II.  That the destruction of Jerusalem, which took place forty years after the commencement of the Christian institution, produced such a change in the state of the country, and the condition of the Jews, that a writer who was unacquainted with the circumstances of the nation before that event would find it difficult to avoid mistakes, in endeavouring to give detailed accounts of transactions connected with those circumstances, forasmuch as he could no longer have a living exemplar to copy from.

III.  That there appears, in the writers of the New Testament, a knowledge of the affairs of those times which we do not find in authors of later ages.  In particular, “many of the Christian writers of the second and third centuries, and of the following ages, had false notions concerning the state of Judea between the nativity of Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem.” (Lardner, part i. vol. ii. p. 960.) Therefore they could not have composed our histories.

Amidst so many conformities we are not to wonder that we meet with some difficulties.  The principal of these I will put down, together with the solutions which they have received.  But in doing this I must be contented with a brevity better suited to the limits of my volume than to the nature of a controversial argument.  For the historical proofs of my assertions, and for the Greek criticisms upon which some of them are founded, I refer the reader to the second volume of the first part of Dr. Lardner’s large work.

I. The taxing during which Jesus was born was “first made,” as we read, according to our translation, in Saint Luke, “whilst Cyrenius was governor of Syria.” (Chap. ii. ver. 2.) Now it turns out that Cyrenius was not governor of Syria until twelve, or at the soonest, ten years after the birth of Christ; and that a taxing census, or assessment, was made in Judea, in the beginning of his government, The charge, therefore, brought against the evangelist is, that, intending to refer to this taxing, he has misplaced the date of it by an error of ten or twelve years.

The answer to the accusation is founded in his using the word “first:”—­“And this taxing was first made:”  for, according to the mistake imputed to the evangelist, this word could have no signification whatever; it could have had no place in his narrative; because, let it relate to what it will, taxing, census, enrolment, or assessment, it imports that the writer had more than one of those in contemplation.  It acquits him therefore of the charge:  it is inconsistent with the supposition of his knowing only of the taxing in the beginning of Cyrenius’s government.  And if the evangelist knew (which this word proves that he did) of some other taxing beside that, it is too much, for the sake of convicting him of a mistake, to lay it down as certain that he intended to refer to that.