r some new revelation or inspiration--did more or less automatically
act and react upon each other, and by the general conditions prevailing
were modified, till they ultimately combined and took united shape
in the movement which we call Christianity, but which only--as I have
said--narrowly escaped being called Mithraism--so nearly related and
closely allied were these cults with each other.

At this point it will naturally be asked: "And where in this scheme of
the Genesis of Christianity is the chief figure and accredited leader of
the movement--namely Jesus Christ himself--for to all appearance in the
account here given of the matter he is practically non-existent or a
negligible quantity?" And the question is a very pertinent one, and very
difficult to answer. "Where is the founder of the Religion?"--or to
put it in another form: "Is it necessary to suppose a human and visible
Founder at all?" A few years ago such a mere question would have been
accounted rank blasphemy, and would only--if passed over--have been
ignored on account of its supposed absurdity. To-day, however, owing to
the enormous amount of work which has been done of late on the
subject of Christian origins, the question takes on quite a different
complexion. And from Strauss onwards a growingly influential and learned
body of critics is inclined to regard the whole story of the Gospels as
LEGENDARY. Arthur Drews, for instance, a professor at Karlsruhe, in his
celebrated book The Christ-Myth, (1) places David F. Strauss as first
in the myth field--though he allows that Dupuis in L'origine de tous
les cultes (1795) had given the clue to the whole idea. He then mentions
Bruno Bauer (1877) as contending that Jesus was a pure invention
of Mark's, and John M. Robertson as having in his Christianity and
Mythology (1900) given the first thoroughly reasoned exposition of the
legendary theory; also Emilio Bossi in Italy, who wrote Jesu Christo
non e mai esistito, and similar authors in Holland, Poland, and other
countries, including W. Benjamin Smith, the American author of The
Pre-christian Jesus (1906), and P. Jensen in Das Gilgamesch Epos in
den Welt-literatur (1906), who makes the Jesus-story a variant of the
Babylonian epic, 2000 B.C. A pretty strong list! (2) "But," continues
Drews, "ordinary historians still ignore all this." Finally, he
dismisses Jesus as "a figure swimming obscurely in the mists of
tradition." Nevertheless I need hardly remark that