passage 7 of 20 · Letter > Book, but the Book itself was unknown to many." This mother church had not only a book of Acts of the apostles different from ours, but also a gospel of their own, called the gospel of the twelve apostles, which is supposed by the learned in important particulars to differ from ours.
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According to Augustine however, this gospel was publickly read in the churches as authentick for 300 years. This gospel in the opinion of
Grabe, Mills, and other learned men, was written before the gospels now received as canonical. See Toland's Nazarenus.
- The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, those to the Ephesians, and
Colossians, are nearly proved to be apocryphal by Evanson, and about the rest there are some suspicious circumstances. You refer the reader of your Sermons in that note to Paley's Evidences, 9th chapter, for evidence for the authenticity of the rest of the gospels; but if the reader goes there he will find, that all the testimony Paley quotes for the first 200 years after Christ except that of Papias, Irenaeus, and
Tertullian, (the value of whose testimony to the authenticity of the gospels, has been considered in the 16th ch. of my work; and which may further appear from these circumstances, that Irenaeus considered the
HKB