found in their works are singularly brief" (Ibid, p. 42).

What does it all, this "evidence," amount to? One writer, Tacitus,
records that a man, called by his followers "Christ"--for no one
pretends that Christ is anything more than a title given by his
disciples to a certain Jew named Jesus--was put to death by Pontius
Pilate. And suppose he were, what then? How is this a proof of the
religion called Christianity? Tacitus knows nothing of the
miracle-worker, of the risen and ascended man; he is strangely ignorant
of all the wonders that had occurred; and, allowing the passage to be
genuine, it tells sorely against the marvellous history given by the
Christians of their leader, whose fame is supposed to have spread far
and wide, and whose fame most certainly must so have spread had he
really performed all the wonderful works attributed to him. But no
necessity lies upon the Freethinker, when he rejects Christianity, to
disprove the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth, although we
point to the inadequacy of the evidence even of his existence. The
strength of the Freethought position is in no-wise injured by the
admission that a young Jew named Joshua (i.e. Jesus) may have wandered
up and down Galilee and Judæa in the reign of Tiberius, that he may have
been a religious reformer, that he may have been put to death by Pontius
Pilate for sedition. All this is perfectly likely, and to allow it in no
way endorses the mass of legend and myth encrusted round this tiny
nucleus of possible fact. This obscure peasant is not the Christian
Jesus, who is--as we shall later urge--only a new presentation of the
ancient Sun-God, with unmistakeable family likeness to his elder
brothers. The Reverend Robert Taylor very rightly remarks, concerning
this small historical possibility: "These are circumstances which fall
entirely within the scale of rational possibility, and draw for no more
than an ordinary and indifferent testimony of history, to command the