The Lost Gospel and Its Contents Part 24

"And have reached such a height of madness as to forget that we are members one of another" (ch. xlvi.). Rom. xii. 5.

"Love beareth all things ... is long suffering in all things" (ch.

xlix.). 1 Cor. xiii. 4.

[196:1] One is in amazement when one reads, in the work of a man who professes to have such a love of truth, the words, "The fact is, that we have absolutely no contemporaneous history at all as to what the first promulgators of Christianity actually a.s.serted" (vol. i. p. 193). This writer, as far as I remember, gives us no reason to believe that he doubts the authenticity of St. Paul's earlier Epistles. Again, what is "contemporary history?" Surely, if a man was now to write the history of the Crimean war in 1854-5, it would be a contemporary history.

[199:1] Celsus, for instance, who had been some time dead when Origen refuted him, knew no other account than the one which he calumniated; Josephus the Jew knew no other, Trypho suggests no counter story. The wild exaggerations of the heretics refuted by Irenaeus all presupposed the one narrative, and can have had no other basis.