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into every other great problem that we might name. I mean, the 

 historicity of the sources. The interpreter pure and simple may 

 ask for the Jesus of the gospels or of a single gospel; the historian 

 must seek the Jesus of historic fact. However congenial to Christian 

 feeling it may be to assume that the two are identical, the New 

 Testament historian cannot make that assumption. New Testament 

 introduction by its classification of the sources and discovery of 

 their relation to one another compels the recognition of the unequal 

 value of different parts of the record. But the work which it thus 

 begins it only begins. It furnishes certain criteria for the solution 

 of the question of historicity, but cannot of itself solve all such ques- 

 tions. Statements of a clearly derivative character are, indeed, 

 thereby discredited. But that an assertion is made in a late docu- 

 ment does not prove it false. And while the presence of a statement 

 in the oldest sources creates a presumption in its favor which is to 

 be overthrown only by strong evidence, yet tne possibility of error 

 even in an original source cannot be a priori denied. And not only 

 so, but the historian cannot ignore the fact that the original sources 

 of the gospel narrative are, in part at least, original only in the sense 

 that they are the original written form of a narrative which had been 

 transmitted orally for a period of some years. Nor can he forget 

 that even an eye-witness can only, strictly speaking, testify to his 

 experience, yet as a rule must of necessity throw that testimony into 

 the form of an interpretation of his experience, expressed in terms of 

 objective fact. 



All these considerations, which pertain to the records of the life 

 of Jesus in general, and yet others, demand to be taken into account 

 when the historian confronts the difficult question of the historicity 

 of the miraculous in the gospel narrative. That there were even in 

 the life of Jesus miracles in the sense of events which lay outside the 

 realm of law, the products of extra-legal, unprincipled divine action 

 - to admit this is for the historian so difficult to-day, in the face of his 

 knowledge of history, that he is compelled at least to scrutinize with 

 extreme care the apparent evidence of such events. On the other 

 hand, that Jesus wrought miracles in the sense at least in which, as 

 testified by Paul, Christians of the apostolic age wrought them, is 

 attested by evidence too strong to be set aside. That there were in 

 the life of Jesus miracles which transcended the limits of anything that 

 happened in the apostolic age or has happened since, it would 

 be rash to deny. For the unparalleled is not of necessity extra- 

 legal or unhistorical. But that the gospels contain narratives which, 

 on the one hand, so far transcend human experience as otherwise 

 historically known, and, on the other hand, are so lacking in the 

 support of the oldest and most trustworthy sources, or so amenable to 

 amendment on the basis of the distinction between the experience 



