[158] of the adherents of Mohammedanism. But this doesn’t PROVE it! It isn’t a matter of faith^a to decide whether large parts of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, as they are called, are Priestly wisdom of the period after the Babylonian exile. And it isn't a matter of faith to decide whether the book of Genesis contains more myths and sacred legend than actual history, even if there are some historical elements. And I can go on in this way. It is not a matter of faith to decide whether the expectation of the final catastrophe of the universe---as it is envisaged in Jewish apocalyptics and in the last book of the New Testament---whether this is a heritage from the Persian religion (which, with greatest probability, it is). But that is not a problem of faith. It is not a matter of faith to decide how much legendary, how much mythological, and how much historical material is amalgamated in the stories about the birth and the resurrection of the Christ. We only can say, with high probability, that all these elements, and beyond this, great poetic power, are united in the writing of these stories. But that is not a matter of faith. It is not a matter of faith to decide which version of the reports about the early days of the church has the greatest probability. All these questions --- And they go through the whole [of] church history, ideas like apostolic succession, the institution of the Pope in Rome, and all this---all these questions must be decided in terms of more or less probability by historical research. They cannot be decided in any other way, they are questions of historical truth^b, not of the truth of faith^c. Now what can faith do? If a religion^d (such as those I enumerated in the beginning, namely