The three treatises making up this volume stand for a process of inquiry which began to take written form in the 1870s. It set out with a certain scientific principle and a certain historical purpose: the principle being that Christian origins should be studied with constant precaution against the common assumption that all myths of action and doctrine must be mere accretions round the biography of a great teacher, broadly figured by ‘the’ Gospel Jesus; while the practical purpose was to exhibit ‘ The Rise of Christianity, Sociologically Considered.’ To that end thr author was prepared to assume a primitive cult, arising in memory of a teacher with twelve disciples. But the first independent explorations, the first rigorous attempts to identify the first Jesuists, led to a series of fresh exposures of myth. ‘ Jesus of Nazareth ‘ turned out to be a compound of an already composite Gospel Jesus, an interposed Jesus the Nazarite, and a superimposed Jesus born at Nazareth. And none of the three aspects equated with the primary Jesus of Paul. Each in turn was, in Paul’s words, ‘ another Jesus whom we have not preached.’ And the Twelve Apostles were demonstrably mythical.
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