Note 10 — Chapter II · THE CENTRAL MYTH

But even as regards the trials there is wide divergence among the biographical school. For instance, Mr. Charles Stanley Lester, an ex-clergyman of Milwaukee, in his interesting work The Historic Jesus,10 entirely rejects the Sanhedrim trial, and likewise the gospel account of the Pilate trial, but finds “probable history” in the view that the priests privately persuaded Pilate to condemn Jesus on their accusation without any trial.11 Again, the anonymous author of The Four Gospels as Historical Records,12 an eminently keen, searching, and candid critic, rejects alike the Judas story, the trial before the Sanhedrim, and the trial before Pilate,13 as he does most of the other items of the gospel history, yet throughout seems to take for granted the historicity of the “Great Teacher,” the “Master,” never even raising that issue save in protesting that he has absolutely nothing to say against him.14 So completely does he destroy the whole narrative, indeed, that he can hardly be said to maintain the thesis of historicity, but he never calls it in question: he merely destroys the biography. Mr. Lester, on the other hand, confidently rejects a hundred details as myth, claiming that he presents the gospels “relieved of the drapery of mythology and set free from all dogmatic fictions”;15 and yet no less confidently affirms a hundred “undoubted” things, in a manner that almost outgoes M. Loisy.