Note 29 — Chapter VII · GOSPEL-MAKING

There is really more force in his argument29 that the predictions of the immediate re-appearance of the Christ after “the tribulation of those days” could not have been invented long after the fall of Jerusalem, the apparent impulse being rather to minimize them. They may perfectly well have been predictions made at the approach of danger by professed prophets. But it does not in the least follow that they were made by one answering to the description of the gospel Jesus, predicting his own Second Coming, though some one may have so prophesied. Any Messiah would be “the Lord”; and the gospel predictions as to false Christs tell of “many” Messiahs, every one of whom would speak as “the Lord.” Such utterances, after a little while, could no more be discriminated by the Christists than the certainly pre-Christian sayings put by their propagandists in the mouth of Jesus. And, once a prediction had been written down, it lived by the tenure of uncertainty that attached to all prediction among blind believers. When one “tribulation” had apparently passed without a Second Coming, there was nothing for it but to look forward to the next.