t a few words in the sand when the Jews brought a
sinful woman before him to accuse her; and we know not what these words
were. We have no record that he ever authorized any one else to write
anything for, or about him. We have three short biographies of him
that were written anywhere from fifty to eighty years after his death,
the exact date of neither being known. The authors of two of
these--Mark and Luke--it is admitted were not Apostles; and there is no
evidence that either of them ever knew Jesus in his lifetime. It is
admitted that each of them got all his information from another, and
that one of them got his information from a person--Paul--who himself
never knew Jesus in the flesh. It is admitted that the
other--Matthew--as we now have it, is not the original writing of the
Apostle of that name; that the original is entirely lost, and no one
knows what additions or eliminations it underwent in its translation
and transcription into another language. Years later a fourth
biography appeared by an unknown author,--tradition being the only
evidence that it was written by the Apostle John--so entirely different
in its general make-up and contents, that but for the _name_ of its
subject and a very few passages in it, no one would ever take it to be
about the same person that formed the subject of the other three.

When these four are taken together, and all repetitions and
duplications are eliminated, it would leave us with a small pamphlet of
some sixty or seventy pages as our only record of this most remarkable
character of all history. None of the epistolary writings throw any
light on the life, doings, sayings or personality of Jesus. They only
deal with deductions drawn from or based upon it. When we add to this
the fact that at least fifty years had elapsed, after the events
described had happened, before a line of it--at least in its present
form--was written; and that in an age when few people could write and
no accurate records were preserved, and when those that did then write,
wrote only from memory or tradition; and when we further consider the
varying and often very different accounts given by the different
writers of the events they describe, differences in both the doings and
sayings of Jesus, altho these are mostly only matters of minor detail,
yet we become more and more convinced that we have no means of knowing
for certain just what Jesus did; nor whether or not he uttered the
exact words