In Gunkel and Maurenbrecher it is only a stop-gap, which is brought into a wholly external connexion with the growth of the new religion. They retain His coming as the phenomenon by which the contact of the two religious worlds is set up, but not as a fructifying element. [pg 234] There is no obvious reason for continuing to take into account this by no means indispensable auxiliary force. If the Oriental belief in a redeemer and the Jewish Messianic hope were inherently adapted to one another, and destined to produce by their fruitful union a new religion, then, after all, any kind of impulse, even a mere train of thought, might have set the process in motion. The assumption of the existence and the death of the Galilaean Rabbi becomes superfluous if once it ceases to supply the efficient cause for the arising of Christianity. Since Comparative Religion finds the latter in the mutual interpenetration of Jewish and Graeco-Oriental elements, it can get along just as well with myth as with the questionable history of the Synoptists. Such is the teaching of William Benjamin Smith,_(_191_)_ and Arthur Drews. Both these writers make a rather extravagant use of the privilege of standing outside the ranks of scientific theology. Their imagination leaps with playful elegance over obstacles of fact and enables them to discover everywhere the pre-Christian Jesus whom their soul desires, even in places where an ordinary intelligence can find no trace of him. Smith takes it for granted that the “Naasenes, whose origin goes back to the most remote antiquity, worshipped a Jesus as a divinity.” How Christianity grew out of this cult he does not tell us, but consoles us with the promise of later revelations. In the preface he betrays the fact that he is now only publishing “the first quarter of the evidence which he has collected,” and intends to go on quietly collecting and arranging his material “until [pg 235] the whole irresistible host can take the field together,” and further, that it is not the—inevitable—victory which is his main concern, but the stimulus imparted to others.