Note 6 — PREFACE TO THE FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS

While criticism of the Gospel documents is advancing more boldly and always leaving in existence less of an historical Jesus, the number of works in popular religious literature intended to glorify Jesus the man grows enormously. These endeavour to make up for the deficiency in certain historical material by sentimental phrases and the deep tone of conviction; indeed, the rhetoric which is disseminated with this design6 seems to find more sympathy in proportion as it works with less historical restraint. And yet learning as such has long come to the point when the historical Jesus threatens to disappear from under its hands. The latest results in the province of Oriental mythology and religion, the advances in the comparative history of religion, that are associated in England with the names of Frazer and Robertson especially, and in Germany with those of Winckler, Jeremias, Gunkel, Jensen, &c., have so much increased our knowledge of the religious position of Nearer Asia in the last century before Christ, that we are no longer obliged to rely exclusively upon the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament for the rise of Christianity.7 The critical and historical theology of Protestantism has itself thrown so deep a light upon the origins of the Christian religion that the question as to the historical existence of Jesus loses all paradox which hitherto may have attached to it in the eyes of many. So, too, Protestant theology no longer has any grounds for becoming excited if the question is answered in a sense opposed to its own answer.