also a pretty general agreement that Mark’s book is the oldest. The
authorship of the fourth Gospel, which like the first was supposed to
have been written by an eye-witness, is still contested, but even those
who adhere to the tradition admit that it represents a theory about
Jesus which is widely different from the view of the three other
biographers.

The result is that it can no longer be said that for the life of Jesus
there is the evidence of eye-witnesses. The oldest account (Mark) was
composed at the earliest some thirty years after the Crucifixion. If
such evidence is considered good enough to establish the supernatural
events described in that document, there are few alleged supernatural
occurrences which we shall not be equally entitled to believe. As a
matter of fact, an interval of thirty years makes little difference, for
we know that legends require little time to grow. In the East, you will
hear of miracles which happened the day before

[197] yesterday. The birth of religions is always enveloped in legend,
and the miraculous thing would be, as M. Salomon Reinach has observed,
if the story of the birth of Christianity were pure history.

Another disturbing result of unprejudiced examination of the first three
Gospels is that, if you take the recorded words of Jesus to be genuine
tradition, he had no idea of founding a new religion. And he was fully
persuaded that the end of the world was at hand. At present, the chief
problem of advanced criticism seems to be whether his entire teaching
was not determined by this delusive conviction.

It may be said that the advance of knowledge has thrown no light on one
of the most important beliefs that we are asked to accept on authority,