Strauss, in turn, believing at once in a residual historical Jesus and in the perfect sufficiency of a mere ideal personage as a standard for men's lives and a basis for their churches, left but a new enigma to his successors. He had stripped the nominal Founder of a mass of mythic accretions, but, attempting no new portrait, left him undeniably more shadowy than before. Later "liberal" criticism, tacitly accepting Strauss's negations, set itself anew to extract from the Gospels, by a process of more or less conscientious documentary analysis, the "real" Jesus whom the critics and he agreed to have existed. Renan undertook to do as much in his famous "romance"; and German critics, who so characterized his work, produced for their part only much duller romances, devoid of Renan's wistful artistic charm. And, as before, every "biographer" in turn demurred to the results of the others.
It is the result of the utter inadequacy of all these attempts to solve the historical problem, and of the ever-growing sense of the inadequacy of a mere legendary construction to form a code for human life and a basis for a cosmic philosophy, that independent inquirers in various countries have set about finding out the real historical process of the rise of Christianity, dismissing the worn-out convention. Small-minded conservatives at once exclaim, and will doubtless go on saying, that those who thus explain away the "historical Jesus," are moved by their antipathy to Christianity, and to theism in general. The assertion is childishly false. One of the leading exponents of the myth-theory gives his theism--or pantheism--as the primary inspiration of his work. The present writer, as he has more than once explained, began by way of writing a sociological history of the rise of Christianity on the foundation of a historical Jesus with twelve disciples--this long after coming to a completely naturalistic view of religion, which excluded theism. From such a point of view there was no à priori objection whatever to a historical Jesus. At one time he sketched a hypothesis of several successive Jesuses. The intangibility of any historical Jesus was the conclusion slowly forced by a long attempt to clear the historical starting-point, supposed to be irreducible.
