Once more we must affirm that the documents merely reveal entire ignorance of any judicial procedure. Pilate finally puts to death a Jewish prisoner at the request of the sanhedrim and the multitude on a charge for which he finds no evidence. That Pilate should make light of a Jew's life is indeed easily to be believed: he is exhibited to us by Josephus as an entirely ruthless Roman; but both the synoptics and the fourth Gospel present him in an entirely different light; and no record or commentary makes it intelligible that the Roman governor should crucify a politically unoffending Jew for a purely ecclesiastical Jewish offence. The offence against Rome he is expressly represented as finding imaginary; and yet on the other hand the offence as avowed is very real. By the method of mere accommodation or partial critical rationalism the ascription of the prosecution to the Jews is accounted for as the result of the later developed anti-Judaism of the Christians. But on that view what historical basis have we left? If the later Christians could invent the trial and the Resurrection, what was to prevent their inventing the crucifixion? M. Loisy admits that if the trial goes the historicity of Jesus goes with it; then the crucifixion becomes myth. To say that this is impossible is to beg the question: the myth theory offers the solution. Given the datum of an original cult-sacrament which had grown out of an ancient ritual-sacrifice, the crucifixion is the first step towards the establishment of a biography of Jesus. A trial and a condemnation, again, are necessary preliminaries to that; and when we critically examine these we find that they are patently unhistorical. Upon no theory of historicity can their contradictions and impossibilities be explained. Once we make the hypothesis, however, that the crucifixion is itself myth, the imbroglio becomes intelligible. What we do know historically is that the early Christists included Judaizers and Gentilizers; this is established by the sect-history, apart from the Acts and the Epistles. For the Judaizers an execution by the Romans was necessary; for the Gentilizers, who were bound to guard against official Roman resentment, and whose hostility to the Jews was progressive, a Jewish prosecution was equally necessary. In the surviving mystery-play, predominantly a Gentile performance as it now stands in the Gospels, an impossible Jewish trial is followed by an equally impossible Roman trial, in which Jesus by doctrinal necessity avows that he is King of the Jews, thereby salving his Messiahship; while, to keep the guilt on Jewish shoulders and to exclude the suspicion of anti-Roman bias, Pilate is made to disclaim all responsibility. Such is, briefly, the outcome of the myth theory. Upon what other theory can the documents be explained?