pare Luke iii. 26 with the first verse of the ensuing chapter, to at once detect that the genealogy has been awkwardly inserted between consecutive verses, and therefore absent from the original manuscript-a discovery which acquits the author of the exordium of claiming the faith of his friend for a mythical pedigree of the Messiah. Is it not, also, obvious that the genealogy was originally inserted by men believing that Jesus was the veritable son of Joseph, and afterwards interpolated with the words as was supposed,' when the fiction of a supernatural birth had corrupted the primitive faith of Galilee?

The Gospel of Mark is so comparatively free from the supernatural, that, if no other Evangelist had reached posterity, Unitarianism would have been the inevitable creed of the Reformation. For even the title, 'Son of God,' not necessarily implying divinity, assigned to Jesus in the opening verse, is from the pen of an interpolator. And when the last twelve spurious verses of the closing chapter are struck out,1 Mark, said to have been the companion of Peter, knew nothing more of the Resurrection than that three women had seen a young man in a white robe, who told them that Jesus was risen from the dead.2

The earliest version of the Gospel of Matthew was written in Aramaic, the vernacular language of Judea. Papias, writing in the second century, says: Matthew wrote the discourses (rà λóyıa) in the Hebrew dialect; and everyone interpreted them to the best of his ability.' 3 This priceless manuscript has perished.

1 Mark xvi. 9-20.

2 Mark xvi. 1–8.

3 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iii. 39.

Egyptian papyri, written two thousand years before the Christian era, have reached us through a natural process of preservation; but all the miraculous powers of Christianity could not save for us an apostolic transcript of the Sermon on the Mount. Orthodoxy suggests that apostolic autograms were withdrawn by divine wisdom to prevent their becoming objects of worship; but surely medieval Christians might as well have adored sacred books as holy relics, and we could then have reverted, at the Reformation, to the original teaching of the school of Galilee.

What has become of primitive Christian manuscripts? The oldest only dates from the fourth century. Were they destroyed to conceal the interpolations of later editions, or hidden away in secret holes and corners, whence some fortunate discoverer may yet bring them forth, to startle the world with the secret history of the evolution of ecclesiastical Christianity?

As Tischendorf found the Sinaitic MS., dating from about A.D. 350, in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, and Bruce brought home the long-lost Book of Enoch from Abyssinia, may we not yet hope to see a MS. Gospel of the second century-a treasure for which united Christendom might well pay millions, if willing to imperil the prescriptive rights of Christian dogmas and mysteries, through the publication of a primitive Evangelist?

What important results may be attained in the detection of ecclesiastical interpolations through the discovery of ancient MSS. is disclosed in the history of the epistles of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, supposed to

have suffered martyrdom as early as A.D. 107 or 116. Of his fifteen extant epistles, eight have been long since condemned as forgeries. The remaining seven reach us in two Greek versions, the second of which is an obviously interpolated version of the first.

Learned theologians have discussed for centuries the rival claims of these two versions; but it remained for Archdeacon Tattam to discover, in 1838-40, in the monastery of St. Mary Deipara, in the Egyptian desert of Nitria, several ancient Syriac MSS., among which were three brief epistles of Ignatius, so much more conformable in style and substance to the apostolic age as to convict the unknown authors of the two Greek versions of literary forgery.

Let us confront primitive simplicity with ecclesiastical innovations. In the Syriac form of the Epistle to the Ephesians we read: Seeing that we have received your abundance in the name of God by Onesimus, who is your bishop in love unutterable, whom I pray that ye love in Jesus Christ our Lord, and that all of you imitate his example, for blessed is he who has given you such a bishop, even as ye deserve.'

In the shorter Greek version of the same epistle we read: Now, the more anyone sees the bishop showing forbearance, the more ought we to reverence him. For we ought to receive everyone whom the master of the house sends to be over his household as we would receive him that sent him. It is manifest, therefore, that we should look upon the bishop even as we would on the Lord Himself.' This is but one of many kindred passages in the Greek versions sustaining episcopal usurpation; and if the epistles of Ignatius could be thus manipu

lated for ecclesiastical purposes, what limit can we place to the corruption of evangelical literature, during the long interval which elapsed between the first written Gospel and the date of the earliest manuscript transmitted to posterity?

Modern theologians industriously collate extant MSS. of the New Testament, with the design of attaining a reliable text; but, as none of these ancient documents are of an earlier date than the fourth century, we are absolutely ignorant of the contents of earlier versions, possibly committed to the flames as heretical when Christianity had corrupted the primitive faith of Galilee.

In the Greek original of our English version of Matthew we therefore see a composite work, combining mythical legends and ecclesiastical interpolations with simple records of the life and teaching of Jesus, suggestive of the welcome presence of a Galilean Apostle, speaking as a faithful witness of the daily life of his great Master. As the testimony of Papias in favour of an Aramaic record of the discourses of Jesus inspires us, therefore, with hope that the compilers of the Greek recension reproduced an approximate version of his oral teaching from an apostolic source, we adopt the first Gospel as the most reliable record of the sayings of Jesus, which we shall endeavour to glean from the fabulous and ecclesiastical interpolations now confusing modern perception of the true Son of Man.

The first two chapters of Matthew identify Christianity with the superstition which depicts the Deity manipulating events that prophecy may be fulfilled; and which, accordingly, invites human co-operation with Providence in the accomplishment of Divine Oracles. We have

already learned the disastrous results of this pernicious superstition from the annals of Israel and Judah, and now await its further development in the story of Jesus of Nazareth.

Hebrew scribes affirmed that prophecy demanded a Messiah of the lineage of David. The compilers of Matthew, accordingly, provided Jesus with a genealogy irreconcilable with, and therefore as apocryphal as, that of Luke. But, if even confirmed by uniformity, it is nullified by Jesus' repudiation of the theory of Messianic descent from David, and cannot therefore have been inserted in the Gospel by an Apostle who records the disavowal of his Master.1 As Jesus was obviously ignorant of the fanciful genealogies of future Evangelists, should not modern Christians cease to identify him with fictions long since exposed through attested facts? The exhumed skulls of prehistoric men, who lived and died on earth in ages remote from Mosaic chronology, have finally disposed of legendary patriarchs of nearly a thousand years, and with them necessarily vanish constructive pedigrees, as mythical as the drama of Eden.

In Matthew the prophetic craze even assumes that unnatural events, incapable of attestation, have actually occurred because supposed to have been predicted by the prophets. Thus sprung into existence the legend of the supernatural birth of Jesus, obviously borrowed from the heathen custom of attributing a divine origin to illustrious men, but sustained by the credulous compilers of Matthew through a misinterpreted passage of Isaiah. All this was done,' they affirm, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the pro

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1 Matt. xxii. 41-46.