I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form, complete and free of additions. The milieu in which this strange figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have been imprinted by the history, the destiny, of the early Christian communities; the latter indeed, must have embellished the type retrospectively with characters which can be understood only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda. That strange and sickly world into which the Gospels lead usa world apparently out of a Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and childish idiocy keep a trystmust, in any case, have coarsened the type: the first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to translate an existence visible only in symbols and inco

The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the worker of wonders, John the Baptistall these merely presented chances to misunderstand it . Finally, let us not underrate the proprium of all great, and especially all sectarian veneration: it tends to erase from the venerated objects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange it does not even see them. It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting dcadentI mean some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the dcadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex and

Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against it, for in that case tradition would have been particularly accurate and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming the contrary. Meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the mount, the sea-shore and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soil very unlike Indias, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renans malice as le grand matre en ironie. I myself havent any doubt that the greater part of this venom (and no less of esprit) got itself into the concept of the Master only as a result of the excited nature of Christian propaganda: we all know the unscrupulousness of sectarians when they set out to turn their leader into an apologia for themselves. When the early Christians had need of an adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously subtle theologian to tackle other th

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