But it is very certain that before the period I mentioned of Trajan's time, the canon of the sacred books, was not yet fixed, nor any certain number of books received in the Catholic Church, whose authority must ever after serve to determine matters of faith; neither were the spurious pieces of heretics yet rejected, nor were the faithful admonished to beware of them for the future.

Likewise, the true writings of the apostles used to be so bound up in one volume with the apocryphal, that it was not manifest by any mark of public censure which of them should be preferred to the other.
We have at this day, certain authentic writings of ecclesiastical authors of those times, as Clemens Romanus, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, who wrote in the same order wherein I have named them, and after all the other writers of the New Testament, except Jude, and the two Johns.

But in Hermas you shall not meet with one passage, or any mention of the New Testament; nor in all the rest is any one of the evangelists called by his own name.

And if sometimes they cite any passages like those we read in our gospels; yet, you will find them so much changed, and for the most part so interpolated, that it cannot be known, whether they produced them out of ours, or some apocryphal gospels; nay, they sometimes cite passages which it is most certain are not in the present gospels.

From hence, therefore, it is evident that no difference was yet put between the apocryphal and canonical books of the New Testament, especially if it be considered, that they pass no censure on the apocryphal, nor leave any mark whereby the reader might discern whether they attributed less authority to the spurious than to the genuine gospels; from whence it may reasonably be suspected, that if they cite sometimes any passages conformable to ours, it was not done through any certain design, as if dubious things were to be confirmed only by the canonical books, so as it is very possible that both those and the like passages may have been borrowed from other gospels besides these we now have.