Much of this peculiar matter in each case bears an individual and characteristic stamp.

The opening chapters of the first and third Synoptics evidently contain two distinct and independent traditions.

So independent indeed are they, that the negative school of critics maintain them to be irreconcilable, and the attempts to harmonise them have certainly not been completely successful [Endnote 101:1].

These differences, however, show what rich quarries of tradition were open to the enquirer in the first age of Christianity, and how readily he might add to the stores already accumulated by his predecessors.

But this state of things did not last long.