It may of course be argued that the previous negative criticism of the gospel record is indecisive; that the avowal of Loisy: "If the trial and condemnation of Jesus, as pretended Messiah, could be put in doubt, we should have no ground for affirming the existence of the Christ," does not commit other inquirers, or that the historicity of the trial story has not really been exploded; that the nullity of the alleged Evangel has not been established; or that the complete destruction of previous biographical theories claimed by Schweitzer for himself and Wrede has not been accomplished. The answer is that these issues are not re-opened in the following chapters. They were carefully handled in the previous volume, to which I have seen no attempt at a comprehensive and reasoned answer. [The latest attack I have seen comes from a former antagonist, who appears to lay his main complaint against the book on the ground that it "omits to notice the theory of the synoptic problem which appears in every modern text-book," that is, "the two-documents hypothesis." And there emerges this indictment:-- As the theory has a vital bearing on the relative values of different strata of tradition, Mr. Robertson cannot afford to ignore it. If we apply to himself the crude principle he applies to Paul and the evangelists, to wit, that if they don't mention a thing they don't know it, we must assume that Mr. Robertson is still ignorant of the very elements of the problem he is professing to solve. Since he has no clear or tenable view of the documents and their relations to one another, he obviously cannot answer the historical questions they raise. [3]... Presumably he omits to mention it because he does not see its significance. [4]