xix. 27-30); and, further, in Mark ix. 28-31, we are told that any one who forsakes anything for Jesus shall receive “an hundredfold now in this time," as well as eternal life in the world to come.  Surely, then, there was “prospect” enough of “honour and advantage”?  These remarks apply quite as strongly to Mark and Luke, neither of whom are pretended to be eye-witnesses.  Of Mark we know nothing, except that it is said that there was a man named John, whose surname was Mark (Acts xii. 12 and 25), who ran away from his work (Acts xv. 38); and a man named Marcus, nephew of Barnabas (Col. iv. 10), who may, or may not, be the same, but is probably somebody else, as he is with Paul; and one of the same name is spoken of (2 Tim. ii.) as “profitable for the ministry,” which John Mark was not, and who (Philemon 24) was a “fellow-labourer” with Paul in Rome, while John Mark was rejected in this capacity by Paul at Antioch.  Why Mark, or John Mark, should write a Gospel, he not having been an eye-witness, or why Mark, or John Mark, should be identical with Mark the Evangelist, only writers of Christian evidences can hope to understand.

A. That forgeries, bearing the names of Christ, of the apostles, and of the early Fathers, were very common in the primitive Church.

“The opinions, or rather the conjectures, of the learned concerning the time when the books of the New Testament were collected into one volume, as also about the authors of that collection, are extremely different.  This important question is attended with great and almost insuperable difficulties to us in these latter times” (Mosheim’s “Eccles.  Hist.,” p. 31).  These difficulties arise, to a great extent, from the large number of forgeries, purporting to be writings of Christ, of the apostles, and of the apostolic Fathers, current in the early Church.  “For, not long after Christ’s ascension into heaven, several histories of his life and doctrines, full of pious frauds and fabulous wonders, were composed by persons whose intentions, perhaps, were not bad, but whose writings discovered the greatest superstition and ignorance.  Nor was this all; productions appeared which were imposed upon the world by fraudulent men, as the writings of the holy apostles” (Ibid, p. 31).  “Another erroneous practice was adopted by them, which, though it was not so universal as the other, was yet extremely pernicious, and proved a source of numberless evils to the Christian Church.  The Platonists and Pythagoreans held it as a maxim, that it was not only lawful, but even praiseworthy, to deceive, and even to use the expedient of a lie, in order to advance the cause of truth and piety.  The Jews, who lived in Egypt, had learned and received this maxim from them, before the coming of Christ, as appears incontestably from a multitude of ancient records; and the Christians were infected from both these sources with the same pernicious error, as appears from the number of books attributed falsely to great