treated
on exactly the same principles. To say abruptly that, because Luke
was a Christian and Suetonius a pagan, Luke is not worthy of the
credence given to Suetonius, is a line of approach that will most
commend itself to those who have read neither author. To gain a real
knowledge of historical truth, the historian's methods must be
slower and more cautious, he must know his author intimately--his
habits of mind, his turns of style, his preferences, his gifts for
seeing the real issue--and always the background, and the ways of
thinking that prevail in the background. An ancient writer is not
necessarily negligible because he records, and perhaps believes,
miracles or marvels or omens which a modern would never notice. It
is bad criticism that has made a popular legend of the unreliable
character of Herodotus. As our knowledge of antiquity grows, and we
become able to correct our early impressions, the credit of
Herodotus rises steadily, and to-day those who study him most
closely have the highest opinion of him.

We may, then, without prejudice, take the evidence of Paul of Tarsus
on the historicity of Jesus, and examine it. If we are challenged as
to the genuineness of Paul's epistles, let us tell our questioner to
read them. Novels have been written in the form of correspondence;
but Paul's letters do not tell us all that a novelist or a forger
would--there are endless gaps, needless references to unknown
persons (needless to us, or to anybody apart from the people
themselves), constant occupation with questions which we can only
dimly discover from Paul's answers. The letters are genuine
letters--written for the occasion to particular people, and not
meant for us. The stamp of genuineness is on them--of life, real
life. The German scholar, Norden, in his Kunstprosa, says there is
much in Paul that he does not understand, but he catches in him
again after three hundred years that note of life that marks the
great literature of Greece. That is not easily forged. Luther and
Erasmus were right when they said--each of them has said it, however
it happened--that Paul "spoke pure flame." The letters, and the
theology and its influence, establish at once Paul's claim to be a
historical character. We may then ask, how a man of his ability
failed to observe that a non-historical Jesus, a pure figment, was
being palmed off on him--on a contemporary, it should be marked--and
by a combination of Jesus' own disciples with ea