This attempt to distinguish between “the religion _of_ Jesus” and the “religion _about_ Jesus,” is as old as modern ignorance of the subject. But Browne, given all the ignorance in the world, seems unable to state it without letting it sting itself to death with its own tail. And he goes on, still further to murder the dead body of his own philosophy: “Now ... there was in the land an evangelist ... called John the Baptizer.... Jesus was for a time a follower of John, one of a multitude of young Jews and Jewesses who believed in the mission of the wild prophet. His gospel was much like that of his teacher. ‘The time is fulfilled,’ he cried, ‘and the Kingdom of God is at hand.’”[164] That is, the new gospel was the messianic gospel of a wild prophet--and the “follower” who preached it preached only ethics! And--“when the stories of that young preacher’s wandering [the reference is to Christ, not to John] were gathered together in later years and set down in writing, it was said that he performed all manner of miracles as he went about the land. Perhaps there is a fragment of truth in that tradition, for if people will only believe with sufficient faith, miracles become not at all impossible.... And Jesus could quite command implicit faith. He himself believed; with all his heart and soul he believed that soon would come the Great Release.... He spoke without the slightest flourish, using plain words and homely parables. He indulged in no philosophy or theology, for, after all, he was an untutored toiler who knew nothing of such vanities. Nor, seemingly, did he preach any inordinate heresies.”[165] How does Browne know how He spoke? Surely he cannot be depending upon the “stories of that young preacher’s wanderings” that were “gathered together in later years and set down in writing,” for he has already told us that “they are no more to be relied on than the suspiciously similar legends told many centuries earlier about Zoroaster.” Again it seems to be suggested that Browne was there. But this at least seems clear: Browne holds that Jesus preached “The Kingdom of God is at hand”; that it is not at all impossible that He performed miracles, though only of the faith-cure sort (I have insufficient space for the discussion of miracles as distinguished from faith-cures); and that He did not preach “any inordinate heresies” from the Jewish standpoint. “He was not a heretic in the sense that Ikhanaton or Zoroaster were heretics. Outwardly he was distinctly a conforming Jew.”[166] “Yet [on the same page] for all his conformity ... Jesus was definitely a rebel.... His whole gospel was intended but to comfort the disinherited, for it declared that no matter how unlettered they might be they could nevertheless be taken into the Kingdom of God when it came.... Now such a gospel was literally saturated with heresy.” Saturated with heresy, but not with inordinate heresy--is that it? [Illustration: RABBI LEWIS BROWNE Stranger than fiction]