claimed by Jesus, and his right to it openly canvassed by the Jews. But--in the three--the disciples acknowledge him as Christ, and he charges them to 'tell _no man_ that he was Jesus the Christ" (Matt. xvi. 20; Mark viii. 29, 30; Luke ix. 20, 21); and this in the same year that he blames the Jews for not owning this Messiahship, since he had told them who he was 'from the beginning' (ch. viii. 24, 25): so that, if 'John' was right, we fail to see the object of all the mystery about it, related by the Synoptics. We mark, too, how Peter is, in their account, praised for confessing him, for flesh and blood had not revealed it to him, while in the fourth Gospel, 'flesh and blood,' in the person of Andrew, reveal to Peter that the Christ is found; and there seems little praise due to Peter for a confession which had been made two or three years earlier by Andrew, Nathanael, John Baptist, and the Samaritans. Contradiction can scarcely be more direct. In John vii. Jesus owns that the Jews know his birthplace (28), and they state (41, 42) that he comes from Galilee, while Christ should be born at Bethlehem. Matthew and Luke distinctly say Jesus was born at Bethlehem; but here Jesus confesses the right knowledge of those who attribute his birthplace to Galilee, instead of setting their difficulty at rest by explaining that though brought up at Nazareth he was born in Bethlehem. But our writer was apparently ignorant of their accounts ("According to St John," by Annie Besant. Scott Series, pp. 11-14, ed. 1873). These are but a few of the contradictions in the Gospels, which compel us to reject them as historical narratives. (3) _The fact that the story of the hero, the doctrines, the miracles, were current long before the supposed dates of the Gospels_, etc. There are two mythical theories as to the growth of the story of Jesus, which demand our attention; the first, that of which Strauss is the best known exponent, which acknowledges the historical existence of Jesus, but regards him as the figure round which has grown a mythus, moulded by the Messianic expectations of the Jews: the second, which is indifferent to his historical existence, and regards him as a new hero of the ancient sun-worship, the successor of Mithra, Krishna, Osiris, Bacchus, etc. To this school, it matters not whether there was a Jesus of Nazareth or not, just as it matters not whether a Krishna or an Osiris had an historical existence or not; it is _Christ_, the Sun-god, not _Jesus_, the Jewish peasant, whom they find worshipped in Christendom, and who is, therefore, the object of their interest.