, large and learned
as the body of opinion here represented is, a still larger (but less
learned) body fights desperately for the actual HISTORICITY of Jesus,
and some even still for the old view of him as a quite unique and
miraculous revelation of Godhood on earth.

(1) Die Christus-mythe: verbesserte und erweitezte Ausgabe, Jena,
1910.

(2) To which we may also add Schweitzer's Quest of the historical
Jesus (1910).

At first, no doubt, the LEGENDARY theory seems a little TOO far-fetched.
There is a fashion in all these things, and it MAY be that there is a
fashion even here. But when you reflect how rapidly legends grow up even
in these days of exact Science and an omniscient Press; how the figure
of Shakespeare, dead only 300 years, is almost completely lost in
the mist of Time, and even the authenticity of his works has become a
subject of controversy; when you find that William Tell, supposed to
have lived some 300 years again before Shakespeare, and whose deeds in
minutest detail have been recited and honored all over Europe, is almost
certainly a pure invention, and never existed; when you remember--as
mentioned earlier in this book (1)--that it was more than five hundred
years after the supposed birth of Jesus before any serious effort
was made to establish the date of that birth--and that then a purely
mythical date was chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN'S new
birth after the winter solstice, and the time of the supposed birth of
Apollo, Bacchus, and the other Sungods; when, moreover, you think for
a moment what the state of historical criticism must have been, and
the general standard of credibility, 1,900 years ago, in a country like
Syria, and among an ignorant population, where any story circulating
from lip to lip was assured of credence if sufficiently marvelous
or imaginative;--why, then the legendary theory does not seem so
improbable. There is no doubt that after the destruction of Jerusalem
(in A.D. 70), little groups of believers in a redeeming 'Christ' were
formed there and in other places, just as there had certainly existed,
in the first century B.C., groups of Gnostics, Therapeutae, Essenes and
others whose teachings were very SIMILAR to the Christian, and there was
now a demand from many of these groups for 'writings' and 'histories'
which should hearten and confirm the young and growing Churches. The
Gospels and Epistles, of which there are still extant a great abundance,
bo