Gobarus, wherein Hegesippus, speaking against Paul’s assertion “that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,” opposes to it the saying of the Lord, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears that hear.”  This is paralleled by Matt. xiii. 16 and Luke x. 23.  “We need not point out that the saying referred to by Hegesippus, whilst conveying the same sense as that in the two Gospels, differs as materially from them as they do from each other, and as we might expect a quotation taken from a different, though kindred, source, like the Gospel according to the Hebrews, to do” ("Sup.  Rel.,” vol. i., p. 447).  Why does not Paley tell us that Eusebius writes of him, not that he quoted from the Gospels, but that “he also states some particulars from the Gospel of the Hebrews and from the Syriac, and particularly from the Hebrew language, showing that he himself was a convert from the Hebrews.  Other matters he also records as taken from the unwritten tradition of the Jews” ("Eccles.  Hist.,” bk. iv., ch 22).  Here, then, we have the source of the quotations in Hegesippus, and yet Paley conceals this, and deliberately speaks of him as referring to our Gospel of Matthew!

EPISTLE OF THE CHURCHES OF LYONS AND VIENNE.—­Paley quietly dates this A.D. 170, although the persecution it describes occurred in A.D. 177 (see ante, pp. 257, 258).  The “exact references to the Gospels of Luke and John and to the Acts of the Apostles,” spoken of by Paley ("Evidences,” p. 125), are not easy to find.  Westcott says:  “It contains no reference by name to any book of the New Testament, but its coincidences of language with the Gospels of St. Luke and St. John, with the Acts of the Apostles, with the Epistles of St. Paul to the Romans, Corinthians (?), Ephesians, Philippians, and the First to Timothy, with the first Catholic Epistles of St. Peter and St. John, and with the Apocalypse, are indisputable” ("On the Canon,” p. 336).  Unfortunately, neither Paley nor Dr. Westcott refer us to the passages in question, Paley quoting only one.  We will, therefore, give one of these at full length, leaving our readers to judge of it as an “exact reference:”  “Vattius Epagathus, one of the brethren who abounded in the fulness of the love of God and man, and whose walk and conversation had been so unexceptionable, though he was only young, shared in the same testimony with the elder Zacharias.  He walked in all the commandments and righteousness of the Lord blameless, full of love to God and his neighbour” ("Eusebius,” bk. v., chap. i).  This is, it appears, an “exact reference” to Luke i. 6, and we own we should not have known it unless it had been noted in “Supernatural Religion.”  Tischendorf, on the other hand, refers the allusion to Zacharias to the Protevangelium of James ("Sup.  Rel.,” vol. ii., p. 202).