SCAURUS ON CHRIST’S BIRTH
On the following morning my indignation against Mark began to seem certainly hasty and possibly unjust. True, his book was apparently without beginning or end, disfigured by superfluities and omissions, and extraordinarily disproportioned. But what if he had no time to revise it? What if it was a collection of notes about Christ’s mighty works and short sayings, which he was intending to combine with a collection of Christ’s doctrine when he died—died perhaps suddenly, perhaps was put to death? I tried to find excuses for his work. Still, I could not deny that, if Scaurus was right as to the story of the fig-tree, the earliest of the evangelists shewed a deplorable inability to distinguish the things that preceded Christ’s resurrection from the things that follow
