CHAPTER VI.
IS THE GOSPEL FACT OR FABLE?
"For they themselves show of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come."-- 1 Thess.i.9, 10.
In the last chapter we ascertained that the Gospels and Epistles were not forgeries of some nameless monks of the third century--that the shopkeepers, silversmiths, tent-makers, coppersmiths, tanners, physicians, senators, town councilors, officers of customs, city treasurers, and nobles of Caesar's household, in Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens, and Alexandria, could no more be imposed upon in the matter of documents, attested by the well-known signatures of their beloved ministers, than you could by forged letters or sermons purporting to come from your own pastor--and that the documents which they believed to contain the directory of their lives, and the charter of that salvation which they valued more than their lives, which they read in their churches, recited at their tables, quoted in their writings, appealed to in their controversies, translated into many languages, and dispersed into every part of the known world, they neither would, nor could, corrupt or falsify.
The genuineness of the copies of the New Testament, which we now possess, is abundantly proved by the comparison of over two thousand manuscripts, from all parts of the world; scrutinized during a period of nearly a hundred years, by the most critical scholars, so accurately that the variations of such things as would correspond to the crossing of a t, or the dotting of an i, in English, have been carefully enumerated; yet the result of the whole of this searching scrutiny has been merely the suggestion of a score of unimportant alterations in the received text of the seven thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine verses of the New Testament.

This is a fact utterly unexampled in the history of manuscripts.

There are but six manuscripts of the Comedies of Terence, and these have not been copied once for every thousand times the New Testament has been transcribed, yet there are thirty thousand variations found in these six manuscripts, or an average of five thousand for each, and many of them seriously affect the sense.

The average number of variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament examined, is not quite thirty for each, including all the trivialities already noticed.
We are, then, by the special providence of God, now as undoubtedly in possession of genuine copies of the Gospels and Epistles, written by the companions of Jesus, as we are of genuine copies of the Constitution of the United States, and of the Declaration of Independence.

These are historic documents, of well-established genuineness and antiquity, which we now proceed to examine as to their truthfulness.
There is no history so trustworthy as that prepared by contemporary writers, especially by those who have themselves been actively engaged in the events which they relate.