story--nor denies the miracles
recorded in them, but attributes them to magic.[70] Here, then, we have
testimony as acceptable to an Infidel as that of Strauss or Voltaire--in
fact, utterly undeniable by any man of common sense--that the New
Testament was well known and generally received by Christians as
authoritative, when Celsus wrote his reply to it, in the end of the
second century. If it was a forgery, it was undoubtedly a forgery of old
standing, if he could not detect it.

But we will go back a step farther, and prove the antiquity of the New
Testament by the testimony of another enemy, two generations older than
Celsus. The celebrated heretic, Marcion, lived in the beginning of the
second century, when he had the best opportunity of discovering a
forgery in the writings of the New Testament, if any such existed; he
was excommunicated by the Church, and being greatly enraged thereat, had
every disposition to say the worst he could about it. He traveled all
the way from Sinope on the Black Sea, to Rome, and through Galatia,
Bithynia, Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, the countries where the
apostles preached, and the churches to which they wrote, but never found
any one to suggest the idea of a forgery to him. He affirmed that the
Gospel of Matthew, the Epistle to the Hebrews, those of James and Peter,
and the whole of the Old Testament, were books only for Jews, and
published a new and altered edition of the Gospel of Luke, and ten
Epistles of Paul, for the use of his sect.[71] We have thus the most
undoubted evidence, even the testimony of an enemy, that these books
were in existence, and generally received as apostolical and
authoritative by Christians, at the beginning of the second century, or
within twenty years of the last of the apostles, and by the churches to
which they had preached and written.

The only remaining conceivable cavil against the genuineness of the
books of the New Testament is: "That they bear internal evidence of
being collections of fragments written by different persons--and are
probably merely traditions committed to writing by various unknown
writers, and afterward collected and issued to the churches under the
names of the apostles, for the sake of greater authority." This theory
being received as gospel by several learned men, has furnished matter
for lengthy discussions as to the sources of the four Gospels.
Translated into English, it amounts to this, that Brown, Smith, and
Jones