100 The Fundamentals the question, was Jesus Christ a real, historical person, or is He'nothing but a literary hero? From two very different quarters the question as to the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth has been raised. At first blush we may think it is ridiculous to raise the question at all. And so it is. But the very fact that scholars do raise the question and mean to be taken seriously, is the necessary result of tendencies in theology which have been fostered until they have reached this culmination point. This fact will, I trust, open the eyes of many in Germany, and in America as well, who are in the habit of intrusting themselves to the guidance of brilliant and charming leaders without real- izing at the start whither they were going. WAS CHRIST A PRODUCT OF BABYLONIAN MYTHOLOGY? The first avenue which led to the negation of the histor- icity of Jesus Christ is the “religionsgeschichtliche” compari- son. The religionsgeschichtliche study of the New Testament aims, as Professor Bousett puts it, “to understand the origin and development of Christianity by means of an investiga- tion of the whole environment of primitive Christianity.” Ap- plying this principle to the person and work of Christ, Pro- fessor Pfleiderer of Berlin, in his “Early Conceptions of Christ,” finds that the Christ of the Church has been formed out of those myths and legends which are the common prop- erty of religion all over the world. The elements of the figure are roughly separable into five groups. There is Christ, the Son of God; Christ the Con- queror ; *Christ the Wonder-worker; Christ the Conqueror of death and the Lifegiver; Christ the King of kings and Lord of lords. The materials for each of these conceptions were taken from various sources. They came from Judaism, from Hellenism, from Mithraism, and the Graeco-Egyptian re- ligion, from Zoroastrianism, and even from Buddhism. They came gradually, and gradually the conception took shape.
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