We have said enough to show that, in all probability—for let us not be dogmatic—the story of Jesus,—his birth and betrayal by one of his own disciples, his trial in a Roman court, his crucifixion, resurrection and ascension,—belongs to the order of imaginative literature. Conceived at first as a religious drama, it received many new accretions as it traveled from country to country and from age to age. The "piece" shows signs of having been touched and retouched to make it acceptable to the different countries in which it was played. The hand of the adapter, the interpolator and the reviser is unmistakably present. As an allegory, or as a dramatic composition, meant for the religious stage, it proved one of the strongest productions of Pagan or Christian times. But as real history, it lacks the fundamental requisite—probability. As a play, it is stirring and strong; as history, it lacks naturalness and consistency. The miraculous is ever outside the province of history. Jesus was a miracle, and as such, at least, we are safe in declaring him un-historical.
We pass on now to the presentation of evidence which we venture to think demonstrates with an almost mathematic precision, that the Jesus of the four gospels is a legendary hero, as unhistorical as William Tell of Switzerland. This evidence is furnished by the epistles bearing the signature of Paul. He has been accepted as not only the greatest apostle of Christianity, but in a sense also the author of its theology. It is generally admitted that the epistles bearing the name of Paul are among the oldest apostolical writings. They are older than the gospels. This is very important information. When Paul was preaching, the four gospels had not yet been written. From the epistles of Paul, of which there are about thirteen in the Bible—making the New Testament largely the work of this one apostle—we learn that there were in different parts of Asia, a number of Christian churches already established. Not only Paul, then, but also the Christian church was in existence before the gospels were composed. It would be natural to infer that it was not the gospels which created the church, but the church which produced the gospels. Do not lose sight of the fact that when Paul was preaching to the Christians there was no written biography of Jesus in existence. There was a church without a book.
In comparing the Jesus of Paul with the Jesus whose portrait is drawn for us in the gospels, we find that they are not the same persons at all. This is decisive. Paul knows nothing about a miraculously born savior. He does not mention a single time, in all his thirteen epistles, that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that his birth was accompanied with heavenly signs and wonders. He knew nothing of a Jesus born after the manner of the gospel writers. It is not imaginable that he knew the facts, but suppressed them, or that he considered them unimportant, or that he forgot to refer to them in any of his public utterances. Today, a preacher is expelled from his denomination if he suppresses or ignores the miraculous conception of the Son of God; but Paul was guilty of that very heresy. How explain it? It is quite simple: The virgin-born Jesus was not yet invented when Paul was preaching Christianity. Neither he, nor the churches he had organized, had ever heard of such a person. The virgin-born Jesus was of later origin than the Apostle Paul.
Let the meaning of this discrepancy between the Jesus of Paul, that is to say, the earliest portrait of Jesus, and the Jesus of the four evangelists, be fully grasped by the student, and it should prove beyond a doubt that in Paul's time the story of Jesus' birth from the virgin-mother and the Holy Ghost, which has since become a cardinal dogma of the Christian church, was not yet in circulation. Jesus had not yet been Hellenized; he was still a Jewish Messiah whose coming was foretold in the Old Testament, and who was to be a prophet like unto Moses, without the remotest suggestion of a supernatural origin.
No proposition in Euclid is safer from contradiction than that, if Paul knew what the gospels tell about Jesus, he would have, at least once or twice during his long ministry, given evidence of his knowledge of it. The conclusion is inevitable that the gospel Jesus is later than Paul and his churches. Paul stood nearest to the time of Jesus. Of those whose writings are supposed to have come down to us, he is the most representative, and his epistles are the first literature of the new religion. And yet there is absolutely not a single hint or suggestion in them of such a Jesus as is depicted in the gospels. The gospel Jesus was not yet put together or compiled, when Paul was preaching.
Once more; if we peruse carefully and critically the writings of Paul, the earliest and greatest Christian apostle and missionary, we find that he is not only ignorant of the gospel stories about the birth and miracles of Jesus, but he is equally and just as innocently ignorant of the teachings of Jesus. In the gospels Jesus is the author of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Story of Dives, the Good Samaritan, etc. Is it conceivable that a preacher of Jesus could go throughout the world to convert people to the teachings of Jesus, as Paul did, without ever quoting a single one of his sayings? Had Paul known that Jesus had preached a sermon, or formulated a prayer, or said many inspired things about the here and the hereafter, he could not have helped quoting, now and then, from the words of his master. If Christianity could have been established without a knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, why, then, did Jesus come to teach, and why were his teachings preserved by divine inspiration? But if a knowledge of these teachings of Jesus is indispensable to making converts, Paul gives not the least evidence that he possessed such knowledge.
But the Apostle Paul, judging from his many epistles to the earliest converts to Christianity, which are really his testimony, supposed to have been sealed by his blood, appears to be quite as ignorant of a Jesus who went about working miracles,—opening the eyes of the blind, giving health to the sick, hearing to the deaf, and life to the dead,—as he is of a Jesus born of a virgin woman and the Holy Ghost. Is not this remarkable? Does it not lend strong confirmation to the idea that the miracle-working Jesus of the gospels was not known in Paul's time, that is to say, the earliest Jesus known to the churches was a person altogether different from his namesake in the four evangelists. If Paul knew of a miracle-working Jesus, one who could feed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes—who could command the grave to open, who could cast out devils, and cleanse the land of the foulest disease of leprosy, who could, and did, perform many other wonderful works to convince the unbelieving generation of his divinity,—is it conceivable that either intentionally or inadvertently he would have never once referred to them in all his preaching? Is it not almost certain that, if the earliest Christians knew of the miracles of Jesus, they would have been greatly surprised at the failure of Paul to refer to them a single time? And would not Paul have told them of the promise of Jesus to give them power to work even greater miracles than his own, had he known of such a promise. Could Paul really have left out of his ministry so essential a chapter from the life of Jesus, had he been acquainted with it? The miraculous fills up the greater portion of the four gospels, and if these documents were dictated by the Holy Ghost, it means that they were too important to be left out. Why, then, does not Paul speak of them at all? There is only one reasonable answer: A miracle-working Jesus was unknown to Paul.
What would we say of a disciple of Tolstoi, for example, who came to America to make converts to Count Tolstoi and never once quoted anything that Tolstoi had said? Or what would we think of the Christian missionaries who go to India, China, Japan and Africa to preach the gospel, if they never mentioned to the people of these countries the Sermon on the Mount, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Lord's Prayer—nor quoted a single text from the gospels? Yet Paul, the first missionary, did the very thing which would be inexplicable in a modern missionary. There is only one rational explanation for this: The Jesus of Paul was not born of a virgin; he did not work miracles; and he was not a teacher. It was after his day that such a Jesus was—I have to use again a strong word—invented.
It has been hinted by certain professional defenders of Christianity that Paul's specific mission was to introduce Christianity among the Gentiles, and not to call attention to the miraculous element in the life of his Master. But this is a very lame defense. What is Christianity, but the life and teachings of Jesus? And how can it be introduced among the Gentiles without a knowledge of the doctrines and works of its founder? Paul gives no evidence of possessing any knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, how could he, then, be a missionary of Christianity to the heathen? There is no other answer which can be given than that the Christianity of Paul was something radically different from the Christianity of the later gospel writers, who in all probability were Greeks and not Jews. Moreover, it is known that Paul was reprimanded