, as must be evident to every common reader
who has paid the slightest attention to the subject.... [Here follow a
number of parallel passages from the three synoptics.] The agreement
between the three evangelists in these extracts is remarkable, and leads
to the question how such coincidences could arise between works which,
from the first years of Christianity until the beginning of the
seventeenth century, were understood to be perfectly independent, and to
have had each a separate and independent origin. The answer to this
question may at last, after more than a hundred years of discussion, be
given with tolerable certainty, if we are allowed to judge of this
subject according to the rules of reason and common sense, by which all
other such difficulties are resolved. 'The most eminent critics'--we
quote from 'Marsh's Michaelis,' vol. iii., part 2, page 170--'are at
present decidedly of opinion that one of the two suppositions must
necessarily be adopted--either that the three evangelists copied from
each other, or that all the three drew from _a common source_, and that
the notion of an absolute independence, in respect to the composition of
our three first Gospels, is no longer tenable'.... The alternative
between _a common source_ and _copying from each other_, is now no
longer in the same position as in the days of Michaelis or Bishop Marsh.
To decide between the two is no longer difficult. No one will now admit
that either of the four evangelists has copied from the other three, 1.
Because in neither of the four is there the slightest notice of the
others. 2. Because, if either of the evangelists may be thought, from
the remarkable similarity of any particular part of his narrative, to
have copied out of either of the other Gospels, we immediately light
upon so many other passages, wholly inconsistent with what the other
three have related on the same subject, that we immediately ask why he
has not copied from the others on those points also. It only remains,
therefore, for us to infer that there was a common source, first
traditional and then written--the [Greek: Apomnemoneumata], in short, or
'Memorials,' etc., of Justin Martyr, and that from this source the four
canonical Gospels, together with thirty or forty others, many of which
are still in existence, were, at various periods of early Christianity,
compiled by various writers" ("Christian Records," Dr. Giles, pp. 266,
270, 271). Dean Alford puts forward a s