When we open these ancient volumes, we discover in them marks of truth,
whether we consider each in itself, or collate them with one another.
The writers certainly knew something of what they were writing about,
for they manifest an acquaintance with local circumstances, with the
history and usages of the times, which could belong only to an
inhabitant of that country, living in that age. In every narrative we
perceive simplicity and undesignedness; the air and the language of
reality. When we compare the different narratives together, we find them
so varying as to repel all suspicion of confederacy; so agreeing under
this variety as to show that the accounts had one real transaction for
their common foundation; often attributing different actions and
discourses to the Person whose history, or rather memoirs of whose
history, they profess to relate, yet actions and discourses so similar
as very much to bespeak the same character: which is a coincidence that,
in such writers as they were, could only be the consequence of their
writing from fact, and not from imagination.
These four narratives are confined to the history of the Founder of the
religion, and end with his ministry.
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