In this connection, finally, it has to be noted that Professor Schmiedel finds an à priori authenticity in a prediction in which Jesus claims supernatural status, though the ostensibly unhistorical character of such claims was his avowed ground for positing the "pillar-texts" which alone defied all skepticism. And the formula in both cases is the same--"it could not have been invented." [398] The major premiss involved is: "No passage could be invented which would stultify the position of the believers." But do none of the admitted inventions [399] in the gospels stultify the position of the believers? The two genealogies do; the anti-Davidic passages stultify these; the pro-Samaritan teaching stultifies the anti-Samaritan; and so on through twenty cases of contradiction. M. Loisy, indeed, claims the pro-Samaritan passage as genuine: does he then admit the anti-Samaritan to be spurious? The biographical school cannot have it both ways. The very fact that they have to oust so many passages on the score of incompatibility is the complete answer to the plea of "genuine because unsuitable to the purposes of the propaganda." The fact that a multitude of contradictions are left standing proves simply that when once an awkward passage was installed it was nearly impossible to get rid of it; because some copies were always left which retained it; and in the stage of increasing respect for the written word it was generally restored. The "Jesus" before Barabbas was at last ejected only because everybody recoiled from it. Predictions were not so easily dropped. On the page on which he claims that Jesus' prediction of his Second Coming could not have been invented, Professor Schmiedel avows that various passages in Mt. xxiv really belong to "a small composition, perhaps Jewish, on the signs of the end of the world, written shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70." If the one set of passages are borrowed, why not the other? Was it unlikely that Jewish eschatologists should predict the coming of the Son of Man at the near end of the world, and that Jesuists should put the prediction in the mouth of their Lord and make him say it of himself? The à priori negative is quite untenable.