slanderous charges against the Gospel, I would ask them to consider how their own writers have spoken of Phaedras and Medeas and Clytemnestras, when there really was but a single individual reputed under each of these names. And what is more common, for example, than for a person to say, “The rustics also behave insolently to me,” even although it should only be one that acted rudely? In short, no real discrepancy would be created by the restriction of Luke’s report to one of the two robbers, unless the other evangelists had declared expressly that “both” the malefactors reviled the Lord; for in that case it would not be possible for us to suppose only one individual intended under the plural number. Seeing, however, that the phrase employed is “the robbers,” or “those who were crucified with Him,” and the term “both” is not added, the expression is one which might have been used if both these men had been engaged in the thing, but which might equally well be adopted if one of the two 204 had been implicated in it,—that fact being then conveyed by the use of the plural number, according to a familiar method of speech. 457 Of the Derision Ascribed to the Robbers, and of the Question Regarding the…