It has, moreover, passed Kalthoff over with the mien of a better informed superiority or preferably with silent scorn, and up to the present it has avoided with care any thoroughgoing examination of Smith. [4] And yet such a distinguished theologian as Professor Paul Schmiedel, of Zürich, who furnished a foreword to Smith's work, laid such an examination upon his colleagues as a "duty of all theologians making any claim to a scientific temper," and strongly warned them against any under-estimation of Smith's highly scientific work! "How can one then confidently stand by his former views," Schmiedel cries to his theological colleagues, "unless he investigates whether they have not in whole or in part been undermined by these new opinions? Or is it a question of some secondary matter merely, and not rather of exactly what for the majority forms the fundamental part of their Christian conviction? But if these new opinions are so completely futile, then it must be an easy matter, indeed a mere nothing, to show this." In the meantime there are many voices which speak out against the existence of an historical Jesus. In wide circles the doubt grows as to the historical character of the picture of Christ given in the Gospels. Popular works written with a purpose, such as the investigations of the Frenchman Jacolliot, worked up by Plange into "Jesus ein Inder" (1898), have to serve to alleviate this thirst for knowledge and confuse views more than they clear them. In a short work, "Die Entstehung des Christentums" (1905), Promus has afforded a brief résumé of the most important matter bearing on the point, without any working up of it on its own account, and attacked the existence of an historical Jesus. Lately Karl Voller, the prematurely deceased Jena Orientalist, in his valuable work, "Die Weltreligionen in ihrem geschichtlichen Zusammenhange" (1907), voiced the opinion "that weighty reasons favour this radical myth interpretation, and that no absolutely decisive arguments for the historicity of the person of Jesus can be brought forward" (op. cit. i. 163). Another Orientalist, P. Jensen, in his work "Das Gilgamesch-Epos in der Weltliteratur" (1906), even thinks that he can show that both the main lines of the Old Testament story and the whole narrative of the life of Jesus given in the Gospels are simply variations of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (about 2000 B.C.), and consequently a pure myth. [5]