The next Christian father who mentions the Gospel of Matthew is Irenoeus, who says also that “Matthew wrote his gospel in the Hebrew Language.”  The character of Irenoeus is discoverable from his work against the Heresies of his time, to that I refer the Reader, who will find him to have been a zealous, though a very credulous, and ignorant man; for he believed the story of Papias just quoted, and many others equally absurd.  He however furnishes this important intelligence, that in the second century, the Christian world was overrun with heresy, and a swarm of apocryphal, and spurious Books were received by many as genuine.

The next witness in favour of the Gospel is Tertullian, who lived in the latter end of the second century.  And the soundness of his Judgment, and his capability to distinguish the genuine Gospels from among a hundred apocryphal ones, and above all his regard for truth, may be judged of from these proofs given by himself.  He asserts upon his own knowledge, “I know it,” says he—­“that the corpse of a dead Christian, at the first breath of the prayer made by the priest, on occasion of its own funeral, removed its hands from its sides, into the usual posture of a supplicant; and when the service was ended, restored them again to their former situation.”  (Tertul. de anima c. 51.) And he relates as a fact, which he, and all the orthodox of his time credited, that—­“the body of another Christian already interred moved itself to one side of the grave to make room for another corpse which was going to be laid by it.”  And it is on the testimony of such men as these, that the authenticity of the gospels entirely depends as to external evidence; for these are all the witnesses that can be produced as speaking of them, who lived within two hundred years after Jesus:  Three men, (for Justin cannot be reckoned as a witness in favour of the gospels.) Three men, who are all of them evidently credulous, and two of whom are certainly *****.

To convince a thinking man that histories recording such very extraordinary, ill supported, improbable facts as are contained in the gospels are divine, or even really written by the men to whom they are ascribed, and are not either some of the many spurious productions with which (as we learn from Irenoeus) that early age abounded, calculated to astonish the credulous, and superstitious, or else writings of authors who were themselves infected with the grossest superstitious credulity; of what use can it be to adduce the testimony of the very few writers, of the same, or next succeeding age, when the very reading of their works shews him that they themselves were tainted with that same superstitious credulity, of which are accused the real authors of the New Testament?