Church of Peter grew above the so-called grave of the apostle. It was at bottom merely an alteration of the name, not of the matter, when the High Priest of Attis blended his rôle with that of the High Priest of Christ, and the Christ-cult spread itself from this new point far over the other parts of the Roman Empire. (c) The True Character of the Synoptic Jesus. The Synoptic Gospels leave open the question whether they treat of a man made God or of a God made man. The foregoing account has shown that the Jesus of the Gospels is to be understood only as a God made man. The story of his life, as presented in the Gospels, is the rendering into history of a primitive religious myth. Most of the great heroes of the legend, which passes as historical, are similar incarnate Gods--such as Jason, Hercules, Achilles, Theseus, Perseus, Siegfried, &c.; in these we have nothing but the old Aryan sun--champion in the struggle against the powers of darkness and of death. That primitive Gods in the view of a later age should become men, without, however, ceasing to be clothed with the glamour of the deity, is to such an extent the ordinary process, that the reverse, the elevation of men to Gods, is as a rule only found in the earliest stages of human civilisation, or in periods of moral and social decay, when fawning servility and worthless flattery fashion a prominent man, either during his life or after his death, into a divine being. Even the so-called "Bible Story" contains numerous examples of such God made men: the patriarchs, Joseph, Joshua, Samson, Esther, Mordecai, Haman, Simon Magus, the magician Elymas, &c., were originally pure Gods, and in the description of their lives old Semitic star-myths and sun-myths obtained a historical garb. If we cannot doubt that Moses, the founder of the old covenant, was a fictitious figure, and that his "history" was invented by the priests at Jerusalem only for the purpose of sanctioning and basing on his authority the law of the priests named after him; if for this end the whole history of Israel was falsified, and the final event in the religious development of Israel, i.e., the giving of the Law, was placed at the beginning--why cannot what was possible with Moses have been repeated in the case of Jesus? Why may not also the founder of the new covenant as an historical person belong entirely to pious legend? According to Herodotus, [490] the Greeks also changed an old Phoenician God, Hercules, for national reasons, into a native hero, the son of Amphitryon, and incorporated him in their own sphere of ideas. Let us consider how strong the impulse was, especially among Orientals, to make history of purely internal experiences and ideas. To carry historical matter into the sphere of myth, and to conceive myth as history, is, as is shown by the investigations of Winckler, Schrader, Jensen, &c., for the Orientals such a matter of course, that, as regards the accounts in the Old Testament, it is