the mystic. Reported deathbed conversion of Couchoud Guitton later reported in his book, 26 years after Couchoud's death, that "a quarter of an hour before his death, Couchoud received by chance the visit of a priest. He died "in the faith" [il mourut dans la foi], as I had the opportunity to say it at his funeral." This "testimony" by Jean Guitton became the source of a French legend that Couchoud would have "converted" on his deathbed, spread in print by most French publications. The reliability of this account has been disputed by those who doubt that the philosopher/psychiatrist, who had been an admirer of Spinoza, a skeptical rationalist all his life, and a standard-bearer of the Christ Myth thesis, would have reversed his lifetime convictions during a short unverified conversation on his deathbed. The value of a deathbed conversion is that it saves a soul from hell, in a Christian perspective. It also gives ammunition to believers for undermining the integrity of a Jesus's existence denier. Couchoud's non-historicity thesis abandoned in French academia Predominance of the historicity thesis in French scholarship The thesis denying the historicity of Jesus has been abandoned by French academic studies since 1933, thanks to the critical work of the secular historian Charles Guignebert. Daniel Marguerat, a Swiss Protestant, former professor of NT at the University of Lausanne, wrote that: "We are no longer in the age when Bruno Bauer (1840), or P. L. Couchoud (1937) went to great lengths to deny that Jesus had existed: Nowadays the debate is about the meaning of his actions, not his existence. Hermann Reimarus is the first source of doubts on the reliability of the Gospels' information on Jesus's life." 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