The master passion that dominated Jewish life in the days of Jesus was a fierce patriotism that expended its fires in bitter and undying hatred of Rome; Jesus, while loving his people and weeping over their impending calamities, said, “Love your enemies.” If these writers were inventing a character when they wrote the gospels their hero would have been in sympathy with his time and people. Such a Christ would have unfurled the lion-ensign of Judah, and every sword would have leaped from its scabbard from the mountains of Lebanon to the borders of Edom. But Jesus paid tribute to Cæsar and commanded his disciples to do it. Of Jesus we may well say what he said of himself: he is “The Son of man.” He belongs to all; he is a universal character, and the only one in history. He is brother to every human being; he loves one as well as another and each one perfectly. He means as much to us of to-day as to those friends in Bethany whom he loved, or as he meant to that “beloved disciple” who leaned upon his breast at the Last Supper. The necessary conclusion is, such a character could not have been created by dramatic genius, least of all by the four writers of that period who have given us the gospels. The Jesus of the gospels must have lived, to have been conceived or described. This conclusion agrees with the method these writers adopt in presenting this character to us. It is the method of perfect simplicity. They nowhere try to tell us what he was or what he was like. There are no comparisons, no analyses of qualities, no character-sketching; there is no effort, not the least, to draw a portrait of him. They simply write down what they saw him do and what they heard him say; and they make it plain that they understood neither his deeds nor his words, and that least of all they understood him. The loftiest genius could not have invented the character of Jesus. Plain men, like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, could write of a life that was lived; they could write down the words they heard him speak; they could record the story of the good works they saw him do, and so make us to know Jesus, “who and what manner of man he was.” CHAPTER V. JESUS AND MYTHS. Some learned men, in seeking a way to account for the Jesus of the New Testament without accepting the reality of his existence, have sought to set up a notion like this: It is true that the evangelists did not invent this character, yet Jesus never really lived; he is only the myth of Hebrew history.