But as this author differs from the other Evangelists, so they also differ among themselves.  And the latter part of the last chapter of Mark is so irreconcilable to the other historians of the resurrection, that in many Manuscripts it is found omitted.  And that gospel ends in them, at the eighth Terse of the last chapter.  And Mr. West, in his attempted reconciliation of their accounts of the resurrection, is obliged to make a number of postulates, to take a number of things for granted, which might be denied:  and after elaborately arranging the stage for the performance, he sets the women, and the disciples a driving backwards, and forwards, from the city to the sepulchre, and from the sepulchre to the city, and so agitated that they forgot to know each other when they cross in their journeys.  Notwithstanding his great ingenuity in reconciling contradictions, in which he beats Surenhusius himself, he makes but a sorry piece of work of it after all.  He had much letter have let it alone; for his work upon the resurrection which he calls “the main fact of Christianity,” displays these contradictions in so glaring a light, that the very laboured ingenuity of his methods of reconciliation, inevitably, suggests “confirmation strong” to the keen-eyed reader, of that irreconcilability which the author endeavors to refute.  What rational man therefore can reasonably be required to believe the story of a resurrection pretended to have been seen and known, only by the party interested in making it believed! when in their testimony even, they do not agree but contradict each other?

There is really an immense number of discrepancies and contradiction in the New Testament which the acumen of learned Christians has of late discovered, and pointed out to the world.  And Mr. Evanson, in his work on “the Dissonance of the four Evangelists,” has collected a mass enough, I should think, to terrify the most determined Reconciliator that ever lived.  It is a little remarkable, that Mr. Evanson has asserted, and has proved, the spuriosness of the Gospel ascribed to John, which Semler spared, in the general wreck which he made of the authenticity of the other books of the New Testament.  Mr. Evanson says, in his examination of it, what has been said before, that the speeches ascribed to Jesus in it, are most incoherent, contradictory, and falsified by well known facts.  And indeed the author of the book itself, sterns to be sensible of this; for he very naturally represents the Jews repeatedly accusing Jesus of being mad.  “He hath a devil, and is mad, (say they to the multitude) why hear ye him?” and so in other places.  Mr. Evanson considers this work as the composition of a converted Platonist or of a” Platonizing Jew; the latter we think to be the most correct opinion; since it is evident that the author of that gospel had the works of Philo at his fingers’ ends, which is more than can be supposed of John.  As Semler excepted the Gospel of John only, so Mr.