Here we find recorded, in the same supercilious style in which the abstract of the Jewish history was given, these great facts:-the origin of a new sect called Christians in Judea, under one Christus as their leader, in the reign of Tiberius; his being put to death by Pontius Pilate; and the spread of his religion throughout Judea and all over the city of Rome to such an extent, that in Nero's reign (A.D. 65, little more than thirty years from the founder's death) a great multitude of his followers were put to death by that tyrant, in the hope of attaching the odium to them which properly belonged to him. We need make no account of what Tacitus says about their being such bad people. It was only his way of expressing himself in all that related to Judea and the Jews.

Other Roman testimonies of a similar kind may be found in Suetonius, and somewhat later in Pliny, which are quoted by Paley in his Evidences of Christianity (P. i. chap. ii.), and by most writers on that subject. But Tacitus has served our more comprehensive object of presenting the Gospel times to view, under Roman colouring indeed, but as connected with the great world's history.

I have had another purpose also in view in quoting this long passage from Tacitus, which will explain itself in the next chapter.

CHAPTER III.

THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES IN THEIR PLACE AMONG ANCIENT BOOKS.

It has been already stated, that the age to which the Christian religion and its records belong, was eminently a literary period. The true character of the Christian Scriptures, and the evidence of their being the genuine productions of the times to which they profess to belong, will be most clearly seen if we take a brief survey of the great world's literature produced during the same period. And, as it is right (and indeed necessary to every intelligent mind) to ask, how it is known that the books of the New Testament are really the works of those to whom they are ascribed, and how we are justified in believing that they have been preserved free from important or disqualifying corruptions through these nearly eighteen hundred years,―the answer to these important and natural questions is to be found, by asking them also in reference to all the other literature that is generally received as belonging to the same period. The same questions precisely have to be asked respecting all other ancient authors (and corresponding questions respecting some modern ones too); and the same processes precisely must be used in all such cases, in order to obtain correct

answers.

The half century before the birth of Christ, and the century after it, embrace the following well-known authors in various classes of literature, whose works we now possess:

Of Latin poets, we have Lucretius, Catullus, Propertius, Virgil, Horace, Phædrus, Ovid, Tibullus, Persius, Lucan, Silius Italicus, Martial.

Of Latin prose writers, we have Julius Cæsar, Hirtius,

Cicero, Cornelius Nepos, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Seneca, Pliny the naturalist, Pliny the younger, Quinctilian the rhetorician, and Cornelius Tacitus the historian.

Among Greek writers of this period are Diodorus Siculus (or the Sicilian), who wrote a sort of universal history, called the "Historical Library;" Strabo the geographer (a native of Pontus, in Asia Minor); Philo the Alexandrian Jew; and Josephus, descended on his mother's side from the Maccabean princes. The object. of the last two writers was, to make known and recommend the Jewish religion and its scriptures to general notice, writing in Greek for the use of the various nations of the Roman world. To this same class of Greek writings belong all the scriptures of the New Testament, written, like the others, in Greek, for diffusion through the Roman empire. The Greek classical writers, belonging to a much earlier period, are, of course, not included in our present inquiry; nor those of the later period (such as Plutarch, Arrian, Longinus and Marcus Antoninus), under whom pure Greek literature revived for a while on the decline of the Latin pen. The literature of the period with which we are concerned may be divided into two classes, namely, Roman literature written in Latin, and Cosmopolitan in Greek; the Greek partaking the national peculiarities of the various countries in which it was written, and generally differing considerably from the standard of the days of Pericles. The Greek of the New Testament is, of course, Hebrew or Jewish Greek; that is to say, it abounds in Hebrew idioms expressed in Greek words, which sound strange to a classical ear, but at once proclaim their nationality and their proximate date also.

In the above list of names are contained some of the best known of the classical authors, and many more names of less celebrated writers might be added. The

period includes the Augustan or golden age of Roman authorship. Of the writers here enumerated, we do not possess by any means all the works which some of them are known to have published; and many of what we have are imperfect through the ravages of time. Respecting some few of the works generally ascribed to this or that author, there are some doubts, intelligible to the learned, as to the real authorship. The text of some of them (that is, the words and expressions as they now stand in the extant copies of these writers) seems to be much more pure than the text of others. In some it is evidently very corrupt. The learned have often great difficulty in imagining what an author can have meant by certain words which are ascribed to him; or they are quite sure that he must have written something very different (which they could pretty confidently restore in some cases by obvious conjecture), and that the ignorance or carelessness of transcribers (like that of an incompetent printer unrevised by a careful corrector of the press) must have been the cause of bringing such obscurity or absurdity into the passage. Sometimes the different printed editions of the same author differ, having been taken in the earliest times of printing from different manuscript copies; and, in such cases, one copy may be often successfully corrected by the aid of another. Where manuscripts older than the days of printing still exist,—as in most if not all these cases they do, in more or less abundance,-a careful comparison (or collation, as it is called) of the different printed copies and manuscripts enables a critical scholar to reproduce a text (of Cicero, Horace, or any other writer) more true to the original than any of the individual editions or single manuscripts would be, if taken alone. It has therefore been the labour of many learned men,-especially, but not exclusively, in Germany (that nation of scholars),—

to produce critical editions of the text of all the great Greek and Latin classics; not only of those whom I have just mentioned as belonging nearly to the same period as the Christian Scriptures, but also of the older Greek writers of the golden period of Athenian literature,-Herodotus, Thucydides, and the great Dramatists, and of the most ancient and venerable Homer himself. And the same work precisely has been done, with yet more zealous care if possible, but purely by the same critical means, for the scriptures of the New Testament. Only, in the latter case, the critical materials have been far more abundant, in proportion to the immensely greater diffusion of the Christian Scriptures; and the result has been proportionately more satisfactory, in the production of a Text of the New Testament, which may be deemed practically identical with that originally written by the evangelists and apostles in their respective, pages. Such a text is Griesbach's; to which little or nothing of any importance to the meaning of any passage in the New Testament has been added by all the care of later editors, as Schultz and Lachmann.

The long quotation, given in the previous chapter, from Tacitus's account of the Jews (Ernesti and Oberlin's edition), will serve to illustrate, to any Latin scholar, the kind of difficulty often presented by the text of an old author, and some of the modes of surmounting it. In a certain sentence, the text of all the existing manuscripts has these words, Necare quenquam ex agnatis, nefas; but the sagacious editor (though he does not venture to alter the text on conjecture) is confident that Tacitus must have written gnatis (children), and not agnatis (relations). Then there is a very strange Latin

* Here there can be no practical doubt as to the true reading; and it may seem strange at first that critical editors should, in such a case, deny themselves the pleasure of rectifying a corrupted text. But, if