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fore Pilate, he persisted in an indecent, sullen silence, till the High Priest adjured him, by the living God, to say, whether he was the predicted Christ, or not; that then he acknowledged he was, and added, "neverthe"less, from this time forth, shall ye see the son "of man sitting on the right hand of power, " and coming in the clouds of heaven :" a prediction absolutely false, because the Jewish nation, from that time to this, have never seen any such thing, but still remain incredulous to his being the promised Christ. Upon his speaking thus, however, the author makes the High Priest rend his clothes, through indignation at the blasphemy of the speech, which I believe no man else can discover in it; and tells us, the members of the council, after pronouncing him guilty of death, amused themselves till morning, in putting on him all sorts of contemptuous, ludicrous, and wanton indignities and abuse; and that then, having consulted together in what manner he should be put to death, "they bound him, and led "him away, and delivered him to Pontius "Pilate the Governor;" that, in the mean while, Peter was not admitted into the council chamber, as we may easily suppose, but as" he sat without in the palace," where it

was impossible for our Lord to look upon him, as Luke assures us he did, three different persons successively challenged him as being a follower of Jesus; and that he was not contented with barely denying any knowledge of his master, but accompanied his denial with oaths and imprecations, as unworthy the character of one chosen to be an Apostle, as they are contradictory to the account given us by Luke.

In the beginning of the twenty-seventh chapter, the author informs us, that when Judas saw that the Jewish council had con demned our Lord to die, (though he must have known from the first, when he cove manted with them to betray him into their hands, that they could have no other intent,) he repented, brought again the price of his treachery, threw the money down in the temple, and went and hanged himself; and that the priests did not put the money into the treasury of the temple, because it was the price of blood; but purchased with it the potter's field, to bury strangers in, which, says the author, "was called the field of blood "unto this day" an expression denoting that a long interval of time had elapsed between that event and the date of his history, not

eight or nine years only, the period at which Matthew is said to have written. Hereby, he tells us, they accomplished a prophecy of Jeremiah; but, like the prophecy of the Messiah's being called a Nazarene, quoted in the second chapter, it is no where to be found in Jeremiah, nor in the writings of any other prophet of the Old Testament. Luke, on the contrary, in the first chapter of the Acts, assures us, that Judas, far from repenting and restoring the money he had received, having traiterously abandoned his apostleship, . that he might go to a place peculiarly his own, purchased some land with the reward of his iniquity; and that he was afterwards killed upon the land he had bought by the violence of a fall, which was so great as to force out his very bowels; that the circumstance was well known to all the inhabitants of Jerusa lem, who from thence, or on account of the nature of the purchase money, or perhaps from both together, denominated it the field of blood. It is not possible to draw up two stories of the same thing more directly contradictory to each other than these two; one of them, therefore, must necessarily be a fic-tion, and a shameful falsehood. Let the reader judge to which author the imputation most

justly belongs. From a Note of the late learned Bishop of Rochester, upon this passage in the Acts, it appears, that the irreconcilable contradiction of these two accounts struck him so forcibly, that he infers from it, as well as from other circumstances, which he does not specify, but which are sufficiently obvious to an attentive and unprejudiced reader, that Matthew's Gospel was not written till after the publication of both the histories of Luke; and his inference is certainly just for since Luke professes to write of every thing as it had been delivered to them by the apostles, he never could have so flatly contradicted the written account of an apostle. But if this Gospel of Matthew was published later than the fifth or sixth year of Nero's reign, as it must have been, to make it posterior to Luke's second history, the testimony of all the early writers, who inform us it was prior to Luke's Gospel, must be false; and not the slightest evidence of any kind remains, that Matthew ever wrote an Evangelical History. Besides, as Luke, we have seen, lived with Matthew and all the other apostles at Jerusalem; and, on account of the election of Matthias to supply his place, the story of Judas, must have been often mentioned amongst them, he could

not be ignorant of the circumstances with which Matthew himself related the story; and it is equally improbable that he should contradict his oral as his written account of this transaction; at the same time, no man can suppose, that an apostle of Jesus Christ, or any other person, who had the least regard to truth, or to his own character, could deliver a verbal account of any fact to Luke and the other disciples, in one manner, and, in writing afterwards, relate the same fact in another, utterly inconsistent with it.

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I omit to animadvert upon the dream and extraordinary interference of Pilate's wife; as also upon the improbability of the Governor's washing his hands before the multitude, to cleanse himself from the guilt of the innocent blood of a just person, which he was going to shed; and upon the horrid imprecation of the people upon themselves and their posterity, which are all peculiar to this writer. But I cannot forbear remarking, that as Pilate was convinced of our Lord's innocence and inof fensive behaviour, and sacrificed him to the clamorous entreaties of the Jews, against his own judgement and inclination, it is not at all consistent with the polished humanity of the Romans, that he should have subjected him

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