(needless to us, or to anybody apart from the people themselves), constant occupation with questions which we can only dimly discover from Paul’s answers.  The letters are genuine letters—­written for the occasion to particular people, and not meant for us.  The stamp of genuineness is on them—­of life, real life.  The German scholar, Norden, in his Kunstprosa, says there is much in Paul that he does not understand, but he catches in him again after three hundred years that note of life that marks the great literature of Greece.  That is not easily forged.  Luther and Erasmus were right when they said—­each of them has said it, however it happened—­that Paul “spoke pure flame.”  The letters, and the theology and its influence, establish at once Paul’s claim to be a historical character.  We may then ask, how a man of his ability failed to observe that a non-historical Jesus, a pure figment, was being palmed off on him—­on a contemporary, it should be marked—­and by a combination of Jesus’ own disciples with earlier friends of Paul, who were trying to exterminate them.  Paul knew priests and Pharisees; he knew James and John and Peter; and he never detected that they were in collusion, yes, and to the point of martyring Stephen—­to impose on him and on the world a non-historical Jesus.  To such straits are we brought, if Jesus never existed.  History becomes pure nonsense, and knowledge of historical fact impossible; and, it may be noted, all knowledge is abolished if history is beyond reach.

But we are not dependent on books for our evidence of the historicity of Jesus.  The whole story of the Church implies him.  He is inwrought in every feature of its being.  Every great religious movement, of which we know, has depended on a personal impulse, and has behind it some real, living and inspiring personality.  It is true that at a comparatively late stage of Hinduism a personal devotion to Shri Krishna grew up, just as in the hour of decline of the old Mediterranean paganism we find Julian the Apostate using a devotional language to Athena at Athens that would have astonished the contemporaries of Pericles.  But Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad stand on a very different footing from Krishna and Athena, even if we concede the view of some scholars that Krishna was once a man, and the contention of Euhemerus, a pre-Christian Greek, that all the gods had once been human.  If we posit that Jesus did not exist, we shall be involved other difficulties as to the story of the Church.  Mr. F. C. Conybeare, an Oxford scholar avowedly not in allegiance to the Christian Church, has characterized some of the reconstructions made by contemporary anti-Christian writers as more miraculous than the history they are trying to correct.