and venerable names, from the Sibylline verses, and several suppositious productions which were spread abroad in this and the following century.  It does not, indeed, seem probable that all these pious frauds were chargeable upon the professors of real Christianity, upon those who entertained just and rational sentiments of the religion of Jesus.  The greatest part of these fictitious writings undoubtedly flowed from the fertile invention of the Gnostic sects, though it cannot be affirmed that even true Christians were entirely innocent and irreproachable in this matter” (Ibid, p. 55).  “This disingenuous and vicious method of surprising their adversaries by artifice, and striking them down, as it were, by lies and fiction, produced, among other disagreeable effects, a great number of books, which were falsely attributed to certain great men, in order to give these spurious productions more credit and weight” (Ibid, page 77).  These forged writings being so widely circulated, it will be readily understood that “It is not so easy a matter as is commonly imagined rightly to settle the Canon of the New Testament.  For my own part, I declare, with many learned men, that, in the whole compass of learning, I know no question involved with more intricacies and perplexing difficulties than this.  There are, indeed, considerable difficulties relating to the Canon of the Old Testament, as appears by the large controversies between the Protestants and Papists on this head in the last, and latter end of the preceding, century; but these are solved with much more ease than those of the New....  In settling the old Testament collection, all that is requisite is to disprove the claim of a few obscure books, which have but the weakest pretences to be looked upon as Scripture; but, in the New, we have not only a few to disprove, but a vast number to exclude [from] the Canon, which seem to have much more right to admission than any of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament; and, besides, to evidence the genuineness of all those which we do receive, since, according to the sentiments of some who would be thought learned, there are none of them whose authority has not been controverted in the earliest ages of Christianity....  The number of books that claim admission [to the canon] is very considerable.  Mr. Toland, in his celebrated catalogue, has presented us with the names of above eighty....  There are many more of the same sort which he has not mentioned” (J.  Jones on “The Canon of the New Testament,” vol. i., pp. 2-4.  Ed. 1788).

The following list will give some idea of the number of the apocryphal writings from which the four Gospels, and other books of the New Testament, finally emerge as canonical:—­

GOSPELS.