e. it reduces the question to this, whether we can
depend or not upon the probity of the relater? which is a considerable
advance in our present argument; for an express attempt to deceive, in
which case alone particularity can appear without truth, is charged upon
the evangelists by few. If the historian acknowledge himself to have
received his intelligence from others, the particularity of the
narrative shows, prima facie, the accuracy of his inquiries, and the
fulness of his information. This remark belongs to St. Luke's history.
Of the particularity which we allege, many examples may be found in all
the Gospels. And it is very difficult to conceive that such numerous
particularities as are almost everywhere to be met with in the
Scriptures should be raised out of nothing, or be spun out of the
imagination without any fact to go upon.*
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* "There is always some truth where there are considerable
particularities related, and they always seem to bear some proportion to
one another. Thus, there is a great want of the particulars of time,
place, and persons in Manetho's account of the Egyptian Dynasties,
Etesias's of the Assyrian Kings, and those which the technical
chronologers have given of the ancient kingdoms of Greece; and,
agreeably thereto, the accounts have much fiction and falsehood, with
some truth: whereas Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, and
Caesar's of the War in Gaul, in both which the particulars of time,
place, and persons are mentioned, are universally esteemed true to a
great degree of exactness.
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