Paley, in quoting "Quadratus," does not tell us that the passage he
quotes is the only writing of Quadratus extant, and is only preserved by
Eusebius, who says that he takes it from an apology addressed by
Quadratus to the Emperor Adrian. Adrian reigned from A.D. 117-138, and
the apology must consequently have been presented between these dates.
If the apology be genuine, Quadratus makes the extraordinary assertion
that some of the people raised from the dead by Jesus were then living.
Jesus is only recorded to have raised three people--a girl, a young man,
and Lazarus; we will take their ages at ten, twenty, and thirty. "Some
of" those raised cannot be less than two out of the three; we will say
the two youngest. Then they were alive at the respectable ages of from
95-116, and from 105-126. The first may be taken as just within the
limits of possibility; the second as beyond them; but Quadratus talks in
a wholesale fashion, which quite destroys his credibility, and we can
lay but little stress on the carefulness or trustworthiness of a
historian who speaks in such reckless words. Added to this, we find no
trace of this passage until Eusebius writes it in the fourth century,
and it is well known that Eusebius was not too particular in his
quotations, thinking that his duty was only to make out the best case he
could. He frankly says: "We are totally unable to find even the bare
vestiges of those who may have travelled the way before us; unless,
perhaps, what is only presented in the slight intimations, which some in
different ways have transmitted to us in certain partial narratives of
the times in which they lived.... _Whatsoever_, therefore, _we deem
likely to be advantageous to_ the proposed subject we shall endeavour to
reduce to a compact body" ("Eccles. Hist.," bk. i., chap. i).
Accordingly, he produces a full Church History out of materials which
are only "slight intimations," and carefully draws out in detail a path
of which not "even the bare vestiges" are left. Little wonder that he
had to rely so much upon his imagination, when he had to build a church,