Excerpt from The Gospel History and Its Transmission The more we investigate the early history of the Christian Church with open and unprejudiced eyes, the more we find ourselves in a strange world, dominated by fixed ideas that are not our fixed ideas and permeated by an intellectual atmosphere quite different from ours. We come to ourselves, and we rub our eyes and wonder if what we have been gazing upon ever had any reality. It was for the student in this state of mind that my book was written. What I have attempted to shew is, that at least the Gospel according to 5. Mark is in touch with the actual condition of Palestine in the times of the Herods; and, further, that the course of events in the second century enables us to understand some of the reasons which led the Church to cherish on the whole a historical, as distinct from an ideal, account of the foundation of Christianity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.