It remains to restate with equal brevity the myth-theory which, long ago propounded on a very narrow basis, has latterly been re-developed in the light of modern mythology and anthropology, and has in recent years found rapidly increasing acceptance. Inevitably the different lines of approach have involved varieties of speculation; Professors Drews and W. B. Smith have ably and independently developed the theory in various ways; and a conspectus and restatement has become necessary for the sake of the theory itself no less than for the sake of those readers who call for a condensed statement. This in turn is in itself tentative. If the progressive analysis of the subject matter from the point of view of its historicity has meant a century and a half of debate and an immense special literature, it is not to be supposed that the theory which negates the fundamental assumptions of that literature can be fully developed and established in one lifetime, at the hands of a few writers. The problem "What really happened?" is in fact a far wider one for the advocate of the myth-theory than for the critic who undertakes to extract a biography from the documents. In its first form, as propounded by Dupuis and Volney, the myth-theory was confined simply to certain parallelisms between Christian and Pagan myth, and to the astronomical basis of a number of these. From this standpoint the actual historic inception of the cult was little considered. Strauss, again, developed with great power and precision the view that most of the detail in the gospel narrative is myth construction on the lines of Jewish prophecy and dogma. But Strauss never fully accepted the myth-theory, having always assumed the existence of a teacher as a nucleus for the whole. As apart from the continuators of Dupuis and Volney, it was Bruno Bauer who, setting out with the purpose of extracting a biography from the gospels, and finding no standing ground, first propounded a myth-theory from that point of view. His construction, being the substantially arbitrary one of a hypothetical evangelist who created a myth and thereby founded the cultus, naturally made no headway; and its artificiality strengthened the hands of those who claimed to work inductively on the documents. It was by reason of a similar failure to find a historic footing where he had at first taken it for granted that the present writer was gradually led, on lines of comparative hierology and comparative mythology and anthropology, to the conception of the evolution of the Jesus-cult from the roots of a "pre-Christian" one. The fact that this view has been independently reached by such a student as Professor W. B. Smith, who approached the problem from within rather than by way of the comparative method, seems in itself a very important confirmation.