I had imagined that no one who had read my preceding papers, could entertain a doubt as to my position in respect of the main issue, as it has been stated and restated by my opponent: 

an Agnosticism which knows nothing of the relation of man to God must not only refuse belief to our Lord’s most undoubted teaching, but must deny the reality of the spiritual convictions in which He lived.[70]

That is said to be “the simple question which is at issue between us,” and the three testimonies to that teaching and those convictions selected are the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Story of the Passion.

My answer, reduced to its briefest form, has been:  In the first place, the evidence is such that the exact nature of the teachings and the convictions of Jesus is extremely uncertain; so that what ecclesiastics are pleased to call a denial of them may be nothing of the kind.  And, in the second place, if Jesus taught the demonological system involved in the Gadarene story—­if a belief in that system formed a part of the spiritual convictions in which he lived and died—­then I, for my part, unhesitatingly refuse belief in that teaching, and deny the reality of those spiritual convictions.  And I go further and add, that, exactly in so far as it can be proved that Jesus sanctioned the essentially pagan demonological theories current among the Jews of his age, exactly in so far, for me, will his authority in any matter touching the spiritual world be weakened.

With respect to the first half of my answer, I have pointed out that the Sermon on the Mount, as given in the first Gospel, is, in the opinion of the best critics, a “mosaic work” of materials derived from different sources, and I do not understand that this statement is challenged.  The only other Gospel—­the third—­which contains something like it, makes, not only the discourse, but the circumstances under which it was delivered, very different.  Now, it is one thing to say that there was something real at the bottom of the two discourses—­which is quite possible; and another to affirm that we have any right to say what that something was, or to fix upon any particular phrase and declare it to be a genuine utterance.  Those who pursue theology as a science, and bring to the study an adequate knowledge of the ways of ancient historians, will find no difficulty in providing illustrations of my meaning.  I may supply one which has come within range of my own limited vision.

In Josephus’s “History of the Wars of the Jews” (chap, xix.), that writer reports a speech which he says Herod made at the opening of a war with the Arabians.  It is in the first person, and could naturally be supposed by the reader to be intended for a true version of what Herod said.  In the “Antiquities,” written some seventeen years later, the same writer gives another report, also in the first person, of Herod’s speech on the same occasion.  This second oration is twice