does not think of giving the national designation to the inhabitants of the country he is writing in, although he naturally does of other countries. The Acts and the Gospel of John were certainly not written in Judea; Matthew, and the original of Mark, I am satisfied were. Now, I find in Matthew the word "Jew" occurs five times; in Mark, seven times; in Luke, five times, and those in cases where it could not be avoided; but in John it occurs seventy-one times; and in the Acts, eighty-two. I can account for this difference in the use of the word in Luke's writings, upon no other supposition than that his Gospel was written in Judea; but if so, it was written under circumstances of all others the most favourable for procuring historical information; and if, as I suppose, some of the apostles had committed accounts of the events which they had witnessed to writing, he could not fail to be acquainted with them. The Gospel of Matthew agrees precisely with his description of the documents mentioned in the preface. It is "a digest of the things which had been accomplished” διήγησιν περὶ τῶν πεπληροφορημένων πραγμάτων, i. 1. Did he, or did he not, make use of it? I apprehend that, if commentators, instead of resting upon their own preconceived opinions of what St Luke ought to have done in such circumstances, had inquired into what he actually has done, they could not have failed to have arrived at the same conclusions which I have been led to, by the evidence of the case, that, amongst other authorities, he has made use of St Matthew's Gospel. I attach no weight to objections drawn from the opinions of modern critics as to the mode in which the evangelists ought to have written, upon the supposition that they were acquainted with the works of their predecessors. When, for instance, Dr Lardner says, "It is not suitable to the character of any of the evangelists that they should abridge another historian," I can only advance the opposite opinion that it was, provided the preceding historian related what fell under his own observation; and I adduce St Luke's own words in support of my views. Dr Davidson asks:

"If authentic histories of Jesus' life, written by Matthew and Mark, existed, and many had erred in departing from them, what reason could Luke have had for writing a new history to correct the many writers who had attempted the task? Were not those of Matthew and Mark quite sufficient? Could he not have referred Theophilus to them? Were they not able to impart ἀσφάλεια ?”—Vol. i. p. 393.

Before answering these questions, I must protest against their relevancy in the present inquiry, which is not, How ought the evangelists to have composed their Gospels? but, How did they compose them? I may not be able to explain either why St Luke, if he was acquainted with the preceding Gospels, added anything, or left anything out from them in his Gospel; but if we take into consideration both the proximate and ultimate object which he had in view, I can see no difficulty. The proximate object was, to assure Theophilus of the certainty of the things wherein he had been instructed;" the ultimate object, to assure others. Now, he could not have sent the Gospel of Mark to Theophilus, for it was not then published, nor did it exist in a language which he could understand. The Gospel of Matthew did exist in a language which Theophilus could understand; and, if not already in possession of it, we may suppose that St Luke did send it to him; but if he did, what then? Are we to suppose that he was resolutely to omit whatever St Matthew had mentioned? Such a mode of composition might serve the purposes of Theophilus, but would render his work unintelligible to others not in possession of St Matthew's Gospel. One object of St Luke, in making use of St Matthew's Gospel, is very evident;-it was to make the account he had translated from the original of St Mark more complete. Let us take the first example which occurs. In his account of John the Baptist, we find two passages inserted from Matthew: first, John's rebuke to the pharisees, beginning, "O generation of vipers," iii. 7; next, John's description of our Lord," whose fan is in his hand," (Sect. 1 and 2, Mat. and Luke, p. 224-5.) In both cases St Luke's account is rendered more complete by the extracts from St Matthew, and we can see a reason why he should have inserted them. We might

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go over the sections, and in many cases be able to assign evident or probable reasons for the manner in which St Luke has treated the matter, as I have done, to a certain extent, in the Notes; but it is unnecessary. It is sufficient to say, that if St Luke had acted as many commentators suppose he would have done, if acquainted with the preceding Gospels, we should have been. deprived of the only record of many of the most important miracles, parables, and discourses of our Lord.

There are, however, other and more weighty objections to this view, because they rest upon the facts of the case. Professor Thiersch, in his review of my Dissertation on the origin of the writings of St Luke,* asks :

« If it were so, how is it possible there should be such great variations between Luke and Matthew? How comes it that, with Luke's striving after completeness, he leaves out so much matter given by Matthew, and that, in the narrative of the childhood of Christ, of his discourses, of his resurrection, he differs so much from that of Matthew? We hold this phenomenon to be inexplicable, except upon the supposition that Matthew and Luke were unacquainted with each other, and worked independently. Their agreements are sufficiently explained by the fact that they had a common leader in Mark. There are difficulties in this hypothesis, but they are small when compared to the difficulty which the author has, apparently without being aware of it, advanced, in ascribing to St Luke the knowledge of the Greek Gospel of Matthew, and that it (the Greek version) was an apostolical writing."

In reply, I admit that in none of the cases cited by Professor Thiersch did Luke make use of the Gospel of Matthew, and I account for his not doing so by the supplemental character of his Gospel; but this, in fact, proves no more than that he made use of other authorities than Matthew and Mark. The differences, if differences there be, existed in the original writings, and Luke made no attempts to reconcile them by suppressions, or tampering with the originals, which, I infer from the terms of the preface, were all apostolical.

The most striking difference between the accounts of the early life of Christ in Matthew and Luke is in the genealogies. Upon

* Goettingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 1851. P. 1378.

this I would merely observe that St Matthew has avowedly given the genealogy of Joseph, and he could not have been at any loss in knowing who the father of Joseph was. The simplest explanation appears to be, that Luke's is the genealogy of our Lord according to the flesh, and that Heli was the father-in-law of Joseph. Had the point of divergence been at a period of remote antiquity, we might have supposed that the authors, ignorant of each other's writings, had made use of different and incorrect registers of descent; but the divergence was, in fact, within the memory of man when the Gospels were written. There is no improbability in supposing that St Luke was personally acquainted with Mary; at all events, he could be under no difficulty in ascertaining a fact which he must have thought of consequence, otherwise he would not have inserted the genealogy, and which must have been within the knowledge of many then living.

With regard to the omissions which Professor Thiersch supposes that St Luke, in his striving after completeness, would have avoided, they are explained by the supposition that his Gospel was to a certain extent supplementary; and besides, we find the very same phenomenon in the connection between Luke and Mark which Professor Thiersch admits. Luke has omitted many passages from Mark, such as that beginning at vi. 45, and ending at viii. 36.

Such objections, however, are merely negative, and whether we can explain them or not, they never can outweigh the positive evidence drawn from the fact that we find passages of Matthew's Gospel included in that of St Luke. It may, indeed, be said, How do we know that it is not Matthew who borrows from Luke, and not Luke from Matthew? I admit that a mere verbal agreement would not of itself indicate which is the latest writer; but in the present case we can apply the geological argument of included fragments. Whenever we find fragments of one deposit included in another, we are certain that the deposit to which they belong is older than the one which contains them. Where I am now writing, I look on rocks of red sandstone; at a very short distance I find rocks of slate: I have never seen them in contact,

so as to infer from the order of superposition which is the oldest, but I find fragments of slate included in the sandstone, and therefore infer with certainty that the slate is the oldest formation. So it is with the Gospels. I find fragments of Matthew included in the Gospel of Luke, and infer that the Greek Gospel of Matthew existed before St Luke wrote, and was used by him as a historical authority. In the Gospel of Luke, then, we find a certain, although not a large portion, which he has taken immediately from the Gospel of Matthew. There are also agreements between the Gospels which may be termed mediate—that is, where both evangelists have drawn their materials from the same source; such are all the agreements which are translational and not transcriptural. Such agreements prove that an original must have existed in another language, and consequently, where they occur, neither of the Gospels can be the original. Agreements of this kind can nearly all of them be referred to the Gospel according to Mark, which I hold to be the translation of an original apostolical memoir, and therefore such an authority as historians would naturally make use of; but as Luke came after Matthew, his translation of the passages which each of them gave entire would almost unavoidably be influenced by the previous one of Matthew, and the phenomena of dependent translation would be the result. In order, therefore, to form an accurate judgment of the nature of the connection of the Gospels of Mark and Luke, we must leave out of sight all the sections which are common to the three Gospels, and confine ourselves to those only common to Luke and Mark now, in these we find no verbal agreement greater than what occurs in independent translations; the exceptional cases pointed out by former writers I have elsewhere shown did not exist in the earliest MSS. I conclude, therefore, that St Luke, in drawing up his Gospel, made use, to a certain extent, of the Greek Gospel of Matthew, and the Hebrew or Aramaic original of Mark.

The retrograde order of our inquiry which we have pursued brings us now to the Gospel of Matthew; for although it was the