The traditionalist is here unconsciously substituting a new and different argument for the first. Hitherto the thesis has been that of the "vividness" of the record, the "human touches," the "speaking and feeling like a real man," the "freedom and variety of life." Apparently he has had a shadow of misgiving over these simple criteria. If, indeed, he had given an hour to the perusal of Albert Kalthoff's Rise of Christianity, instead of proceeding to vilipend a literature of which he had read nothing, he would have learned that his preliminary thesis is there anticipated and demolished. Kalthoff meets it by the simple observation that the books of Ruth and Jonah supply "human touches" and "freedom and variety of life" to a far greater degree than does the Gospel story considered as a life of Jesus; though practically all scholars are now agreed that both of the former books are deliberately planned fictions, or early "novels with a purpose." Ruth is skilfully framed to contend against the Jewish bigotry of race; and Jonah to substitute a humane ideal for the ferocious one embalmed in so much of the sacred literature. Yet so "vividly" are the central personages portrayed that down till the other day all the generations of Christendom, educated and uneducated alike, accepted them unquestioningly as real records, whatever might be thought by the judicious few of the miracle element in Jonah. It is thus ostensibly quite expedient to substitute for the simple thesis of "vividness" in regard to the second Gospel the quite different argument that some of the details exclude the notion that "the author" regarded Jesus as a supernatural person. But this thesis instantly involves the defence in fresh trouble, besides breaking down utterly on its own merits. In the early chapters of Mark, Jesus is emphatically presented as a supernormal person--the deity's "beloved Son," "the Holy One of God," who has the divine power of forgiving sins, is "lord even of the sabbath," and is hailed by the defeated spirits of evil as "the Son of God," and the "Son of the Most High God." Either the conception of Jesus in Mark vi is compatible with all this or it is not. If not, the case collapses, for the "derogatory" episode must be at once branded as an interpolation. And if it be argued that even as an interpolation it testifies at once to a non-supernaturalist view of the Founder's function and a real knowledge of his life and actions, we have only to give a list of more or less mythical names in rebuttal. To claim that the episode in Mark vi, 1-6, is "derogatory from the point of view of conventional hero-worship," and therefore presumptively historical, is to ignore alike Jewish and Gentile hero-worship. In the Old Testament Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Judah, Moses, Aaron, Samson, David, and Solomon are all successively placed in "derogatory" positions; and the Pagan hero-worshippers of antiquity are equally with the Jewish recalcitrant to Mr. Sinclair's