CHAPTER II.
There is satisfactory evidence that many, professing to be original
witnesses of the Christian miracles, passed their lives in labours,
dangers and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the
accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief
of those accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same motives,
to new rules of conduct.
After thus considering what was likely to happen, we are next to inquire
how the transaction is represented in the several accounts that have
come down to us. And this inquiry is properly preceded by the other,
forasmuch as the reception of these accounts may depend in part on the
credibility of what they contain.
The obscure and distant view of Christianity, which some of the heathen
writers of that age had gained, and which a few passage in their
remaining works incidentally discover to us, offers itself to our notice
in the first place: because, so far as this evidence goes, it is the
concession of adversaries; the source from which it is drawn is
unsuspected. Under this head, a quotation from Tacitus, well known to
every scholar, must be inserted, as deserving particular attention.
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