modern science. Or he has to make
believe that the reasoning processes exhibited in the speeches of
the Acts, in certain passages of St. Paul's Epistles, or in the Old
Testament quotations in the Gospels, have a validity for the mind of the
nineteenth century, when in truth they are the imperfect, half-childish
products of the mind of the first century of quite insignificant or
indirect value to the historian of fact, of enormous value to the
historian of _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
favor 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