Paul, probably a contemporary of Jesus, knew well enough the vast difference between the man "Jesus" and the risen "Christ"; he insisted that the man should be ignored, and supplanted by the risen Christ, as revealed by private revelations received by himself after the resurrection. The student must now reverse that: he must ignore those post-resurrectional revelations if he would know Jesus "after the flesh"--that is, the real Jesus. In an age when immortality is a familiar religious belief we can hardly realize the agitation, among a people to whom life after death was a vague, imported philosophy, excited by the belief that a man had been raised bodily from the grave. Immortality was no longer hypothesis. If to this belief be added the further conviction that this resurrection was preliminary to his speedy reappearance, and the world's sudden transformation, a mental condition could not fail to arise in which any ethical or philosophical ideas he might have uttered while "in the flesh" must be thrown into the background, as of merely casual or temporary importance. Such is the state of mind reflected in the Pauline Epistles. In them is found no reference whatever to any moral instructions by Jesus. And when after some two generations had passed, and they who had expected while yet living to meet their returning Lord had died, those who had heard oral reports and legends concerning him and his teachings began to write the memoranda on which our Synoptical Gospels are based, it was too late to give these without adulterations from the apostolic ecstasy. His casual or playful remarks were by this time discoloured and distorted, and enormously swollen, as if under a solar microscope, by the overwhelming conceptions of a resurrection, an approaching advent, a subversion of all nationalities and institutions.