If 1 Tim. v. 18 were an exception, it would shew that that letter, quoting a Gospel as “Scripture,” was later than St. Paul. But it is possibly not an exception.
“Attested” is not the same as “originated.” The tradition may (possibly) have been originated by a single author: but witness, or “attestation”, was borne to its authoritative character by the three earliest Gospels, whose authors, or compilers, independently adopted it. It is therefore ‘triply attested’.
“The Fragment of Muratori,” Westcott, _Introduction to the Gospels_, p. 255.
Once more I am compelled to digress: and, this time, it is in order to meet what you must let me call a preconception of yours. You say that it appears to you “impossible that Christ, if really divine, should have been permitted by God to be worshipped as a worker of miracles for eighteen centuries, although in reality he had no power to work them.”
Is this much more than a repetition of your former objection that my views amount to “a new religion,” and that illusion, although it may abound in the history of the thoughts of mankind, can never have been permitted to connect itself with a really divine revelation? I have already in part answered these prejudices—for they are nothing more—by shewing that illusion permeates what is called “natural religion,” and by subsequently shewing that the inspired books of the Old Testament exhibit illusions in every page; not only the illusions of the chosen people, but illusions also on the part of the authors of the several books, who misinterpreted tradition so as to convert a non-miraculous into a miraculous history. But now let us deal more particularly with Christian illusions. Here I will try to show you, first, how natural and (humanly speaking) how inevitable it was that illusions should gather round the earliest Christian traditions, and how easily there might have sprung up miraculous accounts in connection with them. Then, and not till then, having done my best to dispel your natural prejudice, I will take in detail the six or seven principal miracles attributed to Christ by all the three Synoptic Evangelists, and will endeavour to show you that these accounts did actually spring up in a natural and inevitable way, after the manner of illusions, without any attempt to deceive on the part of the compilers of the Gospels. It will appear, I think, that the life and doctrine of Christ are independent of these miracles and can easily be separated from them.