No one knows really _who Jesus was_. His person is the football of opinions. “If any one desiring reliable information, as to who Jesus Christ was, and what message He brought, should consult the literature of the day, he would find buzzing round him contradictory voices.... Taken all in all, the impression made by these contradicting opinions is depressing: the confusion seems past hope,” admits Prof. _Harnack_. Also _E. V. Hartmann_ remarks: “Thus, according to some, Jesus was a poet, to others a mystic visionary, a third sees in him the militant hero for freedom and human dignity, to a fourth he was the organizer of a new Church and of an ecclesiastical system of ethics, to a fifth the rationalistic reformer ... to the eleventh a naturalistic pantheist like _Giordano Bruno_, to the twelfth a superman on the order of _Nietzsche’s_ Zarathustra....” A chaos of opinions agreeing only in the one aim of rejecting His divinity. _A. Schweitzer_, himself a representative of liberal Protestant research, says, “Nothing is more negative than the result of the research concerning the life of Jesus.” And knowing Jesus’s person no longer, they no longer know anything certain about His teaching, as is clear from the above. According to _I. Wellhausen_, from the “unsufficient fragments at hand we can get but a scanty conception of the doctrine of Jesus.”—The fathers were rich, the children have grown poor. _Dissipaverunt substantiam suam!_