tells us that the first thing to do is to maintain that the traditional view of Christ as directly revealing God in history cannot be true. The old metaphysic, Hinaus! Then when he reads the gospels the modern historian, deeply conscious of the fact that the “historic consciousness” is the only criterion available for determining what is “true,” does not treat statements of Scripture as statements “but as evidence: not as true or false accounts of the facts of which they profess to be accounts, but