he thinks, were versions of an "original Gospel," a kind of rough
outline of Christ's life and discourses, put together without method or
plan, and one of these would be the "Memoirs of the Apostles," of which
Justin Martyr speaks. The Gospels, as we have them, are careful
compilations made from these earlier histories, and we notice that, at
the end of the second, and the beginning of the third, centuries, the
leaders of the Church endeavour to establish the authority of the four
more methodically arranged Gospels, so as to check the reception of
other Gospels, which were relied upon by heretics in their
controversies.

Strauss gives a careful _resume_ of the various theories of the
formation of the Gospels held by learned men, and shows how the mythic
theory was gradually developed and strengthened; "according to George,
_mythus_ is the creation of a fact out of an idea" ("Life of Jesus,"
Strauss, vol. i., p. 42; ed. 1846), and the mythic theory supposes that
the ideas of the Messiah were already in existence, and that the story
of the Gospels grew up by the translation of these ideas into facts:
"Many of the legends respecting him [Jesus] had not to be newly
invented; they already existed in the popular hope of the Messiah,
having been mostly derived, with various modifications, from the Old
Testament, and had merely to be transferred to Jesus, and accommodated
to his character and doctrines. In no case could it be easier for the
person who first added any new feature to the description of Jesus, to
believe himself its genuineness, since his argument would be: Such and
such things must have happened to the Messiah; Jesus was the Messiah;
therefore, such and such things happened to him" (Ibid, pp. 81, 82). "It
is not, however, to be imagined that any one individual seated himself
at his table to invent them out of his own head, and write them down as
he would a poem; on the contrary, these narratives, like all other
legends, were fashioned by degrees, by steps which can no longer be
traced; gradually acquired consistency, and at length received a fixed
form in our written Gospels" (Ibid, p. 35). From the considerations here
adduced--the lack of quotations from our Gospels in the earliest
Christian writers, both orthodox and heretical; the accusations against
each made by the other of introducing chants and modifications in the
Gospels; the facility with which MSS. were altered before the
introduction of printing; the