of so many of the earlier gospels. It is doubtless for this
reason that we do not possess the Aramaean original of the
"Logia" of Matthew, or the "Memorabilia" of Mark, the companion
of Peter,--two works to which Papias (A. D. 120) alludes as
containing authentic reports of the utterances of Jesus.

These considerations will, we believe, sufficiently explain the
curious circumstance that, while we know the Christ of dogma so
intimately, we know the Jesus of history so slightly. The
literature of early Christianity enables us to trace with
tolerable completeness the progress of opinion concerning the
nature of Jesus, from the time of Paul's early missions to the
time of the Nicene Council; but upon the actual words and deeds
of Jesus it throws a very unsteady light. The dogmatic purpose
everywhere obscures the historic basis.

This same dogmatic prepossession which has rendered the data for
a biography of Jesus so scanty and untrustworthy, has also until
comparatively recent times prevented any unbiassed critical
examination of such data as we actually possess. Previous to the
eighteenth century any attempt to deal with the life of Jesus
upon purely historical methods would have been not only contemned
as irrational, but stigmatized as impious. And even in the
eighteenth century, those writers who had become wholly
emancipated from ecclesiastic tradition were so destitute of all
historic sympathy and so unskilled in scientific methods of
criticism, that they utterly failed to comprehend the
requirements of the problem. Their aims were in the main polemic,
not historical. They thought more of overthrowing current dogmas
than of impartially examining the earliest Christian literature