c. 24.--The same consideration accounts also for the paucity of
Christian writings in the first century of its aera.
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This seems the natural progress of the business; and with this the
records in our possession, and the evidence concerning them correspond.
We have remaining, in the first place, many letters of the kind above
described, which have been preserved with a care and fidelity answering
to the respect with which we may suppose that such letters would be
received. But as these letters were not written to prove the truth of
the Christian religion, in the sense in which we regard that question;
nor to convey information of facts, of which those to whom the letters
were written had been previously informed; we are not to look in them
for anything more than incidental allusions to the Christian history. We
are able, however, to gather from these documents various particular
attestations which have been already enumerated; and this is a species
of written evidence, as far as it goes, in the highest degree
satisfactory, and in point of time perhaps the first. But for our more
circumstantial information, we have, in the next place, five direct
histories, bearing the names of persons acquainted, by their situation,
with the truth of what they relate, and three of them purporting, in the
very body of the narrative, to be written by such persons; of which
books we know, that some were in the hands of those who were
contemporaries of the apostles, and that, in the age immediately
posterior to that, they were in the hands, we may say, of every one, and
received by Christians with so much respect and deference, as to be
constantly quoted and referred to by them, without any doubt of the
truth of their accounts.
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