theological attitude: "It seems that the most distinguished men lose a part of their brilliant character in the study of martyrology. Let us leave it to German theologians to study history in their way. We Frenchmen wish throughout our inquiries to preserve our clearness of mind and healthy common-sense. Let us not invent new legends about Nero: there are really too many already." [416] (b) The Objections against a Denial of the Historicity of the Synoptic Jesus. There the matter ends: we know nothing of Jesus, of an historical personality of that name to whom the events and speeches recorded in the Gospels refer. "In default of any historical certainty the name of Jesus has become for Protestant theology an empty vessel, into which that theology pours the content of its own meditations." [417] And if there is any excuse for this, it is that that name has never at any time been anything but such an empty vessel: Jesus, the Christ, the Deliverer, Saviour, Physician of oppressed souls, has been from first to last a figure borrowed from myth, to whom the desire for redemption and the naïve faith of the Western Asiatic peoples have transferred all their conceptions of the soul's welfare. The "history" of this Jesus in its general characteristics had been determined even before the evangelical Jesus. Even Weinel, one of the most zealous and enthusiastic adherents of the modern Jesus-worship, confesses that "Christology was almost completed before Jesus came on earth." [418] It was not, however, merely the general frame and outlines of the "history" of Jesus which had been determined in the Messiah-faith, in the idea of a divine spirit sent from God, of the "Son of Man" of Daniel and the Jewish Apocalyptics, &c., not merely that this vague idea was filled out with new content through the Redeemer-worship of the neighbouring heathen peoples. Besides this, many of the individual traits of the Jesus-figure were present, some in heathen mythology, some in the Old Testament; and they were taken thence and worked into the evangelical representation. There is, for instance, the story of the twelve-year old Jesus in the Temple. "Who would have invented this story?" asks Jeremias. "Nevertheless," he thinks it "probable" that in this Luke was thinking of Philo's description of the life of Moses; he calls to mind that Plutarch gives us a quite similar statement concerning Alexander, whose life was consciously decorated with all the traits of the Oriental King-redeemer. [419] Perhaps, however, the account comes from a Buddhist origin. The account of the temptation of Jesus also sounds very much like the temptation of Buddha, so far as it is not derived from the temptation of Zarathustra by Ahriman [420] or the temptation of Moses by the devil, of which the Rabbis told, [421] while Jesus is said to have entered upon his ministry in his thirtieth year, [422] because at that age the Levite was fitted for his sacred office.