ox THE HISTORICAL TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 203 



alike destructive and conservative criticism, was based on this 

 false premise, and the consequences still remain to some extent 

 in the criticism of all classes and schools. Ideas which, on 

 being strictly tested, are found to be mere inferences from that 

 assumption, are still prevalent and almost unquestioned. For 

 example, how few would venture to maintain that the Synoptic 

 Gospels are, or might be, based on documents, some written 

 while Christ was still living, some within a few hours or days of 

 his death ? i.e., there were such documents in existence, accessible 

 to persons who desired to attain " to know the certainty of those 

 things." I feel no doubt that this was the case, and in a book 

 published more than two years ago I used the words " so far as 

 antecedent probability goes, founded on the general character 

 of preceding and contemporary society, the first Christian 

 account of the circumstances connected with the death of Jesus 

 must be presumed to have been written in the year when Jesus 

 died." I fear that such a statement would find small support 

 in general opinion, and yet it is simply the statement of the 

 known facts, and, unless the followers of Christ had already cut 

 themselves off from the habits and customs of contemporary 

 society, it must be true. In the last few days I have printed 

 an argument that about a sixth part of the Gospels of Matthew 

 and Luke, which is common to them but is not found in the 

 Gospel of Mark, is taken from a document written before the 

 death of Christ. Such results as these, if they can be established, 

 carry us far forward. A history which ultimately rests partly 

 on contemporary written evidence, partly on the evidence of 

 eye-witnesses and actors in the events, stands on the highest 

 plane of historic certainty. 



Can these results, then, be established, and how shall we set 

 about the work of establishing them ? They can be established 

 only in the same way in which the early use of writing was 

 made known to us. 



That writing was used familiarly and commonly some thou- 

 sands of years before Christ, that the whole practice of 

 government and law at an early time w^as based on the rule that 

 everything must be written down at the moment, e.g., that all 

 sales and conveyance of property must be registered in writing, 

 — all this has been revealed in recent years, not on literary 

 evidence, but by finding the actual documents. We know that 

 people wrote at a very early time, because we have the things 

 which they wrote, on stone, on bronze, on pottery, partly incised, 

 partly written in ink. The use of ink is extremely important, 

 because ink was not invented for use on materials of that kind, 



