Eusebius
preserves a passage from a letter which he wrote "in the closing years
of the second century," [137:3] when Victor of Rome attempted to force
the Western usage with respect to Easter on the Asiatic Christians. In
this he uses the expression "he that leaned on the bosom of the Lord,"
which occurs in the fourth Gospel. Nothing could more forcibly show the
meagreness of our information regarding the Gospels than that such a
phrase is considered of value as evidence for one of them. In fact the
slightness of our knowledge of these works is perfectly astounding when
the importance which is attached to them is taken into account.
VI.
_THE CHURCHES OF GAUL._
A severe persecution broke out in the year A.D. 177, under Marcus
Aurelius, in the cities of Vienne and Lyons, on the Rhone, and an
account of the martyrdoms which then took place was given in a letter
from the persecuted communities, addressed "to the brethren that are in
Asia and Phrygia." This epistle is in great part preserved to us by
Eusebius (_H.E._ v. 1), and it is to a consideration of its contents
that Dr. Lightfoot devotes his essay on the Churches of Gaul. But for
the sake of ascertaining clearly what evidence actually exists of the
Gospels, it would have been of little utility to extend the enquiry in
_Supernatural Religion_ to this document, written nearly a century and
a half after the death of Jesus, but it is instructive to show how
exceedingly slight is the information we possess regarding those
documents.
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