_testimony_ and its varieties.'

* * * * *

'Suppose, for instance, before I begin to deal with the
Christian story, and the earliest Christian development, I
try to make out beforehand what are the moulds, the channels
into which the testimony of the time must run. I look for
these moulds, of course, in the dominant ideas, the
intellectual preconceptions and preoccupations existing when
the period begins.

'In the first place, I shall find present in the age which
saw the birth of Christianity, as in so many other ages, a
universal preconception in favour of miracle--that is to say,
of deviations from the common norm of experience, governing
the work of _all_ men of _all_ schools. Very well, allow for
it then. Read the testimony of the period in the light of it.
Be prepared for the inevitable differences between it and the
testimony of your own day. The witness of the time is not
true, nor, in the strict sense, false. It is merely
incompetent, half-trained, pre-scientific, but all through
perfectly natural. The wonder would have been to have had a
life of Christ without miracles. The air teems with them. The
East is full of Messiahs. Even a Tacitus is superstitious.
Even a Vespasian works miracles. Even a Nero cannot die, but
fifty years after his death is still looked for as the
inaugurator of a millennium of horror. The Resurrection is
partly invented, partly imagined, partly ideally true--in any
case wholly intelligible and natural, as a product of the
age, when once you have the key of that age.

'In the next place, look for the preconceptions that have a
definite historical origin; those, for instance, flowing from
the pre-Christian, apocalyptic literature of the Jews, taking
the Maccabean legend of Daniel as the centre of
inquiry--those flowing from Alexandrian Judaism and the
school of Philo--those flowing from the Palestinian schools
of exegesis. Examine your synoptic gospels, your Gospel of
St. John, your Apocalypse, in the light of these. You have no
other chance of understanding them. But so examined, they
fall into place, become explicable and rational; such
material as science can make full use of. The doctrine of the
Divinity of Christ, Christian eschatology, and Christian
views of prophecy will also have found _th