scussion with this hard remark; "We must be forced, with
several of the critics, to leave the difficulty just as we found it,
chargeable with all the consequences of manifest inconsistency."
(Middleton's Reflections answered by Benson, Hist. Christ. vol. iii. p.
50.) But what are these consequences? By no means the discrediting of
the history as to the principal fact, by a repugnancy (even supposing
that repugnancy not to be resolvable into different modes of
computation) in the time of the day in which it is said to have taken
place.

A great deal of the discrepancy observable in the Gospels arises from
omission; from a fact or a passage of Christ's life being noticed by one
writer which is unnoticed by another. Now, omission is at all times a
very uncertain ground of objection. We perceive it, not only in the
comparison of different writers, but even in the same writer when
compared with himself. There are a great many particulars, and some of
them of importance, mentioned by Josephus in his Antiquities, which, as
we should have supposed, ought to have been put down by him in their
place in the Jewish Wars. (Lardner, part i. vol. ii. p. 735, et seq.)
Suetonius, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, have, all three, written of the reign
of Tiberius. Each has mentioned many things omitted by the
rest, (Lardner, part i. vol. ii. p. 743.) yet no objection is from thence
taken to the respective credit of their histories. We have in our own
times, if there were not something indecorous in the comparison, the
life of an eminent person written by three of his friends, in which
there is very great variety in the incidents selected by them; some
apparent, and perhaps some real contradictions; yet without any
impeachment of the substantial truth of their accounts, of the
authenticity of the books, of the competent information or general
fidelity of the writers.

But these discrepancies will be still more numerous, when men do not
write histories, but memoirs: which is, perhaps, the true name and
proper description of our Gospels: that is, when they do not undertake,
nor ever meant to deliver, in order of time, a regular and complete
account of all the things of importance which the person who is the
subject of their history did or said; but only, out of many similar
ones, to give such passages, or such actions and discourses, as offered
themselves more immediately to their attention, came in the way of their
inquiries, occurred to their recol