cause of mysticism was well served by the impenetrable cloud which hung over the mundane activity of Jesus. No common inquiry enabled the diligent adversaries of Chris-
previous works of some magnitude from similar studies, argues on the same side. Havet says, "Sa trace dans l'histoire est pour ainsi dire imperceptible"; Le Christianisme, iii, 1878, p. 493. Bruno Brauer concludes that "the historic Jesus becomes a phantom which mocks all the laws of history"; Kritik d. evang. Geschichte, 1842, iii, p. 308; see also Frazer's Golden Bough, 1900, iii, p. 186, et seq. Disregarding the Gospels, a form of narrative which could not be accepted by us as historical in connection with any other religion, the slight allusions to Jesus in known writers (Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius), are evidently mere hearsay derived from the Christians themselves. Hegesippus, a lost church historian (c. 170), gives some details as to the death of "James, the brother of the Lord," and also states that some poor labourers of Judaea, for whom a descent from the Holy Family was claimed, were brought before Domitian and dismissed as of no account; fragments in Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., iii, 20. Remarkable is the silence, in his voluminous writings, of Philo Judaeus, a philosophico-theological Jew of Alexandria, a prominent citizen, and a man of middle age at the time of the Crucifixion. So close to the scene itself he could scarcely have failed to have heard of any popular agitation centring round a Messiah at Jerusalem. When Augustus was told that Herod had executed two of his sons he observed that "it was better to be Herod's pig than his son." In ignorant repetition at a later date this remark was construed into an allusion to the slaughter of the innocents; Macrobius, ii, 4. Several (non-extant) Jewish historians, Justus Tiberiensis for example, made no mention of Jesus. Still worse is the case for the Apostles; they are not noticed outside the N. T. unless in Acts conceded on all hands to be apocryphal. Most singular is it that no descendants of theirs were ever known. Towards the middle of the second century when the Christians loom into view as a compact body of co-religionists we should assuredly expect to find relations of the Apostles, direct or collateral, moving with extraordinary prestige among the Saints on earth. But, beyond a vague allusion to two daughters of Philip (Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., iii, 39), there is no trace of any such individuals. The descendants of Mahomet alone were numerous a century after his death, but the Twelve proved as barren of progeny as
