admixture of error. With justice and candour, the lecturer
impresses upon his hearers that the special distinction of
Christianity, among the religions of the world, lies in its
claim to be historical; to be surely founded upon events which
have happened, exactly as they are declared to have happened in
its sacred books; which are true, that is, in the sense that the
statement about the execution of Charles the First is true.
Further, it is affirmed that the New Testament presupposes the
historical exactness of the Old Testament; that the points of
contact of "sacred" and "profane" history are innumerable;
and that the demonstration of the falsity of the Hebrew records,
especially in regard to those narratives which are assumed to be
true in the New Testament, would be fatal to Christian theology.

My utmost ingenuity does not enable me to discover a flaw in the
argument thus briefly summarised. I am fairly at a loss to
comprehend how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian
theology must stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness
of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah, or
Christ, is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history; the
identification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon
the interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which
have no evidential value unless they possess the historical
character assigned to them. If the covenant with Abraham was not
made; if circumcision and sacrifices were not ordained by
Jahveh; if the "ten words" were not written by God's hand on the
stone tables; if Abraham is more or less a mythical hero, such
as Theseus; the story of the Deluge a fiction; that of the Fall
a legend; and that of the creation the dream of a seer; if all
these definite and detailed narratives of apparently real events