Since that discovery was reached, the discrediting of the conventional view has been carried to the verge of nihilism by men who still posit a historical Jesus, but critically eliminate nearly every accepted detail, leaving only a choice between two shadowy and elusive historical concepts, even less tenable than those they reject. In the works of Schweitzer and Wrede, there is literally more direct and detailed destruction of Gospel-myth than had been attempted by almost any advocate of the myth-theory who had preceded them; though, as we have seen, it is not difficult to carry the process further. In the name of the historicity claim, they have gone on eliminating one by one myth elements where the myth-theorists had been content to recognize myth in mass. He who would re-establish the historical Jesus has to combat, first and foremost, the latest scientific champions of the belief in the historicity.
Those English critics who, like Dr. Conybeare, have declaimed so loudly of a consensus of critics and of historical common-sense on the side of a "historical Christ," are simply fulminating from the standpoint of the German "liberalism" of thirty years ago. Nine-tenths of what they violently affirm has been definitely and destructively rejected by the latest German representatives of the critical class, in the very name of the defence of the historicity of Jesus. Orthodox Germans, on the other hand, have been pointing out that the "liberal" view is no longer "modern," the really modern criticism having shown that the Gospel-figure is a God-figure or nothing. Vainly they hope to reinforce orthodoxy by the operations of a strict critical method. [224] Our English "liberal-conservatives," all the while, are fighting with obsolete (German) weapons, and in total ignorance of the real course of the campaign in recent years.
In such circumstances, those of us who did our thinking for ourselves, without waiting for new German leads, have perhaps some right to appeal anew to readers to do the same. There is no race quarrel involved. But perhaps those students in the English-speaking countries who in the past have been wont to follow the German leads of the generation before their own, may now realize that they were unduly diffident, and proceed to make that use of their own faculties which Germans were always making from time to time.