him, for flesh and blood had not revealed it to him, while in the fourth Gospel, ‘flesh and blood,’ in the person of Andrew, reveal to Peter that the Christ is found; and there seems little praise due to Peter for a confession which had been made two or three years earlier by Andrew, Nathanael, John Baptist, and the Samaritans.  Contradiction can scarcely be more direct.  In John vii.  Jesus owns that the Jews know his birthplace (28), and they state (41, 42) that he comes from Galilee, while Christ should be born at Bethlehem.  Matthew and Luke distinctly say Jesus was born at Bethlehem; but here Jesus confesses the right knowledge of those who attribute his birthplace to Galilee, instead of setting their difficulty at rest by explaining that though brought up at Nazareth he was born in Bethlehem.  But our writer was apparently ignorant of their accounts ("According to St John,” by Annie Besant.  Scott Series, pp. 11-14, ed. 1873).  These are but a few of the contradictions in the Gospels, which compel us to reject them as historical narratives.

(3) The fact that the story of the hero, the doctrines, the miracles, were current long before the supposed dates of the Gospels, etc.  There are two mythical theories as to the growth of the story of Jesus, which demand our attention; the first, that of which Strauss is the best known exponent, which acknowledges the historical existence of Jesus, but regards him as the figure round which has grown a mythus, moulded by the Messianic expectations of the Jews:  the second, which is indifferent to his historical existence, and regards him as a new hero of the ancient sun-worship, the successor of Mithra, Krishna, Osiris, Bacchus, etc.  To this school, it matters not whether there was a Jesus of Nazareth or not, just as it matters not whether a Krishna or an Osiris had an historical existence or not; it is Christ, the Sun-god, not Jesus, the Jewish peasant, whom they find worshipped in Christendom, and who is, therefore, the object of their interest.

According to the first theory, whatever was expected of the Messiah has been attributed to Jesus.  “When not merely the particular nature and manner of an occurrence is critically suspicious, its external circumstances represented as miraculous and the like; but where likewise the essential substance and groundwork is either inconceivable in itself, or is in striking harmony with some Messianic idea of the Jews of that age, then not the particular alleged course and mode of the transaction only, but the entire occurrence must be regarded as unhistorical” (Strauss’ “Life of Jesus,” vol. i., p. 94).  The mythic theory accepts an historical groundwork for many of the stories about Jesus, but it does not seek to explain the miraculous by attenuating it into the natural—­as by explaining the story of the transfiguration to have been developed from the fact of Jesus meeting secretly two men, and from the brilliancy of the sunlight dazzling the eyes of the