were only two hundred years old. He refers to Noah and the Flood, Lot's wife, and other Old Testament myths. There are, of course, many ingenious attempts to explain; but, to one who has no theory to sustain, the natural inference is irresistible, that Christ knew no more of the Old Testament than his audience did. Finally, we now learn that there was a sufficient interval between the death of Christ and the appearance of the Gospels to allow the accretion of all their supernatural stories; that such accretion has followed the lives of Zoroaster, Buddha, Apollonius of Tyana, etc., and would be natural in the present instance; that (as we shall see) many of the supposed supernatural features of Christ's life have a clear pre-Christian origin, and that the writers of the Gospel are unknown Jews of utterly unverifiable authority. Criticism has impartially weighed the external evidence in favour of the credibility of the Gospels, and can find none of sufficient clearness before the writings of Justin in the middle of the second century. Whatever may be said of the genuineness of the Ignatian epistles, etc., the utmost that could be inferred from them would be that there were certain documents in existence in the first century which reappear in the Gospels. The quotations are too slender to allow us to call them witnesses to the existence of the Gospels. We are, therefore, reduced to the fact that the New Testament, as we have it (substantially), was in use in the Churches about the middle of the second century—more than one hundred years after the death of Christ, four generations from the events of his life. In view of that interval, and of the unknown character of the writers, and keeping in sight the analogy of other religions, criticism can only say of the divine features attributed to the Galilean what it says of them in the case of Buddha and Apollonius—"Fama crescit eundo." A few facts about the lives of religious teachers gain enormous accretions of myth and legend in the course of a century or two.
