In natural course criticism first rejects miraculous episodes, next excludes teachings which purport to come from a God-man, and then seeks to infer a personality from those which are left; but inasmuch as those, like the rest, are disparate and even contradictory, the process usually ends in an avowedly arbitrary selection. And to all such selection the loyal study of the texts is fatal. To put aside, as some still do, the fourth gospel, and then take a stand on the synoptics, is merely to arrest factitiously the critical process, which, when consistently pursued, leads to the conviction that the synoptics were built up by the same order of impulses, under the same conditions of unchecked invention and interpolation, as gave rise to the most obvious fictions in the gospel of "John." We are led without escape to the conclusion that no strain of teaching in the gospels can be fathered on the shadowy founder, who for Paul is only a crucified phantom. The humanistic teachings are no more primordial, no less capable of interpolation, than the mystical and the oracular. Some of the best sayings are among the very latest; some of the narrowest belong to the earliest tradition. Collectively, they tell of a hundred hands.
Surmising that the nominal founder of Paul's Jesuism may possibly be the slain Jesus Pandira of the Talmud, a hundred years "before Christ," we next ask whether any such founder must not be supposed to have taught something, to make men see in him a Messiah and preserve his name. The answer is that the name alone was a large part of the qualification for a Jewish Messiah; that the chance of his execution on the eve of the Passover would give it for some Jews a mystic significance; and that a story of his resurrection, a story easily floated in case of an alleged sorcerer, such as the Talmudic Jesus, would complete the conditions required for the growth of a myth and a cult, seeing that the Jews traditionally expected the Messiah to come at midnight of the day of Passover. Doubtless the alleged sorcerer may have been an innovating teacher. It is quite possible, indeed, that as a bearer of the fated name he may have made Messianic claims: the form of death said to have been inflicted on him suggests energetic priestly or political hostility. But of his utterances history preserves no trace: even in the Talmud his story has passed into legendary form. Thus it is not even certain that "pre-Christian" Jesuism took shape round the memory of an actual man. The mythic Joshua (Jesus) of the Old Testament is seen to have been in all likelihood, like Samson, an ancient Semitic Sun-God, his name, "the Saviour," being a common divine epithet; and as he is in Perso-Arab tradition the son of the mythic Miriam (Mary), it may be that the roots of the historic Christian cult go back to an immemorial Semitic antiquity, when already the name of Jesus was divine. [5] In the shadow of that name its origins are hidden.