Note 32 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

The sources which give information of the origin of Christianity are of such a kind that, considering the present standard of historical research, no historian would care to undertake an attempt to produce the biography of an historical Christ.32 They are, we can add, of such a nature that a real historian, who meets them without a previous conviction or expectation that he will find an historical Jesus in it, cannot for a moment doubt that he has here to do with religious fiction,33 with myth in an historical form, which does not essentially differ from other myths and legends—such as perhaps the legend of Tell.