Excerpt from Canon and Text of the New TestamentIn one case or another a question might emerge from the discussion that would perplex the inquiring mind. Should the testimony for a given book seem either to be weak in general or to offer special and peculiar reasons for uncertainty, the query would at once arise, whether it have had, and whether it still to-day continue to have or cease to have, a right to hold the place it actually occupies in the New Testament volume. Such doubt might even find a proper place in consideration of the rules which were either clearly seen to be, or which have long been traditionally assumed to be, the rules of the early Christians for accepting or for rejecting books. In such a case it would not be absolutely necessary to think of a false judgment, of a false subjective conception, on the part of the Christians of that day, of facts or of circumstances that stood and stand in fully the same manner at the command of the Christians then and of Christians today. For it is altogether conceivable that a scholar to-day should be able to gain a wider and more compre hensive view of the circumstances of that early time, as well as greater clearness and greater depth of insight into the mental movements of the period, than a Christian scholar of that very time could have secured. It may be possible or necessary to say that the decision at that time would have been ren dered in another sense if the judges had known what we now know.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.