t of casting
suspicion on it, when other good grounds speak in its favour; for, in
dealing with writings which have no, or almost no accompanying
literature, such difficulties cannot fail to arise. (4) The condition of
the oldest Christianity up to the beginning of the second century did
not favour literary forgeries or interpolations in support of a definite
tendency. (5) We must remember that, from the death of Nero till the
time of Trajan, very little is known of the history of the Church except
the fact that, by the end of this time, Christianity had not only spread
to an astonishing extent, but also had become vigorously consolidated.]

[Footnote 70: The novelty lies first in the idea itself, secondly in the
form in which it was worked out, inasmuch as Marcion would only admit
the authority of one Gospel to the exclusion of all the rest, and added
the Pauline epistles which had originally little to do with the
conception of the apostolic doctrinal tradition of the Church.]

[Footnote 71: It is easy to understand that, wherever there was
criticism of the Old Testament, the Pauline epistles circulating in the
Church would be thrust into the foreground. The same thing was done by
the Manichaeans in the Byzantine age.]

[Footnote 72: Four passages may be chiefly appealed to in support of the
opposite view, viz., 2 Peter III. 16; Polycarp ep. 12. 1; Barn. IV. 14;
2 Clem. II. 4. But the first is put out of court, as the second Epistle
of Peter is quite a late writing. The second is only known from an
unreliable Latin translation (see Zahn on the passage: "verba 'his
scripturis' suspecta sunt, cum interpres in c. II. 3 ex suis inseruerit
quod dictum est"), and even if the latter were faithful here, the
quotation from the Psalms prefixed to the quotation from the Epistle to
the Ephesians prevents us from treating the passage as certain evidence.
As to the third passage ([Greek: mepote, hos gegraptai, polloi kletoi,
oligoi de eklektoi heurethomen]), it should be noted that the author of
the Epistle of Barnabas, although he makes abundant use of the evangelic
tradition, has nowhere else described evangelic writings as [Greek:
graphe], and must have drawn from more sources than the canonic Gospels.
Here, therefore, we have an enigma which may be solved in a variety of
ways. It seems worth noting that it is a saying of the Lord which is
here in question. But from the very beginning words of the Lord were
equally reverenced w