Note 1 — Chapter XIX · THE HISTORY OF THE DISCUSSION

If it has taken eighty years to yield only that amount of progress, through a whole library of laborious scholarly literature, there can be no great weight left in the appeal to scholarly authority. The authority of to-day is the heretic of our grandfathers’ day. It is for the radical innovator, on the other hand, to learn the lesson which was not duly learned by his predecessors, unless it be that in some cases they were merely silenced by orthodox hostility. While many Freethinkers, probably, had come privately to the view of those intimates of Bolingbroke who are referred to by Voltaire as denying the historicity of Jesus, the two writers who first gave European vogue to the proposition, Dupuis and Volney, staked everything on the astronomical elements of the cult, and on the chief myth-analogies with Pagan religions. Their argument was both sound and important, so far as it went; but for lack of investigation on the Jewish side of the problem, and of the necessary analysis of the Gospels, they failed to make any serious impression on the scholars, especially as so many Freethinking critics, down to Reimarus and Voltaire, treated the historicity of Jesus as certain.1 And when an anonymous German writer in 1799 published a treatise on Revelation and Mythology in which, according to Strauss, he posited the whole life of Jesus as pre-conceived in Jewish myth and speculation, he made no impression on an age busily and vainly occupied with the so-called “rationalizing” of myths and miracles by reducing them to natural events misunderstood.