Étienne Trocmé, a Protestant, President of the Un. of Humanities in Strasbourg, said that "these brilliant ideas of Couchoud’s have been easily refuted by Maurice Goguel ... and Alfred Loisy... They face two insurmountable difficulties: the absence of any denial of the existence of Jesus in ancient times — even among the opponents of Christianity and among those heretics that were the most eager to get rid of the humanity of Jesus — and then the Jewish and specifically Palestinian characteristics that abound in the Synoptic Gospels and make it impossible for them to be the belated creation of a largely Hellenized church. We wish the present epigones of Couchoud and Alfaric would stop rehashing arguments so entirely discredited, that even Soviet historians themselves do not support them any more".