Happens! Mark the peculiar inappropriateness of the word. It indicates our author's whereabouts, and is a beacon in the book to warn the reader. Events transpire, and they _happen_ to agree with prophetic visions which plainly foretold them! Reason being unequal to an explanation, coincidence must be resorted to. Was it an accident that, "at one particular point in history, and in one special individual, the elements of a new religious development, which, _per se_, were already extant, should have concentrated themselves in a new life?" This, says Baur, is "the wonder in the history of the origin of Christianity which no historical reflection can further analyse." Did it _happen_ that the Messiah came as was predicted centuries before?
Did Paul _happen_ to have a vision just at the time when the whole course of his life underwent a change, and from being a chief persecutor of the faith he became a chief apostle--no less an apostle than the most prominent among the Twelve? If the Saviour did not meet him on the way to Damascus he could not be an apostle; and as he was an honest man, and no impostor, could what _happened_ to him have been other than what he asserted? Baur was in a great difficulty about the matter, and said, "_No analysis, either psychological or didactic, can clear up the mystery of that act in which God revealed His Son in Paul._" Jeremiah prophesied that the Jews should return to their own land after seventy years of exile, and they _happened_ to do so!
The artful way in which the evidence from the writings of Hippolytus is disposed of is one of the most notable things in the book we are reviewing. The reader's attention is taxed to keep up with the sophistical argument, and our author finds it necessary to explain why he has been forced to go at such a length into these questions, as to risk "being very wearisome" to his readers (p. 73).
These remarks apply to a great extent to the examination of the evidence of Valentinus, described as "another Gnostic leader, who, about the year A.D. 140, came from Alexandria to Rome, and flourished till about A.D. 160." "Very little remains of the writings of this Gnostic, and we gain our only knowledge of them from a few quotations in the works of Clement of Alexandria, and some doubtful fragments preserved by others" (p. 56).