rlier friends of
Paul, who were trying to exterminate them. Paul knew priests and
Pharisees; he knew James and John and Peter; and he never detected
that they were in collusion, yes, and to the point of martyring
Stephen--to impose on him and on the world a non-historical Jesus.
To such straits are we brought, if Jesus never existed. History
becomes pure nonsense, and knowledge of historical fact impossible;
and, it may be noted, all knowledge is abolished if history is
beyond reach.

But we are not dependent on books for our evidence of the
historicity of Jesus. The whole story of the Church implies him. He
is inwrought in every feature of its being. Every great religious
movement, of which we know, has depended on a personal impulse, and
has behind it some real, living and inspiring personality. It is
true that at a comparatively late stage of Hinduism a personal
devotion to Shri Krishna grew up, just as in the hour of decline of
the old Mediterranean paganism we find Julian the Apostate using a
devotional language to Athena at Athens that would have astonished
the contemporaries of Pericles. But Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad
stand on a very different footing from Krishna and Athena, even if
we concede the view of some scholars that Krishna was once a man,
and the contention of Euhemerus, a pre-Christian Greek, that all the
gods had once been human. If we posit that Jesus did not exist, we
shall be involved other difficulties as to the story of the Church.
Mr. F. C. Conybeare, an Oxford scholar avowedly not in allegiance to
the Christian Church, has characterized some of the reconstructions
made by contemporary anti-Christian writers as more miraculous than
the history they are trying to correct.

We come now to the Gospels; and in what follows, and throughout the
book, we shall confine ourselves the first three Gospels. Great as
has been, and must be, the influence of the Fourth Gospel, in the
present stage of historical criticism it will serve our purpose best
to postpone the use of a source which we do not fully understand.
The exact relations of history and interpretation in the Fourth
Gospel--the methods and historical outlook of the writer--cannot yet
be said to be determined. "Only those who have merely trifled with
the problems it suggests are likely to speak dogmatically upon the
subject."[3] This is not to abandon the Fourth Gospel; for it is a
document which we could not do without in early Church History,