Note 12 — Chapter I · THE APPROACH

It is thoroughly characteristic of the spirit in which some champions of the biographical view work that, in sequel to the falsification of the problem just noted, we have from them the plea that if we give up the historicity of Jesus, we must give up that of Solon and Pythagoras; and that “obviously Jesus has a far larger chance to have really existed than Solon.”12 Such a use of the conception of “chance” reveals the kind of dialectic we are dealing with. One recalls Newman’s derision of the Paleyan position that the “chances” were in favour of there being a God. “If we deny all authenticity to Jesus’s teaching,” we are asked, “what of Solon’s traditional lore?” Well, what of it? Is it to be authenticated by the threat that it must go if we deny that the Sermon on the Mount is a sermon at all? The fragments of Solon’s verse purport to have been written by him: have we anything purporting to have been written by Jesus? The very fact that we have only fragments of Solon is in itself an argument in favour of their genuineness: to Jesus any evangelist could ascribe any sayings at will.13