opened this article is its own explanation. The Jesus of history
is so little known just because the Christ of dogma is so well
known.[16] Other teachers--Paul, Mohammed, Sakyamuni--have come
merely as preachers of righteousness, speaking in the name of
general principles with which their own personalities were not
directly implicated. But Jesus, as we shall see, before the close
of his life, proclaimed himself to be something more than a
preacher of righteousness. He announced himself--and justly, from
his own point of view--as the long-expected Messiah sent by
Jehovah to liberate the Jewish race. Thus the success of his
religious teachings became at once implicated with the question
of his personal nature and character. After the sudden and
violent termination of his career, it immediately became
all-important with his followers to prove that he was really the
Messiah, and to insist upon the certainty of his speedy return to
the earth. Thus the first generation of disciples dogmatized
about him, instead of narrating his life,--a task which to them
would have seemed of little profit. For them the all-absorbing
object of contemplation was the immediate future rather than the
immediate past. As all the earlier Christian literature informs
us, for nearly a century after the death of Jesus, his followers
lived in daily anticipation of his triumphant return to the
earth. The end of all things being so near at hand, no attempt
was made to insure accurate and complete memoirs for the use of a
posterity which was destined, in Christian imagination, never to
arrive. The first Christians wrote but little; even Papias, at
the end of a century, preferring second-hand or third-hand oral
tradition to the written gospels which were then beginning to
come into circulation.[17] Memoirs of the life and teachings of
Jesus were called forth by the necessity of having a written