George Albert Wells (1926–2017), a professor of German, revived the interest in the Christ myth theory. In his early work, including "Did Jesus Exist?" (1975), Wells argued that because the Gospels were written decades after Jesus's death by Christians who were theologically motivated but had no personal knowledge of him, a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed. In "The Jesus Myth" (1999) and later works, Wells argues that two Jesus narratives fused into one, namely Paul's mythical Jesus, and a minimally historical Jesus from a Galilean preaching tradition, whose teachings were preserved in the Q document, a hypothetical common source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. According to Wells, both figures owe much of their substance to ideas from the Jewish wisdom literature.