Existence of Revelation: Introduction and the Historical Authority of the Four Gospels
Introduction
§ 1. On the Method and Division of This Treatise
I. Two methods are possible: the progressive and the regressive. The great religious systems of the present day are chiefly three — Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism — and there can be no doubt of the supremacy of the Christian Faith; if there is a Revelation at all, it must first be sought in the religion established by Christ, which unfolds across three stages: primeval, Mosaic, and Christian.
(A) Down to the nineteenth century, most apologists followed the progressive method, attempting to prove in turn the divine origin of the primeval stage, then of the Mosaic stage (confirmed by the miracles of Moses and the prophets), and finally of the religion of Christ and the Catholic Church; Ottiger has recently attempted this task afresh. But the length of treatment required, and the many difficulties raised against the Books of the Old Testament — difficulties better and more fully resolved by specialized commentators on Scripture — forbid the exclusive use of this method.
(B) During the nineteenth century, accordingly, many apologists turned instead to the regressive method, beginning with an examination of the religion of Christ, and using the light of the New Testament and of fulfilled prophecy to illuminate, in turn, the primitive testimonies and documents of the Old Testament. Some, such as Brugère, establish the truths of Christianity and of Catholicism separately; others, such as Lacordaire, Cardinal Deschamps, and Didiot, find in the very marks of the Church “a great and perpetual motive of credibility, and an irrefragable witness of her own divine mission” (Vatican Council) — so that the Church, standing as a sign to the nations, both invites those who have not yet received the Faith and confirms her own children in the solidity of the foundation on which their Faith rests. Apologists who argue in this way from the testimony of the Church go on to illuminate, in a clearer light, the historical matter of Apologetics — the doctrine and miracles of Christ, the Messianic prophecies — and finally find in the testimony of Christ Himself a warrant for the divine origin of the Mosaic and primeval stages in turn. The regressive method, proceeding as it does from the complex, present fact of the Church’s life back to its underlying principles, is essentially analytic in character, whereas the progressive method is more nearly synthetic.
II. The value of the regressive method lies in several respects: (1) it is easier, since it sets out from what is better known to us; (2) it is shorter and more convincing, since the resolution of historical and critical questions about the origin of Christianity is strengthened at every point by the Church’s own living tradition; (3) it is more natural to set forth first the historical testimony of Christ concerning His own divine mission, the mysteries to be believed, the precepts to be observed, and the institution of the Church, before turning to consider the motives of credibility — these motives, especially the life and the marks of the Church, then serve to confirm that primary testimony; (4) it accords better with the very idea of “Catholic Apologetics,” which marshals rational arguments under the direction of Faith; (5) it accords better with the words of the Vatican Council itself, which asserts that the Church is “a perpetual motive of credibility, and an irrefragable proof of her own divine mission”; and (6) the methods, however provisionally distinguished for convenience, are in the end really identical in substance.
III. The union of both methods. Just as physical science makes use of both analytic and synthetic methods according to its purpose, so too in the science of Apologetics it is best to unite the regressive and the progressive methods. Accordingly, in what follows, the testimony of Christ regarding His own divine mission is given first place, followed by the motives of credibility best known to us — the life and doctrine of the Church — and only then is the inquirer’s mind directed to weigh the evidence of miracles and prophecy from the more distant past. The second part of Catholic Apologetics is thus divided as follows: an Introduction; the Testimony of Christ regarding His divine mission, the mysteries and precepts to be believed, and the institution of the Church; the Confirmation of that testimony by internal motives; its Confirmation by the sublimity of doctrine and the life of the Church; its Confirmation by miracles and prophecy; a Comparison of Christianity with the Mosaic religion; a Comparison of Christianity with other forms of religion; and a Conclusion on the necessity of embracing the Catholic Faith.
The regressive method, though suitable for many reasons, should not, however, be used exclusively. The Vatican Council itself affirms the probative force of the miracles and prophecies of Moses and of Christ before it turns to consider the Church, since — as the Encyclical Providentissimus Deus teaches — the magisterium of the Church herself ultimately rests on the testimony of Sacred Scripture. It should be noted, too, that the distinction between “Christian Apologetics” in general and “Catholic Apologetics” specifically arose only after the Reformation, once it became necessary to distinguish the defence of Christianity as such from the defence of the Catholic Church in particular.
§ 2. The Historical Authority of the Four Gospels
Preliminary remarks. The teaching and history of Christ are found in the New Testament, and especially in the Four Gospels. To establish the existence of Christian Revelation, it is sufficient to establish the historical authority of the Gospels. Rationalists no longer seriously question the historical character of St. Paul’s principal epistles — 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, the Corinthian correspondence, Romans, Philippians — which even Harnack and Jülicher acknowledge to have been written between about A.D. 49 and 64.
The question here at issue is not the inspiration of the Gospels but their historical value: (1) are they genuine, that is, written by the authors to whom they are traditionally attributed, and therefore authoritative; (2) are they integral, that is, substantially in agreement with their original text; and (3) are they historically trustworthy in their narration of facts, that is, were the Evangelists neither themselves deceived nor guilty of deceiving others? A full and adequate treatment of this question is found in the writings of specialists such as Lepin, Cornely, Durand, and Jacquier; only the principal arguments are given here.
Article I — Method
The genuineness, integrity, and historicity of a book may be established by extrinsic arguments, drawn from the testimony of writers who lived at or near the time of its composition, or by intrinsic arguments, drawn from the character of the book itself. Extrinsic arguments give historical certitude of a book’s authenticity once it is clear that the witnesses are reliable and that their testimony has not been seriously contested. Intrinsic arguments, by contrast, do not as a rule sufficiently determine the author or the exact time of composition on their own; they furnish only probability and confirmation. Modernist critics tend to minimize the value of extrinsic evidence and to maximize that of the intrinsic — a tendency against which Leo XIII, in the Encyclical Providentissimus Deus, warns that by the “internal method” alone, taken in isolation, each critic tends simply to find confirmation of his own prior assumptions.
The opinions of adversaries fall into several recognizable schools. Mythism, associated above all with David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), whose Leben Jesu was translated into English by Marian Evans (later known as George Eliot), maintained that the miraculous element in the Gospels was a myth invented some hundred and fifty years after the death of Christ. Evolutionism, associated with the Tübingen school founded by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), held, on broadly Hegelian lines, that Christianity is the synthesis of two originally opposed tendencies — the “thesis” and “antithesis” represented respectively by the teaching of Peter and of Paul, enshrined in turn in the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke, and unified in a “higher synthesis” supposedly represented by the Gospels of Mark and of John. Zeller, Schwegler, Ritschl, and Pfleiderer belong to this school. Modernism, finally, represented by the modern critical school generally, holds that Christ’s own teaching was only gradually idealized by His followers, so that different, successive stages of belief about Him can be traced — first as a man, then as Son of God, then as equal to the Father, then as miraculously born of a virgin — and this school commonly denies the genuineness and historical character of St. John’s Gospel altogether. Reuss, Renan, Sabatier, the two Révilles, Stapfer, Harnack, the two Holtzmanns, Jülicher, Cheyne, and Loisy all belong, in various ways, to this Modernist tendency. Of these, Harnack is without doubt the ablest; his considered judgment assigns Mark to about A.D. 65–70, the work of a disciple of Peter; Luke to about A.D. 78–83, perhaps even earlier (60–70), and genuine; the Greek text of Matthew to about A.D. 70–75, the work of an unknown author; and John to about A.D. 80–110, the work of a certain priest named John, though not the Evangelist himself.
The teaching of the Church. The Biblical Commission, in decrees of June 19, 1911, and June 26, 1912, teaches the genuineness, the chronological order of composition (the Aramaic Gospel of St. Matthew first, then St. Mark, then St. Luke), and the historical character of the Synoptic Gospels; the Commission allows that the hypothesis of the priority of Mark and Luke to the Greek text of Matthew remains tenable, but it disapproves of the attitude of those who, resting on no testimony of tradition or serious historical argument, adopt a rigid “two-source” hypothesis to explain the composition of the Greek Matthew and of Luke purely from their dependence on Mark and on a hypothetical collection of the Lord’s sayings. On May 29, 1907, the Commission, with the Pope’s approval, declared the genuineness and historical character of the Fourth Gospel.
About fifty years ago the critics of the Tübingen school habitually assigned the books of the New Testament to comparatively late dates and to unknown authors; in more recent years a marked reaction has set in, led above all by Harnack himself. In his Chronology of Ancient Christian Literature (1897) he affirms that, on all the chief points and the great majority of details, the early literature of the Church is trustworthy from the standpoint of literary history, and that contemporary criticism of the most ancient Christian sources is returning, without a doubt, to the traditional view. His Chronology was followed by further studies on Luke and Acts which, reversing his own earlier opinions almost entirely, returned still further toward the traditional position.
Concerning the Gospel of St. Mark, tradition (recorded by Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, about A.D. 130, a disciple of St. John and master of St. Irenaeus, and preserved by Eusebius) holds that Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, carefully wrote down, though not in strict order, all that he remembered of what Christ had said and done. The “young man” who fled naked from the garden at Christ’s arrest, recorded only in Mark’s own Gospel (Mark 14:51–52), is in all probability Mark himself, giving an eyewitness’s touch to his narrative. Mark was closely connected with Paul and Barnabas in the early stages of Paul’s first missionary journey, but left them before they went on from Perga into Pisidian Antioch; later, when Paul and Barnabas disagreed over taking Mark with them a second time, Barnabas and Mark sailed together to Cyprus (cf. Acts 13:13; 15:36–39). After a gap of some ten years, Mark is found again at Rome as a trusted companion of St. Paul, then a prisoner; in his second captivity Paul wrote asking Timothy, at Ephesus, to bring Mark with him to Rome, “for he is profitable to me for the ministry” (2 Tim. 4:11); and St. Peter, writing from Rome, speaks of “my son Mark,” who is with him (1 Pet. 5:12–13). During the intervening years, Mark evidently followed Peter, taking notes of his teaching and so gathering the material for his own Gospel, which was probably published about the year of Peter’s death, A.D. 67 — the old Tübingen suggestion of a second-century date for Mark’s Gospel is now generally abandoned.
Concerning the authorship of the third Gospel and of Acts, several points are certain: (1) Acts is the work of one of Paul’s own travelling companions, often present at the incidents it describes; (2) the Gospel and the Acts were written by the same author; (3) that author, among Paul’s companions, was almost certainly Luke, “the beloved physician” (Col. 4:14), to whom tradition ascribes both books — the educated character of the language, and its use of medical terms, points strongly in the same direction; (4) the Acts ends abruptly at the close of the second year of Paul’s imprisonment at Rome, about A.D. 63; since the Gospel was the first of Luke’s two books, it must have been written before that date, and since it appears to presuppose knowledge of Mark’s Gospel, the material of the latter must already have been available by about A.D. 60. The conclusion drawn by Sanday, Harnack, and many others is that the materials of all three Synoptic Gospels were substantially in existence before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and that the passage of time thereafter had no serious effect upon them.
M. Rackham, in his commentary on Acts, observes that Luke writes with equal familiarity of the Sanhedrin and its parties, the priests and the temple guard, the Herodian princes in Jerusalem, the proconsul of Cyprus, the officials of the synagogue, the leading men of Antioch in Pisidia, the priest of Zeus at Lystra, the magistrates and jailer at Philippi, the politarchs of Thessalonica, the Areopagus of Athens, and the civic officials of Ephesus, down to the centurions, tribune, and procurator of Judaea, the chief man of Malta, and the captain of the guard at Rome — a range and accuracy of detail that would have been almost impossible for a writer compiling his history fifty years after the events. In several cases where Luke’s statements were once impugned, he has since been vindicated by the discovery of inscriptions, as with the politarchs of Thessalonica and the proconsul of Cyprus. On balance, Catholic critics conclude — and Harnack himself regards the conclusion as probable — that the Synoptic Gospels were written between about A.D. 50 and 70, and the Fourth Gospel between about A.D. 80 and 100.
The Fourth Gospel. Internal evidence shows its author to have been: (1) a Jew, given the many Hebraisms and the accurate description of Jewish custom and Messianic expectation; (2) an eyewitness, given the vividness of his portraits of John the Baptist, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Martha, the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, and others; (3) an Apostle, given his knowledge of the minutest details of Our Lord’s life — His thoughts, His prayers, His secret conversations with Nicodemus and with the Samaritan woman; and (4) John the son of Zebedee specifically, since he is never named “John” within the Gospel itself, but always “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” The last chapter, whose authenticity is not seriously disputed, states of this same disciple: “This is that disciple who giveth testimony of these things, and hath written these things; and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24).
The differences of arrangement and content between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptics tell nothing against its genuineness; they show, rather, that John wished to supply what was wanting in the earlier Gospels — hence his emphasis on the Judean ministry, and his more explicit teaching on the divinity of Christ, for which purpose he selects particular miracles and discourses. The remaining differences are due also to the distinct gifts of each writer, of the kind St. Paul alludes to in speaking of the diversity of spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12): John’s special gift lay in the interpretation of Christ’s own words, the “word of wisdom” of which St. Paul speaks (1 Cor. 2:6–10).
As to the integrity of the text, careful modern examination of the manuscripts, the ancient versions, and the citations of the Fathers — even on the admission of non-Catholic critics — shows no substantial alteration of the Gospel text since the last stage of its composition (about A.D. 70–90 for the Synoptics, A.D. 110–120 for the Fourth Gospel). Variant readings exist, but the great majority are mere transpositions of words, synonymous substitutions, or differences of spelling. About ten passages have their authenticity questioned in whole or part — among them the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20), the agony in the garden in Luke (22:43–44), the pericope of the woman taken in adultery in John (7:53–8:11), and the trinitarian baptismal formula in Matthew (28:19) — but none of these disputed passages contains anything essential either to Christ’s teaching or to the principal facts of His life.
Article II — Genuineness and Integrity of the Gospels: The Extrinsic Testimony
The genuineness of the Gospels is confirmed by an unbroken chain of external testimony reaching back to the Apostolic age itself.
From the first century: (1) the First Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians (about A.D. 96) contains six passages drawn from the Synoptic Gospels, giving their sense though not their literal wording; (2) the Didache, or “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” (about A.D. 80–100), discovered in 1873 in the library of Constantinople by Philotheus Bryennius, cites words taken from Matthew and Luke; (3) the Epistle attributed to St. Barnabas (about A.D. 96–100) contains allusions to Matthew, Mark, and Luke alike; (4) St. Ignatius of Antioch, martyred about A.D. 110, borrows sentences from Matthew and Luke; and (5) Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History, preserves a fragment of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia (about A.D. 130), a disciple of St. John and master of St. Irenaeus, who explicitly mentions the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and records that Matthew compiled the sayings of the Lord in the Hebrew tongue.
From the second century: (1) St. Justin Martyr, in his First Apology (c. 66), narrates that at Christian gatherings the Gospels were read aloud; in his Dialogue with Trypho (n. 103) he states plainly that the Gospels were written by Apostles and their disciples; in the First Apology (c. 15) he cites some twenty verses from the Sermon on the Mount, refers to Messianic prophecies recorded in the first Gospel, and describes the Annunciation and other incidents of Christ’s birth as related in Luke. (2) Tatian, a Syrian and a disciple of Justin, composed his Diatessaron, a harmony of the four Gospels, about A.D. 170. (3) The Muratorian Canon, a fragment discovered by Muratori in the Ambrosian Library, and composed before A.D. 200, names Luke’s Gospel as the third and John’s as the fourth. (4) St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, writing his Adversus Haereses about A.D. 180, states that Matthew published his Gospel, written in the Hebrew tongue, while Peter and Paul were preaching and founding the Church at Rome; that after their deaths, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, handed down in writing what Peter had taught; that Luke, the companion of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel that Paul had preached; and that John, the disciple of the Lord who had rested upon His breast, published his own Gospel while residing at Ephesus in Asia — Irenaeus himself was a disciple of Polycarp, who had in turn been a disciple of St. John. (5) Tertullian (about A.D. 200) regards it as beyond controversy that the Church had possessed the four Gospels since Apostolic times: “Matthew and John being Apostles, Mark and Luke disciples of Apostles” (Adversus Marcionem, IV, 2 and 5). (6) Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromata (about A.D. 200), names the four Evangelists and carefully distinguishes their writings from the apocryphal gospels. (7) Origen (about A.D. 200) states that the Church acknowledges only these four Gospels as authoritative.
The testimony of heretics is, if anything, still more telling. Many of the Gnostics — Basilides and Valentinus among them — accepted the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel and even tried to draw support for their own doctrine of “Æons” from its language; Marcion chose the Gospel of Luke as his standard, believing it to represent the original teaching of Paul; and Celsus states plainly that heretics attempted to alter the wording of the Gospel text to defend their own errors (cf. Origen, Contra Celsum, II, 13–16) — an admission that presupposes a fixed, well-known text that such alteration had to work against.
It is thus clear beyond reasonable doubt that the four Gospels were already in use, in churches scattered far apart from one another, by the end of the second century, and that their genuineness was acknowledged without serious question. Were these four Gospels not genuine, several morally impossible consequences would follow: why would the Apostolic Fathers, bishops, and the faithful generally have received as their rule of Faith what were, on this hypothesis, merely apocryphal writings? Why did neither heretics nor pagans, who had every motive to do so, ever deny their genuineness? How did the widely scattered churches all come to receive the same Gospels as Apostolic in origin? And if the Gospels are not genuine, who, in fact, wrote them, and when and where?
The intrinsic evidence confirms this extrinsic testimony at every point. Examination of the Synoptic Gospels shows their authors to have been unlettered Jews, unfamiliar with literary Greek and given to frequent Hebraisms; and their minute, error-free description of places, customs, and persons belonging to the period before A.D. 70 would have been all but impossible for writers of such modest literary ability composing after the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. The Synoptic Gospels, moreover, closely associate the prophecy of Jerusalem’s destruction with the end of the world, a conjunction that itself points strongly to a date of composition before that destruction had actually occurred.
Article III — The Historical Character of the Gospels
Some Rationalists, such as Baur, did not hesitate to accuse the Evangelists of deliberate and conscious deceit; Renan and others preferred to attribute the miraculous element to hallucination; Modernists generally maintain that the historical figure of Christ was gradually transfigured by a process of idealization, born of the faith and enthusiasm of His disciples.
The hypothesis of hallucination collapses on inspection. How could every one of the Evangelists, over the whole course of their separate lives, have suffered from the same hallucination regarding the same set of facts, in the same way? Even Christ’s bitterest enemies would, on this hypothesis, have had to suffer from an identical delusion, since they never denied, and never even attempted to deny, that the miracles had occurred — the whole hypothesis is plainly untenable. Indeed, the apparent discrepancies among the four accounts are themselves, on reflection, a proof of their genuineness. As Brugère argues: if the books bearing the Apostles’ names are really the work of later writers, those writers composed them either honestly, with no intention to deceive, or dishonestly, with such an intention. If honestly, why do the Gospels display so many, and such minute, points of agreement? If dishonestly, why do they display such differences of arrangement and detail? Neither alternative fits a theory of later, artificial composition.
The hypothesis of wilful deceit is equally untenable. The goodness and simplicity of the Apostles is everywhere apparent; they could hope for no gain, temporal or eternal, from a lie, and reaped instead only persecution and suffering. They died as martyrs — as witnesses — displaying not fanaticism but humility and patience, and sealed their testimony with their own blood. How, on a theory of deliberate fraud, could that supposed fraud have proved fruitful, across nineteen centuries, in such sanctity and such beneficence?
The theory of idealization fares no better. The Synoptic writers relate, in a plainly historical and literal manner, the political, moral, and religious condition of the Jewish people of their day; there is no reason their narrative of the words and deeds of Christ should be any less accurate. A genuine process of legendary transformation and exaggeration can indeed be traced in the later apocryphal gospels, with their extravagant tales of the child Christ working trivial and fantastic wonders — but nothing of the kind appears in the simple, restrained, and grave language of the canonical Synoptics. Nor was a composition of the Synoptic Gospels within thirty or forty years of the events impossible merely because many eyewitnesses were still living at the time — quite the reverse, since their presence would have made any large-scale fabrication far harder to sustain undetected. Strauss’s assignment of the Gospels’ composition to the end of the second century is a hypothesis no longer seriously entertained by anyone. And, as both Rousseau and John Stuart Mill in their different ways acknowledged, it is simply not credible that Galilean fishermen, or early Christian writers of comparable ability, could themselves have invented so extraordinary and consistent a character and teaching as that attributed, throughout, to Jesus Christ.
The historicity of the Fourth Gospel raises a further set of objections. Modernists assert that John’s Gospel is not history at all but a “mystical Gospel,” in which words and deeds attributed to Christ are really meditations, composed by the Evangelist, on the mysteries of salvation and of the Christian life — giving prominence not to more extraordinary miracles but to the Word made flesh in Christ. Loisy went so far as to hold that the Fourth Gospel is merely a witness to the influence of Christ within the Church at the end of the first century, and nothing more.
As to the historicity of the facts it records: the objection is raised that many events narrated in the Fourth Gospel do not appear in the Synoptics, and are therefore unhistorical. But the facts peculiar to John are not narrated as allegories or parables — they are presented plainly as real events; the facts common to John and to the Synoptics (the testimony of John the Baptist, the ejection of the sellers from the Temple, the walking on the water, the anointing at Bethany, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the whole narrative of the Passion) are related in substantially the same way in both; and John deliberately aimed at supplementing his predecessors, passing quickly over the Galilean ministry to concentrate on the Judean, omitting the institution of the Eucharist (which he has already assumed) in favour of describing its promise, passing over the raising of Jairus’s daughter and of the widow’s son at Naim and the confession of Peter, while recording instead the miracle at Cana, the visit of Nicodemus, the conversation with the Samaritan woman, the healing of the man born blind, the cure of the paralytic at the pool, and the raising of Lazarus — every one of these narrated with precise details of place, time, and Jewish custom that leave no room for an allegorical reading.
As to the historicity of the discourses: it is objected that the discourses of the Fourth Gospel differ greatly, in both doctrine and style, from those of the Synoptics, which record Christ’s moral teaching simply, whereas John records sublime dogmatic teaching in an elevated register. But the Synoptics themselves often give us only the substance, not the full text, of Christ’s discourses — a comparison of Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount with Matthew’s makes this plain — so it should occasion no surprise that John records certain discourses at greater length, especially where they touch on the higher mysteries. The dogmatic purpose of the Fourth Gospel must also be considered: John wrote above all to affirm the divinity of Christ, at that time denied by the Gnostic Cerinthus and by the Ebionites, and so deliberately selected words and deeds of Christ in which that divine glory and power shine most clearly — though the Synoptics, too, affirm His divinity, if less explicitly. John’s more ornate and vivid style, finally, suits the sublimity of the doctrine he teaches, and reflects his own temperament and special calling as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” who rested his head upon Christ’s breast at the Last Supper, and to whom the dying Christ commended the care of His Mother — yet even so, John carefully distinguishes, in several places, his own reflections from the words he attributes directly to Christ.
As to the apparent contradictions between John and the Synoptics, even non-Catholic critics who accept their reality generally allow that they are merely accidental, touching only details of chronology or of the number and order of certain miracles, and leaving the substance of Christ’s history and teaching wholly untouched. Such minor discrepancies are, if anything, a further proof of the Evangelists’ sincerity — had they not been sincere, they would surely have taken care to remove every appearance of contradiction. Interesting corroboration of their accuracy sometimes emerges precisely from an apparent divergence: the Synoptics, for instance, speak of “Pharisees and Sadducees,” where John speaks instead of “High Priests and Pharisees” — yet it can independently be shown that the High Priests of that particular period were in fact drawn from the Sadducean party, so that the two descriptions agree perfectly once the underlying facts are known.
A final word on external corroboration. Few secular books of antiquity can claim textual support as well attested as that of the Gospels. The historian Herodotus is first mentioned only a hundred years after his own death, and not again until Cicero, three centuries later still; Thucydides is likewise first mentioned by Cicero. Even Strauss himself acknowledged that he had no historical grounds on which to contest the genuineness of the Gospels, and Renan wrote in substantially the same terms. Zeller, for his part, went so far as to admit that he would refuse to believe in the Resurrection of Christ even if it were supported by the most certain testimony imaginable. It is not, in the end, historical considerations that lead Rationalists to reject the Gospel testimony to the supernatural — it is something else entirely.