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CONFLUENCE OF OPPOSITES
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selves. It has now been shown, as the result of this scholarly investigation, that. Ha number of data in the Christian gospels, both miraculous
aod 000-miraculous, held by Christians to be historical, or at least, accretiops rouod the life and doctrine of a remarkable religious teacher and creed-founder, are really mere adaptations from royths of much greater antiquity ; and that accordiogly the alleged or iuferred personality of the Founder is under suspicion of being as mythical me that of the demigods of elder lore...... Broadly, the contention is that wben overy salient item in the legend of the gospel Jesus torus out to be more or less clearly mythical, the matter of doctrine, equally so with the matter of action, there is simply nothiog left which can entitle anyone to a belief in any tangible personality behind the maine. Such a view. as scholars are aware, ir pot now in the listory of criticiant, though the grounds for it may be so. Jo the second century, if not in the first, the Docetoe' had come to conceive of the Founder as a kind of snperuatural phantom, which only seemed? lo suffer on the cross; and many Goostics had all aloug regarded him as an abstraction. One or other view recurs in medieval heresy from time to time. A Docetio' view of Jesus was proferred by the secret rooiety of cleries and others which was broken ap at Orleaux aboat 1022 ; and in England, as elsewhere, in the sixteepth ceutary, nectaries are found taking highly mystical views of the Foouder's personality. To the fifteenth century, again, Voltaire tells of dinciples of Bolingbroke who on ground of historical criticiso denied the historicity of Jesus ; and in the period of the French Revolutiou we have not only the works of Volaey and Dupuis, reducing the gospel
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