have misunderstood and misrepresented him. It must be added that a similar presumption of truth attaches to the record of faults or blunders in the conduct of the disciples, whose characters their disciples were likewise anxious to exalt.
In the fifth place, it is a reasonable supposition that the less complete the outline of the life of Jesus contained in any Gospel, the more authentic is that Gospel. Gaps in the story told by one writer which, in another writer, have been filled up, are strong indications of actual gaps in the life as known to the first Christians. While it is true that the compiler of one Gospel might, from ignorance or from design, omit some historical fact which the compiler of another would insert, yet it is unlikely that whole years would be passed over in silence, or remarkable events left out, where any genuine knowledge of those years or those events was possessed by the biographer. But nothing is more natural than that a space, subsequently felt to be a serious and almost intolerable void, should in process of time be removed by the exercise of the imagination craving to fill the empty canvas with living figures. Nor even where there is no positive blank, is it surprising that many actions conformable to the notion formed of Christ should be fitted into his career, and made to take their places alongside of others of a more unquestionable nature. We shall therefore prefer the scantiest account of the life of Jesus to the fullest.
A careful comparison of the first three Gospels—which alone can pretend to an historical character—will establish the fact that the second, ascribed to Mark, is the most trustworthy, or to speak accurately, the least untrustworthy, according to these canons. For in the first place, it absolutely omits many of the most noteworthy events comprehended by the other Gospels in the life of Jesus. Secondly, it sometimes gives a natural version of a circumstance which appears in the others as supernatural; or a comparatively simple version of a circumstance which the others have converted into something mystical. It surpasses the others in statements, and still more in omissions, implying divergence from well-established subsequent tradition; and in general the far greater scantiness of detail, the failure to fill up blanks as the other Evangelists have done, the almost fragmentary character of this Gospel, are points telling largely in
