11. The fourth gospel is only one more systematic step in the process of myth-making. The biographical school, in giving this up as unhistorical, in effect admits that the "personality" of the alleged Teacher had been so ineffectual as to admit of a successful interposition of a new and thoroughly mythical figure, entirely supernatural in theory, but more "impressive" as a speaking and quasi-human personage. The "Logos" of John is again an adaptation of a Jewish adaptation of a pagan conception, the doctrine of the Logos set forth by the Alexandrian Jew Philo having come through Greek and Eastern channels. [400] There was no critical faculty in the early Church that could secure its rejection, though it was somewhat slow of acceptance. The doctrine of the Trinity is again an assimilation from paganism, proximately Egyptian. [401] Such, in outline, is our working hypothesis. As explained at the outset, it is not supposed that so complex a problem can in so brief a space and time be conclusively solved; and criticism will doubtless involve modification when criticism is scientifically applied. To such scientific criticism the production of a complete outline may be an aid; previous debate, even when rational in temper, having been spent on some of the "trees" without regard to the "wood" in general. All that is claimed for the complete hypothesis is that it is at all points inductively reached, and that for that reason it squares better with the whole facts than any form of the biographical theory--including the highly attenuated "eschatological" form in which Jesus is conceived solely as a proclaimer of "the last things." That thesis, indeed, reduces the biographical theory to complete nullity by leaving the mass of the record without any explanation save the mythical one, which suffices equally to account for eschatology. CHAPTER VIII SUPPLEMENTARY MYTH § 1. Myths of Healing It is significant that the later myth-making of the synoptics is partly by way of reversion to the folk-lore in which the myth had risen, partly by way of meeting non-Jewish Messianic requirements, partly by way of Gentilism, partly by way of concessions to the Gnosticism or occultism whose pretensions in the second century exercised so strong a pressure on the Church. As Professor Smith points out, the story in Mark (xiv, 51-52) of the youth who at the betrayal fled naked, leaving his linen cloth in the hands of the captors, [402] is a crude provision for the Docetic theory that the real Christ did not suffer. Cerinthus taught that "at last Christ departed from Jesus, and that then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained impassible, inasmuch as he was a spiritual being." [403]