In fine, there is no figure in human history that signifies more.
Men may love him or hate him, but they do it intensely. If he was
only what some say, he ought to be a mere figure of antiquity by
now. But he is more than that; Jesus is not a dead issue; he has to
be reckoned with still; and men who are to treat mankind seriously,
must make the intellectual effort to understand the man on whom has
been centred more of the interest and the passion of the most
serious and the best of mankind than on any other. The real secret
is that human nature is deeply and intensely spiritual, and that
Jesus satisfies it at its most spiritual point.

The object before us in these pages is the attempt to know Jesus, if
we can, in a more intimate and intelligent way than we have done--at
least, to put before our minds the great problem, Who is this Jesus
Christ? and to try to answer it.

One answer to this question is that Jesus was nothing, never was
anything, but a myth developed for religious purposes; that he never
lived at all. This view reappears from time to time, but so far it
has not appealed to any who take a serious interest in history. No
historian of the least repute has committed himself to the theory.
Desperate attempts have been made to discredit the Christian writers
of the first two centuries; it has been emphasized that Jesus is not
mentioned in secular writers of the period, and the passage in
Tacitus ("Annals", XV:44) has been explained away as a Christian
interpolation, or, more gaily, by reviving the wild notion that
Poggio Bracciolini forged the whole of the "Annals". But such
trifling with history and literature does not serve. No scholar
accepts the theory about Poggio--and yet if the passage about Christ