In 1733, appeared the first volume of the second part of the ‘Credibility of the Gospel History.’ The main object of this extensive and most valuable work is, to collect into one view the train of historical evidence by which we are authorized to receive the books of the New Testament as genuine, and, consequently, authentic and credible. If it be asked, why we receive any ancient work as in reality the production of its reputed author, our answer is, that it has been handed down to us from those times by an uninterrupted tradition; that though, perhaps, no copy of the work is actually extant which can with any probability be referred to that remote period, yet it has been described, quoted, and commented on, by a succession of intervening writers, in such a manner as to prove that the work we have in our hands, presenting the same passages which they profess to have quoted from it, is the same in all essential respects with that which existed in their time. The genuineness of the writings ascribed to these intervening witnesses, and in which their testimony is contained, is of course determined chiefly in the same manner, but partly also from the constant consent of all succeeding times, and from the correspondence of their contents with the known character of the supposed authors, and the events, opinions, and controversies, of the age
