Note 2 — Chapter I · THE APPROACH

Myth-theories, sound or unsound, are the attempts of students who find the record incredible as history to think out, in the light of the documents and of comparative mythology and hierology, the process by which it came to be produced; and even as all myth is but a form of traditionary error, so any attempt to trace its growth runs the risk of error. It is one thing to show, for instance, that the Pentateuch cannot have been written by “Moses,” seen to be a non-historical figure: it is another thing to settle how the books were really made. In such cases, the “something in the place” of the tradition is to be ascertained only after long and patient investigation and counter-criticism. So with the investigation of the fabulous history of early Rome. After several scholars had set forth grounded doubts, the problem was ably and systematically handled by the French freethinker Louis de Beaufort in 1738. Early in the nineteenth century, Niebuhr, confidently undertaking “with the help of God” to get at the truth, and falsely disparaging Beaufort’s work as wholly “sceptical,” effected a reconstruction which has since been found to be in large measure unsound, though long acquiesced in by English students.2 In such matters there is really no finality. If well-documented history must in every age be rewritten, no less inevitable is the re-writing of that which is reached only by processes of inference. And the gospel problem is the hardest of all. Still more than in the case of the Pentateuch problem, many revisions will probably be needed before a generally satisfactory solution is reached.