Note 3 — Chapter VII · THE ALLEGED CONSENSUS OF SCHOLARS

These may suffice to illustrate the point. Few of the other experts escape Dalman’s Ithuriel spear; and as he frankly confesses past blunders of his own, it is not to be doubted that some of the others have returned his thrusts.3 Supposing then that this body of experts, so many of them deep in Aramaic, so opposed to each other on so many issues clearly within the field of their special studies, were to unite in affirming the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, what would their consensus signify? Simply that they were agreed in affirming the unknown, the improbable, and the unprovable, while they disputed over the known. Their special studies do not give them the slightest special authority to pronounce upon such an issue. It is one of historic inference upon a mass of data which they among them have made common property so far as it was not so already, in the main documents and in previous literature. Dalman, who takes for granted the historicity of Jesus and apparently of the tradition in general, pronounces (p. 9) that