So Strauss, Eichorn, De Wette, and their disciples here, attempt to set aside the New Testament.

In plain English, it is a collection of forgeries.
These assertions are absurd.

In the hundred years between the death of the apostles, and the beginning of the third century, there was not time to form a mythology.

The times of Trajan's persecution, and that of the philosophic Aurelius, and the busy bustling age of Severus, were not the times for such a business.

Bigoted Jews would not, and could not, have made such a character as Jesus of Nazareth; and the philosophers of that day, Celsus and Porphyry, for instance, hated it when presented to them as heartily as either Strauss or Paine.