the raising of the dead--not only did they
include several discourses, such as the reply to the messengers of
John and the saying to the Centurion whose servant was healed,
which have direct reference to miracles, but they also give marked
prominence to the chief and cardinal miracles of the Gospel
history, the Incarnation and the Resurrection. It is antecedently
quite possible that the narrative of these events may have been
derived from a document other than our Gospels; but, if so, that
is only proof of the existence of further and independent evidence
to the truth of the history. This document, supposing it to exist,
is a surprising instance of the homogeneity of the evangelical
tradition; it differs from the three Synoptic Gospels, nay, we may
say even from the four Gospels, _less_ than they differ from
each other.

(2) But we may go further than this. If Justin really used a
separate substantive document now lost, that document, to judge
from its contents, must have represented a secondary, or rather a
tertiary, stage of the evangelical literature; it must have
implied the previous existence of our present Gospels. I do not
now allude to the presence in it of added traits, such as the cave
of the Nativity and the fire on Jordan, which are of the nature of
those mythical details that we find more fully developed in the
Apocryphal Gospels. I do not so much refer to these--though, for
instance, in the case of the fire on Jordan it is highly probable
that Justin's statement is a translation into literal fact of the
canonical (and Justinian) saying, 'He shall baptize with the Holy
Ghost and with fire'--but, on general grounds, the relation which
this supposed document bears to the extant Gospels shows that it
must have been in point of time posterior to them.

The earlier stages of evangelical composition present a nucleus,
with a more or less defined circumference, of unity, and outside
of this a margin of variety. There was a certain body of
narrative, which, in whatever form it was handed down--whether as
oral or written--at a very early date obtained a sort of general
recognition, and seems to have been as a matter of course
incorporated in the evangelical works as they appeared.

Besides this there was also other matter which, without such
general recognition, had yet a considerable circulation, and,
though not found in all, was embodied in more than one of the
current compilations. But, as we should naturall