"We must" do no such thing. We "must" draw a licit inference. The alleged great fact is morally a chimera, and historically a hallucination. To admit that all the evidence collapses, and then to posit the visionary gospel with a "must," is to abandon critical principle. The "must" is simply the eternal presupposition. And the choice of the sincere student "must" be between that negation of science and a fresh scientific search, from which the presupposition, as such, is excluded. If it can reappear as a licit conclusion, so be it. But it has never yet so arisen. CHAPTER IX BLASS AND FLINDERS PETRIE A very interesting attempt to bring the synoptic problem to a new critical test has latterly been made by Dr. Flinders Petrie in his work, The Growth of the Gospels as shown by Structural Criticism (1910). His starting point is the likelihood that logia, analogous to the non-canonical fragments discovered in recent years, were the original material from which the Gospels were built up. The hypothesis is prima facie quite legitimate, there being nothing to repel it. As he contends, there is now evidence that writing was in much more common use in some periods of antiquity than scholars had formerly supposed; and scraps of writing by non-scholarly persons, he argues, may have been widely current in the environment with which we are concerned. All the while he is founding on data from the Egypt of the third century for a Palestinian environment of the first; and he is obliged to stress the point that Matthew the tax-gatherer was a "professional scribe," while his argument runs that Matthew used the detached jottings of other people, not his own. But let us follow out his thesis:-- We cannot doubt [writes Dr. Petrie] that such was the course of growth when we look at the logia. Those collections of brief sayings could hardly have come into existence if full narratives and sufficient standards of information in the Gospels were already circulating. They belong essentially to a preparatory age, when records were in course of compilation. But, once written out, they naturally survived side by side with the Gospels, which had only used a portion of their material. [47] It is not quite clear whether Dr. Petrie meant here to claim not only that the so-called Logia Iesou published in 1897 and 1904 are anterior to and independent of the Gospels (though found only in third-century MSS.), but that they are on the same footing of credibility with the Gospels. This, however, seems inevitably to follow from his position, though it appears to suggest to him no difficulty about the general historicity of the Gospel story, which he too takes for granted. Let us then note the problems raised.