It should be further noticed that the evangelists Matthew and Mark, in reference to “the abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place, throw in the admonitory words, “Let him that readeth understand.”  These are not the Saviour’s words, but those of the narrators calling the attention of believers to a most important sign requiring their immediate flight to the mountains.  Before the overthrow of the city these words had a weighty office; after its overthrow they would have been utterly superfluous.  Their presence in such a connection is proof that the record was written before the event to which it refers.

Admitting the genuineness and authenticity of the book of Acts, (which will be considered hereafter,) we have a special proof of the early composition of the gospel according to Luke.  The book of Acts ends abruptly with Paul’s two years residence at Rome, which brings us down to A.D. 65, five years before the destruction of Jerusalem.  The only natural explanation of this fact is that here the composition of the book of Acts was brought to a close.  The date of the gospel which preceded, Acts 1:1, must therefore be placed still earlier.

If, now, we examine the gospel of John, we find its internal character agreeing with the ancient tradition that it was written at Ephesus late in the apostle’s life.  That it was composed at a distance from Judea, in a Gentile region, is manifest from his careful explanation of Jewish terms and usages, which among his countrymen would have needed no explanation.  No man writing in Judea, or among the Galileans who habitually attended the national feasts at Jerusalem, would have said, “And the passover, a feast of the Jews, was nigh,” 6:4; “Now the Jews’ feast of tabernacles was at hand,” 7:2, etc.  The absence of all reference to the overthrow of the Jewish polity, civil and ecclesiastical, may be naturally explained upon the supposition that the apostle wrote some years after that event, when his mind had now become familiar with the great truth that the Mosaic institutions had forever passed away to make room for the universal dispensation of Christianity; and that he wrote, too, among Gentiles for whom the abolition of these institutions had no special interest.  In general style and spirit, moreover, the gospel of John is closely allied to his first epistle, and cannot well be separated from it by a great interval of time; but the epistle undoubtedly belongs to a later period of the apostle’s life.

From the language of John, chap. 5:2, “Now there is at Jerusalem, by the sheep-gate, a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue, Bethesda, having five porches,”—­it has been argued that, when John wrote, the city must have been still standing.  But Eusebius speaks of the pool as remaining in his day, and why may not the porches, as useful to the Roman conquerors, have been preserved, at least for a season?

We have seen the relation of John’s gospel to