On purely religious grounds the wrongly so-called "Catholicism" could very probably dispense with the fiction of an historical Jesus, and go back to Paul's standpoint before the origin of the Gospels, if it could have faith to-day in its mythological conception, of the God sacrificing himself for mankind, without that fiction. In its present form, however, it stands or falls as a Church with the belief in the historical truth of the God-redeemer; because all the Church's hierarchical claims and authority are based on this authority having been entrusted to her by an historical Jesus through the apostles. Catholicism relies for this, as it has been said, on "tradition." But Catholicism itself called this tradition into life, just as the priests at Jerusalem worked up the tradition of an historical Moses in order to trace back to him their claim to authority. It is the "Irony of World-History" that that very tradition soon afterwards forced the Church, with regard to the historical Christ, to conceal its real nature from the crowd, and to forbid the laity to read the Gospels, on account of the contradiction between the power of the Church and the traditional Christ it had produced. But the position of Protestantism is even more contradictory and more desperate than that of the Catholic Church, in view of our insight into the fictitious character of the Gospels. For Protestantism has no means but history for the foundation of its religious metaphysics; and history, viewed impartially, leads away from those roots of Christianity to which Protestantism strives, instead of towards them.