Christian tradition are the associates and fellow-countrymen of Papias.
They will remark that, having the work of Papias in his hands and
holding it in high esteem, he nevertheless is so impressed with the
conviction that our present four Gospels, and these only, had formed the
title-deeds of the Church from the beginning, that he ransacks heaven
and earth for analogies to this sacred number. They will perhaps carry
their investigations further, and discover that Irenaeus not only
possessed our St Mark's Gospel, but possessed it also with its present
ending, which, though undoubtedly very early, can hardly have been part
of the original work. They will then pass on to the Muratorian author,
who probably wrote some years before Irenaeus, and, remembering that
Irenaeus represents the combined testimony of Asia Minor and Gaul, they
will see that they have here the representative of a different branch of
the Church, probably the Roman. Yet the Muratorian writer agrees with
Irenaeus in representing our four Gospels, and these only, as the
traditional inheritance of the Church; for though the fragment is
mutilated at the beginning, so that the names of the first two
Evangelists have disappeared, the identity cannot be seriously
questioned. They will then extend their horizon to Clement in Alexandria
and Tertullian in Africa; and they will find these fathers also
possessed by the same belief. Impressed with this convergency of
testimony from so many different quarters, they will be utterly at a
loss to account for the unanimity of these early witnesses--all sharing
in the same delusion, all ignorant that a false Mark has been silently
substituted for the true Mark during their own lifetime, and
consequently assuming as an indisputable fact that the false Mark was
received by the Church from the beginning. And they will end in a revolt
against the attempt of our author to impose upon them with his favourite
commonplace about the 'thoroughly uncritical character of the fathers.'

Indeed, they will begin altogether to suspect this wholesale
denunciation; for they will observe that our author is convicted out of
his own context. They will remark how he repels an inconvenient question
of Tischendorf by a scornful reference to 'the frivolous character of
the _only_ criticism in which they [Eusebius and the other Christian
Fathers] _ever_ indulged [167:1].' Yet they will remember at the same
time to have read in this very chapter on