The whole discussion regarding the sources is only loosely connected with the process of arriving at the portrait of Jesus, since this portrait is fixed from the first, being determined by the mental atmosphere and religious horizon of the ’sixties. They all portray the Jesus of liberal theology; the only difference is that one is a little more conscientious in his colouring than another, and one perhaps has a little more taste than another, or is less concerned about the consequences. The desire to escape in some way from the alternative between the Synoptists and John was native to the Marcan hypothesis. Weisse had endeavoured to effect this by distinguishing between the sources in the Fourth Gospel.(128) Schenkel and Weizsäcker are more modest. They do not feel the need of any clear literary view of the Fourth Gospel, of any critical discrimination between original and secondary elements in it; they are content to use as historical whatever their instinct leads them to accept. “Apart from the fourth Gospel,” says Schenkel, “we should miss in the portrait of the Redeemer the unfathomable depths and the inaccessible heights.” “Jesus,” to quote his aphorism, “was not always thus in reality, but He was so in truth.” Since when have historians had the right to distinguish between reality and truth? That was one of the bad habits which the author of this characterisation of Jesus brought with him from his earlier dogmatic training. Weizsäcker(129) expresses himself with more circumspection. “We possess,” he says, “in the Fourth Gospel genuine apostolic reminiscences as much as in any part of the first three Gospels; but between the facts on which the reminiscences are based and their reproduction in literary form there lies the development of their possessor into a great mystic, and the influence of a philosophy which here for the first time united itself in this way with the Gospel; they need, therefore, to be critically examined; and the historical truth of this gospel, great as it is, must not be measured with a painful literality.”