There is nothing audacious in Schweitzer’s proclamation of the collapse of the liberal life of Jesus. He does not claim to have destroyed it, he merely attests the fact of its collapse. “The Jesus of Nazareth who appeared as the Messiah, proclaimed the morality of the kingdom of God, established the kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died in order to consecrate his work,—this Jesus never existed. It is a figure sketched by Rationalism, enlivened by Liberalism, and dressed up by Modern Theology in the clothes of historical science.”_(_8_)_This fabric did not fall by reason of the strength of any attack from without, but collapsed through its inherent weakness, “shattered and cloven by the actual historical problems which one after another emerged and would not down in spite of all the cunning, art, artifice, and force” which was expended upon this picture of Jesus during the last hundred years. In spite of the protestation that this picture still stands undemolished, no one can be found any more to write a liberal life of Jesus. On [pg 027] the other hand sceptical works have multiplied so rapidly that it would be difficult to enumerate them here. After Kalthoff_(_9_)_ and Drews_(_10_)_the designation of “thoroughgoing scepticism” can hardly be applied to Wrede’s theory. All the books of this class owe what appearance of strength they have, not to their inherent worth, but to the weakness of the theory which opposes them—the current liberal life of Jesus. Solely with a view to maintaining the integrity of this picture it has been found necessary from time to time to sacrifice so much of the documentary evidence—the Synoptic Gospels or their sources—upon which the history of Jesus reposes, that in the end it seems not very unreasonable for Drews and others to assume, from the admissions of their opponents, that there is no convincing historical evidence for the existence of Jesus, and that the real task of the scholar is to show how such a figure was invented. “It is extraordinary,” says Schweitzer in the last chapter of the new edition of his History of the Life of Jesus Study, “how it has fared with the study of the life of Jesus. It set out to find the historical [pg 028] Jesus, and fancied that when he was found he could be set, just as he is, in the midst of our age as Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands which fettered him to the rock of ecclesiastical dogma, and rejoiced when life and movement returned to the figure and the historical man Jesus was seen approaching. He did not stay, however, but passed our age by and returned again to his own. That is what astonished and alarmed the theology of the last decades,—that by no violence of misinterpretation could they succeed in keeping him in our age, but had to let him go. He returned to his own age with the same necessity that the freed pendulum swings back to its original position.