Enough has now been said to make it clear to the open-minded reader that the myth-theory is no wanton challenge to belief in a clear and credible historical narrative. It is not the advocates of the myth-theory who have raised the issue. The trouble began with the attempts of the believers to solve their own difficulties. Before the rise of criticism so-called we find them hating and burning each other in their quarrels over the meaning of their central sacrament. As soon as criticism began to work on the problem of the miracles and the contradictions in the narratives of these, they set themselves to frame "Harmonies" of the Gospels which only brought into clearer relief their discordance. After the spread of scientific views had shaken the belief in miracles, they set themselves, still as believers, to frame explanatory Lives of Jesus in which miracles were dissolved into hallucinations or natural episodes misunderstood; and, as before, no two explanations coincided. A "consensus of scholars" has never existed. It was after a whole generation of German scholars had laboured to extract a historical Jesus from the Gospel mosaic that Strauss produced his powerful and sustained argument to show that most of the separate episodes which they had arbitrarily striven to reduce to history were but operations of the mythopoeic faculty, proceeding upon the mass of Jewish prophecy and legend under the impulse of the Messianic idea. Strauss was no wanton caviller, but a great critic, forced to his work by the failure of a multitude of Gelehrten vom Fach to extract a credible result from what they admitted to be, as it stood, a history in large part incredible. Strauss, in turn, believing at once in a residual historical Jesus and in the perfect sufficiency of a mere ideal personage as a standard for men's lives and a basis for their churches, left but a new enigma to his successors. He had stripped the nominal Founder of a mass of mythic accretions, but, attempting no new portrait, left him undeniably more shadowy than before. Later "liberal" criticism, tacitly accepting Strauss's negations, set itself anew to extract from the Gospels, by a process of more or less conscientious documentary analysis, the "real" Jesus whom the critics and he agreed to have existed. Renan undertook to do as much in his famous "romance"; and German critics, who so characterized his work, produced for their part only much duller romances, devoid of Renan's wistful artistic charm. And, as before, every "biographer" in turn demurred to the results of the others.