And after I have been received up, I will send to thee a certain one of my disciples, that he may heal thy affliction, and give life to thee, and to those who are with thee.”  After the ascension of Jesus, Thaddaeus, one of the seventy, is sent to Edessa, and lodges in the house of Tobias, the son of Tobias, and heals Agbarus and many others.  “These things were done in the 340th year” (Eusebius does not state what he reckons from).  The proof given by Eusebius for the truth of the account is as follows:  “Of this also we have the evidence, in a written answer, taken from the public records of the city of Edessa, then under the government of the king.  For, in the public registers there, which embrace the ancient history and the transactions of Agbarus, these circumstances respecting him are found still preserved down to the present day.  There is nothing, however, like hearing the epistles themselves, taken by us from the archives, and the style of it, as it has been literally translated by us, from the Syriac language” ("Eccles.  Hist.,” bk. i., chap. xiii.).  And Paley calls this an attempt at forgery, “deserving of the smallest notice,” and dismisses it in a few lines.  It would be interesting to know for what other “Scripture,” canonical or uncanonical, there is evidence of authenticity so strong as for this; exactness of detail in names; absence of any exaggeration more than is implied in recounting any miracle; the transaction recorded in the public archives; seen there by Eusebius himself; copied down and translated by him; such evidence for any one of the Gospels would make belief far easier than it is at present.  The assertion of Eusebius was easily verifiable at the time (to use the favourite argument of Christians for the truth of any account); and if Eusebius here wrote falsely, of what value is his evidence on any other point?  A Freethinker may fairly urge that Eusebius is not trustworthy, and that this assertion of his about the archives is as likely to be false as true; but the Christian can scarcely admit this, when so much depends, for him, on the reliability of the great Church historian, all whose evidence would become worthless if he be once allowed to have deliberately fabricated that which did not exist.

We have already noticed the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, and pointed out the numerous forgeries circulated under their names, and the consequent haze hanging over all the early Christian writers, until we reach the time of Justin Martyr.  Thus we entirely destroy the whole basis of Paley’s argument, that “the historical books of the New Testament ... are quoted, or alluded to, by a series of Christian writers, beginning with those who were contemporary with the Apostles, or who immediately followed them” ("Evidences,” page 111;) for we have no certain writings of any such contemporaries.  In dealing with the positions f. and h., we shall seek to prove that in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers—­taking