And he needs to be very well posted up in the matters of names, dates, places, manners and customs, else he will contradict some well-known facts, and so expose his forgery to the world.

Therefore writers of forgeries avoid all such things as much as possible, and as surely as they venture on specifications of that sort they are detected.

A man who is conscious of writing a book of falsehoods does not begin on this wise: "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being Governor of Judea, and Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip Tetrarch of Iturea and of the regions of Trachonitis, and Lysanias Tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiphas being high priests, the Word of God came unto John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness." Here in one sentence are twenty historical, geographical, political, and genealogical references, every one of which we can confirm by references to secular historians.

The enemies of the Lord have utterly failed in their attempts to disprove one out of the hundreds of such statements in the New Testament.

The only instance of any _public political event_ recorded in the gospel, said not to be confirmed by the fragments of secular history we possess, is Luke's account of a census of the Roman Empire, ordered by Augustus Caesar.