Well may M. Loisy say that the episode is a thing "found ready made"; it has certainly no place in the original document. But it was "made" by a later hand, and it was inserted either by him who made it or by him who "found" it. It is the work of a Gentilizer, aiming at Jewish priests and Levites, and in a less degree at the scribes, whom he treats as comparatively open to instruction. It is part of the Gentilizing propaganda which evolved the story of the mission of the Seventy, and it is naturally inserted after that episode. But to admit that to be a work of redaction and to call the parable a genuine Jesuine utterance is only to give one more distressing illustration of the common collapse of the simplest principles of documentary criticism under the sway of conservative prepossession. M. Loisy retains the parable of the Good Samaritan as Jesuine simply because he feels that to abandon it is to come near making an end of the claim for the moral originality of the Gospels. It is probably from a Gentile hand, though it may conceivably have come from an enlightened Jew.
And so we find M. Loisy, with all his scholarly painstaking and his laudable measure of candour, presenting us finally with an uncritical result. His historical Jesus will not cohere. It is a blend of early Judaic eschatology with later ethical common sense, early Judaic humanity and particularism with later Gentile universalism; even as the Gospels are a mosaic of a dozen other diverging and conflicting tendencies, early and late. "One can explain to oneself Jesus," exclaims M. Loisy; "one cannot explain to oneself those who invented him." [196] Let the reader judge for himself whether M. Loisy has given us any explanation; and whether, after our survey, there is any scientific difficulty in the conception of an imaginary personage produced, like an ideal photograph resulting from a whole series of superimposed portraits, by the continued travail of generations of men variously bent on picturing a Messiah for their hopes, a God for their salvation, and a Teacher for their lives.
How much M. Loisy is swayed by prepossession may be further gathered from his argumentation over the "testimony of Paul" in connection with his criticism of the myth theory. Professor Drews, he remarks, does not follow those who contest the authenticity of the Epistles, "though the interest of his thesis imperiously demands it"; and again: "Paul is a dangerous witness for the mythic hypothesis." [197]