Note 17 — Chapter IX · CONCLUSION

The more the moral teaching of the gospels is comparatively studied, as apart from their myths of action and dogma, the more clear becomes its entire dependence on previous lore,17 and its failure even to maintain the level of the best of that. The Sermon on the Mount is wholly pre-Christian.18 It is a Christian scholar who points out that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness is fully set forth in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a century before the Christian era. In his view, those verses19 “contain the most remarkable statement on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature.”20 Why then does it not warm the heart of Professor Schmiedel equally with the doctrine of the gospels? Simply because he was brought up to assign pre-eminence to the teaching of Jesus—God or Man. And here we have, in its fundamental form, that unchecked assumption of “uniqueness” which secretly dictates the bulk of the denials of the myth-theory. Canon Charles explicitly traces the Jesuine teaching to the verses in question: