And what they wrote is all we know. It is the only basis we have upon which we can form any judgment as to who or what Jesus of Nazareth was. What Paul may have thought of him, and the system of theology he built thereon, is of but little value. What the Church Fathers may have thought, in the light of the age in which they lived, and their own standard of intellectual attainments, is of less. We have got to fall back upon the four gospels, and interpret them, not in the light of the superstitious age in which they were written; not assuming them to be exact truth; for in view of the fact of their own contradictions of each other on material and vital points this is impossible; but in the full light of this age of science and exact knowledge; of a more highly developed intelligence, and a deeper and more accurate reasoning power. With these records as a basis, or starting point, we must work out the problem for ourselves: Who and what was Jesus? First, he was a Jew,--born, lived and died a Jew. There is no evidence that he ever rejected, or abrogated the religion of his fathers. That he tried to reform it, inject into it a deeper spiritual life, a more rational and higher ethical standard, will more fully appear as we proceed. He came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it,--not by dying on the cross, for the law nowhere says, or even intimates, anything about anybody dying on a cross or anywhere else. He came to fulfill it by living up to its full ethical and spiritual import, and teaching others to do so. "Moses had summed up the law in ten commandments, the Pharisees of the time of Jesus had made of these ten thousand--to be exact, six hundred and thirteen--and Jesus reduced them to two,"--and kept them. This is how he fulfilled the law. Next, Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary by the same process of natural generation by which all other human beings come into the world. Paul, the earliest and most elaborate writer of the New Testament, nowhere gives us the remotest hint that he had ever heard of any such a thing as the supernatural birth; and it is wholly unthinkable that if such had been the truth he should have been ignorant of it; or that if it sustained such a vital relation to the Christian system of religion to which he devoted his whole life, he should never in the remotest manner refer to it.