Drews_(_192_)_ does not play the amateur quite so completely, but endeavours on the basis of his belief in the pre-Christian Jesus to present a coherent picture of the way in which Christianity arose; and he makes Paul its creator. “The Jesus-faith,” so runs his thesis, “had long existed in numerous Mandaean sects in Western Asia, in many respects distinct from one another, before the belief in the Jesus-religion acquired a fixed form and its adherents became conscious of their religious _differentia_ and their independence of the official Jewish religion.” This ancient faith first meets us as a new religion in the letters ascribed to Paul. The citizen of Tarsus, trained as a Pharisee, heard of a sect-god named Jesus, and brought this conception into connexion with the belief in the death and resurrection of Adonis and the thought of the suffering “servant of the Lord” in Isaiah liii., and thus arrived at the idea that a god had appeared in human form, and had by his death and resurrection become the Redeemer, and had enabled men “to become God.” This was the birth-hour of Christianity. For a historic personality, “to serve, so to speak, as the living model for the God-man,” there was no need in order to produce this Jesus-religion, which then entered on its world-wide career of victory. Drews’ thesis is not merely a curiosity; it indicates the natural limit at which the hypothesis advanced by the advocates of Comparative Religion, when left to its own momentum, finally comes to rest. Paulinism, in the judgment of the adherents of this much-vaunted method, is to be regarded as a synthesis between primitive Christianity and the conceptions current in the Mystery-religions. If this be taken as the starting-point, it is necessary to proceed to the conclusion—since the synthesis cannot be conceived as [pg 236] accomplished by an individual—that Christianity itself is a product of syncretism. And if the constitutive factor in the new faith is seen in the combination of the Jewish Messianic expectation with a Graeco-Oriental belief in a redeemer-god who dies and rises again, the assumption of the existence of a historic Jesus who was not Himself touched by Hellenic ideas becomes a worthless subsidiary hypothesis. It becomes quite a natural step to leave it on one side and to regard the synthesis as either developing gradually, by an impersonal process, or as coming to birth in the brain of the author of the Pauline Epistles, who thus becomes the creator of early Christianity. Drews is justified in appealing to Gunkel, and asserting that he is only offering his ideas with a logically necessary correction.