PREFACE.

neither the Acts nor the Epistles could have been known to the Church in the time of Addai. In another place it is recorded that a large multitude assembled day by day for prayer and to read the Diatessaron a harmony of the four Gospels of Tatian, which was not compiled till about the middle of the second century. The paragraph in p. 50 of the translation, about the ordination of Palut by Serapion, Bishop of Antioch, is contradicted in p. 39, where it is said that Palut was ordained an elder by Addai. The narrative of the portrait of our Lord painted by Hannan, which follows immediately after Abgar's letter, and our Lord's reply is not alluded to by Eusebius, although he has followed the Syriac both before and after this statement. This circumstance shows that, if it formed a part of the Syriac text in his time, he did not believe in the truth of what was related. Other passages are met with which contain internal evidence that they did not form a part of the original text. The story of the invention of the cross by Protonice or, as the name is elsewhere written, Petronice must have been written by some person who was very ignorant of the Roman history of the time when the apostles were living. This is obviously an interpolation, and this and several other passages carry on the face of them their own condemnation.

A question arises at what time or times might these interpolations have been introduced into the document. They do not appear to be so many, but that we may fairly assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary,