But upon the supposition that the gospel of John is a spurious production of the age succeeding that of the apostles, let any one explain, if he can, how it could have obtained universal and unquestioned apostolic authority.  Its very difference from the earlier gospels must have provoked inquiry and examination, and these must have led to its rejection, especially at a time when some who had known the apostle yet survived; and no one now pretends to assign to it a later period.

15.  We will next consider the relation of the first three gospels to each other.  Here we have remarkable agreements with remarkable differences.  The general plan of all three is the same.  It is manifest also, at first sight, that there lies at the foundation of each a basis of common matter—­common not in substance alone, but to a great extent in form also.  Equally manifest is it that the three evangelists write independently of each other.  Matthew, for example, did not draw his materials from Luke; for there is his genealogy of our Lord, and his full account of the sermon on the mount, not to mention other particulars.  Nor did Luke take his materials from Matthew; for there is his genealogy also, with large sections of matter peculiar to himself.  Mark has but little matter that is absolutely new; but where he and the other two evangelists record the same events, if one compares his narratives with theirs, he finds numerous little incidents peculiar to this gospel woven into them in a very vivid and graphic manner.  They come in also in the most natural and artless way, as might be expected from one who, if not himself an eye-witness, received his information immediately from eye-witnesses.  The three writers, moreover, do not always agree as to the order in which they record events; yet, notwithstanding the diversities which they exhibit, they were all received from the first as of equal authority.

The natural explanation of this is that all three wrote in the apostolic age, and consequently had access, each of them independently of the other two, to the most authentic sources of information.  These sources (so far as the evangelists were not themselves eye-witnesses) lay partly, perhaps, in written documents like those referred to by Luke, 1:1, partly in the unwritten traditions current in the apostolic churches, and partly in personal inquiry from eye-witnesses, especially, in the case of Mark and Luke, from apostles themselves.  From these materials each selected as suited his purposes, and the churches everywhere unhesitatingly received each of the three gospels, notwithstanding the above-named variations between them, because they had undoubted evidence of their apostolic authority.  We cannot suppose that after the apostolic age three gospels, bearing to each other the relation which these do, could have been imposed upon the churches as all of them equally authentic.  We know from the history of Marcion’s gospel how fully alive they were to the character of their sacred records.  On apostolic authority they could receive—­to mention a single example—­both Matthew’s and Luke’s account of our Lord’s genealogy; but it is certain that they would not have received the two on the authority of men who lived after the apostolic age.