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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: passed beyond the measure of the primitive oral tradition. Why may not an immediate witness of Jesus' ministry have felt himself called to rise once above all these traditional accounts, to draw directly from the source of his own recollections, and, while omitting all the scenes already sufficiently known, which had passed into the ordinary narrative, to trace, at a single stroke, the picture of the moments which were most marked, most impressive to his own heart, in the ministry of his Master? There was not in this, as we can well understand, any deliberate selection, any artificial distribution. The division of the evangelic matter was the natural result of the historical circumstances in which the founding of the Church was accomplished. This course of things is so simple that it is, in some sort, its own justification. The apostolic origin of the fourth Gospel may be disputed, but it cannot be denied by any one that the situation indicated is probable, and the part assigned to the author of such a writing natural. It remains to be discovered whether in this case the probable is real, and the natural true. This is precisely the question which we have to elucidate. CHAPTER SECOND. THE DISCUSSIONS RELATING TO THE AUTHENTICITY OP THE FOURTH GOSPEL. In the rapid review which is to follow, we might unite in a single series arranged chronologically all the writings, to whatever tendency they belong, in which the subject which occupies us has been treated. But it seems preferable to us, with a view to clearness, to divide the authors whom we have to enumerate into three distinct series: 1. The partisans of the entire spuriousness of our Gospel; 2. The defenders of its absolute authenticity; 3. The advocates of some intermediate position.1 Until the end of the seventee...