of these two teachers they would be quite similar to the reputed
life of Jesus. The moral sentiments attributed to Christ in the Gospels
were borrowed from the Jewish rabbis and the numerous cults that
flourished in that age. The birth, death, and resurrection of Christ is
quite similar to the myths of that time concerning the savior gods
Adonis, Isis, Osiris, Attis, Mithra, and a multitude of others. (_For a
full exposition of the subject, the reader is referred to E. Carpenter,
"Pagan and Christian Creeds."_)

The evidence for the point of view that Jesus was actually a historic
character is so slight that such scholars as J. M. Robertson, Prof. W.
B. Smith, Professor Drews, Dr. P. L. Couchoud, and many others deny the
historic reality of Christ on the ground that the Gospels are totally
unreliable as history, that Paul bears no witness to a human Jesus, and
that the pagan and Jewish writers are strangely silent about the Messiah
Jesus.

There are in existence only twenty-four lines from Jewish and Pagan
writers referring to Jesus. These include a reference in Tacitus'
Annals, and brief references by Suetonius and Pliny the Younger. These
three references are considered spurious by many scholars, and even if
they were all to be accepted it would mean that the total pagan
testimony as to the historicity of Jesus is confined to three very vague
and brief references written a century after the reputed time of Jesus.
The longest reference to Jesus is in the writings of the Jewish
historian, Josephus. The passage referring to Jesus in his "Jewish
Antiquities" has been considered as spurious even by conservative
scholars. A group of scholars has always deemed it very probable,
however, that this spurious reference may have replaced an unfavorable
reference to Jesus in the original. Working on this theory, Dr. Eisler
has purged of interpolations this work by a painstaking and scholarly
investigation.

However, it must be pointed out that with regard to Jesus' actual
existence, what divided the Christians and non-Christians was not the
question whether or not Jesus existed; but the vastly more pertinent
and essentially different question whether or not the obscure Galilean
carpenter, executed by a Roman governor as king of the Jews, was really
a superhuman being who had overcome death, the longed-for-savior of
mankind, foretold by the Prophets, the only-begotten Son of God Himself.

To the Jews, Jesus was indeed a heretic