The device of saying that we must accept the historicity of Jesus if we accept that of Solon is merely a new dressing of the old claim that we must believe in the resurrection if we believe in the assassination of Cæsar. Both theses rest on spurious analogies; and both alike defeat themselves, the older by carrying the implication that the prodigies at Cæsar's death are as historical as the assassination; the newer by involving the consequence that Solon accredits not only Lycurgus but Herakles and Dionysos, Ulysses and Achilles. The argument from Pythagoras is a still more fatal device. Of him "it is no easy task to give an account that can claim to be regarded as history." [18] And "of the opinions of Pythagoras we know even less than of his life." [19] It is held to be certain that he taught the doctrine of transmigration and originated certain propositions in mathematics; but while the mathematical element has no analogue in the gospels, the residual view of Pythagoras as vending in religion only a "thoroughly primitive" set of taboos [20] would sanction, by analogy, the view that the real Jesus was the Talmudic Ben Pandira, who dates about 100 B.C., and was reputed a worker of wonders by sorcery. This is a sufficiently lame and impotent conclusion from a polemic in favour of the gospel Jesus, whom it leaves, in effect, a myth, as the myth-theory maintains. As for Apollonius of Tyana, one holds him historical [21] just because his myth-laden story is finally intelligible as history, which is precisely what the Jesus story is not. This said, The Historical Jesus may be left, as it is, open to critical refutation. The present volume is theoretically constructive, and does not unnecessarily return upon the other. It is open in its turn to refutative criticism. That description, it may be remarked, would not be accorded by me to a mere asseveration that there "must" be a historical basis for the gospels in a person answering broadly to the Gospel Jesus. Any one who confidently holds such a view need hardly trouble himself with the present thesis at all: and for me any one who affects to dispose of the issue by merely fulminating the "must" is simply begging the question. Those who, on the other hand, do but lean instinctively to such a belief may be respectfully invited to reconsider it in the light of all hierology. That there "must" be a historic process of causation behind every cult is a truism: it does not in the least follow that the historic basis must be the historicity of the God or Demigod round whose name the cult centres.