accompanied with heavenly signs and wonders. He knew nothing of a
Jesus born after the manner of the gospel writers. It is not
imaginable that he knew the facts, but suppressed them, or that he
considered them unimportant, or that he forgot to refer to them in any
of his public utterances. Today, a preacher is expelled from his
denomination if he suppresses or ignores the miraculous conception of
the Son of God; but Paul was guilty of that very heresy. How explain
it? It is quite simple: The virgin-born Jesus was not yet
_invented_ when Paul was preaching Christianity. Neither he, nor
the churches he had organized, had ever heard of such a person. The
virgin-born Jesus was of later origin than the Apostle Paul.

Let the meaning of this discrepancy between the Jesus of Paul, that is
to say, the earliest portrait of Jesus, and the Jesus of the four
evangelists, be fully grasped by the student, and it should prove
beyond a doubt that in Paul's time the story of Jesus' birth from the
virgin-mother and the Holy Ghost, which has since become a cardinal
dogma of the Christian church, was not yet in circulation. Jesus had
not yet been Hellenized; he was still a Jewish Messiah whose coming
was foretold in the Old Testament, and who was to be a prophet like
unto Moses, without the remotest suggestion of a supernatural origin.

No proposition in Euclid is safer from contradiction than that, if
Paul knew what the gospels tell about Jesus, he would have, at least
once or twice during his long ministry, given evidence of his
knowledge of it. The conclusion is inevitable that the gospel Jesus is
later than Paul and his churches. Paul stood nearest to the time of
Jesus. Of those whose writings are supposed to have come down to us,
he is the most representative, and his epistles are the _first_
literature of the new religion. And yet there is absolutely not a