handed down to the credulity of after
times; many actual events, honestly, interpreted as miracles,
without fraud in any party concerned, have been so accepted and
testified to.

Roman Catholic Christendom claims to this day the performance of
miracles within the Church; while all Protestant Christendom
scouts them as ridiculous tales: and this may be one of them. How
can we demonstrate that it does not fall within the same class on
the laws of evidence?" And although our own moral beliefs and
sympathies may force upon us the most profound conviction to the
contrary, it is plainly out of our power to disprove the
possibility of this hypothesis being true. In the third place, he
will say, "Of all who testify to the resurrection, there is
nothing in the record admitting its entire reliableness as an
ingenuous statement of the facts as apprehended by the authors to
show that any one of them knew that Jesus was actually dead, or
that any one of them made any real search into that point. He may
have revived from a long insensibility, wandered forth in his
grave clothes, mingled afterwards with his disciples, and at last
have died from his wounds and exhaustion, in solitude, as he was
used to spend seasons in lonely prayer by night. Then, with
perfectly good faith, his disciples, involving no collusion or
deceit anywhere, may have put a miraculous interpretation upon it
all, such additional particulars as his visible ascension into the
sky being a later mythical accretion." This view may well seem
offensive, even shocking