(xx. 30) says that Jesus healed two blind men when He was coming out of Jericho; St. Mark (x. 46) says He healed only one; and St. Luke (xviii. 35) says that only one was healed, and that too, not when Jesus was going out of the city, but before He entered it.

C. There is no contradiction here, though the three accounts differ somewhat from one another. If you look again at St. Mark's account you will perceive that he does not say that only one was healed, though he mentions Bartimaeus by name. Putting St. Mark's account and that of St. Luke together, we arrive at an agreement with St. Matthew's account in the number of those healed at Jericho on that occasion. Beyond this we cannot at this distance of time go. St. Matthew may have spoken of the two together for the sake of brevity, or (as St. Mark does not say that Bartimaeus was alone) Christ may have healed one as He entered and two as He came out of the city. But the very fact of there being a difference, though not an irreconcilable one, between the three accounts, shows the absence of collusion, and that we have three independent testimonies to the fact of the occurrence of the miracle at Jericho. If a judge finds that three witnesses agree with one another exactly, he suspects collusion: but if he finds that they agree on the main point, though differing in reference to details, he gives far more weight to their evidence. You have here adduced a very strong proof that the Bible has not been corrupted. For many

hundreds of years assailants of the Bible have dwelt upon this and other similar differences between different Gospels, and yet we have never changed a single word to endeavour to bring the accounts into complete accordance with one another.

48. M. Again, it is hard to reconcile with one another the varying accounts of Christ's appearances after His Resurrection. Moreover, we have two contradictory accounts of the death of the traitor Judas, and differences as to the number of the angels seen at the sepulchre.

C. The difficulty in each case arises from our want of full knowledge of all the circumstances. It is easy to show theoretically that the varying accounts are not really contradictory. But the important point is that the very divergencies in the different narratives prevent the suspicion of collusion ¹, and that our retaining them in the text of the Gospels proves that we have not ventured to change the text in order to get rid of difficulties ².

49. M. Again, the Gospel of St. Matthew tells us that Herod died when Jesus was still an infant in Egypt (ii. 19), while St. Luke (xxiii. 8) assures us that Herod was alive more than thirty years later,