But that is not the question. We are not concerned with what hysterical mobs may have thought about charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools, but with what Jesus thought about Himself. We are also concerned with what Jesus did when He was hailed as the Awaited One. It would seem that an exalted person, not self-convinced of his Messiahship, would have been constrained by his own exalted character to enter a disclaimer in such a case. Of course, if one could quote the Gospels without fear of setting Mr. Browne to thinking of “all the stupid and silly and gross extravagances, all the pious embellishments and patent falsehoods that clog and confuse the Gospel accounts,” one could prove even to him that Jesus actually claimed to be the Messiah. For in the Gospel According to St. John it is written,[171] “Jesus said unto him [Thomas], I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me.” And, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” Doubtless Browne considers these and similar passages as suspiciously similar to certain legends told many centuries earlier about Zoroaster. But in any case his own argument should force him to conclude that Jesus was the Messiah; or was self-deluded; or was a charlatan. Or does Browne consider it possible to be a charlatan and an exalted person at one and the same time? Out of charity we must conclude that he decides in favor of the delusion hypothesis. Of the other alternatives, his text forbids one and his presumable sanity forbids the other. So it was the victim of a delusion which we are not even certain that he entertained who took cringing serfs and made them over into towering men. “This Believing World” continues: “By the time Jesus reached the capital his fame had already preceded him. A great mob rushed out ... wildly throwing their cloaks to the ground beneath the feet of the colt on which he rode. They hailed him as their Messiah.... ‘Hosanna!’ they cried, ecstatically, ‘Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord!’” Browne quotes the Gospels! But what makes him think that this triumphant entrance into Jerusalem is not a pious embellishment, or even a patent falsehood? He only tells us that “One wonders whether those poor wretches out of the alleys and dunghills of old Jerusalem understood who the man Jesus really was. One wonders whether even his own disciples understood--or whether even his most pious devotees today understand. To that frantic mob, at least, he was simply an arch-zealot, a martial hero who had come to lead them in bloody rebellion against Rome.”[172]