It is needless to show in detail that an exalted view of the person of Christ is with the New Testament writers connected with the central place which they assign to His death and resurrection. Mark, whose Christology is thought to be least developed, may be taken as a single example. In the opening scene of the ministry, as in the Transfiguration scene, the divine voice says: "Thou art (this is) my beloved Son" (i. 11; ix. 7); and in the closing scene the centurion exclaims, "Truly this man was the Son of God" (or a son of God, Mark xv. 39). The climax of the narrative is said to be the confession of Peter, "Thou art the Christ" (viii. 29); and Jesus alludes to Himself as "the Son," above prophets and men and angels (xii. 6; xiii. 32). At the trial, in answer to the solemn question of the high priest, "Art thou the Christ, the Son of the blessed?" He said, "I am" (xiv. 61-62). Bousset admits that the three first Gospels differ from the Fourth only in degree,[4] and in his latest work he says that if the phrase "Son of God" (i. 1), omitted in many manuscripts of Mark, is really an interpolation, it is a suitable one as indicating the theme of the book.[5] Wrede even says the Gospel of Mark belongs in a sense to the history of dogma.[6] 4: "Was Wissen Wir von Jesus?" 1904, p. 54. 5: "Kyrios Christos," 1913, p. 70, note 1, and p. 65. 6: See Schweitzer: "Von Reimarus zu Wrede," p. 336; E. T., "Quest of the Historical Jesus," p. 337. For the writers of the New Testament, leaving out for the present the question of sources, in spite of differences in time and place and race and circumstances, and by implication for the various circles of readers, Jewish, Greek and Roman, whom they addressed, there was but one kind of Christianity, one gospel of the Kingdom and the Cross and the Son of God. II. PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY AND PAULINE CHRISTIANITY It is asserted that the striking unanimity of the New Testament writers in their view of Christianity is not due to the teaching of Jesus, but to the powerful influence of the Apostle Paul. The statement is made in many quarters that not Jesus but Paul was the virtual founder of Christianity, so far as its central doctrines, its institutions, its worship of a divine Christ, and its world-wide propaganda are concerned. In Paul, it is said, the gospel of a simple piety and a pure ethic, the gospel of Jesus, was so overlaid by the incrustations of dogma that its true nature was hidden until rediscovered by modern criticism; and it had thus lost the simplicity that is in Christ. It was Paul himself, whose missionary labours carried the gospel throughout Europe, that really preached "another gospel." As Schweitzer, following Kalthoff, suggests with some irony, there was, under this supposition, "an immediate declension from and falsification of a pure original principle" in Christianity, comparable only to the Fall in the moral history of mankind.[7]