Note 32 — Chapter VII · GOSPEL-MAKING

11. The fourth gospel is only one more systematic step in the process of myth-making. The biographical school, in giving this up as unhistorical, in effect admits that the “personality” of the alleged Teacher had been so ineffectual as to admit of a successful interposition of a new and thoroughly mythical figure, entirely supernatural in theory, but more “impressive” as a speaking and quasi-human personage. The “Logos” of John is again an adaptation of a Jewish adaptation of a pagan conception, the doctrine of the Logos set forth by the Alexandrian Jew Philo having come through Greek and Eastern channels.32 There was no critical faculty in the early Church that could secure its rejection, though it was somewhat slow of acceptance. The doctrine of the Trinity is again an assimilation from paganism, proximately Egyptian.33