ey may know
Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.]

Can the writer of "Supernatural Religion" be serious when he writes, "He
nowhere identifies the Logos with Jesus?" Does the writer of
"Supernatural Religion" seriously think that a Christian writer, living
in 177, and presenting to the emperor a plea for Christians, would have
any difficulty about identifying Jesus with that Son of God Whom he
expressly states to be the Logos of God?

The following also are seeming quotations from the Synoptics in
Athenagoras.

"What, then, are those precepts in which we are instructed? 'I say
unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse, pray for them
that persecute you, that ye may be sons of your Father which is in
the heavens, who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good,
and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.'

"'For if ye love them which love you, and lend to them which lend to
you, what reward shall ye have?'

"'For whosoever, He says, looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath
committed adultery already in his heart.'

"'For whosoever, says He, putteth away his wife and marrieth
another, committeth adultery.'"

When we consider that in the time of Athenagoras, or very soon after,
there were three authors living who spoke of the Gospels in the way we
have shown, and quoted them in the way we shall now show, why assign
these quotations to defunct Gospels of whose contents we are perfectly
ignorant, when we have them substantially in Gospels which occupied the
same place in the Church then as now?

NOTE ON SECTION XIX.

I have asserted that the three authors, Tertullian, Clement of
Alexandria, and Irenaeus, all flourishing before the close of the second
century, quote the four Gospels, if anything, more frequently than most
modern Christian authors do. I append, in proof of this, some of the
references in these authors to the first two or three chapters of our
present Gospels.

IRENAEUS.

Matthew, i.

"And Matthew, too, recognizing one and the same Jesus Christ,
exhibiting his generation as a man from the Virgin ... says, 'The
book of the generation of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of
Abraham.' Then, that he might free our mind from suspicion regarding
Joseph, he says, 'But the birth of Christ was on this wise: when His
mother was espoused,'" &c. (iii. xvi.)

Then he proceeds to