Some of us who in our teens critically read the sacred books first and foremost to clear our minds on the general question of supernaturalism, and then proceeded to try, with the help of the documentary scholars, to trace the history of religion as matter of anthropology and sociology, had the experience of being told by Professor Huxley, whose own work we had followed, that we were still at the standpoint of Voltaire. Later we had the edification of seeing Huxley expatiate upon topics which had long been stale for Secularist audiences, and laboriously impugn the story of the Flood and the miracle of the Gadarene swine in discursive debate with Gladstone, even making scientific mistakes in the former connection.
In view of it all, it seems still a sound discipline to treat all opinions as for ever open to revision, and at the same time to doubt whether the acceptance of any popular formula will place us in a position to disparage unreservedly all our critical predecessors. If we find reason to dismiss as inadequate the conclusions of many scholars of the past, orthodox and heterodox, we are not thereby entitled to speak of the best of them otherwise than as powerful minds and strenuous toilers, hampered by some of their erroneous assumptions in the task of relieving their fellows of the burden of others.
It is precisely the habituation of the professional scholars to working in a special groove that has so retarded the progress of New Testament criticism. The re-discussion of the historicity question that has followed upon the modern exposition of the myth-theory has involved the reiteration by the historicity school of a set of elementary claims from the long-discredited interpolation in Josephus and the pagan "testimonies" of Suetonius and Tacitus; and Professor W. B. Smith has had to meet these with a detailed rebuttal such as used to be made--of course with less care and fullness--on the ordinary English Secularist platform forty or even seventy years ago. Less advanced scholars once more begin to recognize the nullity of the argument from the famous passage in the Annals of Tacitus, [2] which was clear to so many unpretending freethinkers in the past; and to other Gelehrten vom Fach it has to be again pointed out that the impulsore Chresto of Suetonius, so far from testifying to the presence of a Christian multitude at Rome under Nero--a thing so incompatible with their own records--is rather a datum for the myth-theory, inasmuch as it posits a cult of a Chrestos or Christos out of all connection with the "Christian" movement.