It is a very hard thing to forge a signature, but give a business man two lines of any man's writing besides that, and he is perfectly secure against imposition.[72] The churches to which the Epistles were written, and to which the Gospels were delivered, consisted largely of business men, of merchants and traders, tent makers and coppersmiths, city chamberlains, and officers of Caesar's household, and the like.

Does any one think such men could not tell the handwriting of their minister, who had lived among them for years; or that men who were risking their lives for the instructions he wrote them, would care less about the genuineness of the documents, than you do about the genuineness of a ten dollar check?
I am not as long in this city as Paul was in Ephesus, nor one fourth of the time that John lived there, yet I defy all the advocates of the mythical theory of Germany, and all their disciples here, to write a myth half as long as this essay, and impose it on the elders and members of my church as my writing.

Let it only be presented in manuscript to the congregation--there was no printing in Paul's days--and in five minutes a dozen members of the church will detect the forgery, even if I should hold my peace.

And were I to leave on a mission to China or India, and write letters to the church, would any of these business men, who have seen my writing, have the least hesitation in recognizing it again?
Do you think anybody could forge a letter as from me, and impose it on them?
What an absurdity, then, to suppose that anybody could write a gospel or epistle, and get all the members of a large church to believe that an Apostle wrote it.

The first Christians, then, were absolutely certain that the documents which they received as apostolic, were really so.