Let it be observed that before the elaboration of the Jesus of the Gospels, those who fabricated the conception were wholly without a model to guide them. All ancient fact or fable fails to furnish anything at all analogous to this great character. Such models as they had would have guided its inventors wrong. The only ones which they possessed were the popular Messianic conceptions of the period, and the prevailing Jewish ideas of religion and morality. Besides these, they might have fallen back on the general ideas contained in the Old Testament Scriptures and the apocryphal books. The ideal of a Jewish hero would certainly not have helped them in forming the conception of the Evangelical Jesus. One apocryphal book has been frequently referred to as affording considerable aid--the Book of Enoch. I have fully discussed this subject elsewhere,[109] and the conclusion to which I have arrived is, I think, incontrovertible, that even if we grant that its Messianic portions were composed prior to the Christian era (a concession which I am by no means prepared to make), the aid which it would have afforded the mythologists who invented the Christ of the Gospels would have been inconsiderable. To avoid a lengthened controversy as to its date, I am quite willing that these schools of thought should make all the use they can of them. Let me point out a few of the difficulties which must have beset the path of the inventors of the great portraiture of the Gospels. Every reader at once recognizes that the character who is there depicted is a superhuman one; or rather, to speak more accurately, it is exhibited as uniting the human and the divine. This is a plain matter of fact, and is quite independent of the question whether the Evangelists were right in so representing it. Nor is my argument at all affected by any supposed difficulty in defining, in the terms of an abstract creed, the precise measure of the divine which they have ascribed to it. All that I contend for is that the Jesus of the Evangelists is dramatized as uniting a divine and human consciousness, and that it is exhibited with a faultless propriety. Now the moment the mythologists made a movement in this direction, a hundred problems of a most difficult character must have demanded their solution before they could advance a single step. I can only adduce one or two examples. How was the human to be represented as acting in union with the divine, and the divine with the human? In what proportions were they to be combined? How was the one to be prevented from swallowing up the other? Let it be observed that there was no model to guide them. The attempt to exhibit the divine and human in a single personality had never been attempted before.