NOTES ON THE GOSPEL OF LUKE. I. 1-4. (Luke's Introduction to his Gospel.) "Different interpreters have understood some of the expres sions in this passage in different ways; but with variations which do not affect the main purpose for which I have quoted it. I have adopted that sense of the words which seems to me most probable. In the last clause, my rendering is different from any that I recollect to have seen ('that you may know the truth concerning the relations which you have heard'). Most modern expositors agree in effect with the Common Version, in understanding St. Luke as meaning, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed'; that is, that thou mightest know that they are certain. But the words of Luke are, ἵνα ἐπιγνῷς περὶ ὧν κατηχήθης λόγων τὴν ἀσφάλειαν, and I conceive λόγων in the genitive to depend upon περί and not upon ἀσφάλειαν. The obvious meaning of St. Luke, if his words are to be thus constructed, is, that he wrote in order that Theophilus might know τὴν ἀσφάλειαν, * what was to be relied upon,' that is, 'the truth,' in relation to the accounts he had heard. This meaning seems best to suit the context. A proper cause is assigned for the composition of an accurate history by one who had diligently inquired into the facts; while, if the object of Luke had only been to assure Theophilus of the certainty of what he had already heard, it may seem that his simple affirmation would have been most to the purpose. To an unbeliever or a skeptic of those times, the mere history of Luke would have afforded no new evidence. A believer, as there is no reasonable doubt that Theophilus was, had been already convinced of the truth of Christianity; and if the term λóyou is, as I conceive, to be understood in the sense of narratives' respecting the life of Christ, St. Luke surely did not mean to vouch for the truth of all that Theophilus might have heard. Many incorrect and false accounts respecting Christ must have been in circulation in the times of the Apostles; accounts which first were contradicted by their oral narratives, and afterwards by the written narratives of the Evangelists; and it is, I think, a want of attention to this fact which has prevented the words of Luke from being correctly understood." Genuineness of the Gospels, Vol. I. pp. clxxi, clxxii, note. See also the same work, Vol. I. pp. cli, clii. I. 5-II. 52. (Narrative of the birth of John the Baptist, and of the nativity and early life of Jesus.) "I agree with many critics in supposing that the account of the nativity given by Luke existed in a written form in Hebrew, previously to the composition of his Gospel, in which he inserted a translation of it, perhaps his own, perhaps one already made. The language differs from that of the rest of his Gospel, as being more conformed to the Hebrew idiom ; and the cast of the narrative has something of a poetical, and |