s were called "Worshipers of the Hung."

Little is said about Jesus in the _Talmud_, except that he was a scholar
of Joshua Ben Perachiah (who lived a century before the time assigned by
the Christians for the birth of Jesus), accompanied him into Egypt,
there learned magic, and was a seducer of the people, and was finally
put to death by being stoned, and then hung as a blasphemer.

"The conclusion is, that no clearly defined traces of the personal Jesus
remain on the surface, or beneath the surface, of Christendom. The
silence of Josephus and other secular historians may be accounted for
without falling back on a theory of hostility or contempt.[517:1] The
_Christ_-idea cannot be spared from Christian development, but the
personal Jesus, in some measure, can be."

"The person of Jesus, though it may have been immense, is indistinct.
That a great character was there may be conceded; but precisely wherein
the character was great, is left to our _conjecture_. Of the eminent
persons who have swayed the spiritual destinies of mankind, none has
more completely disappeared from the critical view. The ideal image
which Christians have, for nearly two thousand years, worshiped under
the name of Jesus, has no authentic, distinctly visible, counterpart in
history."

"His followers have gone on with the process of idealization, placing
him higher and higher; making his personal existence more and more
essential; insisting more and more urgently on the necessity of private
intercourse with him; letting the Father subside into the background, as
an 'effluence,' and the Holy Ghost lapse from individual identity into
impersonal influence, in order that he might be all in all as
Regenerator and Saviour. From age to age the personal Jesus has been
made the object of an extreme adoration, till now _faith_ in the living
Christ is the heart of the Gospel; philosophy, science, culture,
humanity are thrust resolutely aside, and the great teachers of the age
are extinguished in order that _his_ light may shine." But, as Mr.
Frothingham remarks, in "The Cradle of the Christ": "In the order of
experience, historical and biographical truth is discovered by stripping
off layer after layer of exaggeration, and going back to the statements
of contemporaries. As a rule, figures are _reduced_, not enlarged, by
criticism. The influence of admiration is recognized as distorting and
falsifying, while exalting. The process of legend-making begins
im