e or no
historic reality. So Strauss, Eichorn, De Wette, and their disciples
here, attempt to set aside the New Testament. In plain English, it is a
collection of forgeries.

These assertions are absurd. In the hundred years between the death of
the apostles, and the beginning of the third century, there was not time
to form a mythology. The times of Trajan's persecution, and that of the
philosophic Aurelius, and the busy bustling age of Severus, were not the
times for such a business. Bigoted Jews would not, and could not, have
made such a character as Jesus of Nazareth; and the philosophers of that
day, Celsus and Porphyry, for instance, hated it when presented to them
as heartily as either Strauss or Paine. There were not wanting thousands
of enemies, able and willing, to expose such a forgery.

The aspect and character of the gospel narrative are totally unlike
those of mythologies. Hear the verdict of one who confessedly stands at
the head of the roll of oriental historians: "In no single respect--if
we except the fact that it is miraculous--has that story a mythical
character. It is a single story, told without variations; whereas myths
are fluctuating and multiform: it is blended inextricably with the civil
history of the times, which it everywhere reports with extraordinary
accuracy; whereas myths distort or supersede civil history: it is full
of prosaic detail, which myths studiously eschew: it abounds with
practical instruction of the simplest and purest kind; whereas myths
teach by allegory. Even in its miraculous element it stands to some
extent in contrast with all mythologies, where the marvelous has ever a
predominant character of grotesqueness which is absent from New
Testament miracles. (This Strauss himself admits, _Leben Jesu_, 1-67.)
Simple earnestness, fidelity, painstaking accuracy, pure love of truth,
are the most patent characteristics of the New Testament writers, who
evidently deal with facts, not with fancies, and are employed in
relating a history, not in developing an idea. They write that 'we may
know the certainty of the things which are most surely believed' in
their day. They 'bear record of what they have seen and heard.' I know
not how stronger words could have been used to prevent the notion of
that plastic, growing myth which Strauss conceives to have been in
apostolic times."[69]

The character of Christ exhibited in the Gospels is the contrary of that
of the heroes of mythology;