the Evangelist, only writers of Christian evidences can hope to
understand.

A. _That forgeries, bearing the names of Christ, of the apostles, and of
the early Fathers, were very common in the primitive Church_.

"The opinions, or rather the conjectures, of the learned concerning the
time when the books of the New Testament were collected into one volume,
as also about the authors of that collection, are extremely different.
This important question is attended with great and almost insuperable
difficulties to us in these latter times" (Mosheim's "Eccles. Hist.," p.
31). These difficulties arise, to a great extent, from the large number
of forgeries, purporting to be writings of Christ, of the apostles, and
of the apostolic Fathers, current in the early Church. "For, not long
after Christ's ascension into heaven, several histories of his life and
doctrines, full of pious frauds and fabulous wonders, were composed by
persons whose intentions, perhaps, were not bad, but whose writings
discovered the greatest superstition and ignorance. Nor was this all;
productions appeared which were imposed upon the world by fraudulent
men, as the writings of the holy apostles" (Ibid, p. 31). "Another
erroneous practice was adopted by them, which, though it was not so
universal as the other, was yet extremely pernicious, and proved a
source of numberless evils to the Christian Church. The Platonists and
Pythagoreans held it as a maxim, that it was not only lawful, but even
praiseworthy, to deceive, and even to use the expedient of a lie, in
order to advance the cause of truth and piety. The Jews, who lived in
Egypt, had learned and received this maxim from them, before the coming
of Christ, as appears incontestably from a multitude of ancient records;
and the Christians were infected from both these sources with the same
pernicious error, as appears from the number of books attributed falsely