date; which cannot mean earlier than the twentythird, and may mean as late as the twenty-fourth. They had not, therefore, left Jerusalem to go into Galilee before the 23d of Nisan: for as to supposing that they might have been thither, and returned thence again, after the sixteenth and before the twenty-third, it is too absurd to require any disproof. Yet, John xxi. 1, at the time when that incident happened, the Apostles were certainly in Galilee. Consequently they must have gone thither between John xx. 29. and xxi. 1. Between these extremes, then, they must have received the command which instructed them when to proceed thither.

That they would not receive any such command before the twenty-first of Nisan, at least, may be further argued as follows. The final end of sending the message in general, besides the proposed manifestation ultimately to ensue upon it, had in view the necessity of special instructions for directing the motions of the Apostles, now that they had been deprived of the constant presence and superintendence of Christ himself. Obedience to the law would require their continuance in Jerusalem, under any circumstances, till the feast of the Azyma was over; and under the circumstances of their attendance on this occasion, perhaps more imperiously than ever. The same obedience, however, would not require their attendance later than the twenty-first of Nisan; yet St. John has shewn they were still there on the twenty-second and the twentythird. The first of these days, it is true, was a sabbath; but the second was not. They might then, have left Jerusalem on the latter, if they had not thought it their duty to remain there still. It was a special admonition, therefore, which instructed them to return to Galilee. And as they received such direc

tions when to leave Judæa, so did they probably receive similar instructions when to return thither again. They were not still there some time after the 23d of Nisan; but they were again there some time before the 26th of Jar; which was the day of the Ascension into heaven.

To this explanation of the first manifestation in St. Matthew there are two objections; which I shall proceed to consider. The first is, that the words os dè ἐπορεύοντο ἀπαγγεῖλαι τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ, xxviii. 9, by restricting the manifestation to the day of the resurrection, are at variance with it. But if these words were absent from the text, that verse would begin with kai idoù merely; the usual formulary, both of transition and of connection, which occurs so often in St. Matthew, when he would pass from one memorable particular to another, without affirming any thing of the relative order between them; of which idiom, ix. 1, 2, in his Gospel is decidedly an example.

It may be added, not because the argument requires it, but on purely independent and critical principles, that there is good reason to suspect the words in question to be an interpolation. The difficulty to which we should be reduced by retaining them, and supposing them to have come from St. Matthew himself, is almost self-evident: and I think it is such that no skill nor ingenuity, without the most unwarrantable and gratuitous assumptions, could succeed in harmonizing this Evangelist with the rest. Now they are marked in Griesbach's edition of the New Testament with the note of probable omission-which means with him only one degree removed from certain or unquestionable spuriousness. Besides Origen and Chrysostom, they are not acknowledged by Jerome or by Augustin -they are wanting in all the most ancient of the ver

sions, such as the Syriac or Peschito-the Arabicthe Persic-the Armenian-the Coptic-the old Italic *-and the Saxon-and what is more, they do not appear in the Codex Vaticanus-or the Codex Bezæ. Their absence from this last manuscript is perhaps one of the most decisive indications of their apocryphal character; for there is good reason to believe that this manuscript is among the most ancient in existence; and still more that it exhibits the state of the Vulgate text prior to any of the recensions, whether Origen's, Hesychius', or Lucian's: a state of the text abounding in extraordinary and unauthorized readings, which from time to time had crept into it, and had gradually debased more and more the purity of the original: the common source of all which, however, was some endeavour to clear up, to illustrate, to reconcile or connect the several Evangelical accounts †. The interpolation

* SS. Deperditorum Vat. Coll. iii. Pars ii. 260, there is a version of St. Matthew's Gospel, according to the editor Angelo Maio, older than that of Jerome, which he calls the Codex Claremontanus. In this, too, the words in question are wanting.

+ It is observed by Jerome, Operum i. 1425, 1426. Præfatio in iv. Evangelia; Magnus siqui

dem hic in nostris codicibus error inolevit, dum quod in eadem re alius Evangelista plus dixit, in alio quia minus putaverint, addiderunt. vel dum eumdem sensum alius aliter expressit, ille qui unum e quattuor primum legerat, ad ejus exemplum ceteros quoque æstimaverit emendandos. unde accidit ut apud nos mixta sint omnia, et in Marco plura Lucæ atque Matthæi, rursum in Matthæo plura Johannis et Marci, et in ceteris reliquo

rum quæ aliis propria sunt, inve

niantur.

The interpolation in the present instance, it is true, is nothing which could have been borrowed from any other Evangelist but it might have been borrowed from St. Matthew himself: and it was just as natural to explain an Evangelist by himself, as one Evangelist by another. It appears to me a probable conjecture that the interpolation itself was made at twice; that the words os dè éπoρεύοντο were interpolated first, and the words ἀπαγγεῖλαι τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ were interpolated next. Now this was manifestly possible; for the former might obviously have been a marginal annotation, founded on Matt. xxviii. 11. and the latter, a similar explanation, founded on Matt. xxviii. 8: and this conjecture is

in the present instance, if it is one, must plainly have had this object in view; and, consequently, had there not been the most decisive and unquestionable proof of its absence from all the extant copies of St. Matthew's Gospel, it was likely to have crept into general circulation as speedily as any; in which case it would hardly have failed to appear in the Codex Beza, which preserves so many others of the like description. So far from this, however, we might venture to say that for the first four or five centuries all the evidence, which we have to appeal to, is in favour of its nonexistence. The Alexandrine manuscript is the most ancient which exhibits it; yet there is no reason to suppose that this MS. is a better authority than the Vatican *.

strongly supported by the fact that some of the manuscript authorities, quoted by Griesbach, have the one of these, viz. the ὡς δὲ ἐπορεύοντο, but not the other, ἀπαγγεῖλαι τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτ TOU while the best authorities of every kind omit them both.

*As it is confessed that no MS. of St. Matthew's Gospel, at present in existence, is known, or even probably supposed to be of greater antiquity than the fifth or sixth century; if there are any MSS. of a later date, which contain the words in question, this is no proof that they were always a part of his Gospel. The interpolation itself might be made at a period earlier than the age of the oldest extant MS. yet not before the fifth century. In any case, it is much easier to account for its presence in a given instance, than for its absence; if the words were originally a part of St. Matthew's Gospel. Why they were ever

left out, if they always belonged to the Gospel, so as not now to appear in some MSS., and in so many of the most ancient versions, it would be difficult to say; though why they were probably introduced, even had they originally been wanting, very satisfactory reasons might be assigned.

Next to the direct testimony of MSS. in the original Greek, which still want the words in question-and that of the different versions, which, though made at so remote a period, shew that they were absent from the copies used for these translations; the quotations of the most ancient of the Fathers may be justly appealed to, in proof that they also were strangers to the existence of the words in question. In the Harmonia, or Diatessaron, ascribed to Tatian, caput 175, began without them: καὶ ἰδοὺ Ἰησοῦς ἀπήντησεν αὐταῖς : Et ecce Jesus occurrit illis. Ori

It may be urged in the next place that xxviii. 1115, which certainly belongs to the day of the resurrection itself, is placed after this appearance to the women. But this objection ought to have no weight, unless it could be previously shewn that no such phenomenon as the Trajection of facts is to be found in, or to be ex