AND HISTORICAL RESEARCH UPON THE NEW TESTAMENT. ISS' 



is saturated with ideas and expressions found in the different 

 books of the Kew Testament from the Gospels to the 

 Kevelation. Hence we cannot but assent to Harnack's view 

 that the discovery of the Apology " is a find of the first 

 importance." 



It must be plain to all that what Aristides calls " The 

 Gospel," " the Holy Gospel Writing/' " their Writings," " their 

 Other Writings," contain what we read in our New Testament 

 to-day. 



As to the date of the presentation of the Apology to 

 Hadrian, there can be little doubt that it was, as Eusebius 

 states in his Chronicon, in the eighth year of this Emperor's 

 reign, i.e,, in 124 or 125 A.D. 



Aristides' frequent mention of what he calls the Holy 

 Gospel Writing," which the Emperor is again and again 

 entreated to read, is significant just here. As it is not 

 improbable that the Four Gospels had already been translated 

 into that Syriac version of which we have a copy in the Sinai 

 Syriac Palimpsest discovered by Mrs. Lewis, this " Holy Gospel 

 Writing," the " Books of the Holy Gospel," distributed by 

 Quadratus and other evangelists, were, in all probability, the 

 Four Gospels, quoted by Justin Martyr and interwoven to 

 make the Diatessaron by Tatian. 



The contention of the German rationalistic Tubingen school 

 that the Gospels were not all written before 170 a.d., has been 

 thoroughly refuted, not by arguments, but by archaBological 

 discoveries. Even Harnack, once a follower of Baur, has said 

 {Die Chronologie cler Altchristlichen Litteratur, Introd., p. 8 f.), 

 " The presuppositions of the Baur school can now be fairly 

 said to have been entirely discarded," and adds — 



" Yet there is left in Biblical criticism, as an inheritance from 

 that age, an vmdefined captiousness of a kind practised by a 

 trickster lawyer, a petty fault-finding method [pettifogging] which 

 still clings to all manner of minor details, and from these, argues 

 against the clear and decisive facts of the case." 



iv. The Gospel of Peter. 



In a grave at Akhniin in Egypt was found in 1886 a part 

 of the so-called Gospel according to Peter. 



In the fifth edition of a book which may be called the 

 American echo of Supernal wral Peligion, the theory is advanced 

 that this was an original Gospel, written before any of our 

 four, but suppressed by ecclesiastical authority, the canonical 



