We have thus far seen that the five earliest Fathers of the Christian Church have no claim to be considered Apostolic, and that, so far from bearing testimony to the authenticity of our canonical Gospels, their own age and authorship are disputed. We have noticed that their works never mention by name any of the writers of the New Testament with the exception of Paul; that the sayings they ascribe to Jesus, while often similar to those found in our Gospels, are never identical with them, and that they contain much that is evidently derived from other sources. We have in addition seen that there were numerous Gospels current in the early days of the Christian Church; thus confirming the account of Luke that many had taken in hand to set forth in order the things believed among them.

The early Christian ages were characterised by anything rather than by investigation, or even by accuracy of representation. Deception in literary productions appears to have been the rule rather than the exception. It was not only practised but defended. The author of "Supernatural Religion" says of these Fathers (pp. 460—1, vol. 1, 1879):—"No fable could be too gross, no invention too transparent, for their unsuspicious acceptance, if it assumed a pious form or tended to edification. No period in the history of the world ever produced so many spurious works as the first two or three centuries of our era. The name of every Apostle, or Christian teacher, not excepting that of the great Master himself, was freely attached to every description of religious forgery. False gospels, epistles, acts, martyrologies, were unscrupulously circulated, and such pious falsification was not even intended or regarded as a crime, but perpetrated for the sake of edification. It was only slowly and after some centuries that many of these works, once, as we have seen, regarded with pious veneration, were excluded from the canon; and that genuine works shared this fate, whilst spurious ones usurped their places, is one of the surest results of criticism."

Yet we are to suppose that while words written for edification were falsely ascribed to other Apostles, it was utterly impossible with regard to our four Evangelists. We shall be better able to judge this question upon examining the testimony of the first person who mentions the writings of the first two.