Renan's comment on Matthew 28.19 revealed an insight into the part played by the lex orandi in the creation of this text, as well as by the text itself in the evolution of the lex credendi, that was well ahead of its time, and still remained so when F. C. Conybeare, a quarter of a century later, proposed to advance on it in two respects. Renan had nowhere implied that the hand that planted the seed of Trinitarian dogma in the gospel, whatever its cultic background, was any but the evangelist's own; Conybeare found evidence in Eusebius' writings that suggested otherwise. And the extreme conclusions that he drew from that evidence about Eusebius' permanent ignorance of the received text were pressed into the service of an account of later dogmatic history that was not evolutionary so much as revolutionary.

Iconoclasm invites overkill, and it was to be expected that conservative professionals like E. Riggenbach and J. Lebreton (who would have been little happier with Renan's position than with Conybeare's) would apply themselves to crush the gentleman amateur on both counts. Of his wilder conclusions they were able to make short work.