THE CHRISTIAN JESUS
I
THE PAULINE JESUS
The faith in a Jesus had been for a long time in existence among innumerable Mandaic sects in Asia Minor, which differed in many ways from each other, before this faith obtained a definite shape in the religion of Jesus, and its adherents became conscious of their religious peculiarities and their divergence from the official Jewish religion. The first evidence of such a consciousness, and also the first brilliant outline of a new religion developed with Jesus as its central idea, lies in the epistles of the tent-maker of Tarsus, the pilgrim-apostle Paul.
Of the epistles in his name which have been handed down to us, that to the Hebrews is quite certainly not Paul’s. But also the two epistles to the Thessalonians, that to the Ephesians, as well as the so-called pastoral epistles (to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon), are considered by the overwhelming majority of theologians to be forgeries; and also the authenticity of the epistles to the Colossians and Philippians is negatived by considerations of great weight. But with all the more certainty modern critical theologians believe that Paul was the writer of the four great didactic epistles—one to the Galatians, two to the Corinthians, and one to the Romans; and they are wont to set aside all suspicion of these epistles as a “grave error” of historical hypercriticism.
In opposition to this view the authenticity of even these epistles is contested, apart from Bruno Bauer, especially by Dutch theologians, by Pierson, Loman, von Mauen, Meyboom, Matthes, and others; and, in addition, recently the Bern theologian R. Steck, and B. W. Smith, Professor of Mathematics in the Tulane University of New Orleans, with whom the late Pastor Albert Kalthoff of Bremen was associated, have contested the traditional view with objections that deserve consideration. They have attempted to prove the Pauline epistles, as a literary product, to be the work of a whole school of second-century theologians, authors who either simultaneously or successively wrote for the growing Church.
This much is certain—a conclusive proof that Paul was really the author of the epistles current in his name cannot be given. With regard to this it must always remain a ground for doubt that Luke, who accompanied Paul on his missionary travels, was completely silent as to such literary activity of the apostle; and this, although he devoted the greatest portion of his account in the Acts to Paul’s activities.[1] Also the proof given by Smith, that the Pauline epistles were as yet completely unknown in the first century a.d., that in particular the existence of the Epistle to the Romans is not testified to before the middle of the second century, must speak seriously against Paul’s authorship, and is evidence that those epistles cannot be accepted as the primary source of the Pauline doctrines. For this reason it can in no way be asserted that the critical theology of last century has “scientifically and beyond question established”[2] the authenticity of the Pauline writings.
It is well known that the ancient world was not as yet in possession of the idea of literary individuality in our sense of the word. At that time innumerable works were circulated bearing famous names, whose authors had neither at the time nor probably at any time anything to do with the men who bore those names. Many such productions were circulated among the members of Sects of antiquity, which passed, for example, under the names of Orpheus, of Pythagoras, of Zoroaster, &c., and thereby sought to procure the canonical acceptance of their contents! Of the works of the Old Testament neither the Psalms, nor the Proverbs, nor the so-called Preacher, nor the Book of Wisdom, can be connected with the historical kings David and Solomon, whose names they bear; and the prophet Daniel is just such a fictitious personality as the Enoch and the Ezra of the Apocalypses known under their names. Even the so-called Five Books of Moses are the literary product of an age much later than the one in which Moses is supposed to have lived, while Joshua is the name of an old Israelite God after whom the book in question is called.[3] There has never anywhere been such a Moses as the one described in the Old Testament.
The possibility of the so-called Pauline epistles having been the work of later theologians, and of having been christened in the name of Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, only to increase their authority in the community, is therefore by no means excluded; especially when we consider how exuberantly literary falsifications and “pious frauds” flourished in the first century, and at other times also, in the interests of the Christian Church. Indeed, at that time they even dared, as is shown by Christian documents of the second century, to alter the very text of the Old Testament, and thereby, as they used to say, to “elucidate” it. Already in the middle of the second century Marcion, the Gnostic, reproached the Church with possessing the Pauline epistles only in a garbled form, and who can say whether it was a false accusation? He himself undertook to restore the correct text by excisions and completions.[4]
But let us leave completely on one side the question of the authenticity of the Pauline epistles, a question absolute agreement on which will probably never be attained, for the simple reason that we lack any certain basis for its decision. Instead of this let us turn rather to what we learn from these epistles concerning the historical Jesus.
There we meet in the first place with the fact, testified to by Paul himself, that the Saviour revealed himself in person to him, and at the same time caused him to enter his service ([Gal. i. 12]). It was, as is stated in the Acts, on the way to Damascus that suddenly there shone round about him a light out of heaven, while a voice summoned him to cease his former persecution of the community of the Messiah, and revealed itself to him as Jesus.[5] There is no need to doubt the fact itself; but to see in it a proof of the historical Jesus is reserved for those theologians who have discovered the splendid conception of an “objective vision,” basing the objective reality of the vision in question on Paul’s life in the desert. It was obviously only an “inner vision,” which the “visionary” and “epileptic” Paul attributed to Jesus; and for this reason it proves nothing as to the existence of an historical Jesus when he asks, [1 Cor. ix. 1], “Have I not seen our Lord Jesus?” and remarks, [1 Cor. xv. 9], “Last of all he appeared to me also.”
It only proves the dilemma of theologians on the whole question that they have recently asserted that Paul, notwithstanding his own protestations ([Gal. i].), must have had a personal knowledge of the historical Jesus, as otherwise on the occasion at Damascus he could not have recognised the features and voice of the transfigured Jesus, not being already acquainted with them from some other quarter! With equal justice we might assert that the heathens also, who had visions of their Gods, must previously have known them personally, as otherwise they could not have known that Zeus or Athene or any other definite God had appeared to them. In the Acts we read only of an apparition of light which Paul saw, and of a voice which called to him, “Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Is the supposition referred to necessary to account for the fact that Paul, the persecutor of Jesus, referred the voice and the vision to Jesus?
The case is similar with Paul’s testimony as to those who, like him, saw the Saviour after his death.[6] It is possible that the people concerned saw something, that they saw a Jesus “risen up” in heavenly transfiguration; but that this was the Jesus of the so-called historical theology, whose existence is hereby established, even its supporters would not in all probability insist upon; for in their view the historical Jesus had in no way risen from the dead: but here also there would only be question of a purely subjective vision of the ecstatically excited disciples. Moreover, the passage of the Epistle to the Corinthians in question (5–11) seems clearly to be one at least very much interpolated, if it is not entirely an after-insertion. Thus, the Risen Jesus is said to have been seen by “more than five hundred Brethren at once.” But of this the four Gospels know nothing; and also, according to xv. 5, that “the twelve” had the vision, would lead us to suspect that it was first inserted in the text at a much later date.[7]
Paul himself never disguised the fact that he had seen Jesus, not with mortal eyes, but only with those of the Spirit, as an inner revelation. “It has pleased God,” he says ([Gal. i. 16]), “to reveal his Son within me.”[8] He confesses that the Gospel preached by him was not “of men,” that he neither received nor learnt it from any man, but that he had obtained it directly from the heavenly Christ and was inspired by the Holy Ghost.[9] He seems also to have had no interest at all in giving accurate information as to the personality of Jesus, as to his fortunes and teachings. When three years after his conversion he first returns to Jerusalem, he visits only Peter and makes the acquaintance of James during the fourteen days of his stay there, troubling himself about none of the other apostles.[10] But when, fourteen years after, he meets with the “First Apostles” in the so-called Council of the Apostles in Jerusalem, he does not set about learning from them, but teaching them and procuring from them recognition of his own missionary activity; and he himself declares that he spoke with them only on the method of proclaiming the Gospel, but not on its religious content or on the personality of the historic Jesus.[11]
Certainly that James whose acquaintance Paul made in Jerusalem is designated by him as the “Brother of the Lord”;[12] and from this it seems to follow that Jesus must have been an historical person. The expression “Brother,” however, is possibly in this case, as so often in the Gospels,[13] only a general expression to designate a follower of Jesus, as the members of a religious society in antiquity frequently called each other “Brother” and “Sister” among themselves. [1 Cor. ix. 5] runs: “Have we [i.e., Paul and Barnabas] not also right to take about with us a wife that is a sister, even as the other Apostles and Brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” There it is evident that the expression by no means necessarily refers to bodily relationship, but that “Brother” serves only to designate the followers of the religion of Jesus.[14] Accordingly Jerome seems to have hit the truth exactly when, commenting on [Gal. i. 19], he writes: “James was called the Brother of the Lord on account of his great character [though the Pauline epistles certainly show the opposite of this], of his incomparable faith and extraordinary wisdom. The other Apostles were as a matter of fact also called Brothers, but he was specially so called, because the Lord at his death had confided to him the sons of his mother” (i.e., the members of the community at Jerusalem).[15] And how then should Paul have met with a physical brother of that very Jesus whom, as will be shown, he could only treat as a myth in other respects? The thing is, considered now purely psychologically, so improbable that no conclusion can in any case be drawn from the expression concerning James as the Brother of the Lord as to the historical existence of Jesus; especially in view of the fact that theologians from the second century to the present day have been unable to come to an agreement as to the true blood-relationship between James and Jesus.[16] Moreover, if we consider how the glorification of James came into fashion in anti-Pauline circles of the second century, and how customary it was to connect the chief of the Jewish Christians at Jerusalem as closely as possible with Jesus himself (e.g., Hegesippus, in the so-called Epistles of Clement, in the Gospel of the Nazarenes, &c.), the suspicion forces itself on us that the Pauline mention of James as “the Brother of the Lord” is perhaps only an after-insertion in the Epistle to the Galatians in order thereby to have the bodily relationship between James and Jesus confirmed by Paul himself.[17] Jesus’ parents are not historical personalities (see above, 117 ff.); and it is probably the same with his brothers and sisters. Also Paul never refers to the testimony of the brothers or of the disciples of Jesus concerning their Master; though this would have been most reasonable had they really known any more of Jesus than he himself did. “He bases,” as Kalthoff justly objects, “not a single one of his most incisive polemical arguments against the adherents of the law on the ground that he had the historical Jesus on his side; but he gives his own detailed theological ideas without mentioning an historical Jesus, he gives a gospel of Christ, not the gospel which he had heard at first, second, or third hand concerning a human individual Jesus.”[18]
From Paul, therefore, there is nothing of a detailed nature to be learnt about the historical Jesus. The apostle does indeed occasionally refer to the words and opinions of the “Lord,” as with regard to the prohibition of divorce,[19] or to the right of the apostles to be fed by the community.[20] But as the exact words are not given there is no express reference to an historical individual of the name of Jesus; and so we are persuaded that we here have to do with mere rules of a community such as were current and had canonical significance everywhere in the religious unions as “Words of the Master,” i.e., of the patrons and celebrities of the community (cf. the “ἀυτὸς ἔφα: he himself, viz., the Master, has said it” of the Pythagoreans). Only once, [1 Cor. xi. 23] sq., where Paul quotes the words at the Last Supper, does the apostle apparently refer to an experience of the “historical” Jesus: “The Lord Jesus, in the night in which he was betrayed, took bread,” &c.[21] Unfortunately here we have to do with what is clearly a later insertion. The passage is obscure throughout (vers. 23–32), and through its violent and confusing interruption of the Pauline line of thought may be recognised as an after-insertion in the original text, as is even acknowledged by many on the theological side.[22] Paul says that he had obtained these things from the “Lord” himself. Does this mean that they were directly “revealed” to him by the transfigured Jesus? It seems much more reasonable to believe that he took them from a religion already existing. This could indeed refer at most only to the words of the Last Supper in themselves. On the other hand, the words “in the night in which he was betrayed” are certainly an addition. They will do neither in the connection of a “revelation” nor of an existing religion, but stand there completely by themselves as a reference to a real event in the life of Jesus; and so, for this alone, they form much too small a basis for testimony as to its historical truth.[23]
All expressions concerning Jesus which are found in Paul are accordingly of no consequence for the hypothesis of an historical person of that name. The so-called “words of the Lord” quoted by him refer to quite unimportant points in the teachings of Jesus. And, on the other hand, Paul is just as silent on those points in which modern critical theology finds the particular greatness and importance of this teaching; as, e.g., on Jesus’ confidence in the divine goodness of the Father, his command of the love of our neighbours as the fulfilment of the Law, his sermon about humility and charity, his warning against the over-esteem of worldly goods, &c., as on Jesus’ personality, his trust in God, and his activity among his people.[24]
Paul did not give himself the least trouble to bring the Saviour as a man nearer to his readers. He seems to know nothing of any miraculous power in Jesus. He says nothing of his sympathy with the poor and oppressed, though surely just this would have been specially adapted to turn the hearts of men towards his Jesus and to make an impression on the multitude that sought for miracles. All the moral-religious precepts and exhortations of Jesus are neither employed by Paul as a means of proselytising for him, nor in any way used to place his individuality in opposition to his prophetic precursors in a right light, as is the case in the Christian literature of the present day. “Thus, just those thoughts, which Protestant theologians claim as the particular domain of their historical Jesus, appear in the epistles independently of this Jesus, as individual moral effusions of the apostolic consciousness; while Christian social rules, which the same theologians consider additions to the story, are introduced directly as rules of the Lord. For this reason the Christ of the Pauline epistles may rather be cited as a case against critical theologians than serve as a proof for the historical Jesus in their sense.”[25] Even so zealous a champion of this theology as Wernle must admit: “We learn from Paul least of all concerning the person and life of Jesus. Were all his epistles lost we should know not much less of Jesus than at present.” Immediately after this, however, this very author consoles himself with the consideration that in a certain sense Paul gave us even more than the most exact and the most copious records could give. “We learn from him that a man (?) Jesus, in spite of his death on the cross, was able to develop such a power after his death, that Paul knew himself to be mastered, redeemed, and blessed by him; and this in so marked a way that he separated his own life and the whole world into two parts: without Jesus, with Jesus. This is a fact which, explain it as we may, purely as a fact excites our wonder (!) and compels us to think highly of Jesus.”[26] What does excite our wonder is this style of historical “demonstration.” And then how peculiar it is to read, from the silence of an author like Paul concerning the historical Jesus, an argument in its favour! As if it does not rather prove the unimportance of such a personality for the genesis of Christianity! As if the fact that Paul erected a religious-metaphysical thought construction of undoubted magnificence must necessarily be based on the “overwhelming impression of the person of Jesus,” of the same Jesus of whom Paul had no personal knowledge at all! The disciples—who are supposed to have been in touch with Jesus for many years—Paul strenuously avoided, and of the existence of this Jesus no other signs are to be found in his epistles but such as may have quite a different meaning. Or did Paul, as historical theology says, reveal more of Jesus in his sermons than he did in the epistles? Surely that could only be maintained after it was first established that in his account Paul had in view any historical Jesus at all.
This seems to be completely problematic. The “humanity” of Jesus stands as the central point of the Pauline idea. And yet the Jesus painted by Paul is not a man, but a purely divine personality, a heavenly spirit without flesh and blood, an unindividual superhuman phantom. He is the “Son of God” made manifest in Paul; the Messiah foretold by the Jewish Apocalyptics; the pre-existing “Son of Man” of Daniel and his followers; the spiritual “ideal man” as he appeared in the minds of the Jews influenced by Platonic ideas; whom also Philo knew as the metaphysical prototype of ordinary sensual humanity and thought he had found typified to in [Gen. i. 27]. He is the “great man” of the Indian legends, who was supposed to have appeared also in Buddha and in other Redeemer figures—the Purusha of the Vedic Brahmans, the Mandâ de hajjê and Hibil Ziwâ of the Mandaic religion influenced by Indian ideas, the tribe-God of syncretised Judaism. The knowledge which Paul has of this Being is for this reason not an ordinary acquaintance from teachings, but a Gnosis, an immediate consciousness, a “knowledge inspired”; and all the statements which he makes concerning it fall within the sphere of theosophy, of religious speculation or metaphysics, but not of history. As we have stated, the belief in such a Jesus had been for a long time the property of Jewish sects, when Paul succeeded, on the ground of his astounding personal experiences, in drawing it into the light from the privacy of religious arcana, and setting it up as the central point of a new religion distinct from Judaism.
“There was already in their minds a faith in a divine revealer, a divine-human activity, in salvation to be obtained through sacraments.”[27] Among the neighbouring heathen peoples for a very long time, and in Jewish circles at least since the days of the prophets, there had existed a belief in a divine mediator, a “Son of God,” a “First-born of all creation,” in whom was made all that exists, who came down upon earth, humbled himself in taking on a human form, suffered for mankind a shameful death, but rose again victorious, and in his elevation and transfiguration simultaneously renewed and spiritualised the whole earth.[28] Then Paul appeared—in an age which was permeated as no other with a longing for redemption; which, overwhelmed by the gloom of its external relations, was possessed with the fear of evil powers; which, penetrated with terror of the imminent end of the world, was anxiously awaiting this event and had lost faith in the saving power of the old religion—then he gave such an expression to that belief as made it appear the only means of escape from the confusion of present existence. Can the assumption of an historical Jesus in the sense of the traditional conception really be necessary, in order to account for the fact that men fled impetuously to this new religion of Paul’s? Is it even probable that the intelligent populations of the sea-ports of Asia Minor and Greece, among whom in particular Paul preached the Gospel of Jesus, would have turned towards Christianity for the reason that at some time or other, ten or twenty years before, an itinerant preacher of the name of Jesus had made an “overpowering” impression on ignorant fisher-folk and workmen in Galilee or Jerusalem by his personal bearing and his teachings, and had been believed by them to be the expected Messiah, the renowned divine mediator and redeemer of the world? Paul did not preach the man Jesus, but the heavenly spiritual being, Christ.[29] The public to which Paul turned consisted for the most part of Gentiles; and to these the conception of a spiritual being presented no difficulties. It could have no strengthening, no guarantee, of its truth, through proof of the manhood of Jesus. If the Christians of the beginning of our own historical epoch had only been able to gain faith in the God Christ through the Man Jesus, Paul would have turned his attention from that which, to him, particularly mattered; he would have obscured the individual meaning of his Gospel and brought his whole religious speculation into a false position, by substituting a man Jesus for the God-man Jesus as he understood him.[30]
Paul is said to have been born in the Greek city of Tarsus in Cilicia, the son of Jewish parents. At that time Tarsus was, like Alexandria, an important seat of Greek learning.
Here flourished the school of the younger Stoics, with its mixture of old Stoic, Orphic, and Platonic ideas. Here the ethical principles of that school were preached in a popular form, in street and market-place, by orators of the people. It was not at all necessary for Paul, brought up in the austerity of the Jewish religion of the Law, to visit the lecture-rooms of the Stoic teachers in order to gain a knowledge of Stoic views, for in Tarsus it was as though the air was filled with that doctrine. Paul was certainly acquainted with it. It sank so deeply into his mind, perhaps unknown to himself, that his epistles are full of the expressions and ideas of the Stoic philosopher Seneca, and to this are due the efforts which have been made to make Seneca a pupil of Paul’s, or the reverse, to make Paul a pupil of Seneca’s. A correspondence exists, which is admittedly a forgery, pretending to have passed between the two.
Tarsus, in spite of its Eastern character, was a city saturated with Greek learning and ways of thought, but not these alone. The religious ideas and motives of the time found also a fruitful soil there. In Tarsus the Hittite Sandan (Sardanapal) was worshipped, a human being upon whom Dionysus had bestowed the godhead of life and fecundity, who was identified by the Greeks either with Zeus, or with Heracles, the divine “Son” of the “Father” Zeus. He passed as the founder of the city, and was represented as a bearded man with bunches of grapes and ears of corn, with a double-headed axe in his right hand, standing on a lion or a funeral pyre; and every year it was the custom for a human representative of the God, or in later times his effigy, to be ceremoniously burnt on a pyre.[31] But Tarsus was also at the same time a centre for the mystery-religions of the East. The worship of Mithras, in particular, flourished there, with its doctrine of the mystic death and re-birth of those received into the communion, who were thereby purified from the guilt of their past life and won a new immortal life in the “Spirit”; with its sacred feast, at which the believers entered into a communion of life with Mithra by partaking of the consecrated bread and chalice; with its conception of the magic effect of the victim’s blood, which washed away all sins; and with its ardent desire for redemption, purification, and sanctification of the soul.[32] Paul was not unaffected by these and similar ideas. His conception of the mystic significance of Christ’s death shows that; in which conception the whole of this type of religious thought is expressed, although in a new setting. Indeed, the expression ([Gal. iii. 27]), in which the baptized are said to have “put on” Christ, seems to be borrowed directly from the Mithraic Mysteries. For in these, according to a primitive animistic custom, the initiated of different degrees used to be present in the masks of beasts, representing God’s existence under diverse attributes; that is, they used to “put on” the Lord in order to place themselves in innermost communion with him. Again, the Pauline expression, that the consecrated chalice and bread at the Lord’s Supper are the “communion of the blood and body of Christ,”[33] reminds us too forcibly of the method of expression in the Mysteries for this agreement to be purely a coincidence.[34]
If in such circumstances Paul, the citizen of Tarsus, heard of a Jewish God of the name of Jesus, the ideas which were connected with him were in no way quite new and unaccustomed. Nearer Asia was, indeed, as we have seen, filled with the idea of a young and beautiful God, who reanimated Nature by his death; with popular legends connected with his violent end and glorious resurrection: and not merely in Tarsus, but also in Cyprus and in countless other places of the Western Asiatic civilised world, there was the yearly celebration in most impressive fashion of the feast of this God, who was called Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, &c. Nowhere, perhaps, was the celebration more magnificent than at Antioch, the Syrian capital. But at Antioch, if we may believe the Acts[35] on this point, the Gospel of Jesus had been preached even before Paul. Men of Cyprus and Cyrene are said to have spoken there the Word of the dead and risen Christ, not only to the Jews but also to the Greeks, and they are said to have converted many of the heathens to the new “Lord.” The Acts tells us this after it has recounted the persecution of the community of the Messiah at Jerusalem; representing the spreading of the Gospel as a consequence of the dispersion of the community that followed the persecution. It seems, however, that Cyprus—where Adonis was particularly worshipped, at Paphos—and Cyrene were very early centres from which missionaries carried abroad the faith in Christ.[36] Consequently the Gospel was in origin nothing but a Judaised and spiritualised Adonis cult.[37] Those earliest missionaries of whom we hear would not have attacked the faith of the Syrian heathens: they would have declared that Christ, the Messiah, the God of the Jewish religions, was Adonis: Christ is the “Lord”! They would only have attempted to draw the old native religion of Adonis into the Jewish sphere of thought, and by this means to carry on the Jewish propaganda which they could find everywhere at work, and which developed an efficacy about the beginning of our epoch such as it had never before possessed. They would carry on the propaganda, not in the sense of the strict standpoint of the Law, but of the Jewish Apocalypses and their religious teachings.[38]
Such a man as Paul, who had been educated in the school of Gamaliel as a teacher of the Law of the strict Pharisaical sort, could not indeed calmly look on while the heathen belief in Adonis, which he must surely, even in his native city of Tarsus, have despised as a blasphemous superstition, was uniting itself, in the new religious sects, with the Jewish conceptions. “Cursed is he who is hung upon the tree,” so it stood written in the Law;[39] and the ceremony of the purification—at which one criminal was hung, amid the insults of the people, as the scapegoat of the old year, while another was set free as Mordecai, and driven with regal honours through the city, being revered as representative of the new year—must have been in his eyes only another proof of the disgrace of the tree, and of the blasphemous character of a belief that honoured in the hanged man the divine Saviour of the world, the Messiah expected by the Jews. Then on a sudden there came over him as it were enlightenment. What if the festivals of the Syrian Adonis, of the Phrygian Attis, and so on, really treated of the self-sacrifice of a God who laid down his life for the world? The guiltless martyrdom of an upright man as expiatory means to the justification of his people was also not unknown to the adherents of the Law since the days of the Maccabean martyrs. The “suffering servant of God,” as Isaiah had portrayed him, suggests as quite probable the idea that, just as among the heathen peoples, in Israel also an individual might renew the life of all others by his voluntary sacrifice. Might it not be true, as the adherents of the Jesus-religions maintained, that the Messiah was really a “servant of God,” and had already accomplished the work of redemption by his own voluntary death? According to the heathen view, the people were atoned for by the vicarious sacrifice of their God, and that “justification” of all in the sight of the Godhead took place which the pious Pharisee expected from the strict fulfilment of the Jewish Law. And yet, when Paul compared the “righteousness” actually achieved by himself and others with the ideal of righteousness for which they strove, as it was required in the Law, then terror at the greatness of the contrast between the ideal and the reality must have seized him; and at the same time he might well have despaired of the divine righteousness, which required of the people the fulfilment of the Law, which weighed the people down with the thought of the imminent end of the world, and which, through the very nature of its commands, excluded the possibility of the Messiah meeting on his arrival, as he should have done, with a “righteous” people. Were those who expected the sanctification of humanity not from the fulfilment of the Law, but immediately, through an infusion of God himself, really so much in the wrong? It was not unusual among the heathen peoples for a man to be sacrificed, in the place of the Deity, as a symbolical representative; although already at the time of Paul it was the custom to represent the self-sacrificing God only by an effigy, instead of a real man. The important point, however, was not this, but the idea which lay at the foundation of this divine self-sacrifice. And this was not affected by the victim’s being a criminal, who was killed in the rôle of the guiltless and upright man, and by the voluntariness of his death being completely fictitious. Might it not also be, as the believers in Jesus asserted, that the Messiah was not still to be expected, and that only on the ground of human righteousness; but that rather he had already appeared, and had already accomplished the righteousness unattainable by the individual through his shameful death and his glorious resurrection?
The moment in which this idea flashed through Paul’s mind was the moment of the birth of Christianity as Paul’s religion. The form in which he grasped that conception was that of an Incarnation of God; and at the same time this form was such that he introduced with it quite a new impulse into the former mode of thought. According to the heathen conception a God did indeed sacrifice himself for his people, without thereby ceasing to be God; and here the man sacrificed in the place of God was considered merely as a chance representative of the self-sacrificing God. According to the old view of the Jewish faith it was really the “Son of Man,” a being of human nature, who was to come down from heaven and effect the work of redemption, without, however, being a real man and without suffering and dying in human form. With Paul, on the contrary, the stress lay just on this, that the Redeemer should be himself really a man, and that the man sacrificed in God’s place should be equally the God appearing in human form: the man was not merely a representation of God’s as a celestial and supernatural being, but God himself appearing in human form. God himself becomes man, and thereby a man is exalted to the Deity, and, as expiatory representative for his people, can unite mankind with God.[40] The man who is sacrificed for his people represents on the one hand his people in the eyes of God, but on the other hand the God sacrificing himself for mankind in the eyes of this people. And thereby, in the idea of the representative expiatory victim, the separation between God and Man is blotted out, and both fuse directly in the conception of the “God-man.” God becomes man, and by this means mankind is enabled to become God. The man is sacrificed as well in the place of God as in that of mankind, and so unites both contradictories in a unity within himself.
It is evident that in reality it was merely a new setting to the old conception of the representative self-sacrifice of God—in which the genitive is to be taken both in its subjective and objective sense. No historical personality, who should, so to say, have lived as an example of the God-man, was in any way necessary to produce that Pauline development of the religion of Jesus. For the chance personalities of the men representing the God came under consideration just as little for Paul as for the heathens; and when he also, with the other Jews, designated the Messiah Jesus as the bodily descendant of David “according to the flesh,”[41] i.e., as a man; when he treated him as “born of woman,” he thought not at all of any concrete individuality, which had at a certain time embodied the divinity within itself, but purely of the idea of a Messiah in the flesh; just as the suffering servant of God of Isaiah, even in spite of the connection of this idea with an actually accomplished human sacrifice, had possessed only an ideal imaginary or typical significance. The objection is always being raised that Paul must have conceived of Jesus as an historical individual because he designates him as the bodily descendant of David, and makes him “born of woman” ([Gal. iv. 4]). But how else could he have been born? (Cf. [Job xiv. 1].) The bringing into prominence the birth from woman, as well as the general emphasis laid by the Apostle on the humanity of Jesus, is directed against the Gnostics in the Corinthian community, but proves nothing whatsoever as to the historical Jesus. And the descent from David was part of the traditional characteristics of the Messiah; so that Paul could say it of Jesus without referring to a real descendant of David. But even less is proved by Paul’s, in [Gal. iii. 1], reproaching the Galatians with having seen the crucified Christ “set forth openly”; we would then have to declare also that there was an actual devil and a hell, because these are set forth to the faithful by the “caretakers of their souls” when preaching. Here then lies the explanation for the fact that the “man” Jesus remained an intangible phantom to Paul, and that he can speak of Christ as a man, without thinking of an historical personality in the sense of the liberal theology of the present day. The ideal man, as Paul represented Jesus to himself—the essence of all human existence—the human race considered as a person, who represented humanity to God, just as the man sacrificed in his rôle had represented the Deity to the people—the “Man” on whom alone redemption depended—is and remains a metaphysical Being—just as the Idea of Plato or the Logos of Philo are none the less metaphysical existences because of their descent into the world of the senses and of their assuming in it a definite individual corporality. And what Paul teaches concerning the “man” Jesus is only a detailed development and deepening of what the Mandæi believed of their Mandä de hajjê or Hibil Ziwâ, and of what the Jewish religions under the influence of the Apocalypses involved in their mysterious doctrines of the Messiah. For Paul the descent, death, and resurrection of Jesus represented an eternal but not an actual story in time; and so to search Paul for the signs of an historical Jesus is to misunderstand the chief point in his religious view of the world.
God, the “father” of our “Lord” Jesus Christ, “awakened” his son and sent him down upon the earth for the redemption of mankind. Although originally one with God, and for that reason himself a divine being, Christ nevertheless renounced his original supernatural existence. In contradiction to his real Being he changed his spiritual nature for “the likeness of sinful flesh,” gave up his heavenly kingdom for the poverty and misery of human existence, and came to mankind in the form of a servant, “being found in fashion as a man,” in order to bring redemption.[42] For man is unable to obtain religious salvation through himself alone. In him the spirit is bound to the flesh, his divine supersensible Being is bound down to the material of sensible actuality, and for that reason he is subject “by nature” to misfortune and sin. All flesh is necessarily “sinful flesh.” Man is compelled to sin just in so far as he is a being of the flesh. Adam, moreover, is the originator of all human sin only for the reason that he was “in the flesh”—that is, a finite Being imprisoned in corporality. Probably God gave the Law unto mankind, in order to show them the right path in their obscurity; and thereby opened the possibility of being declared righteous or “justified” before his court, through the fulfilment of his commands; but it is impossible to keep the commandments in their full severity.
And yet only the ceaseless fulfilment of the whole Law can save mankind from justice. We are all sinners.[43] So the Law indeed awakened the knowledge of guilt, and brought sin to light through its violation; but it has at the same time increased the guilt.[44] It has shown itself to be a strict teacher and taskmaster in righteousness, without, however, itself leading to righteousness. So little has it proved to be the desired means of salvation, that it may equally be said of it that it was given by God not for the purpose of saving mankind, but only to make it still more miserable. Consequently Paul would rather attribute the mediation of the Law of Moses not to God himself but to his angels, in order to relieve God of the guilt of the Law.[45] This circumstance is of so much the more consequence for mankind, because the sin aroused by the Law unresistingly drew death in its train; and that deprived them also of the last possibility of becoming equal to their higher spiritual nature. So is man placed midway between light and darkness—a pitiable Being. His spirit, that is kin with God, draws him upwards; and the evil spirit and dæmons drag him downwards, the evil spirits who rule this world and who lure him into sin—and who are at bottom nothing but mythical personifications of man’s sinful and fleshly desires.
Christ now enters this world of darkness and of sin. As a man among men, he enters the sphere over which the flesh and sin have power, and must die as other men. But for the incarnate God death is not what it is in the ordinary sense. For him it is only the liberation from the incongruous condition of the flesh. When Christ dies, he merely strips off the fetters of the flesh and leaves the prison of the body, leaves the sphere over which sin, death, and evil spirits hold their sway. He, the God-man, dies to the sin, which was once unknown to him, once and for all. By prevailing over the power of death in his resurrection, the Son regains, by means of death, his original individual existence, perpetual life in and with the Father.[46] Thus also does he attain mastery over the Law, for this rules only in so far as there are fleshly men of earth, and ceases to hold good for him at the moment when Christ raises himself above the flesh and returns to his pure spiritual nature. Were there the possibility for mankind of similarly dying to their flesh, then would they be redeemed, as Christ was, from sin, death, and the Law.
There is, in fact, such a possibility. It lies in this: even Christ himself is nothing but the idea of the human race conceived as a personality, the Platonic idea of Humanity personified, the ideal man as a metaphysical essence; and so in his fate the fate of all mankind is fulfilled. In this sense the saying holds, “If one has died for all, then have they all died.”[47] In order to become partakers of the fruit of this Jesus’ death, it is certainly necessary that the individual man become really one with Christ; that he enter into an inner unity with the representative, with the divine type of the human race, not merely subjectively, but objectively and actually; and this takes place, according to Paul, by means of “faith.” Faith, as Paul understands it, is not a purely external belief in the actuality of Jesus’ death as a victim and of his resurrection, but the turning of the whole man to Jesus, the spiritual unification with him and the divine disposition produced thereby, from which the corresponding moral action proceeds of itself. It is only in this sense that Paul sets faith above works as demanded by the Law. An action that does not proceed from faith, from the deepest conviction of the divine, has no religious value, be it ever so conformable to the letter of the Law. That is a view which Paul completely shared with the Stoic philosophy of his age, and which was at that time being brought more and more to the front in the more advanced circles of the old civilisation. Man is justified not through the Law, not through works, but through faith; faith, even without works, is reckoned as righteousness.[48] It is only another expression for the same thought when Paul says that God justifies man, not according to his merit and actions, but “gratuitously,” “of his grace.” In the conception of the Jewish religion of the Law the idea of justification has a purely juridical significance. Reward here answers exactly to merit. Justification is nothing but an “obligation” according to an irrevocable standard. In Paul’s new conception it is, on the contrary, a natural product of God’s mercy. But mercy consists finally in this, that God of his own accord sacrificed his Son, so that mankind may share in the effects of his work of redemption by “faith” in him, and by the unity with him thus brought about. But faith is only one way of becoming one with Christ; and real unity with him must also be externally effected. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper must be added to faith. There Paul directly follows the Mysteries and their sacramental conception of man’s unification with the deity; and shows the connection of his own doctrines with those of the heathen religions. By his baptism, his immersion and disappearance in the depths of the water, man is “buried in death” with Christ. In that he rises once more from the water, the resurrection with Christ to a new life is fulfilled, not merely in a symbolic but also in a magical mystic fashion.[49] And Christ is as it were “put on”[50] through Baptism, so that henceforth the baptized is, no longer potentially but actually, one with Christ; Christ is in him, and he is in Christ. The Lord’s Supper is indeed on one hand a feast of fraternal love and recollection, in memory of the Saviour; just as the adherents of Mithras used to hold their love-feasts (Agape) in memory of their God’s parting feast with his own people.[51] But on the other hand it is a mystic communion of the blood and body of Christ, through the drinking of the sacramental chalice and the eating of the sacramental bread—a mystic communion in no other sense than that in which the heathens thought they entered into inner connection with their Gods through sacrificial feasts, and in which savages generally even to-day believe that through the eating of another’s flesh, be it beast’s or man’s, and through the drinking of his blood, they become partakers of the power residing in him.[52] Even for Paul baptism and the Lord’s Supper are to such an extent purely natural processes or magic practices, that he does not object to the heathen custom of baptizing, by proxy, living Christians for dead ones; and in his opinion unworthy eating and drinking of the Lord’s Supper produce sickness and death.[53] In this respect, consequently, there can be no talk of a “transcending of the naturalism of the heathen mysteries” in Paul; and to attribute to him a much higher or more spiritual conception of the sacrament than the heathens had seems difficult to reconcile with his express statements.[54]
Now Christ, as already stated, is for Paul only a comprehensive expression for the ideal totality of men, which is therein represented as an individual personal being. It is clearly the Platonic idea of humanity, and nothing else; just as Philo personified the divine intelligence and made this coalesce with the “ideal man,” with the idea of humanity.[55] As in the Platonic view the union of man with the ideal takes place through love, through immediate intellectual perception on the basis of ideal knowledge, and the contradiction between the world of sense and the world of ideas is overcome by the same means; as also thereby man is raised to membership in the cosmos of ideas; in just such a manner, according to Paul, Christians unite together by means of faith and the sacraments into constitutive moments of the ideal humanity. Thus they realise the idea of humanity, and enter into a mystic communion with Jesus, who himself, as we have already said, represents this idea in its united compass. The consequence of this is, that all that is fulfilled in Christ is equally experienced along with him, in mysterious fashion, by those men who are united with him. Consequently they can now be termed “members of the one body of Christ,” who is its “head” or “Soul”; and this indeed in the same sense as with Plato the different ideas form but members and moments of the one world of ideas, and their plurality is destroyed in the unity of the comprehensive and determining idea of the One or the Good.
Just what an elevation of the spirit to the world of ideas is for Plato, the union of mankind with Christ is for Paul. What the man actually in possession of knowledge, the “wise man,” is for the former, “Christ” is for the latter. What is there called Eros—the mediator of the unity between the world of ideas and the sense-world, of Being and Conscious Being, of objective and subjective thought, and at the same time the very essence of all objective thought—is here called Christ. Eros is called by Plato the son of riches and poverty, who bears the “nature and signs” of both: “He is quite poor, runs around barefoot and homeless, and must sleep on the naked earth without a roof, in the open air, at the doors and on the streets, in conformity with his mother’s nature.” “As, however, he is neither mortal nor immortal, at one moment he is flourishing and full of life, at another he is weary and dies away, and all that often on the self-same day; but ever he rises up again in life in conformity with his father’s nature.”[56] So also the Pauline Christ contains all the fulness of the Godhead[57] and is himself the “Son of God”; yet nevertheless Christ debases himself, takes on the form of a servant, becomes Man, and dies, thereby placing himself in direct opposition to his real nature, but only to rise again continually in each individual man and allow mankind to participate in his own life. And as Christ (in [1 Tim. ii. 5]) is the “mediator” between God and men, so also the Platonic Eros “is midway between the immortal and the mortal.” “Eros, O Socrates, is a daimon, a great daimon, and everything of this nature is intermediate between God and man. The daimon transfers to the Gods what comes from man, and to man what comes from the Gods; from the one prayer and sacrifice, from the other the orders and rewards for the sacrifice. Midway, he fills the gap between the immortal and the mortal, and everything is through him bound into one whole. By his mediation is disseminated every prophecy and the religious skill which has reference to sacrifice, sanctification, sacred maxims, and each prediction and magic spell. God himself does not mix with mankind, but all intercourse and all speech between God and man, as well in waking as in sleep, takes place in the way mentioned. Whoever has experienced this, in him is the daimon.” In this connection we recall to our minds that Eros appears in the “Timæus” under the name of the “world-soul,” and this is supposed by Plato to have the form of an oblique cross.[58]
The Platonic Eros is the mythical personification of the conception that the contemplation of Being (obj. gen.) as such is at the same time a contemplation of Being’s (sub. gen.); or that in the contemplation of the Ideas the subjective thought of the Philosopher and the objective ideal Reality as it were meet each other from two sides and fuse directly into a unity.[59] It is thus only the scientific and theoretical formulation of the fundamental idea of the old Aryan Fire Cult. According to this the sacrifice of Agni—that is, the victim which man offers to God—is as such equally Agni’s sacrifice, the victim which God offers, and in which he sacrifices himself for humanity. It is in agreement with this that according to Paul the death and resurrection of Christ, as they take place in the consciousness of the believer, represent a death and resurrection of Christ as a divine personality: man dies and lives again with Christ, and God and man are completely fused together in the believer. As mankind by this means becomes a “member” of the “Body of Christ,” so in the Vedic conception the partaker of the Fire-God’s sacrifice, by the tasting of the blood and the eating of the sacred bread, is associated with a mystic body, and is infused with the one Spirit of God, which destroys his sins in its sacred fire, and flows through him with new life-power. In India, from the cult of the Fire-God and the complete unity of God and man thereby attained, Brahmanism was developed, and gained an influence over all the Indian peoples. In Plato intellectual contemplation formed the basis of cognition. He placed the wise man at the head of the social organism, and regarded the philosopher as the only man fitted for the government of the world. And the future development of the Church as a “Communion of Saints” appears already in the Pauline conception of the faithful as the “Body of Christ,” in which the Idea of the human race (Christ) is realised, as the kingdom of God upon earth, as the true humanity, as the material appearance of the divine ideal man, to belong to which is mankind’s duty, and without which it is impossible for man to live in his real ideal nature.
Ancient philosophy had attempted until now in vain to overcome the contradiction between the sense-world and the world of ideas, and to destroy the uncertainty of human thought and life which results from this contradiction. From the time of Plato it had worked at the problem of uniting, without contradiction, Nature and Spirit, whose contradictory nature had first been brought to notice by the founder of metaphysical idealism. Religion, particularly in the Mystery Cults, had tried to solve in a practical way the problem that seemed insoluble by abstract means, and had sought to secure for man a new basis and resting-place by means of devotion and “revelation”—a mystic sinking into the depths of God. But Paul’s Christianity first gave a form to all this obscure desire, a form which united the thrills and joy of mystic ecstasy with the certainty of a comprehensive religious view of the world, and enlightened men as to the deepest meaning of their emotional impulse towards certainty: man obtains unity with God and certainty as to the true reality, not by an abstract dialectic, as Plato supposed; not by logical insight into the cosmos in the sense of an abstract knowledge attainable only by the few, but through faith, through the divine act of redemption. To adopt this internally, thereby to live with it directly—this alone can give man the possibility of emerging from the uncertainty and darkness of corporeal existence into the clear light of the spiritual. All certainty of the true or essential being is consequently a certainty of faith, and there is no higher certainty than that which is given to men in faith and piety. As Christ died and was thereby freed from the bonds of the body and of the world, so also must man die in the spirit. He must lay aside the burden of this body, the real cause of all his ethical and intellectual shortcomings. He must inwardly rise with Christ and be born again, thereby taking part in his spiritual certitude and gaining together with the “Life in the Spirit” salvation from all his present shortcomings. It is true that outwardly the body still exists, even after the inner act of redemption has taken place. Even when the man who died with Christ has arisen and has become a new man, he is nevertheless still subject to corporeal limitations. The redeemed man is still in the world and must fight with its influences. But what man gains in the union with the body of Christ is the “Spirit” of Christ, which holds the members of the body together, shows itself to be active in everything which belongs to the body, and acts in man as a supernatural power. This spirit, as it dwells henceforth in the redeemed man, works and directs and drives him on to every action; lifts man in idea far above all the limitations of his fleshly nature; strengthens him in his weakness; shows him existence in a new light, so that henceforth he feels himself no longer bound; gives him the victory over the powers of earth, and enables him to anticipate, even in this life, the blessedness of his real and final redemption in a life to come.[60] But the spirit of Christ as such is equally the divine spirit. So that the redeemed, as they receive the spirit of Christ, are the “sons” of God himself, and this is expressed by saying that with the spirit they “inherit the glorious freedom of the children of God.”[61] For, as Paul says, “the Lord is the spirit; but where the spirit is, there is freedom.”[62]
So that when the Christian feels himself transformed into a “new creature,” equipped with power of knowledge and of virtue, blest in the consciousness of his victorious strength over carnal desires, and wins his peace in faith, this is only the consequence of a superhuman spirit working in him. Hence the Christian virtues of Brotherly Love, Humility, Obedience, &c., are necessary consequences of the possession of the Spirit: “If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also walk.”[63] And if the faithful suddenly develop a fulness of new and wonderful powers, which exceed man’s ordinary nature—such as facility in “tongues,” in prophecy, and in the healing of the sick—this is, in the superstitious view of the age, only to be explained by the indwelling activity of a supernatural spirit-being that has entered man from the outside. Certainly it does not seem clear, in the Pauline conception of the redemption, how this heavenly spirit can at the same time be the spirit of man—how it can be active in man without removing the particular and original spirit of man, and without reducing the individual to a passive tool, to a lifeless puppet without self-determination and responsibility; how the man “possessed” by such a spirit can nevertheless feel himself free and redeemed by the Spirit. For it is in truth an alien spirit, one that does not in essence belong to him, which enters man through the union with Christ. Yet it is supposed to be the spirit, not merely of the individual man, but also Christ’s personal spirit. One and the same spirit putting on a celestial body of light must be enthroned on the right hand of the Father in heaven, and must also be on earth the spirit of those who believe in it, setting itself to work in them as the source of Gnosis, of full mystic knowledge; and, as the power of God, as the spirit of salvation, must produce in them supernatural effects.[64] It must be on the one hand an objective and actual spirit-being which in Christ becomes man, dies, and rises again; and on the other hand an inner subjective power, which produces in each individual man the extinction of the flesh and a new birth which is to be shared by the faithful as the fruit of their individual redemption. That is perhaps comprehensible in the mode of thought of an age for which the idea of personality had as yet no definite meaning, and which consequently saw no contradiction in this, that a personal Christ-spirit should at the same time inhabit a number of individual spirits; and which did not differentiate between the one, or rather the continual, act of redemption by God and its continual temporal repetition in the individual. We can understand this only if the Pauline Christ is a purely metaphysical being. It is, on the contrary, quite incomprehensible if Paul is supposed to have gained his idea of the mediator of salvation from any experience of an historical Jesus and his actual death. Only because in his doctrine of the saving power of the Christ-spirit Paul had thought of no particular human personality could he imagine the immanence of the divine in the world to be mediated by that spirit. Only because he connected no other idea with the personality of Jesus than the Book of Wisdom or Philo did with their particular immanence principles, does he declare that Christ brings about salvation. So that Christ, as the principle of redemption, is for Paul only an allegorical or symbolical personality and not a real one. He is a personality such as were the heathen deities, who passed as general cosmic powers without prejudice to their appearing in human form. Personality is for Paul only another mode of expressing the supernatural spirituality and directed activity of the principle of redemption, in distinction from the blindly working powers and material realities of religious naturalism. It serves merely to suggest spirituality to an age which could only represent spirit as a material fluid. It corresponds simply to the popular conception of the principle of redemption, which treated this as bound up with the idea of a human being. But it in no way referred to a real historical individual, showing, in fact, just by the uncertainty and fluctuation of the idea, how far the Christ of the Pauline doctrine of redemption was from being connected with a definite historical reality.
Not because he so highly esteemed and revered Jesus as an historical personality did Paul make Christ the bearer and mediator of redemption, but because he knew nothing at all of an historical Jesus, of a human individual of this name, to whom he would have been able to transfer the work of redemption. “Faithful disciples,” Wrede considers, “could not so easily believe that the man who had sat with them at table in Capernaum, or had journeyed over the Sea of Galilee with them, was the creator of the world. For Paul this obstacle was absent.”[65] But Paul is nevertheless supposed to have met James, the “Brother of the Lord,” and to have had dealings with him which would certainly have modified his view of Jesus, if here there were really question of a corporeal brotherhood. What a wonderful idea our theologians must have of a man like Paul if they think that it could ever have occurred to him to connect such tremendous conceptions with a human individual Jesus as he does with his Christ! It is true that there is a type of religious ecstasy in which the difference between man and God is completely lost sight of; and, especially at the beginning of our era, in the period of Cæsar-worship and of the deepest religious superstition, it was not in itself unusual to deify, after his death, a man who was highly esteemed. A great lack of reason, a great mental confusion, an immense flight of imagination, would be necessary to transform a man not long dead, who was still clearly remembered by his relatives and contemporaries, not merely into a divine hero or demi-god, but into the world-forming spiritual principle, into the metaphysical mediator of redemption and the “second God.” And if, as even Wrede acknowledges in the above-quoted words, personal knowledge of Jesus was really an “obstacle” to his apotheosis, how is it to be explained that the “First Apostles” at Jerusalem took no exception to that representation of Paul’s? They surely knew who Jesus had been; they knew the Master through many years’ continual wandering with him. And however highly they may always have thought of the risen Jesus, however intimately they may have joined in their minds the memory of the man Jesus with the prevailing idea of the Messiah, according to the prevalent theological opinion, even they are supposed to have risen in no way to such a boundless deification of their Lord and Master as Paul undertook a comparatively short while after Jesus’ death.
“Paul already believed in such a heavenly Being, in a divine Christ, before he believed in Jesus.”[66] The truth is that he never believed at all in the Jesus of liberal theology. The “man” Jesus already belonged to his faith in Christ, so far as Christ’s act of redemption was supposed to consist in his humbling himself and becoming man—and no historical Jesus was necessary for that. For Paul also, just as for the whole heathen world, the man actually sacrificed in God’s place was at best merely a chance symbol of the God presenting himself as victim. Hence it cannot be said that the man Jesus was but “the bearer of all the great attributes,” which as such had been long since determined;[67] or, as Gunkel puts it, that the enthusiastic disciples had transferred to him all that the former Judaism had been wont to ascribe to the Messiah; and that consequently the Christology of the New Testament, in spite of its unhistorical nature, was nevertheless “a mighty hymn which History sings to Jesus”(!).[68] If we once agree as to the existence of a pre-Christian Jesus—and even Gunkel, apart from Robertson and Smith, has worked for the recognition of this fact—then this can in the first place produce nothing but a strong suspicion against the historical Jesus; and it seems a despairing subterfuge of the “critical” theology to seek to find capital, from the existence of a pre-Christian Jesus, for the “unique” significance of their “historical” Jesus.
Christ’s life and death are for Paul neither the moral achievement of a man nor in any way historical facts, but something super-historical, events in the supersensible world.[69] Further, the “man” Jesus comes in question for Paul, just as did the suffering servant of God for Isaiah, exclusively as an Idea, and his death is, like his resurrection, but the purely ideal condition whereby redemption is brought about. “If Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain.”[70] On this declaration has till now been founded the chief proof that an historical Jesus was to Paul the pre-supposition of his doctrine. But really that declaration in Paul’s mouth points to nothing but the faith of his contemporaries, who expected natural and religious salvation from the resurrection of their God, whether he were called Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, or anything else.
The fact is therefore settled, that Paul knew nothing of an historical Jesus; and that even if he had known anything of him, this Jesus in any case plays no part for him, and exercised no influence over the development of his religious view of the world. Let us consider the importance of this: the very man from whom we derive the first written testimony as to Christianity, who was the first in any way to establish it as a new religion differing from Judaism, on whose teachings alone the whole further development of Christian thought has depended—this Paul knew absolutely nothing of Jesus as an historical personality. In fact, with perfect justice from his point of view he was even compelled to excuse himself, when others wished to enlighten him as to such a personality! At the present day it will be acknowledged by all sensible people that, as Ed. von Hartmann declared more than thirty years ago, without Paul the Christian movement would have disappeared in the sand, just as the many other Jewish religions have done—at best to afford interest to investigators as an historical curiosity—and Paul had no knowledge of Jesus! The formation and development of the Christian religion began long before the Jesus of the Gospels appeared, and was completed independently of the historical Jesus of theology. Theology has no justification for treating Christianity merely as the “Christianity of Christ,” as it now is sufficiently evident; nor should it present a view of the life and doctrines of an ideal man Jesus as the Christian religion.[71]
The question raised at the beginning, as to what we learn from Paul about the historical Jesus, has found its answer—nothing. There is little value, then, in the objection to the disbelievers in such a Jesus which is raised on the theological side in triumphant tones: that the historical existence of Jesus is “most certainly established” by Paul. This objection comes, in fact, even from such people as regard the New Testament, in other respects, with most evidently sceptical views. The truth is that the Pauline epistles contain nothing which would force us to the belief in an historical Jesus; and probably no one would find such a person in them if that belief was not previously established in him. It must be considered that, if the Pauline epistles stood in the edition of the New Testament where they really belong—that is, before the Gospels—hardly any one would think that Jesus, as he there meets him, was a real man and had wandered on the earth in flesh and blood; but he would in all probability only find therein a detailed development of the “suffering servant of God,” and would conclude that it was an irruption of heathen religious ideas into Jewish thought. Our theologians are, however, so strongly convinced of it a priori—that the Pauline representation of Christ actually arose from the figure of Jesus wandering on earth—that even M. Brückner confesses, in the preface to his work, that he had been “himself astonished” (!) at the result of his inquiry—the independence of the Pauline representation of Christ from the historical personality, Jesus.[72]
Christianity is a syncretic religion. It belongs to those multiform religious movements which at the commencement of our era were struggling with one another for the mastery. Setting out from the Apocalyptic idea and the expectation of the Messiah among the Jewish sects, it was borne on the tide of a mighty social agitation, which found its centre and its point of departure in the religious sects and Mystery communities. Its adherents conceived the Messiah not merely as the Saviour of souls, but as deliverer from slavery, from the lot of the poor and the oppressed, and as the bearer of a new justice.[73]
It borrowed the chief part of its doctrine, the specific point in which it differed from ordinary Judaism, the central idea of the God sacrificing himself for mankind, from the neighbouring peoples, who had brought down this belief into Asia, in connection with fire-worship, from its earlier home in the North. Only in so far as that faith points in the end to an Aryan origin can it be said that Jesus was “an Aryan”; any further statements on this point, such as, for example, Chamberlain makes in his “Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts,” are pure fancies, and rest on a complete misunderstanding of the true state of affairs. Christianity, as the religion of Christ, of the “Lord,” who secularised the Jewish Law by his voluntary death of expiation, did not “arise” in Jerusalem, but, if anywhere, in the Syrian capital Antioch, one of the principal places of the worship of Adonis. For it was at Antioch where, according to the Acts,[74] the name “Christians” was first used for the adherents of the new religion, who had till then been usually called Nazarenes.[75]
That certainly is in sharpest contradiction to tradition, according to which Christianity is supposed to have arisen in Jerusalem and to have been thence spread abroad among the heathen. But Luke’s testimony as to the arising of the community of the Messiah at Jerusalem and the spreading of the Gospel from that place can lay no claim to historical significance. Even the account of the disciples’ experience at Easter and of the first appearances after the Resurrection, from their contradictory and confused character appear to be legendary inventions.[76] Unhistorical, and in contradiction to the information on this point given by Matthew and Mark, is the statement that the disciples stayed in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death, which is even referred by Luke to an express command of the dead master.[77] Unhistorical is the assemblage at Pentecost and the wonderful “miracle” of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, which, as even Clemen agrees, probably originated from the Jewish legends, according to which the giving of the Law on Sinai was made in seventy different languages, in order that it might be understood by all peoples.[78] But also Stephen’s execution and the consequent persecution of the community at Jerusalem are legendary inventions.[79] The great trouble which Luke takes to represent Jerusalem as the point whence the Christian movement set out, clearly betrays the tendency of the author of the Acts to misrepresent the activity of the Christian propaganda, which really emanated from many centres, as a bursting out of the Gospel from one focus. It is meant to produce the impression that the new religion spread from Jerusalem over the whole world like an explosion; and thus its almost simultaneous appearance in the whole of Nearer Asia is explained. For this reason “devout Jews of all nations” were assembled in Jerusalem at Pentecost, and could understand each other in spite of their different languages. For this reason Stephen was stoned, and the motive given for that persecution which in one moment scattered the faithful in all directions.[80]
Now it is certainly probable that there was in Jerusalem, just as in many other places, a community of the Messiah which believed in Jesus as the God sacrificing himself for humanity. But the question is whether this belief, in the community at Jerusalem, rested on a real man Jesus; and whether it is correct to regard this community, some of whose members were personally acquainted with Jesus, and who were the faithful companions of his wanderings, as the “original community” in the sense of the first germ and point of departure of the Christian movement. We may believe, with Fraser, that a Jewish prophet and itinerant preacher, who by chance was named Jesus, was seized by his opponents, the orthodox Jews, on account of his revolutionary agitation, and was beheaded as the Haman of the current year, thereby giving occasion for the foundation of the community at Jerusalem.[81] Against this it may be said that our informants as to the beginning of the Christian propaganda certainly vary, now making one assertion, now another, without caring whether these are contradictory; and they all strive to make up for the lack of any certain knowledge by unmistakable inventions. If the doctrine of Jesus was, as Smith declares, pre-Christian, “a religion which was spread among the Jews and especially the Greeks within the limits of the century [100 B.C. to 100 A.D.], more or less secretly, and wrapped up in ‘Mysteries,’” then we can understand both the sudden appearance of Christianity over so wide a sphere as almost the whole of Nearer Asia, and also the fact that even the earliest informants as to the beginning of the Christian movement had nothing certain to tell. This, however, seems quite irreconcilable with the view of a certain, definite, local, and personal point of departure for the new doctrine.[82] The objection will be raised: what about the Gospels? They, at least, clearly tell the story of a human individual, and are inexplicable, apart from the belief in an historical Jesus.
The question consequently arises as to the source from which the Gospels derived a knowledge of this Jesus; for on this alone the belief in an historical Jesus can rest.
[1] Of course the “Acts of the Apostles” is, and remains in spite of all modern attempts at vindication (Harnack), a very untrustworthy historical document, and the information it gives as to Paul’s life is for the most part mere fiction. We need not go so far as Jensen, who disputes the existence at any time of an historical Paul (“Moses, Jesus, Paulus. Drei Sagenvarianten des babylonischen Gottmenschen Gilgamesch,” 2 Aufl., 1909), but will nevertheless not be able to avoid the view that the description of Paul, as Bruno Bauer has already shown, represents an original, in any case very much worked over, and in the opinion of many only a copy of the original, which preceded it in the portrayal of the “chief of the apostles,” Peter (cf., on the historical value of the Acts, also E. Zeller, “Die Apg. nach ihrem Inhalt und Ursprung kritisch untersucht,” 1854). [↑]
[2] Cf. H. Jordan, “Jesus und die modernen Jesusbilder. Bibl. Zeit- u. Streitfragen,” 1909, 36. [↑]
[3] “To create authors who have never written a letter, to forge whole series of books, to date the most recent production back into grey antiquity, to cause the well-known philosophers to utter opinions diametrically opposed to their real views, these and similar things were quite common during the last century before and the first after Christ. People cared little at that time about the author of a work, if only its contents were in harmony with the taste and needs of the age” (E. Zeller, “Vorträge u. Abhdlg.,” 1865, 298 sq.). “It was at that time a favourite practice to write letters for famous men. A collection of not less than 148 letters was attributed to the tyrant Phalaris, who ruled Agrigentum in the sixth century B.C. Beyschlag has proved that they were ascribed to him in the time of Antoninus. Similarly the letters attributed to Plato, to Euripides and others, are spurious. It would have been indeed strange if this custom of the age had not gained an influence over the growing Christian literature, for such forgery would be produced most easily in the religious sphere, since it was here not a question of producing particular thoughts, but of being an organ of the common religious spirit working in the individual” (Steck, op. cit., 384 sq.; cf. also Holtzmann, “Einl. in das N.T.,” 2 Aufl., 223 sqq.). [↑]
[4] E. Vischer, “Die Paulusbriefe, Rel. Volksb.,” 1904, 69 sq. [↑]
[6] [1 Cor. xv. 5] sqq. [↑]
[7] Cf. W. Seufert, “Der Ursprung und die Bedeutung des Apostolates in der christlichen Kirche der ersten Jahrhunderte,” 1887, 46, 157. [↑]
[8] An attempt is now being made to prove the contrary, citing [2 Cor. v. 16], which runs: “Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more.” The passage has been most differently explained. According to Baur the “Christ after the flesh” refers to the Jewish Messiah, the expected king and earthly Saviour of the Jews from political and social distress, in whom even Paul believed at an earlier date; and the meaning of the passage quoted is that this sensuous and earthly conception of the Messiah had given place in him to the spiritual conception (“Die Christuspartei in der kor. Gemeinde Tüb. Ztschr.,” 1831, 4 Heft, 90). According to Heinrici the “even though we have known” is not a positive assertion of a point of view which had once determined his judgment of Christ, but a hypothetical instance, which excludes a false point of view without asserting anything as to its actuality (“Komment,” 289). According to Beyschlag the passage is to be understood as asserting that Paul had seen Jesus at Jerusalem during his life on earth. But with Paul there is no talk of a mere seeing, but rather of a knowing. Lütgert disproves all these different hypotheses with the argument that the words “after the flesh” refer not to Christ but to the verb. “The apostle no longer knows any one ‘after the flesh,’ and so he no longer knows Jesus thus. At an earlier stage his knowledge of Christ was ‘after the flesh.’ At that time he did not have the spirit of God which made him able to see in Jesus the Son of God. Paul then is not protecting himself from the Jews, who denied him a personal knowledge of Jesus, but from the Pneumatics, who denied him a pneumatic knowledge of Jesus” (“Freiheitspredigt und Schwarmgeister in Korinth,” 1908, 55–58). [↑]
[9] [Gal. i. 11, 12]; [1 Cor. ii. 10]; [2 Cor. iv. 6]. [↑]
[11] [Gal. ii. 1] sqq. [↑]
[13] [Matt. xxviii. 10]; [Mark xiii. 33] sqq.; [John xx. 17]. [↑]
[14] In the opinion of the Dutch school of theologians, whom Schläger follows in his essay, “Das Wort kürios (Herr) in Seiner Bezichung auf Gott oder Jesus Christus” (“Theol. Tijdschrift,” 33, 1899, Part I.), this mention of the “Brother of the Lord” does not come from Paul; as according to Schläger, all the passages in 1 Cor., which speak of Jesus under the title “Kurios,” are interpolated. “Missionary travels of Brothers of Jesus are unknown to us from any other quarter, and are also in themselves improbable” (op. cit., 46; cf. also Steck, op. cit., 272 sq.). [↑]
[15] Similarly Origen, “Contra Celsum,” i. 35; cf. Smith, op. cit., 18 sq. [↑]
[16] Cf. as to this Sieffert in “Realenzyklop. f. prot. Theol. und Kirche” under “James.” In Ezr. ii. 2 and 9 there is also mention of “Brothers” of the High Priest Joshua, by which only the priests subordinate to him seem to be meant; and in Justin (“Dial c. Tryph.,” 106) the apostles are collectively spoken of as “Brothers of Jesus.” Similarly in [Rev. xii. 17], those “who keep the word of God and bear testimony to Jesus Christ” are spoken of as children of the heavenly woman and also as Brothers and Sisters of the Divine Redeemer, whom the dragon attempts to swallow up together with his mother. As Revelation owes its origin to a pre-Christian Jesus-cult, the designation of pious brothers of a community as physical brothers of Jesus seems also to have been customary in that cult, antecedent to the Pauline epistles and the Gospels. [↑]
[17] This is actually the view of the Dutch school of theologians. [↑]
[18] A. Kalthoff, “Was wissen wir von Jesus? Eine Abrechnung mit Prof. D. Bousset,” 1904, 17. [↑]
[22] Cf. Brandt, “Die evangel. Geschichte u. d. Ursprung d. Christentums,” 1893, 296. Schläger also agrees with the Dutch school, and produces telling arguments in favour of the view that [1 Cor. xi. 23–32] is an interpolation. “In our opinion,” he says, “the opening words, ‘For I received of the Lord,’ betray the same attempt as can be seen in vii. 10 and ix. 14—and probably the attempt of one and the same interpolator—to trace back Church institutions and regulations to the authority of the Lord, of the Kurios. In the three cases in which the latter is mentioned he is called ‘the Lord,’ which is a fact well worthy of consideration in view of the usual designation.” Schläger also shows that verse 32 is a very appropriate conclusion to verse 22; while as they stand now the logical connection is broken in a forcible manner by the interpolation of the account of the Last Supper. Another proof of the interpolation of 23–32 is to be found, Schläger thinks, in the fact that in verse 33 as in verse 22 the Corinthians are addressed in the second person, while in verses 31 and 32 the first person plural is used (op. cit., 41 sq.). In view of these notorious facts we can hardly understand how German theologians can with such decision adhere to the authenticity of the passage, reproaching those who contest it with “faults in method.” As against this view of theirs Schläger justly objects that “References to words and events from the life of Jesus are so isolated in the Pauline writings that we are entitled to and forced to raise the question as to each such reference, whether it is not the reflection of a later age, of an age which already placed confidence in the Gospel literature, that brought Jesus’ authority into the text” (Schläger, op. cit., 36). And the critical theologians are convinced that the writings of the New Testament are worked over to a great extent, rectified to accord with the Church, and in many places interpolated. But when some one else brings this to publicity, and dares to doubt the authenticity of a passage, they immediately raise a great outcry, and accuse him of wilfully misrepresenting the text; as if there were even one single such passage on which the views of critics are not divergent! [↑]
[23] M. Brückner’s opinion also is “that the Pauline account of the scene at the Last Supper is in all probability not a purely historical one, but is a dogmatic representation of the festival.” And he adds: “In any case just on account of its religious importance this scene cannot be cited to prove Paul’s acquaintance with the details of Jesus’ life” (“Die Entstehung der paulinischen Christologie,” 1903, 44). Cf. also Robertson, “Christianity and Mythology,” 388 sq. [↑]
[24] Holtzmann has, as a matter of fact, in an essay in the “Christliche Welt” (No. 7, 1910) recently attempted to prove the contrary, citing from Paul a number of moral exhortations, &c., which are in accord with Jesus’ words in the Gospels. But in this argument there is a presupposition, which should surely be previously proved, that the Gospels received their corresponding content from Jesus and not, on the contrary, from Paul’s epistles. It is admitted that they were in many other respects influenced by Pauline ideas. Moreover, all the moral maxims cited have their parallels in contemporary Rabbinical literature, so that they need not necessarily be referred back to an historical Jesus; also, such is their nature, that they might be advanced by any one, i.e., they are mere ethical commonplaces without any individual colouring. Thus we find the Rabbis in agreement with [Rom. xiii. 8] sq. and [Gal. v. 14], which Holtzmann traces back to [Matt. vii. 12]: “Bring not on thy neighbour that which displeases thee; this is our whole doctrine.” [Rom. xiii. 7] has its parallel not only in [Matt. xxii. 21], but also in the Talmud, which runs: “Every one is bound to fulfil his obligations to God with the like exactness as those to men. Give to God his due; for all that thou hast is from him.” [Rom. xii. 21] runs in the Sanhedrin: “It is better to be persecuted than to persecute, better to be calumniated by another than to slander.” So that the remark need not necessarily be based on [Matt. v. 39]; in fact, the last-named passage is not found at all in the standard MSS., in the Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The phrase, “to remove mountains” ([1 Cor. xiii. 2]). is a general Rabbinical one for extolling the power of a teacher’s diction, and so could easily be transferred to the power of faith. So also the phrase, [Mark ix. 50], “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace one with another”—which [Rom. xii. 18] is supposed to resemble—is a well-known Rabbinical expression. [Matt. v. 39] sq., which is supposed to accord with [1 Cor. vi. 7], runs in the Talmud: “If any one desires thy donkey, give him also the saddle.” [Matt. vii. 1–5], on which [Rom. ii. 1] and xiv. 4 are supposed to be based, equally recalls the Talmud: “Who thinks favourably of his neighbour brings it about that fair judgments are also made of him.” “Let your judgment of your neighbour be completely good.” “Even as one measures, with the same measure shall it also be measured unto him.” [Rom. xiv. 13] and [1 Cor. viii. 7–13] need not necessarily be an allusion to Jesus’ tender consideration for those who are ruined by scandal, as we find in the Talmud: “It would have been better that the evil-minded had been born blind, so that they would not have brought evil into the world” (cf. also Nork, “Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen zu neutestamentlichen Schriftstellen,” 1839). And does Paul’s usual phrase of greeting, “from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” really contain the avowal of the “Father-God” preached by Christ? For the connection of the divine Son and bearer of salvation with the “Father-God” is a general mythological formula which occurs in all the different religions—witness the relation between Marduk and Ea, Heracles and Zeus, Mithras and Ormuzd, Balder and Odin. What then does it mean when Paul speaks of the “meekness and humility of Christ,” who lived not for his own pleasure, who made no fame for himself, but was “submissive,” assumed the form of a servant, and was “obedient” to the will of his “father,” even to the death of the cross? All these traits are reproduced directly from the description of the suffering servant of God in Isaiah, which we know had a great part in shaping the personality of Jesus. Meekness, humility, charitableness, and obedience are the specific virtues of the pious of Paul’s time. It was a matter of course for Christ also, the ideal prototype of good and pious men, to be endowed with these characteristics. Abraham was obedient when he sacrificed his son Isaac; and so was the latter to his father, being also submissive in himself bringing the wood to the altar and giving himself up willingly to the sacrificial knife. And we know what a significant rôle the story of Isaac’s sacrifice has always played in the religious ideas of the Jews. Moreover, the heathen redeemer deities—Marduk, of the Mandaic Hibil Ziwâ, Mithras and Heracles—were also obedient in coming down upon earth at the bidding of their heavenly father, burst the gates of death, and gave themselves up, in the case of Mithras, even to be sacrificed; and Heracles served mankind in the position of a servant, fought with the monsters and horrors of hell, and assumed the hardest tasks at the will of others. [↑]
[25] Kalthoff, “Die Entstehung d. Christentums,” 1904, 15. [↑]
[26] P. Wernle, “Die Quellen des Lebens Jesu, Religionsgesch. Volksbücher,” 2 Aufl., 4. [↑]
[27] Gunkel, op. cit., 93. [↑]
[28] Gunkel also takes the view “that before Jesus there was a belief in Christ’s death and resurrection current in Jewish syncretic circles (op. cit., 82). Now we have already seen (p. 57) that the term “Christ” is of very similar significance to “Jesus.” So that it is not at all necessary to believe, as Gunkel asserted in the Darmstadt discussion, that Paul in speaking of “Jesus” testifies to an historical figure, because Jesus is the name of a person. “Jesus Christ” is simply a double expression for one and the same idea—that is, for the idea of the Messiah, Saviour, Physician, and Redeemer; and it is not at all improbable, as Smith supposes, that the contradictions in the conception of the Messiah in two different sects or spheres of thought found their settlement in the juxtaposition of the two names. [↑]
[29] “Not the teacher, not the miracle-worker, not the friend of the publicans and sinners, not the opponent of the Pharisees, is of importance for Paul. It is the crucified and risen Son of God alone” (Wernle, op. cit., 5). [↑]
[30] “Indeed, the historical Jesus in the sense of the Ritschlian school would have been for Paul an absurdity. The Pauline theology has to do rather with the experiences of a heavenly being, which have, and will yet have, extraordinary significance for humanity” (M. Brückner, “Die Entstehung der paulinischen Christologie,” 1903, 12). Brückner also considers it settled “that Jesus’ life on earth had no interest at all for Paul” (op. cit., 46). “Paul did not trouble himself about Jesus’ life on earth, and what he may here and there have learnt concerning it, with few exceptions, remained indifferent to him” (42). Brückner also shows that the passages which are cited to contradict this prove nothing as to Paul’s more detailed acquaintance with Jesus’ life on earth (41 sqq.). He claims “to have given the historical demonstration” in his work “that the Christian religion is at bottom independent of ‘uncertain historical truths’” (Preface). And in spite of this he cannot as a theologian free himself from the conception of an historical Jesus even with regard to Paul, though he is, nevertheless, not in a position to show where and to what extent the historical Jesus had a really decided influence over Paul. [↑]
[31] Movers, op. cit., 438 sqq.; Fraser, “Adonis, Attis, Osiris,” 42, 43, 47, 60, 79 sq. [↑]
[32] Cumont, “Textes et monuments,” &c., i. 240; Pfleiderer, “Urchristentum,” i. 29 sqq. [↑]
[34] Pfleiderer, op. cit., 45. [↑]
[36] Smith, op. cit., 21 sq. [↑]
[37] Cf. Zimmern, “Zum Streit um die Christusmythe,” 23. [↑]
[38] “I am the A and the O, the beginning and the end,” the Revelation of John makes the Messiah say (i. 8.). Is there not at the same time in this a concealed reference to Adonis? The Alpha and the Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, form together the name of Adonis—Ao (Aoos) as the old Dorians called the God, whence Cilicia is also called Aoa. A son of Adonis and Aphrodite (Maia) is said (“Schol. Theocr.,” 15, 100) to have been called Golgos. His name is connected with the phallic cones (Greek, golgoi), as they were erected on heights in honour of the mother divinities of Western Asia, who were themselves, probably on this account, called Golgoi and golgōn anássa (Queens of the Golgoi), and is the same as the Hebraic plural Golgotha (Sepp, “Heidentum,” i. 157 sq.). Finally, was the “place of skulls” an old Jebusite place of worship of Adonis under the name of Golgos, and was the cone of rock, on which statue of Venus was erected in the time of Hadrian, selected for the place of execution of the Christian Saviour because it was connected with the remembrance of the real sacrifice of a man in the rôle of Adonis (Tammuz)? [↑]
[40] We notice that already in these distinctions the germs of those endless and absurd disputes concerning the “nature” of the God-man lie concealed, which later, in the first century A.D., tore Christendom into countless sects and “heresies,” and which gave the occasion for the rise of the Christian dogma. [↑]
[42] [Rom. viii. 3]; [2 Cor. viii. 9]; [Phil. ii. 7] sq. [↑]
[43] [Gal. iii. 10] sqq.; [Rom. iii. 9]. [↑]
[44] [Rom. iii. 20], [iv. 15], [v. 20], [vii.], sqq. [↑]
[45] [Gal. iii. 19] sqq. [↑]
[46] [Rom. vi. 9] sq. [↑]
[48] [Rom. iv. 3] sqq. [↑]
[49] [Rom. vi. 3] sqq. [↑]
[52] [1 Cor. x. 16] sqq., xi. 23–27. [↑]
[53] [1 Cor. x. 3] sqq., 16–21. [↑]
[54] Cf., e.g., Pfleiderer, op. cit., 333. [↑]
[55] Cf. above, p. 49 sqq. [↑]
[56] Plato, “Symposium,” c. 22. [↑]
[59] Cf. my work, “Plotin und der Untergang der antiken Weltanschauung,” 1907. [↑]
[60] [Gal. ii. 20]; [Rom. viii. 4], [26]. [↑]
[64] [1 Cor. ii. 9, 14]; [Rom. xii. 2]. [↑]
[71] Cf. as to the whole question my essay on “Paulus u. Jesus” (“Das Freie Wort” of December, 1909). [↑]
[72] It is true that other theologians think differently on this point, as, e.g., Feine in his book, “Jesus Christus und Paulus” (1902), declares that Paul had “interested himself very much in gaining a distinct and comprehensive picture of Jesus’ activity and personality” (!) (229). [↑]
[73] Kalthoff has in his writings laid especial stress on this social significance of Christianity. Cf. also Steudel, “Das Christentum und die Zukunft des Protestantismus” (“Deutsche Wiedergeburt,” iv., 1909, 26 sq.), and Kautsky, “Der Ursprung des Christentums,” 1908. [↑]
[75] In the same way Vollers also, in his work on “Die Weltreligionen” (1907), seeks to explain the faith of the original Christian sects in Jesus’ death and resurrection as a blend of the Adonis (Attis) and Christ faiths. He regards this as the essence of that faith, that the existing views of the Messiah and the Resurrection were transferred to one and the same person; and shows from this of what great importance it must be that this faith met a well-prepared ground, in North Syria, Anatolia, and Egypt, where it naturally spread. But he treats the Jewish Diaspora of these lands as the natural mediator of the new preaching or “message of Salvation” (Gospel), and finds a proof of his view in this, “that the sphere of the greatest density of the Diaspora almost completely coincides with those lands where the growing and rising youthful God was honoured, and that these same districts are also the places in which we meet, only a generation after Jesus’ death, the most numerous, flourishing, and fruitful communities of the new form of belief.” It is the Eastern Mediterranean or Levantine horse-shoe shaped line which stretches from Ephesus and Bithynia through Anatolia to Tarsus and Antioch, thence through Syria and Palestine by way of the cult-centres Bubastes and Sais to Alexandria. Almost directly in the middle of these lands lies Aphaka, where was the chief sanctuary of the “Lord” Adonis, and a little south of this spot lies the country where the Saviour of the Gospels was born (op. cit., 152). [↑]
[76] Cf. O. Pfleiderer, “Die Entstehung des Christentums,” 1905, 109 sqq. [↑]
[77] [Luke xxiv. 33], [xlix. 52]; [Acts i. 4, 8, 12] sqq. [↑]
[78] “Religionsgesch. Erklärung d. N.T.,” 261. Cf. also [Joel iii. 1] and [Isa. xxviii. 11], and the Buddhist account of the first sermon of Buddha: “Gods and men streamed up to him, and all listened breathlessly to the words of the teacher. Each of the countless listeners believed that the wise man looked at him and spoke to him in his own language; though it was the dialect of Magadha which he spoke.” Seydel, “Evangelium von Jesus,” 248; “Buddha-Legende,” 92 sq. [↑]
[79] Stephen’s so-called “martyrdom,” whose feast falls on December 26th, the day after the birth of Christ, owes its existence to astrology, and rests on the constellation of Corona (Gr., Stephanos), which becomes visible at this time on the eastern horizon (Dupuis, op. cit., 267). Hence the well-known phrase “to inherit the martyr’s crown.” Even the theologian Baur has found it strange that the Jewish Sanhedrin, which could not carry into effect any death sentence without the assent of the Roman governor, should completely set aside this formality in the case of Stephen; and he has clearly shown how the whole account of Stephen’s martyrdom is paralleled with Christ’s death (Baur, “Paulus,” 25 sqq.). [↑]
[80] Smith, op. cit., 23–31. [↑]
[81] Frazer, “Golden Bough,” iii. 197. [↑]
[82] Smith, op. cit., 30 sq. [↑]
II
THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS
However widely views may differ even now in the sphere of Gospel criticism, all really competent investigators agree on one point with rare unanimity: the Gospels are not historical documents in the ordinary sense of the word, but creeds, religious books, literary documents revealing the mind of the Christian community. Their purpose is consequently not to give information as to the life and teachings of Jesus which would correspond to reality, but to awaken belief in Jesus as the Messiah sent from God for the redemption of his people, to strengthen and defend that belief against attacks. And as creeds they confine themselves naturally to recounting such words and events as have any significance for the faith; and they have the greatest interest in so arranging and representing the facts as to make them accord with the content of that faith.
(a) The Synoptic Jesus.
Of the numerous Gospels which were still current in the first half of the second century, as is well known, only four have come down to us. The others were not embodied by the Church in the Canon of the New Testament writings, and consequently fell into oblivion. Of these at most a few names and isolated and insignificant fragments remain to us. Thus we know of a Gospel of Matthew, of Thomas, of Bartholomew, Peter, the twelve apostles, &c. Of our four Gospels, two bear the names of apostles and two the names of companions and pupils of apostles, viz., Mark and Luke. In this, of course, it is in no way meant that they were really written by these persons. According to Chrysostom these names were first assigned to them towards the end of the second century. And the titles do not run: Gospel of Matthew, of Mark, and so on, but “according to” Matthew, “according to” Mark, Luke, and John; so that they indicate at most only the persons or schools whose particular conception of the Gospel they represent.
Of these Gospels, again, that of John ranks as the latest. It presupposes the others, and shows such a dogmatic tendency, that it cannot be considered the source of the story. Of the remaining Gospels, which on account of their similarity as to form and matter have been termed “Synoptic” (i.e., such as must be dealt with in connection with each other and thus only give a real idea of the Saviour’s personality), that of Mark is generally regarded as the oldest. Matthew and Luke rely on Mark, and all three, according to the prevailing view, are indebted to a common Aramaic source, wherein Jesus’ didactic sermons are supposed to have been contained. Tradition points to John Mark, the nephew of Barnabas, pupil of Peter, and Paul’s companion on his first missionary journey and later a sharer in the captivity at Rome, as the author of the Gospel of Mark. It is believed that this was written shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem (70)—i.e., at least forty years after Jesus’ death (!). This tradition depends upon a note of the Church historian Eusebius (d. about 340 A.D.), according to which Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, learnt from the “elder John” that Mark had set forth what he had heard from Peter, and what this latter had in turn heard from the “Lord.” On account of its indirect nature and of Eusebius’ notorious unreliability this note is not a very trustworthy one,[1] and belief in it should disappear in view of the fact that the author of the Gospel of Mark had no idea of the spot where Jesus is supposed to have lived. And yet Mark is supposed to have been born in Jerusalem and to have been a missionary! As Wernle shows in his work, “Die Quellen des Lebens Jesu,” Mark stands quite far from the life of Jesus both in time and place(!); indeed, he has no clear idea of Jesus’ doings and course of life.[2] And Wrede confirms this in his work, “Das Messias-geheimnis” (1901), probably the clearest and deepest inquiry into the fundamental problem of the Gospel of Mark which we possess. Jesus is for Mark at once the Messiah and the Son of God. “Faith in this dogma must be aroused, it must be established and defended. The whole Gospel is a defence. Mark wishes to lead all his readers, among whom he counts the Heathens and Gentile Christians, to the recognition of what the heathen centurion said, ’Truly this man was the Son of God!’[3] The whole account is directed to this end.”[4]
Mark’s main proof for this purpose is that of miracles. Jesus’ doctrines are with Mark of so much less importance than his miracles, that we never learn exactly what Jesus preached. “Consequently the historical portrait is very obscure: Jesus’ person is distorted into the grotesque and the fantastic”(!)[5] Not only does Mark often introduce his own thought into the tradition about Jesus, and so prove perfectly wrong, and indeed absurd, the view held, for instance, by Wernle, that Jesus had intentionally made use of an obscure manner of speech and had spoken in parables and riddles so as not to be understood by the people;[6] but also the connection which he has established between the accounts, which had first gone from mouth to mouth for a long time in isolation, is a perfectly disconnected and external one. At first the stories reported by Mark were totally disconnected with one another. There is no evidence at all of their having followed each other in the present order(!).[7] So that only the matter, not what Mark made of it, is of historical value.[8] Single stories, discourses, and phrases are bound into a whole by Mark; and often enough it may be seen that we have here a tradition which was first built up in the earliest Christianity long after Jesus’ death. Experiences were at first gradually fashioned into a story—and the miracle-stories may especially be regarded in this way. In spite of all these trimmings and alterations, and in spite of the fact that neither in the words of Jesus nor in the stories is it for the most part any longer possible to separate the actual from the traditional, which for forty years was not put into writing—in spite of all this, the historical value of the traditions given us by Mark is “very highly” estimated. For not only is “the general impression of power, originality, and creation” “valuable,” which is given in this account of Mark’s, but also there are so many individual phrases “corresponding to reality.” Numerous accounts, momentary pictures and remarks, “speak for themselves.” The modesty and ingenuousness(!), the freshness and joy(!) with which Mark recounts all this, show distinctly that he is here the reporter of a valid tradition, and that he writes nothing but what eye-witnesses have told him(!). “And so finally, in spite of all, this Gospel remains an extraordinarily valuable work, a collection of old and genuine material, which is loosely arranged and placed under a few leading conceptions; produced perhaps by that Mark whom the New Testament knows, and of whom Papias heard from the mouth of the elder John.”[9]
One does not trust one’s eyes with this style of attempting to set up Mark as an even half-credible “historical source.” This attempt will remind us only too forcibly of Wrede’s ironical remarks when he is making fun of the “decisions as you like it” that flourish in the study of Jesus’ life. “This study,” says Wrede, “suffers from psychological suggestion, and this is one style of historical solution.”[10] One believes that he can secure this, another that, as the historical nucleus of the Gospel; but neither has objective proofs for his assertions.[11] If we wish to work with an historical nucleus, we must really make certain of a nucleus. The whole point is, that in an anecdote or phrase something is proved, which makes any other explanation of the matter under consideration improbable, or at least doubtful.[12] It seems very questionable, after his radical criticism of the historical credibility of Mark’s Gospel, that Wrede saw in it such a “historical kernel”—though this is supposed by Wernle to “speak for itself.” Moreover, Wrede’s opinion of the “historian” Mark is not essentially different from Wernle’s. In his opinion, for example, Jesus’ disciples, as the Gospel portrays them, with their want of intelligence bordering on idiocy, their folly, and their ambiguous conduct as regards their Master, are “not real figures.”[13] He also concedes, as we have stated, that Mark had no real idea of the historical life of Jesus,[14] even if “pallid fragments”(!) of such an idea entered into his superhistorical faith-conception. “The Gospel of Mark,” he says, “has in this sense a place among the histories of dogma.”[15] The belief that in it the development of Jesus’ public life is still perceptible appears to be decaying.[16] “It would indeed be in the highest degree desirable that such a Gospel were not the oldest.”[17]
Thus, then, does Mark stand as an historical source. After this we could hardly hope to be much strengthened in our belief in Jesus’ historical reality by the other two Synoptics. Of these, Luke’s Gospel must have been written, in the early part of the second century, by an unknown Gentile Christian; and Matthew’s is not the work of a single author, but was produced—and unmistakably in the interests of the Church—by various hands in the first half of the second century.[18] But now both, as we have said, are based on Mark. And even if in their representations they have attained a certain “peculiar value” which is wanting in Mark—e.g., a greater number of Jesus’ parables and words—even if they have embellished the story of his life by the addition of legendary passages (e.g., of the history of the time preceding the Saviour, of many additions to the account of the Passion and Resurrection, &c.), this cannot quite establish the existence of an historical Jesus. It is true that Wernle takes the view that in this respect “old traditions” have been preserved “with wonderful fidelity” by both the Evangelists; but, on the other hand, he concedes as to certain of Luke’s accounts that even if he had used old traditions they need not have been as yet written, and certainly they need not have been “historically reliable.” It seems rather peculiar when, leaving completely on one side the historical value of the tradition, he emphatically declares that even such a strong interest, as in his opinion the Evangelists had in the shaping and formation of their account, could not in any way set aside “the worth of its rich treasure of parables and stories, through which Jesus himself [!] speaks to us with freshness and originality” (!). He also strangely sums up at the end, “that the peculiar value of both Gospels, in spite of their very mixed nature, has claim enough on our gratitude”(!).[19] This surely is simply to make use of the Gospels’ literary or other value in the interest of the belief in their historical credibility.
But there is still the collection of sayings, that “great authority on the matter,” from which all the Synoptics, and especially Luke and Matthew, are supposed to have derived the material for their declarations about Jesus. Unfortunately this is to us a completely unknown quantity, as we know neither what this “great” authority treats of, nor the arrangement of the matter in it, nor its text. We can only say that this collection was written in the Aramaic tongue, and the arrangement of its matter was not apparently chronological, but according to the similarity of its contents. Again, it is doubtful whether the collection was a single work, produced by one individual; or whether it had had a history before it came to Luke and Matthew. All the same, “the collection contains such a valuable number of the Lord’s words, that in all probability an eye-witness was its author” (!).[20] As for the speeches of Jesus constructed from it, they were never really made as speeches by Jesus, but owe the juxtaposition of their contents entirely to the hand of the compiler. Thus the much admired Sermon on the Mount is constructed by placing together individual phrases of Jesus, which belong to all periods of his life, perhaps made in the course of a year. The ideas running through it and connecting the parts are not those of Jesus, but rather those of the original community; “nevertheless, the historical value of these speeches is, on the whole, very great indeed. Together with the ‘Lord’s words’ of Mark they give us the truest insight into the spirit of the Gospel”(!).[21]
Such are the authorities for the belief in an historical Jesus! If we survey all that remains of the Gospels, this does indeed appear quite “scanty,” or, speaking plainly, pitiable. Wernle consoles himself with, “If only it is certain and reliable.” Yes, if! “And if only it was able to give us an answer to the chief question: Who was Jesus?”[22] This much is certain: a “Life of Jesus” cannot be written on the basis of the testimony before us. Probably all present-day theologians are agreed on this point; which, however, does not prevent them producing new essays on it, at any rate for the “people,” thus making up for the lack of historical reliability by edifying effusions and rhetorical phrases. “There is no lack of valuable historical matter, of stones for the construction of Jesus’ life; they lie before us plentifully. But the plan for the construction is lost and completely irretrievable, because the oldest disciples had no occasion for such an historical connection, but rather claimed obedience to the isolated words and acts, so far as they aroused faith.” But would they have been less faith-arousing if they had been arranged connectedly, would the credibility of the accounts of Jesus have been diminished and not much rather increased, if the Evangelists had taken the trouble to give us some more information as to Jesus’ real life? As things stand at present, hardly two events are recounted in the same manner in the Gospels, or even in the same connection. Indeed, the differences and contradictions—and this not only as to unimportant things, such as names, times and places, &c.—are so great that these literary documents of Christianity can hardly be surpassed in confusion.[23] But even this is, according to Wernle, “not so great a pity, if only we can discover with sufficient clearness, what Jesus’ actions and wishes were on important points.”[24] Unfortunately we are not in a position to do even this. For the ultimate source of our information, which we arrive at in our examination of the authorities is completely unknown to us—the Aramaic collection of sayings, and those very old traditions from which Mark is supposed to have derived his production, gleanings of which have been preserved for us by Luke and Matthew. But even if we knew these also, we would almost certainly not have “come to Jesus himself.” “They contain the possibility of dispute and misrepresentation. They recount in the first place the faith of the oldest Christians, a faith which arose in the course of four hundred years, and moreover changed much in that time.”[25] So that at most we know only the faith of the earliest community. We see how this community sought to make clear to itself through Jesus its belief in the Resurrection, how it sought to “prove” to itself and to others the divine nature of Jesus by the recital of tales of miracles and the like. What Jesus himself thought, what he did, what he taught, what his life was, and—might we say it?—whether he ever lived at all—that is not to be learnt from the Gospels, and, according to all the preceding discussion, cannot be settled from them with lasting certainty.
Of course the liberal theologian, for whom everything is compatible with an historical Jesus, has many resources. He explains that all the former discussion has not touched the main point, and that this point is—What was Jesus’ attitude to God, to the world, and to mankind? What answer did he give to the questions: What matters in the eyes of God? and What is religion? This should indicate that the solution of the problem is contained in what has preceded, and that this solution is unknown to us. But such is not the case. Wernle knows it, and examines it “in the clear light of day.” “From his numerous parables and sermons and from countless momentary recollections it comes to us as clearly and distinctly as if Jesus were our contemporary [!]. No man on earth can say that it is either uncertain or obscure how Jesus thought on this point, which is to us [viz., to the liberal theologians] even at the present day the chief point.” “And if Christianity has forgotten for a thousand years what its Master desired first and before all, to-day [i.e., after the clear solutions of critical theology] it shines on us once more from the Gospels as clearly and wonderfully, as if the sun were newly risen, driving before its conquering rays all the phantoms and shadows of night.”[26] And so Wernle himself, to whom we owe this consoling assurance, has written a work, “Die Anfänge unserer Religion” (1901), which is highly esteemed in theological circles, and in which he has given a detailed account, in a tone of overwhelming assurance, of the innermost thoughts, views, words, and teachings of Jesus and of his followers, just as if he had been actually present.
We must be careful of our language. These are indeed the views of a man who must be taken seriously, with whom we have been dealing above, a “shining light” of his science! The often cited work on “Die Quellen des Lebens Jesu” belongs to the series of “Popular Books on the History of Religion,” which contains the quintessence of present-day theological study, and which is intended for the widest circles interested and instructed in religion. We may suppose, probably with justice, that that work expresses what the liberal theology of our day wishes the members of the community subject to it to know and to believe. Or is it only that the popular books on the history of religion place the intellectual standard of their readers so low that they think they can strengthen the educated in their belief in an historical Jesus by productions such as Wernle’s? We consider the more “scientifically” elaborated works of other important theologians on the same subject. We think of Beyschlag, Harnack, Bernard Weiss, of Pfleiderer, Jülicher, and Holtzmann. We consult Bousset, who defended against Kalthoff, with such great determination and warmth, the existence of an historical Jesus. Everywhere there is the same half-comic, half-pathetic drama: on the one hand the evangelical authorities are depreciated and the information is criticised away to such an extent that hardly anything positive remains from it; on the other hand there is a pathetic enthusiasm for the so-called “historical kernel.” Then comes praise for the so-called critical theology and its “courageous truthfulness,” which, however, ultimately consists only in declaring evident myths and legends to be such. This was known for a long time previously among the unprejudiced. There usually follows a hymn to Jesus with ecstatic raising of the eyes, as if all the statements concerning him in the Gospels still had validity. What then does Hausrath say?—“To conceal the miraculous parts of the [evangelical] accounts and then to give out the rest as historical, has not hitherto passed as criticism.”[27] Can we object to Catholic theology because it looks with open pity on the whole of Protestant “criticism,” and reproaches it with the inconsistency, incompleteness, and lack of results, which is the mark of all its efforts to discover the beginnings of Christianity.[28] Is it not right in rejoicing at the blow which Protestantism has sustained and from which it must necessarily suffer through all such attempts at accepting the Gospels as basis for a belief in an historical Jesus? Certainly what Catholic theologians bring forward in favour of the historical Jesus is so completely devoid of any criticism or even of any genuine desire to elucidate the facts, that it would be doing them too much honour to make any more detailed examination of their works on this point. For them the whole problem has a very simple solution in this: the existence of the historical Jesus forms the unavoidable presupposition of the Church, even though every historical fact should register its veto against it; and as one of its writers has put it, that is at bottom the long-established and unanimous view of all our inquiries into the subject under discussion: “The historical testimony for the authenticity of the Gospels is as old, as extensive, and as well established as it is for very few other books of ancient literature [!]. If we do not wish to be inconsistent we cannot question their authenticity. Their credibility is beyond question; for their authors were eye-witnesses of the events [!] related, or they gained their information from such; they were as competent judges [!] as men loving the truth can well be; they could, and in fact were obliged to speak the truth.”[29]
How distinguished, as compared with this kind of theologian, Kalthoff seems! It is true that we are obliged to allow for the one-sidedness and insufficiency of his positive working out of the origin of Christianity, of his attempt to explain it, on the basis of Mark’s handling of the story, purely on the lines of social motives, and to represent Christ as the mere reflection of the Christian community and of its experiences. Quite certainly he is wrong in identifying the biblical Pilate with Pliny, the governor of Bithynia under Trajan, and in the proof based on this; and this because in all probability Pliny’s letter to the Emperor is a later Christian forgery.[30] But Kalthoff is quite right in what he says about modern critical theology and its historical Jesus. The critical theologians may think themselves justified in treating this embarrassing opponent as “incompetent,” or in ignoring him on account of the mistaken basis of argument; but all the efforts made with such great perseverance and penetration by historical theologians to derive from the authorities before us proof of the existence of a man Jesus in the traditional sense have led, as Kalthoff very justly says, to a purely negative conclusion. “The numerous passages in the Gospels which this theology, in maintaining its historical Jesus, is obliged to place on one side and pass over, stand from a literary point of view exactly on the same footing as those passages from which it constructs its historical Jesus; and consequently they claim historical value equal to these latter. The Synoptic Christ, in whom modern theology thinks it finds the characteristics of the historical Jesus, stands not a hair’s breadth nearer to a human interpretation of Christianity than the Christ of the fourth Gospel. What the Epigones of liberal theology think they can distil from this Synoptic Christ as historical essence has historical value only as a monument of masterly sophistry, which has produced its finest examples in the name of theological science.”[31] Historical research should not have so long set apart from all other history that of early Christianity as the special domain of theology and handed it over to churchmen, as if for the decision of the questions on this point quite special talent was necessary—a talent far beyond the ordinary sphere of science and one which was only possessed by the Church theologian. The world would then long since have done with the whole literature of the “Life of Jesus.”
The sources which give information of the origin of Christianity are of such a kind that, considering the present standard of historical research, no historian would care to undertake an attempt to produce the biography of an historical Christ.[32] They are, we can add, of such a nature that a real historian, who meets them without a previous conviction or expectation that he will find an historical Jesus in it, cannot for a moment doubt that he has here to do with religious fiction,[33] with myth in an historical form, which does not essentially differ from other myths and legends—such as perhaps the legend of Tell.
Supplement: Jesus in Secular Literature.
There seems to be but little hope of considerably adding to the weight of the reasons in favour of the historical existence of Jesus by citing documents of secular literature. As is well known, only two passages of the Jewish historian Josephus, and one in each of the Roman historians, Tacitus and Suetonius, must be considered in this connection. As for the testimony of Josephus in his “Antiquities,” which was written 93 A.D., the first passage (viz., xviii. 3, 3) is so evidently an after-insertion of a later age, that even Roman Catholic theologians do not venture to declare it authentic, though they always attempt, with pitiful naïveté, to support the credibility of pre-Christian documents of this type.[34] But the other passage, too (xx. 9, 1), which states that James was executed under the authority of the priest Ananos (A.D. 62), and refers to him as “the Brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ,” in the opinion of eminent theologians such as Credner,[35] Schürer,[36] &c., must be regarded as a forgery;[37] but even if its authenticity were established it would still prove nothing in favour of the historical Jesus. For, first, it leaves it undecided whether a bodily relationship is indicated by the word “Brother,” or whether, as is much more likely, the reference is merely to a religious brotherhood (see above, 170 sq.). Secondly, the passage only asserts that there was a man of the name of Jesus who was called Christ, and this is in no way extraordinary in view of the fact that at the time of Josephus, and far into the second century, many gave themselves out as the expected Messiah.[38]
The Roman historians’ testimony is in no better case than that of Josephus. It is true that Tacitus writes in his “Annals” (xv. 44), in connection with the persecution of the Christians under Nero (64), that “the founder of this sect, Christ, was executed in Tiberius’ reign by the procurator Pontius Pilate”; and Suetonius states in his biography of the Emperor Claudius, chap. xxv., that he “drove out of Rome the Jews, who had caused great disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus.” What does this prove? Are we so certain that the passage cited from Tacitus as to the persecution of the Christians under Nero is not after all a later insertion and falsification of the original text? This is indeed the case, judging from Hochart’s splendid and exhaustive inquiry. In fact, everything points to the idea that the “first persecution of the Christians,” which is previously mentioned by no writers, either Jewish or heathen, is nothing but the product of a Christian’s imagination in the fifth century.[39] But let us admit the authenticity of Tacitus’ assertion; let us suppose also that by Suetonius’ Chrestus is really meant Christ and not a popular Jewish rioter of that name; let us suppose that the unrest of the Jews was not connected with the expectation of the Messiah, or that the Roman historian, in his ignorance of the Jewish dreams of the future, did not imagine a leader of the name of Chrestus.[40] Can writers of the first quarter of the second century after Christ, at which time the tradition was already formed and Christianity had made its appearance in History as a power, be regarded as independent authorities for facts which are supposed to have taken place long before the birth of the Tradition? Tacitus can at most have heard that the Christians were followers of a Christ who was supposed to have been executed under Pontius Pilate. That was probably even at that time in the Gospels—and need not, therefore, be a real fact of history. And if it has been proved, according to Mommsen, that Tacitus took his material from the protocols of the Senate and imperial archives, there has equally been, on the other hand, a most definite counter-assertion that he never consulted these authorities.[41]
Lately, Tacitus proving to be slightly inconsistent, it has been usual to refer to Pliny’s letter to the Emperor Trajan, asserting that the historical Jesus is certified to in this. The letter hinges on the question of what Pliny’s attitude as Governor of Bithynia must be to the Christians; so that naturally the Christians are much spoken of, and once even there is mention of Christ, whose followers sing alternate hymns to him “as to a God” (quasi deo). But Jesus as an historical person is not once mentioned in the whole letter; and Christ was even for Paul a “Quasi-god,” a being fluctuating between man and God. What then is proved by the letter of Pliny as to the historical nature of Jesus? It only proves the liberal theologians’ dilemma over the whole question, that they think they can cite these witnesses again and again for strengthening the belief in an historical Jesus, as, e.g. Melhorn does in his work “Wahrheit und Dichtung im Leben Jesu” (in “Aus Natur und Geisteswelt,” 1906), trying to make it appear that these witnesses are in any way worthy of consideration. Joh. Weiss also—according to the newspaper account—in his lecture on Christ in the Berlin vacation-course of March, 1910, confessed that “statements from secular literature as to the historical nature of Jesus which are absolutely free of objection are very far from having been authenticated.” Even an orthodox theologian like Kropatscheck writes in the “Kreuzzeitung” (April 7, 1910): “It is well known that the non-Christian writers in a very striking way ignore the appearing of Christ. The few small notices in Tacitus, Suetonius, &c., are easily enumerated. Though we date our chronology from him, his advent made no impression at all on the great historians of his age. The Talmud gives a hostile caricature of his advent which has no historical value. The Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, from whom we might have expected information of the first rank, is absolutely silent. We are referred to our Gospels, as Paul also says little of the life of Jesus; and we can understand how it is that attempts are always being made to remove him, as an historical person, from the past.” The objection to this, that the secular writers, even though they give no positive testimony for Jesus’ historical existence, have never brought it in question, is of very little strength. For the writings considered in it, viz., Justin’s conversation with the Jew Trypho, as well as the polemical work of Celsus against Christianity, both belong to the latter half of the second century, while the passages in the Talmud referred to are probably of a later date, and all these passages are merely based on the tradition. So that this “proof from silence” is in reality no proof. It is, rather, necessary to explain why the whole of the first century, apart from the Gospels, seems to know nothing of Jesus as an historical personality. The Frenchman Hochart ridicules the theological attitude: “It seems that the most distinguished men lose a part of their brilliant character in the study of martyrology. Let us leave it to German theologians to study history in their way. We Frenchmen wish throughout our inquiries to preserve our clearness of mind and healthy common-sense. Let us not invent new legends about Nero: there are really too many already.”[42]
(b) The Objections against a Denial of the Historicity of the Synoptic Jesus.
There the matter ends: we know nothing of Jesus, of an historical personality of that name to whom the events and speeches recorded in the Gospels refer. “In default of any historical certainty the name of Jesus has become for Protestant theology an empty vessel, into which that theology pours the content of its own meditations.”[43] And if there is any excuse for this, it is that that name has never at any time been anything but such an empty vessel: Jesus, the Christ, the Deliverer, Saviour, Physician of oppressed souls, has been from first to last a figure borrowed from myth, to whom the desire for redemption and the naïve faith of the Western Asiatic peoples have transferred all their conceptions of the soul’s welfare. The “history” of this Jesus in its general characteristics had been determined even before the evangelical Jesus. Even Weinel, one of the most zealous and enthusiastic adherents of the modern Jesus-worship, confesses that “Christology was almost completed before Jesus came on earth.”[44]
It was not, however, merely the general frame and outlines of the “history” of Jesus which had been determined in the Messiah-faith, in the idea of a divine spirit sent from God, of the “Son of Man” of Daniel and the Jewish Apocalyptics, &c., not merely that this vague idea was filled out with new content through the Redeemer-worship of the neighbouring heathen peoples. Besides this, many of the individual traits of the Jesus-figure were present, some in heathen mythology, some in the Old Testament; and they were taken thence and worked into the evangelical representation. There is, for instance, the story of the twelve-year old Jesus in the Temple. “Who would have invented this story?” asks Jeremias. “Nevertheless,” he thinks it “probable” that in this Luke was thinking of Philo’s description of the life of Moses; he calls to mind that Plutarch gives us a quite similar statement concerning Alexander, whose life was consciously decorated with all the traits of the Oriental King-redeemer.[45] Perhaps, however, the account comes from a Buddhist origin. The account of the temptation of Jesus also sounds very much like the temptation of Buddha, so far as it is not derived from the temptation of Zarathustra by Ahriman[46] or the temptation of Moses by the devil, of which the Rabbis told,[47] while Jesus is said to have entered upon his ministry in his thirtieth year,[48] because at that age the Levite was fitted for his sacred office.[49] Till then (i.e., till his baptism) we learn nothing of Jesus’ life. Similarly [Isa. liii. 2], jumps from the early youth of the Servant of God (“He grew up as a tender plant, as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness, is despised and rejected of men”) straight to his passion and death; while the Gospels attempt to fill in the interval from Jesus’ baptism up to his passion by painting in further so-called Messianic passages from the Old Testament and Words of Jesus. We know how the early Christians liked to rediscover their faith in the Scriptures and see it predicted, and with what zeal they consequently studied the Old Testament and altered the “history” of their Jesus to make it agree with those predictions, thus rendering it valuable as corroboration of their own notions. In this connection it has been shown above how the “ride of the beardless one” influenced the collection of the tribute and his direct attack on the shopkeepers and money-changers in the evangelical account of Jesus’ advent to the Temple at Jerusalem.[50] But the more detailed development of this scene is determined by [Zech. ix. 9], [Mal. iii. 1–3], and [Isa. i. 10] sqq., and the words placed in Jesus’ mouth on this occasion are taken from [Isa. lvi. 7] and [Jer. vii. 1] sqq., so that this “most important” event in Jesus’ life can lay no claim to historical actuality.[51]
And again the account of the betrayal, of the thirty pieces of silver, and of Judas’ death, have their source in the Old Testament, viz., in the betrayal and death of Ahitophel.[52] To what extent in particular the figures of Moses, with reference to [Deut. xviii. 15] and xxxiv. 10, of Joshua, of Elijah and Elisha, influenced the portrayal of the evangelical Jesus has also been traced even by the theological party.[53] Jesus has to begin his activities through baptism in the Jordan, because Moses had begun his leadership of Israel with the passage through the Red Sea and Joshua at the time of the Passover led the people through the Jordan, and this passage (of the sun through the watery regions of the sky) was regarded as baptism.[54] He has to walk on the water, even as Moses, Joshua, and Elias walked dryshod through the water. He has to awaken the dead, like Elijah;[55] to surround himself with twelve or seventy disciples and apostles, just as Moses had surrounded himself with twelve chiefs of the people and seventy elders, and as Joshua had chosen twelve assistants at the passage of the Jordan;[56] he has to be transfigured,[57] and to ascend into heaven like Moses[58] and Elijah.[59] Elijah (Eli-scha) and Jeho-schua (Joshua, Jesus) agree even in their names, so that on this ground alone it would not have been strange if the Prophet of the Old Testament had served as prototype of his evangelical namesake.[60] Now Jesus places himself in many ways above the Mosaic Law, especially above the commands as to food,[61] and in this at least one might find a trait answering to reality. But in the Rabbinical writings we find: “It is written,[62] the Lord sets loose that which is bound; for every creature that passes as unclean in this world, the Lord will pronounce clean in the next.”[63] So that similarly the disposition of the Law belongs to the general characteristics of the Messiah, and cannot be historical of Jesus, because if it were the attitude of the Jewish Christians to Paul on account of his disposition of the Law would be incomprehensible.[64] The contrary attitude, which is likewise represented by Jesus,[65] was already foreseen in the Messianic expectation. For while some hoped for a lightening and amendment of the Law by the Messiah, others thought of its aggravation and completion. In [Micah iv. 5] the Messiah was to exert his activity, not merely among the Jews, but also among the Gentiles, and the welfare of the kingdom of the Messiah was to extend also to the latter. According to [Isaiah lx.] and [Zechariah xiv]., on the contrary, the Gentiles were to be subjected and brought to nothing, and only the Jews were worthy of participation in the kingdom of God. For that reason Jesus had to declare himself with like determination for both conceptions,[66] without any attempt being made to reconcile the contradiction contained in this.[67] That the parents of Jesus were called Joseph and Mary, and that his father was a “carpenter,” were determined by tradition, just as the name of his birthplace, Nazareth, was occasioned by the name of a sect (Nazaraios = Protector), or by the fact that one sect honoured the Messiah as a “branch of the root of Jesse” (nazar Isai).[68] It was a Messianic tradition that he began his activity in Galilee and wandered about as Physician, Saviour, Redeemer, and Prophet, as mediator of the union of Israel, and as one who brought light to the Gentiles, not as an impetuous oppressor full of inconsiderate strength, but as one who assumed a loving tenderness for the weak and despairing.[69] He heals the sick, comforts the afflicted, and proclaims to the poor the Gospel of the nearness of the kingdom of God. That is connected with the wandering of the sun through the twelve Signs of the Zodiac (Galil = circle), and is based on [Isa. xxxv. 5] sqq., xlii. 1–7, xlix. 9 sqq., as well as on [Isa. lxi. 1], a passage which Jesus himself, according to [Luke iv. 16] sqq., began his teaching in Nazareth by explaining.[70] He had to meet with opposition in his work of salvation, and nevertheless endure patiently, because of [Isa. 1. 5]. Naturally Jesus, behind whose human nature was concealed a God, and to whom the pilgrim “Saviour” Jason corresponded,[71] was obliged to reveal his true nature by miraculous healing, and could not take a subordinate place in this regard among the cognate heathen God-redeemers. At most we may wonder that even in this the Old Testament had to stand[72] as a model, and that Jesus’ doings never surpass those which the heathens praise in their gods and heroes, e.g., Asclepius. Indeed, according to Tacitus[73] even the Emperor Vespasian accomplished such miracles at Alexandria, where, on being persistently pressed by the people, he healed both a lame man and a blind, and this almost in the same way as Jesus did, by moistening their eyes and cheeks with spittle; which information is corroborated also by Suetonius[74] and Dio Cassius.[75] But the most marvellous thing is that the miracles of Jesus have been found worth mentioning by the critical theology, and that there is an earnest search for an “historical nucleus,” which might probably “underlie them.”
All the individual characteristics cited above are, however, unimportant in comparison with the account of the Last Supper, of the Passion, death (on the cross), and resurrection of Jesus. And yet what is given us on these points is quite certainly unhistorical; these parts of the Gospels owe their origin, as we have stated, merely to cult-symbolism and to the myth of the dying and rising divine Saviour of the Western Asiatic religions. No “genius” was necessary for their invention, as everything was given: the derision,[76] the flagellation, both the thieves, the crying out on the cross, the sponge with vinegar ([Psa. lxix. 22]), the piercing with a lance,[77] the soldiers casting dice for the dead man’s garments, also the women at the place of execution and at the grave, the grave in a rock, are found in just the same form in the worship of Adonis, Attis, Mithras, and Osiris. Even the Saviour carrying his cross is copied from Hercules (Simon of Cyrene),[78] bearing the pillars crosswise, as well as from the story of Isaac, who carried his own wood to the altar on which he was to be sacrificed.[79] But where the authors of the Gospels have really found something new, e.g., in the account of Jesus’ trial, of the Roman and Jewish procedure, they have worked it out in such an ignorant way, and to one who knows something about it betray so significantly the purely fictitious nature of their account, that here really there is nothing to wonder at except perhaps the naïveté of those who still consider that account historical, and pique themselves a little on their “historical exactness” and “scientific method.”[80]
Is not Robertson perhaps right after all in considering the whole statement of the last fate of Jesus to be the rewriting of a dramatic Mystery-play, which among the Gentile Christians of the larger cities followed the sacramental meal on Easter Day? We know what a great rôle was played by dramatic representations in numerous cults of antiquity, and how they came into especial use in connection with the veneration of the suffering and rising God-redeemers. Thus in Egypt the passion, death, and resurrection of Osiris and the birth of Horus; at Eleusis the searching and lamentation of Demeter for her lost Persephone and the birth of Iacchus; at Lernæ in Argolis and many other places the fate of Dionysus (Zagreus); in Sicyon the suffering of Adrastos, who threw himself on to the funeral pyre of his father Hercules; at Amyclæ the passing away of Nature and its new life in the fate of Hyacinth: these were celebrated in festal pageants and scenic representations, to say nothing of the feasts of the death and resurrection of Mithras, Attis, and Adonis. Certainly Matthew’s account, xx.–xxviii. (with the exception of verses 11–15 in the last chapter), with its connected sequence of events, which could not possibly have actually followed each other like this—Supper, Gethsemane, betrayal, passion, Peter’s denial, the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection—throughout gives one the impression of a chain of isolated dramatic scenes. And the close of the Gospel agrees very well with this conception, for the parting words and exhortations of Jesus to his people are a very suitable ending to a drama.[81]
If we allow this, an explanation is given of the “clearness” which is so generally praised in the style of the Gospels by the theologians and their following, and which many think sufficient by itself to prove the historical nature of the Synoptic representation of Jesus.
Of course, Wrede has already warned us “not too hastily to consider clearness a sign of historical truth. A writing may have a very secondary, even apocryphal character, and yet show much clearness. The question always is how this was obtained.”[82] Wernle and Wrede quite agree that at least in Mark’s production the clearness is of no account at all, while clearness in the other Gospels is found just in those parts which admittedly belong to the sphere of legend. And how clearly and concretely do not our authors of the various “Lives of Jesus,” not to mention Renan, or our ministers in the pulpits describe the events of the Gospels, with how many small and attractive traits do they not decorate these events, in order that they should have a greater effect on their listeners! This kind of clearness and personal stamp is really nothing but a matter of the literary skill and imagination of the authors in question. The writings of the Old Testament, and not merely the historical writings, are also full of a most clear ability for narration and of most individual characteristics, which prove how much the Rabbinical writers in Palestine knew of this side of literary activity. Or is anything wanting to the clearness and individual characterisation, to which Kalthoff also has alluded, of the touching story of Ruth; of the picture of the prophet Jonah, of Judith, Esther, Job, &c? And then the stories of the patriarchs—the pious Abraham, the good-natured, narrow-minded Esau, the cunning Jacob, and their respective wives—or, to take one case, how clear is not the meeting of Abraham’s servant with Rebecca at the well![83] Or let us consider Moses, Elijah, Samson—great figures who in their most essential traits demonstrably belong to myth and religious fable! If in preaching our ministers can go so vividly into the details of the story of the Saviour that fountains of poetry are opened and there stream forth from their lips clear accounts of Jesus’ goodness of heart, of his heroic greatness, and of his readiness for the sacrifice, how much more would this have been so at first in the Christian community, when the new religion was still in its youth, when the faith in the Messiah was as yet unweakened by sceptical doubts, and when the heart of man was still filled with the desire for immediate and final redemption? And even if we are confronted with a host of minor traits, which cannot so easily be accounted for by religious motives and poetic imagination, must these all refer to the same real personality? May they not be based on events which are very far from being necessarily experiences of the liberal theology’s historical Jesus? Even Edward v. Hartmann, who is generally content to adhere to the historical Jesus, suggests the possibility “that several historical personages, who lived at quite different times, have contributed concrete individual characteristics to the picture of Jesus.”[84] There is a great deal of talk about the “uninventable” in the evangelical representation. Von Soden even goes so far as to base his chief proof for the historical existence of Jesus on this individuality that cannot be invented.[85] As if there was any such thing as what cannot be invented for men with imagination! And as if all the significant details of Jesus’ life were not invented on the lines of the so-called Messianic passages in the Old Testament, in heathen mythology, and in the imported conceptions of the Messiah! The part that is professedly “uninventable” shrinks continuously the more assiduously criticism busies itself with the Gospels; and the word can at present apply only to side-issues and matters of no importance. We are indeed faced with the strange fact, that all the essential part of the Gospels, everything which is of importance for religious faith, such as especially the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, is demonstrably invented and mythical; but such parts as can at best only be historical because of their supposed “uninventable” nature are of no importance for the character of the Gospel representation!
Now, it has been shown that the Gospel picture of Jesus is not without deficiencies. We may see a proof[86] of the historical nature of the events referred to in small traits, as, for example, in Jesus’ temporary inability to perform miracles,[87] the circumstance that he is not represented as omniscient,[88] the attitude of his relatives to him.[89] So the theologian Schmiedel set up first five and then nine passages as “clearly credible,” and pronounced these to be the basis of a really scientific knowledge of Jesus. The passages are [Mark x. 17] sqq. (Why callest thou me good?), [Matt. xii. 31] sqq. (The sin against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven), [Mark iii. 21] (He is beside himself), [Mark xiii. 32] (But the day and the hour is known to no man), [Mark xv. 24] (My God, why has thou forsaken me?), [Mark vi. 5] (And he could there do no mighty work), [Mark viii. 12] (There shall no sign be given unto this generation), [Mark viii. 14–21] (Reproaching the disciples on the occasion of the lack of bread), [Matt. xi. 5] (The blind see, the lame walk). All these “bases” evidently have a firm support only on the supposition that the Gospels are meant to paint a stainless ideal, a God, that they are at most but a conception, such, perhaps, as has been set up by Bruno Bauer. But they are useless from the point of view intended, as portraying a man. If, however, the Evangelists’ intention was to paint the celestial Christ of the Apostle Paul, the God-man, the abstract spirit-being, as a completely real man for the eyes of the faithful, to place him on the ground of historical reality, and so to treat seriously Paul’s “idea” of humanity, they were obliged to give him also human characteristics. And these could be either invented afresh or taken from the actual life of honoured teachers, in which the fact is acknowledged that, even for the noblest and best of men, there are hours of despair and grief, that the prophet is worth nothing in his own fatherland, or is even unknown to his nearest relatives. Even the prophet Elijah, the Old Testament precursor of the Messiah, who has in many ways determined the picture of Jesus, is said to have had moments of despair in which he wanted to die, till God strengthened him anew to the fulfilment of his vocation.[90] Moreover, [Mark x. 17] was a commonplace in all ancient philosophy from the time of Plato, and gained that form by an alteration of the original text (A. Pott, “Der Text des Neuen Testaments nach seiner gesch. Entwicklung” in “Aus Natur und Geisteswelt,” 1906, p. 63, sq.); [Mark xiv. 24] is taken from the 22nd Psalm, which has also in other respects determined the details of the account of the crucifixion. [Mark iii. 21] is, as Schleiermacher showed and Strauss corroborated, a pure invention of the Evangelist, the words of the Pharisees being put into their mouths, as their opinion, in order to explain Jesus’ answer by the assertion of his kinship (Strauss, “Leben Jesu,” i. 692; cf. also [Psa. lix. 1]: “I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother’s children”). [Matt. xi. 5] is based on [Isaiah xxxv. 5], [xlii. 7], [xlix. 9], [lxi. 1], which runs in the Septuagint: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the poor; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to the blind the opening of their eyes; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn.”[91] Schmiedel’s nine “bases” consequently are at most testimony to a “lost glory”; but the construction of a “really scientific” life of Jesus cannot possibly arise from them.[92]
Clearness of exposition, then, can never afford a proof of the historical nature of the matter concerned. And how easily is not this clearness imported by us into the evangelical information! We are brought up in the atmosphere of these tales, and carry about with us, under the influence of the surrounding Christianity, an imaginary picture of them, which we unwittingly introduce into our reading of the Gospels. And how subjective and dependent on the reader’s “taste” the impression of clearness given by the Gospel picture of Jesus is, to what a great extent personal predilections come in, is evidenced by this fact, that a Vollers could not discover in the Gospels any real man of flesh and blood, but only a “shadowy image,” which he analysed into a thaumaturgical (the miracle-worker) and a soteriological (the Saviour) part.[93] In opposition to the efforts of the historical theology to give Jesus a “unique” position above that of all other founders of religions, Vollers justly remarks how difficult it must be for the purely historical treatment to recognise these and similar assertions. “The improbability, not to say impossibility, of the soteriological picture is too obvious. At bottom this picture of critical theology is nothing but the contemporary transformation of Schleiermacher’s ideal man; what must have a hundred years ago appeared comprehensible as the product of a refined Moravianism, in the atmosphere of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, is nowadays a mere avoidance of an open and honourable analysis from the point of view that prevails outside of theology, and is principally known in the spheres of Nature and of History. Who would deny that the tone of the catechism and of the pulpit, that full-sounding words of many meanings, even the concealment and glossing over of unpleasant admissions, play a part in this sphere such as they could never have in in any other science?”
We are then reduced to the individual maxims and sermons of Jesus. These must be proved to be intelligible only as the personal experiences and thoughts of one supreme individual. Unfortunately just this, as has already been proved, seems peculiarly doubtful. As for Jesus’ sermons, we have already understood from Wernle that they were in any case not received from Jesus in the form in which they have been handed down to us, but were subsequently compiled by the Evangelists from isolated and occasional maxims of his.[94] These single phrases and occasional utterances of Jesus are supposed to have been taken in the last resort partly from oral tradition, partly from the Aramaic collection—that “great source” of Wernle’s—which was translated into Greek by the Gospels. The existence of this source has been established only very indirectly, and we know absolutely nothing more of it. But it is self-evident that even in the translation from one language into another much of the originality of those “words of the Lord” must have been lost; and, as may be shown, the different Evangelists have “translated” the same words quite differently. Whether it will be possible to reconstruct the original work, as critical theology is striving to do, from the material before us, seems very questionable. And we are given no guarantee that we have to do with actual “words of the Lord” as they were contained in the Aramaic collection.
Even if the Evangelist is supposed to have expressed the original meaning, what is to assure us that this phrase was spoken by Jesus just in this way, and not in other connections, if even the phrases were taken down as soon as uttered? But this is admittedly supposed not to have occurred till after Jesus’ death, after his Messianic significance was clearly recognised, and after people were making efforts to go back in memory to the Master’s figure and preserve of his sayings any that were serviceable. Bousset, indeed, in his work, “Was wissen wir von Jesus?”—which was directed against Kalthoff—has referred to the “good Oriental memory of the disciples.” All who know the East from personal experience are in tolerable agreement on one point, viz., how little an Oriental is able to repeat what he has heard or experienced in a true and objective fashion. Consequently there are in the East no historical traditions in our sense of the word, but all important events are decorated like a novel, and are changed according to the necessities of the moment. Such maxims, indeed, as “Love your enemies,” “To give is more blessed than to receive,” “No one but God is good,” “Blessed are the poor,” “You are the light of the world,” “Give to Cæsar that which is Cæsar’s,” &c., once heard may be “not easily forgotten,” as the theological phrase runs. But also they are not of such a kind that the Jesus of liberal theology was necessary for their invention.
We need not here take into consideration how many of Jesus’ expressions may have been imported into the Gospels from the Mystery drama, with whose existence we must nevertheless reckon, and from which phrases may have been changed into sayings of the “historical” Jesus. Such obscure and high-flown passages as, e.g., [Matt. x. 32] sq.; xi. 15–30, xxvi. 64, and xxviii. 18, give one the impression of coming from the mouth of God’s representative on the stage; and this probability is further increased when we meet quite similar expressions, such as of the “light burden” and the “easy yoke,” in the Mysteries of Mithras or of Isis.[95] Bousset admits that all the individual words which have been handed down to us as expressions of Jesus are “mediated by the tradition of a community, and have passed through many hands.”[96] They are, as Strauss has observed, like pebbles which the waves of tradition have rolled and polished, setting them down here and there and uniting them to this and that mass. “We are,” Steck remarks, “absolutely certain of no single word of the Gospels—that it was spoken by Jesus just in this way and in no other.”[97] “It would be very difficult,” thinks Vollers, “to refer even one expression, one parable, one act of this ideal man to Jesus of Nazareth with historical certainty, let us say with the same certainty with which we attribute the Epistle to the Galatians to the Apostle Paul, or explain the Johannine Logos as the product of Greek philosophy.”[98] Even one of the leaders of Protestant orthodoxy, Professor Kähler, of Halle, admitted, as was stated in the “Kirchliche Monatsblatt für Rheinland und Westfalen,” in a theological conference held in Dortmund, that we possess “no single authentic word” of Jesus. Any attempt, such as Chamberlain has made, to gather from the tradition a certain nucleus of “words of Jesus,” is consequently mistaken; and if nothing is to be a criterion but one’s personal feelings, it would be better to confess at once that here there can be no talk of any kind of decision.
It is, then, settled that we cannot with certainty trace back to an historical Jesus any single one of the expressions of the “Lord” that have come down to us. Even the oldest authority, the Aramaic collection, may have contained merely the tradition of a community. Can we then think that the supporters of an “historical” Jesus are right in treating it as nothing more than a “crude sin against all historical methods,” as something most monstrous and unscientific, if one draws the only possible inference from the result of the criticism of the Gospels, and disputes the existence at any time of an historical Jesus? There may after all have been such a collection of “words of the Lord” in the oldest Christian communities; but must we understand by this words of a definite human individual? May they not rather have been words which had an authoritative and canonical acceptation in the community, being either specially important or congenial to it, and which were for this reason attributed to the “Lord”—that is, to the hero of the association or cult, Jesus? It has been generally agreed that this was the case, for example, with the directions as to action in the case of quarrels among the members of the community[99] and with regard to divorce.[100] Let us also recall to our minds the “words of the Lord” in the other cult-associations of antiquity, the ἀυτὸς ἔφα of the Pythagoreans. And how many particularly popular, impressive, and favourite sayings were current in antiquity bearing the names of one of the “Seven Wise Men,” without any one dreaming of ascribing to them an historical signification! How then can it be anything but hasty and uncritical to give out the “words of the Lord” in the collection, which are the basis of Jesus’ sermons in the Gospels, as sayings of one definite Rabbi—that is, of the “historical” Jesus? One may have as high an opinion of Jesus’ words as one likes: the question is whether Jesus, even the Jesus of liberal theology, is their spiritual father, or whether they are not after all in the same position as the psalms or sayings of the Old Testament which are current in the names of David and Solomon, and of which we know quite positively that their authors were neither the one nor the other.
But perhaps those sayings and sermons of Jesus are of such a nature that they could only arise from the “historical Jesus”? Of a great number both of isolated sayings and parables of Jesus—and among these indeed the most beautiful and the most admired, for example, the parable of the good Samaritan, whose moral content coincides with [Deut. xxix. 1–4], of the Prodigal Son,[101] of the man that sowed—we know that they were borrowed[102] partly from Jewish philosophy, partly from oral tradition of the Talmud, and partly from other sources. In any case they have no claim to originality.[103] This holds good even of the Sermon on the Mount, which is, as has been shown by Jewish scholars in particular, and as Robertson has once more proved, a mere patchwork taken from ancient Jewish literature, and, together with the Lord’s Prayer, contains not a single thought which has not its prototype in the Old Testament and in the ancient philosophical maxims of the Jewish people.[104] Moreover, the remaining portions, whose genesis from any other quarter is at least as yet unproved, is not at all of such a nature that it could only have arisen in the mind of such a personality as the theological Jesus of Nazareth. At bottom, indeed, he neither said nor taught anything beyond the purer morality of contemporary Judaism—to say nothing at all of the Stoics and of the other ethical teachers of antiquity, in particular those of the Indians. The gravest suspicion of their novelty and originality is awakened at the Gospels’ emphasising the novelty and significance of Jesus’ sayings by “the ancients said”—“but I say unto you”; attempting thereby to make an artificial contradiction with the former spiritual and moral standpoint of Judaism, even in places where only a look at the Old Testament is necessary to convince us that such a contradiction does not exist, as, for example, in the case of the love of God and of one’s neighbor.[105] Moreover, our cultivated reverence for Jesus and the overwhelming glorification of everything connected with him has surrounded a great many of the “words of the Lord” with a glitter of importance which stands in no relation to their real value, and which they would never have obtained had they been handed down to us in another connection or under some other name.
Let us only think how much that is in itself quite trivial and insignificant has been raised to quite an unjustifiable importance merely through the use of the pulpit and the consecration of divine service. Even though our theologians are not already tired of extolling the “uniqueness,” incomparability, and majesty of Jesus’ words and parables, they might nevertheless just for once consider how much that is of little worth, how much that is mistaken, spiritually insignificant and morally insufficient, even absolutely doubtful, there is in what Jesus preached.[106] In this connection it has always been the custom to extenuate the tradition by referring to the inexactitude or to fly in the face of any genuine historical method by tortuous elucidations of the passages in question, by unmeaning references to the temporal and educational limitations even of the “superman,” and by suppression of the disagreeable parts.
How much trouble have not our theologians taken, and do they not even now take, to show even one single point in Jesus’ doctrines which may justify their declaring with a good conscience his “uniqueness” in the sense understood by them, and may justify their raising their purely human Jesus as high as possible above his own age! Not one of all the passages quoted to this end has been allowed to remain. The Synoptic Jesus taught neither a new and loftier morality, nor a “new meekness,” nor a deepened consciousness of God; neither the “indestructible value of the individual souls of men” in the present-day individualistic sense, nor even freedom as against the Jewish Law, nor the immanence of the kingdom of God, nor anything else, that surpassed the capabilities of another intellectually distinguished man of his age. Even the love, the general love, of one’s neighbour, the preaching of which is with the greater portion of the laity the chief claim to veneration possessed by the historical Jesus, in the Synoptics plays no very important part in Jesus’ moral conception of life; governing no wider sphere than had already been allowed it in the Old Testament.[107] And if the pulpit eloquence of nineteen hundred years has nevertheless attempted to lay stress on this point, it is because it counts on the faithful not having in mind the difference between the Gospels, and on their peacefully permitting the Gospel of John, the one and only “gospel of love,” which, however, is not supposed to be “historical,” to be substituted for the Synoptic Gospels. And so we actually see the glorification of Jesus’ doctrines which, a short time ago, flourished so luxuriantly, appearing recently in more and more moderate terms.[108]
Thus it was for a time customary in theology, under the influence of Holtzmann and Harnack, to consider the ethical deepening and return of God’s “fatherly love” as the essentially new and significant point in Jesus’ “glad tidings,” and to write about it in unctuous phrases. Recently, even this seems to have been abandoned, as, for example, Wrede openly confesses, with respect to the “filiation to God,” that this conception existed in Judaism very long before Christ; also that Jesus did not especially preach God as the loving “Father” of each individual, that indeed he did not once place in the foreground the name of God as the Father.[109] But so much the more decidedly is reference made to the “enormous effects” which attended Jesus’ appearance, and the attempt is made to prove from them his surpassing greatness, “uniqueness,” and historical reality. As if Zarathustra, Buddha, and Mohammed had achieved less, as if the effects which proceed from a person must stand in a certain relation to his human significance, and as if those effects were to be ascribed to the “historical” and not rather to the mythical Jesus—that is, to the idea of the God sacrificing himself for humanity! As a matter of fact, his faith in the immediate proximity of the Messianic kingdom of God, and the demand for a change of life based on this, which is really “unique” in the traditional Jesus, is without any religious and ethical significance for us, and is at most only of interest for the history of civilisation. On the other hand, such part of his teaching as is still of importance to us is not “unique,” and only has the reputation of being so because we are accustomed by a theological education to treat it in the light of the Christian dogmatic metaphysics of redemption. Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Laotse, or Buddha in their ethical views are not behind Jesus with his egoistical pseudo-morals, his basing moral action on the expectation of reward and punishment in the future, his narrow-minded nationalism, which theologians in vain attempt to debate away and to conceal; and his obscure mysticism, which strives to attain a special importance for its maxims by mysterious references to his “heavenly Father.”[110] And as for the “great impression” which Jesus is supposed to have made on his own people and on the following age, and without which the history of Christianity is supposed to be inexplicable, Kalthoff has shown with justice that the Gospels do not in any way reflect the impression which a person produced, but only such as the accounts of Jesus’ personality would have made on the members of the Christian community. “Even the strongest impression proves nothing as to the historical truth of these accounts. Even an account of a fictitious personage may produce the deepest impression on a community if it is given in historical terms. What an impression Goethe’s “Werther” produced, though the whole world knew that it was only a romance! Yet it stirred up countless disciples and imitators.”[111]
In this we have at the same time a refutation of the popular objection that to deny the historical existence of Jesus is to misunderstand “the significance of personality in the historical life of peoples and religions.” Certainly, as Mehlhorn says, active devotion above all is enkindled to persons in whom this personality strikes us in an evident, elevating, and animating way.[112] But in order to enkindle devotion and faith in Jesus Christ the elevating personality of a Paul sufficed, whether or not he was the author of the epistles current in his name; the missionary activity of apostles, working, like him, in the service of the Jesus-creed, was enough, since they moved from place to place, and, often undergoing great personal sacrifice and privation, with danger to their own lives demanded adoration of the new God. Those in need of redemption could never find any real religious support outside of the faith in a divine redeemer, they could never find satisfaction and deliverance but in the idea of the God sacrificing himself for mankind—the God whose redeeming power and whose distinct superiority to the other Mystery-deities the apostles could portray in such a lively and striking fashion. That an idea can only be effective and fruitful by means of a great personality is a barren formula.[113] In thinking they can with this argument support their faith in an historical Jesus liberal theologians avail themselves of an irrelevant bit of modern street-philosophy without noticing that in their case it proves nothing at all. Where, then, is the “great personality” which gave to Mithraism such an efficacy that in the first century of our era it was able to conquer from the East almost the whole of the West and to make it doubtful for a time whether the world was to be Mithraic or Christian? In such influential religions as those of Dionysus and Osiris, or indeed in Brahmanism, we cannot speak of great personalities as their “founders”; and as for Zarathustra, the pretended founder of the Persian, and Moses, the founder of the Israelite religion, they are not historical persons; while the views of different investigators differ as to the historical existence of the reputed founder of Buddhism. Of course, even in the above-mentioned religions the particular ideas would have been brought forward by brilliant individuals, and the movements depending on them would have been first organised and rendered effective by men of energy and purpose. But the question is whether persons of this type are necessarily “great,” even “unique,” in the sense of liberal theology, in order to be successful. So that to set aside Paul, whose inspiring personality gifted with a genius for organisation we know from his epistles,—to set him aside in favour of an imaginary Jesus, to base the importance of the Christian religion on the “uniqueness” of its supposed founder, and to base this uniqueness in turn on the importance of the religious movement which resulted from it, is to abandon the critical standpoint and to turn about in circles. “It is an empty assertion,” says Lützelberger, “without any real foundation, that the invention of such a person as the Gospels give us in their Jesus would have been quite impossible, as we find in him such a peculiar and sharply defined character that imagination would never have been able to invent and adhere to it. For the personality which meets us in the Gospels is by no means one that is sharply drawn and true to itself; but the story shows us rather a man who from quite different mental tendencies spoke now one way and now another, and is perfectly different in the first and fourth Gospels. Only with the greatest trouble can a homogeneous and coherent whole be formed from the descriptions in the Gospels. So that we are absolutely wrong in concluding from the originality of the person of Christ in the Gospels to their historical credibility.” The conclusion is much more justifiable that if such a person with such a life-history and such speech had stood at the beginning of the Christian Church, the history of its development must have been quite a different one, just as the history of Judaism would have been different if a Moses with his Law had stood at its head.[114]
And now if we compare the praises of Buddha in the Lalita Vistara with the description of Jesus’ personality given in the New Testament, we will be convinced how similarly—even if we exclude the hypothesis of a direct influence—and under what like conditions the kindred religion took shape: “In the world of creatures, which was long afflicted by the evils of natural corruption, thou didst appear, O king of physicians, who redeemest us from all evil. At thy approach, O guide, unrest disappears, and gods and men are filled with health. Thou art the protector, the firm foundation, the chief, the leader of the world, with thy gentle and benevolent disposition. Thou art the best of physicians, who bringest the perfect means of salvation and healest suffering. Distinguished by thy compassion and sympathy, thou governest the things of the world. Distinguished by thy strength of mind and good works, completely pure, thou hast attained to perfection, and, thyself redeemed, thou wilt, as the prophet of the four truths, redeem other creatures also. The power of the Evil One has been overcome by wisdom, courage, and humility. Thou hast brought it about,—the highest and immortal glory. We greet thee as the conqueror of the army of the Deceiver. Thou whose word is without fault, who freest from error and passion, hast trod the path of eternal life; thou dost deserve in heaven and on earth honour and homage unparalleled. Thou quickenest Gods and men with thy clear words. By the beams which go forth from thee thou art the conqueror of this universe, the Master of Gods and men. Thou didst appear, Light of the Law, destroyer of misery and ignorance, completely filled with humility and majesty. Sun, moon, and fires no longer shine before thee and thy fulness of imperishable glory. Thou who teachest us to know truth from falsehood, ghostly leader with the sweetest voice, whose spirit is calm, whose passions are controlled, whose heart is perfectly at rest, who teachest what should be taught, who bringest about the union of gods and men: I greet thee, Sakhyamuni, as the greatest of men, as the wonder of the three thousand worlds, who deservest honour and homage in heaven and on earth, from Gods and men!” Where, then, is the “uniqueness” of Jesus, into which the future divinity of the World-redeemer has disappeared for modern critical theology, and into which it has striven to import all the sentimental considerations which once belonged to the “God-man” in the sense of the Church dogma? “Nothing is more negative than the result of the inquiry into the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth, who appeared as the Messiah, who proclaimed the morals of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died to give consecration to his acts, never existed. He is a figure which was invented by Rationalism, restored by Liberalism, and painted over with historical science by modern theologians.” With these words of the theologian Schweitzer[115] the present inquiry may be said to agree.
In fact, in the Gospels we have nothing but the expression of the consciousness of a community. In this respect the view supported by Kalthoff is completely right. The life of Jesus, as portrayed by the Synoptics, merely brings to an expression in historical garb the metaphysical ideas, religious hopes, the outer and inner experiences of the community which had Jesus for its cult-god. His opinions, statements, and parables only reflect the religious-moral conceptions, the temporary sentiments, the casting down and the joy of victory, the hate and the love, the judgments and prejudices of the members of the community, and the differences and contradictions in the Gospels prove to be the developing material of the conception of the Messiah in different communities and at different times. Christ takes just the same position in the religious-social brotherhoods which are named after him as Attis has in the Phrygian, Adonis in the Syrian, Osiris in the Egyptian, Dionysus, Hercules, Hermes, Asclepius, &c., in the Greek cult-associations. He is but another form of these club-gods or patrons of communities, and the cult devoted to him shows in essentials the same forms as those devoted to the divinities above named. The place of the bloody expiatory sacrifice of the believers in Attis, wherein they underwent “baptism of blood” in their yearly March festival, and wherein they obtained the forgiveness of their sins and were “born again” to a new life, was in Rome the Hill of the Vatican. In fact, the very spot on which in Christian times the Church of Peter grew above the so-called grave of the apostle. It was at bottom merely an alteration of the name, not of the matter, when the High Priest of Attis blended his rôle with that of the High Priest of Christ, and the Christ-cult spread itself from this new point far over the other parts of the Roman Empire.
(c) The True Character of the Synoptic Jesus.
The Synoptic Gospels leave open the question whether they treat of a man made God or of a God made man. The foregoing account has shown that the Jesus of the Gospels is to be understood only as a God made man. The story of his life, as presented in the Gospels, is the rendering into history of a primitive religious myth. Most of the great heroes of the legend, which passes as historical, are similar incarnate Gods—such as Jason, Hercules, Achilles, Theseus, Perseus, Siegfried, &c.; in these we have nothing but the old Aryan sun—champion in the struggle against the powers of darkness and of death. That primitive Gods in the view of a later age should become men, without, however, ceasing to be clothed with the glamour of the deity, is to such an extent the ordinary process, that the reverse, the elevation of men to Gods, is as a rule only found in the earliest stages of human civilisation, or in periods of moral and social decay, when fawning servility and worthless flattery fashion a prominent man, either during his life or after his death, into a divine being. Even the so-called “Bible Story” contains numerous examples of such God made men: the patriarchs, Joseph, Joshua, Samson, Esther, Mordecai, Haman, Simon Magus, the magician Elymas, &c., were originally pure Gods, and in the description of their lives old Semitic star-myths and sun-myths obtained a historical garb. If we cannot doubt that Moses, the founder of the old covenant, was a fictitious figure, and that his “history” was invented by the priests at Jerusalem only for the purpose of sanctioning and basing on his authority the law of the priests named after him; if for this end the whole history of Israel was falsified, and the final event in the religious development of Israel, i.e., the giving of the Law, was placed at the beginning—why cannot what was possible with Moses have been repeated in the case of Jesus? Why may not also the founder of the new covenant as an historical person belong entirely to pious legend? According to Herodotus,[116] the Greeks also changed an old Phœnician God, Hercules, for national reasons, into a native hero, the son of Amphitryon, and incorporated him in their own sphere of ideas. Let us consider how strong the impulse was, especially among Orientals, to make history of purely internal experiences and ideas. To carry historical matter into the sphere of myth, and to conceive myth as history, is, as is shown by the investigations of Winckler, Schrader, Jensen, &c., for the Orientals such a matter of course, that, as regards the accounts in the Old Testament, it is hardly possible to distinguish their genuinely “historical nucleus” from its quasi-historical covering. And it is more especially the Semitic thought of antiquity which proves to be completely unable to distinguish mythical phantasy from real event! It is, indeed, too often said that the Semite produced and possessed no mythology of his own, as Renan asserted; and no doubt at all is possible that they could not preserve as such and deal with the mythical figures and events whencesoever they derived them, but always tended to translate them into human form and to associate them with definite places and times. “The God of the Semites is associated with place and object, he is a Genius loci,” says Winckler.[117] But if ever a myth required to be clothed in the garment of place and the metaphysical ideas contained in it to be separated into a series of historical events, it was certainly the myth of the God sacrificing himself for humanity, who sojourned among men in human form, suffered with the rest of men and died, returning, after victoriously overcoming the dark powers of death, to the divine seat whence he set out.
We understand how the God Jesus, consequent on his symbolical unification with the man sacrificed in his stead, could come to be made human, and how on this basis the faith in the resurrection of God in the form of an historical person could arise. But how the reverse process could take place, how the man Jesus could be elevated into a God, or could ever fuse with an already existing God of like name into the divine-human redeemer—indeed, the Deity—that is and remains, as we have already said, a psychological puzzle. The only way to solve it is to refer to the “inscrutable secrets of the Divine will.” In what other way can we explain how “that simple child of man, as he has been described,” could so very soon after his death be elevated into that “mystical being of imagination,” into that “celestial Christ,” as he meets us in the epistles of Paul? There can only have been at most seven, probably three, years, according to a recent estimate hardly one year, between the death of Jesus and the commencement of Paul’s activity.[118] And this short time is supposed to have sufficed to transform the man Jesus into the Pauline Christ! And not only Paul is supposed to have been able to do this; even Jesus’ immediate disciples, who sat with him at the same table, ate and drank with him, knowing then who Jesus was, are supposed to have declared themselves in agreement with this, and to have prayed to him whom they had always seen praying to the “Father”! Certainly in antiquity the deification of a man was nothing extraordinary: Plato and Aristotle were, after their death, honoured by their pupils as god-like beings; Demetrius Poliorcetes, Alexander, the Ptolemies, &c., had divine honours rendered to them even during their lives. But this style of deification is completely different from that which is supposed to have been allotted to Jesus. It is merely an expression of personal gratitude and attachment, of overflowing sentiment and characterless flattery, and never obtained any detailed theological formulation. It was the basis for no new religion. Schopenhauer has very justly pointed out the contradiction between Paul’s apotheosis of Jesus and usual historical experience, and remarked that from this consideration could be drawn an argument against the authenticity of the Pauline epistles.[119] In fact, Holtzmann considers, with reference to this assertion of the philosopher’s, the question “whether the figure of Jesus attaining such colossal dimensions in Paul’s sight may not be taken to establish the distance between the two as that of only a few years, if there was not immediate temporal contact,” as the question “most worthy of discussion, which the critics of the Dutch school have propounded for consideration.”[120] According to the prevalent view of critical theologians, as presented even by Pfleiderer, the apparitions of the “Lord,” which after Jesus’ death were seen by the disciples who had fled from Jerusalem, the “ecstatic visionary experiences, in which they thought they saw their crucified Master living and raised up to heavenly glory,” were the occasion of their faith in the resurrection, and consequently of their faith in Jesus’ divine rôle as Redeemer.[121] Pathological states of over-excited men and hysterical women are then supposed to form the “historical foundation” for the genesis of the Christian religion! And with such opinions they think themselves justified in looking down on the rationalist of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment with supreme contempt, and in boasting of the depth to which their religious-historical insight reaches! But if we really admit, with historical theology, this more than doubtful explanation, which degrades Christianity into the merely chance product of mental excitement, at once the further question arises as to how the new religion of the small community of the Messiah at Jerusalem was able to spread itself abroad with such astounding rapidity that, even so soon as at most two decades after Jesus’ death, we meet with Christian communities not only over the whole of Western Asia, but also in the islands of the Mediterranean, in the coast-towns of Greece, even in Italy, at Puteoli, and in Rome; and this at a time when as yet not a line had been written about the Jewish Rabbi.[122] Even the theologian Schweitzer is obliged to confess of historical theology that “until it has in some way explained how it was that, under the influence of the Jewish sect of the Messiah, Greek and Roman popular Christianity appeared at all points simultaneously, it must admit a formal right of existence to all hypotheses, even the most extravagant, which seek to attack and solve this problem.”[123]
If in all this it is shown to be possible, or even probable, that in the Jesus of the Gospels we have not a deified man, but rather a humanised God, there remains but to find an answer to the question as to what external reasons led to the transplanting of the God Jesus into the soil of historical actuality and the reduction of the eternal or super-historical fact of his redeeming death and of his resurrection into a series of temporal events.
This question is answered at once if we turn our attention to the motives present in the earliest Christian communities known to us, which motives appear in the Acts and in the Pauline epistles. From these sources we know at what an early stage an opposition arose between Paul’s Gentile Christianity and the Jewish Christianity, the chief seat of which was at Jerusalem, and which for this reason, as we can understand, claimed for itself a special authority. As long as the former persecutor of the Christian community, over whose conversion they could not at first rejoice too much,[124] did not obstruct others and seemed to justify his apostolic activity by his success among the Gentiles, they left him to go his way. But when Paul showed his independence by his reserve before the “Brothers” at Jerusalem, and began to attract the feelings of those at Jerusalem by his abrogation of the Mosaic Law, then they commenced to treat him with suspicion, to place every obstacle in the way of his missionary activity, and to attempt, led by the zealous James, to bring the Pauline communities under their own government. Then, seeking a title for the practice of the apostolic vocation, they found it in this—that every one who wished to testify to Christ must himself have seen him after his resurrection.
But Paul could very justly object that to him also the transfigured Jesus had appeared.[125] Then they made the justification for the apostolic vocation consist in this, that an apostle must not only have seen Christ risen up, but must also have eaten and drunk with him.[126] This indeed was not applicable in the case of Judas, who in the [Acts i. 16] is nevertheless counted among the apostles; and it was also never asserted of Matthias, who was chosen in the former’s stead, that he had been a witness of Jesus’ resurrection. Much less even does he seem to have fulfilled the condition to which advance was made in the development of the original idea, i.e., that an apostle of Jesus should have been personally acquainted with the living Jesus, that he should have belonged to the “First Apostles” and have been present as eye-witness and hearer of Jesus’ words from the time of John’s baptism up to the Resurrection and Ascension.[127] Now Seufert has shown that the passage of the Acts referred to is merely a construction, a transference of later conditions to an earlier epoch; and that the whole point of it is to paralyse Paul’s mission to the Gentiles and to establish the title of the Jew-Christians at Jerusalem as higher than that of his followers.
If with this purpose, as Seufert showed, the organisation of the Apostleship of Twelve arose—an organisation which has no satisfactory basis or foundation in the Gospels or in the Pauline epistles—then it is from this purpose also that we can find cause for the God Jesus to become a human founder of the apostleship. “An apostle was to be only such an one as had seen and heard Jesus himself, or had learnt from those who had been his immediate disciples. A literature of Judaism arose which had at quite an early stage the closest interest in the historical determination of Jesus’ life; and this formed the lowest stratum on which our canonical Gospels are based.”[128] Judaism in general, and the form of it at Jerusalem in particular, needed a legal title on which to base its commanding position as contrasted with the Gentile Christianity of Paul; and so its founders were obliged to have been companions of Jesus in person, and to have been selected for their vocation by him. For this reason Jesus could not remain a mere God, but had to be drawn down into historical actuality. Seufert thinks that the tracing of the Apostleship of Twelve back to an “historical” Jesus, and the setting up of the demand for an apostle of Jesus to have been a companion of his journeying, took place in Paul’s lifetime in the sixth, or perhaps even in the fifth decade.[129] In this he presupposes the existence of an historical Jesus, while the Pauline epistles themselves contain nothing to lead one to believe that the transformation of the Jesus-faith into history took place in Paul’s lifetime. In early Christianity exactly the same incident took place here, on the soil of Palestine and at Jerusalem, as took place later in “eternal” Rome, when the bishop of this city, in order to establish his right of supremacy in the Church, proclaimed himself to be the direct successor of the Apostle Peter, and caused the “possession of the keys” to have been given to this latter by Jesus himself.[130]
So that there were very mundane and very practical reasons which after all gave the impulse for the God Jesus to be transformed into an historical individual, and for the central point of his action, the crisis in his life, his death and his resurrection, which alone affected religious considerations, to be placed in the capital of the Jewish state, the “City of God,” the Holy City of David, of the “ancestors” of the Messiah, with which now the Jews connected religious salvation. But how could this fiction succeed and maintain its ground, so that it was able to become an absolutely vital question for the new religion, an indestructible dogma, a self-evident “fact,” so that its very calling in question seems to the critical theologians of our time a perfect absurdity?
Before we can answer this question we must turn our attention to the Gnostic movement and its relations to the growing Church.
(d) Gnosticism and the Johannine Jesus.
Christianity was originally developed from Gnosticism (Mandaism). The Pauline religion was only one form of the many syncretising efforts to satisfy contemporary humanity’s need of redemption by a fusion of religious conceptions derived from different sources. So much the greater was the danger which threatened to spring up on this side of the youthful Church.
Gnosticism agreed with Christianity in its pessimistic valuation of the world, in its belief in the inability of man to obtain religious salvation by himself, in the necessity for a divine mediation of “Life.” Like Christianity, it expected the deliverance of the oppressed souls of men by a supernatural Redeemer. He came down from Heaven upon earth and assumed a human form, establishing, through a mystic union with himself, the connection between the spheres of heaven and earth. He thereby guarantees to mankind an eternal life in a bliss to come. Gnosticism also involves a completely dualistic philosophy in its opposition of God and world, of spirit and matter, of soul and body, &c.; but all its efforts are directed to overcoming these contradictions by supernatural mediation and magical contrivances. It treats the “Gnosis,” the knowledge, the proper insight into the coherence of things, as the necessary condition of redemption. The individual must know that his soul comes from God, that it is only temporarily confined in this prison of the body, and that it is intended for something higher than to be lost here in the obscurity of ignorance, of evil and of sin; so that he is already freed from the trammels of the flesh, and finds a new life for himself. The God-Redeemer descended upon earth to impart this knowledge to mankind; and Gnosticism pledges itself, on the basis of the “revelation” received directly from God, to open to those who strive for the highest knowledge all the heights and depths of Heaven and of earth.
This Gnosticism of the first century after Christ was a wonderfully opalescent and intricate structure—half religious speculation, half religion, a mixture of Theosophy, uncritical mythological superstition, and deep religious mysticism. In it Babylonian beliefs as to Gods and stars, Parsee mythology, and Indian doctrines of metempsychosis and Karma were combined with Jewish theology and Mystery-rites of Western Asia; and through the whole blew a breath of Hellenic philosophy, which chiefly strove to fix the fantastic creatures of speculation in a comprehensible form, and to work up the confusion of Oriental licence and extravagance of thought into the form of a philosophical view of the world. The Gnostics also called their mediating deity, as we have already seen of the Mandaic sect of the Nassenes, “Jesus,” and indulged in a picture rendering of his pre-worldly existence and supernatural divine majesty. They agreed with the Christians that Jesus had been “human.”
The extravagant metaphysical conception which they had of Jesus at the same time prevented them from dealing seriously with the idea of his manhood. So that they either maintained that the celestial Christ had attached himself to the man Jesus in a purely external way, and indeed, first on the occasion of the baptism in the Jordan, and only temporarily, i.e., up to the Passion—it being only the “man” Jesus who suffered death (Basilides, Cerinthus); or they thought of Jesus as having assumed merely a ghostly body—and consequently thought that all his human actions took place merely as pure appearance (Saturninus, Valentinus, Marcion). But how little they managed to penetrate into the centre of the Christian doctrine of redemption and to value the fundamental significance of the Christ-figure, is shown by the fact that they thought of Christ merely as one mediator among countless others. It is shown also by the romantic and florid description of the spirits or “æons,” who are supposed to travel backwards and forwards between heaven and earth, leading their lives apart. These played a great part in the Gnostic systems.
It was a matter of course that the Christian faith had to take exception to such a fantastic and external treatment of the idea of the God-man. The Pauline Christianity was distinct from Gnosticism, with which it was most closely connected, just in this, that it was in earnest with the “manhood” of Jesus. It was still more serious that the Gnostics combined with their extreme dualism an outspokenly anti-Jewish character. For this in the close relationship between Gnosticism and Christianity would necessarily frighten the Jews from the Gospel, and incite only too many against the young religion. But the Jews formed the factor with which early Christianity had first of all to reckon. In addition to this the Gnostics, from the standpoint of their spiritualistic conception of God, turned to contempt of the world and asceticism. They commended sexual continence, rejected marriage, and wished to know nothing either of Christ’s or of man’s bodily resurrection. But in the West no propaganda of an ascetic religion could succeed. And yet even with the Gnostics, as is so often the case, asceticism only too frequently degenerated into unbridled voluptuousness and libertinage, and the spiritual pride of those chosen by God to knowledge, who were raised above the Mosaic Law, threatened completely to tear apart the connection with Judaism by its radical criticism of the Old Testament. In this Gnosticism not only undermined the moral life of the communities, but also brought the Gospel into discredit in other parts of the world. As an independent religion, which expressly opposed all other worships, and the adherents of which withdrew from the religious practices of the State, even from any political activity whatsoever, Christianity brought on itself the suspicion of the authorities and the hate of the people, and incurred the prohibition of new religions and secret sects (lex Julia majestatis).[131] So that Gnosticism, by taking it from its Jewish native soil, drove Christianity into a conflict with the Roman civil laws.
All these dangers, which threatened Christianity from the Gnostic movement, were set aside in one stroke by the recognition of the true “manhood” of Jesus, the assertion of the “historical” Jesus. This preserved the connection, so important for the unhindered spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, with Judaism and its “revealed” legality—the heteronomous and ritualistic character of which had indeed been shown by Paul, and the moral content of which was nevertheless adhered to by the Christians even later. It was made possible, in default of any previous written documents of revelation, even yet to regard the Old Testament in essentials as the authoritative book of the new faith, and as a preparatory testimony to the final revelation which appeared in Jesus. And most of all, it put a check on Gnostic phantasy, in drawing together the perplexing plurality of the Gnostic æons into the one figure of the World-redeemer and Saviour Christ, in making the chief dogma the redeeming sacrificial death of the Messiah, and in concentrating the religious man’s attention on this chief turning-point of all the historical events. This was the reason why the Apologists and “Fathers” of Christianity, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, Irenæus, &c., spoke with such decision in favour of the actuality and true manhood of Jesus. It was not perhaps a better historical knowledge which caused them to do this, but the life-instinct of the Church, which knew only too well that its own position and the prosecution of its religious task, in contrast with the excitements of Gnosticism and its seductive attempts to explain the world, was dependent on the belief in an historical Redeemer. So the historical Jesus was from the beginning a dogma, a fiction, caused by the religious and practical social needs, of the growing and struggling Christian Church. This Jesus has, indeed, led it to victory; not, however, as an historical reality, but as an idea; or, in other words, not an historical Jesus, in the proper sense of the word, a really human individual, but the pure idea of such a person, is the patron-saint, the Genius of ecclesiastical Christianity, the man who enabled it to overcome Gnosticism, Mithraism, and the other religions of the Redeemer-Gods of Western Asia.
The importance of the fourth Gospel rests in having brought to a final close these efforts of the Church to make history of the Redeemer-figure Christ. Begun under the visible influence of the Gnostic conception of the process of redemption, it meets Gnosticism later as another Gospel; indeed, it seems saturated through and through with the Gnostic attitude and outlook. To a certain degree it shares with Gnosticism its anti-Jewish character. But at the same time it adheres, with the Synoptics, to Jesus’ historical activity, and seeks to establish a kind of mediation between the essentially metaphysical conception of the Gnostics and the essentially human conception of the Synoptic Gospels.
The author who wrote the Gospel in the name of John, the “favourite disciple of Jesus,” probably about 140 A.D., agrees with Gnosticism in its dualistic conception of the universe. On one side is the world, the kingdom of darkness, deceit, and evil, in deadly enmity to the divine kingdom of light, the kingdom of truth and life. At the head of the divine kingdom is God, who is himself Light, Truth, Life, and Spirit—following Parsee thought. At the head of the kingdom of earth is Satan (Angromainyu). In the middle, between them, is placed man. But mankind is also divided, as all the rest of existence, into two essentially different kinds. The souls of the one part of mankind are derived from God, those of the other from Satan. The “children of God” are by nature destined for the good and are fit for redemption. The “children of Satan”—among whom John, in agreement with the Gnostics, counts the Jews before all—are not susceptible of anything divine and are assigned to eternal damnation. In order to accomplish redemption, God, from pure “Love” for the world, selected Monogenes, his only-begotten Son, that is, the only being which, as the child of God, was produced not by other beings, but by God himself. The author of the Gospel fuses Monogenes with the Philonic Logos, who in the Gnostic conception was only one of countless other æons, and was a son of Monogenes, the divine reason, and so only a grandson of God. At the same time, he transfers the whole “pleroma”—the plurality of the æons into which, in the Gnostic conception, the divine reality was divided—to the single principle of the Logos, defines the Logos as the unique bearer of the whole fulness of divine glory, as the pre-existent creator of the world; and calls him also, since he is in essence identical with God his “Father,” the source of life, the light, the truth, and the spirit of the universe.
And how then does the Logos bring about redemption? He becomes flesh, that is, he assumes the form of the “man” Jesus, without, however, ceasing to be the supernatural Logos, and as such brings to men the “Life” which he himself is, by revealing wisdom and love. As revealer of wisdom he is the “light of the world”; he opens to men the secret of their filial relation to God; he teaches them, by knowing God, to understand themselves and the world; he collects about himself the children of God, who are scattered through the world, in a united and brotherly society; and gives them, in imitating his own personality, the “light of life”—that is, he inwardly enlightens and elevates them. As revealer of love he not only assumes the human form and the renunciation of his divine bliss connected with it, but as a “good shepherd” he lays down his life for his flock; he saves them from the power of Satan, from the terrors of darkness, and sacrifices himself for his people, in order through this highest testimony of his love for men, through the complete surrender of his life, to regain the life which he really is, and to return to his celestial glory. This is the meaning of Christ’s work of redemption, that men by faith and love become inwardly united with him and so with God; whereby they gain the “life” in the higher spirit. For though Christ himself may return to God, his spirit still lives on earth. As the “second Paraclete” or agent, the Spirit proceeds with the Saviour’s work of redemption, arouses and strengthens the faith in Christ and the love for him and for the Brotherhood, thereby mediating for them the “Life,” and leading them after their death into the eternal bliss.
In all this the influence of Gnosticism and of the Philonic doctrine of the Logos is unmistakable, and it is very probable that the author of the fourth Gospel was influenced by the recollection, still living at Ephesus, of the Ephesian Heraclitus’ Logos, in his attachment to Philo and to the latter’s more detailed exposition of the Hellenic Logos-philosophy. But he fundamentally differs from Philo and Gnosticism in his assertion that the Logos “was made flesh,” sojourned on earth in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, and suffered death. It is true, however, that the Evangelist is more persistent in this assertion than successful in delineating a real man, notwithstanding his use of the Synoptic accounts of the personal fate of Jesus. The idea of the divine nature of the Saviour is the one that prevails in his writings. The “historical picture” which came down to him was forcibly rectified, and the personality of Jesus was worked up into something so wonderful, extraordinary, and supernatural that, if we were in possession of the fourth Gospel alone, in all probability the idea would hardly have occurred to any one that it was a treatment of the life-story of an historical individual. And yet in this the difference between the Johannine and the Synoptic Gospels is only a slight one. For the Synoptic Jesus also is not really a man, but a “superman,” the original Christian community’s God-man, cult-hero, and mediator of salvation. And if it is settled that the quarrel between the Church teachers and the Gnostic heretics hinged, not on the divinity of Christ, in which they agreed, but rather on the kind and degree of his humanity, then this “paradoxical fact” is by itself sufficient to corroborate the assertion that the divinity of the mediator of redemption was the only originally determined and self-evident presupposition of the whole Christian faith; and that, on the contrary, his humanity was doubtful even in the earliest times, and for this reason alone could become a subject of the bitterest strife.
Indeed, even the author of the fourth Gospel did not bring about a real fusion between the human person Jesus and the mythological person, the Gnostic Son of God, who with Philo wavered, also in the form of the Logos, between impersonal being and allegorical personality. All the efforts to render comprehensible “the interfusion of the divine and the human in the unity of the personal, its basis (essence) being divine, its appearance a human life of Jesus,” are frustrated even with the so-called John by one fact. This fact is that a Logos considered as a person can never be at once a human personality and yet have as its basis and essence a divine personality, but can only be demoniacally possessed by this latter, and can never be this latter itself. And so, as Pfleiderer says, the Johannine Christ wavers throughout “between a sublime truth and a ghostly monstrosity; the former, in so far as he represents the ideal of the Son of God, and so the religion of mankind, separated from all the accidents and limits of individuality and nationality, of space and time—and the latter so far as he is the mythical covering of a God sojourning on earth in human form.”[132]
It is true that this fusion of the Gnostic Son of God and the Philonic Logos with the Synoptic Jesus first fixed the hazy uncertainty of mythological speculation and abstract thought in the clear form and living individuality of the personal mediator of redemption. It brought this personality nearer to the hearts of the faithful than any other figure of religious belief, and thereby procured for the Christian cult-god Jesus, in his pure humanity, his overflowing goodness and benevolence, such a predominance over his divine competitors, Mithras, Attis, and others, that by the side of Jesus these faded away into empty shadows. The Gnostic ideal man, that is, the Platonic idea, and the moral ideal of man merged in him directly into a unity. The miracle of the union of God and man, over which the ancient world had so hotly and so fruitlessly disputed, seemed to have found its realisation in Christ. Christ was the “Wise man” of the Stoic philosophy, in whom was united for them all that is most honourable in man; more than this, he was the God-man, as he had been preached and demanded by Seneca for the moral elevation of mankind.[133] The world was consequently so ready to receive and so well prepared for his fundamental ideas that we easily see why the Church Christianity took its stand on the human personality of its redeeming principle with almost more decision than on the divine character of Jesus. Nevertheless, in spite of the majesty and sublimity, in spite of the immeasurable significance which the accentuation of the true humanity of Jesus has had for the development of Christianity, it remains true that on the other hand it is just this which is the source of all the insoluble contradictions, of all the insurmountable difficulties from which the Christian view of the world suffers. This is the reason why that great idea, which Christianity brought to the consciousness of the men of the West, and through which it conquered Judaism—the idea of the God-man—was utterly destroyed, and the true content of this religion was obscured, hidden, and misrepresented in such disastrous fashion, that to-day it is no longer possible to assent to its doctrine of redemption without the sacrifice of the intellect.
[1] As to the small value of Papias’ statement, cf. Gfrörer, “Die heilige Sage,” 1838, i. 3–23; also Lützelberger, “Die kirchl. Tradition über den Apostel Johannes,” 76–93. The whole story, according to which Mark received the essential content of the Gospel named after him from Peter, is based on [1 Peter v. 13], and merely serves the purpose of increasing the historical value of the Gospel of Mark. “As the first Gospel was believed to be the work of the Apostle Matthew, and the second (Luke) the work of an assistant of Paul, it was very easy to ascribe to the third (Mark) at least a similar origin as the second, i.e., to trace it back in an analogous way to Peter; as it would have seemed natural for the chief of the apostles, longest dead, to have had his own Gospel, one dedicated to him, as well as Paul. The passage [1 Peter v. 13], “My son Mark saluteth you,” gave a suitable opportunity for bestowing a name on the book,” (Gfrörer, op. cit., 15; cf. also Brandt, “Die evangelische Geschichte u. d. Ursprung des Christentums,” 1893, 535 sq.) [↑]
[6] The proper explanation for this should lie in the fact that the Jesus-faith was set up as a sect-faith and not for “outsiders.” [↑]
[11] It strikes the reader, who stands apart from the controversy, as comical to find the matter characterised in the theological works on the subject as “undoubtedly historical,” “distinct historical fact,” “true account of history,” and so forth; and to consider that what holds for one as “historically certain” is set aside by another as “quite certainly unhistorical.” Where is the famous “method” of which the “critical” theologians are so proud in opposition to the “laity,” who allow themselves to form judgments as to the historical worth or worthlessness of the Gospels? [↑]
[18] Cf. Pfleiderer, “Entstehung des Christentums,” 207, 213. All estimates as to the time at which the Gospels were produced rest entirely on suppositions, in which points of view quite different from that of purely historical interest generally predominate. Thus it has been the custom on the Catholic side to pronounce, not Mark or Luke, but Matthew, to be the oldest source. “Proofs” for this are also given—naturally, as it is indeed the “Church” Gospel: it contains the famous passage (xvi. 18, 19) about Peter’s possession of the keys; how, then, should this not be the oldest? And lately Harnack (“Beiträge zur Einl. in das N.T.,” iii., “Die Apostelgeschichte,” 1908) has tried to prove that the Acts, with the Gospel of Luke, had been already produced in the early part of the year 60 A.D. But he does not dare to come to a real decision; and his reasons are opposed by just as weighty ones which are against that “possibility” suggested by him (op. cit., 219 sqq.). Such is, first, the fact that all the other early Christian writings which belong to the first century, as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, evidently know nothing of them. In the Epistle of Barnabas, written about 96 A.D., we read that Jesus chose as his own apostles, as men who were to proclaim his Gospel, “of all men the most evil, to show that he had come to call, not the righteous, but sinners, to repentance” (iv.). As to this Lützelberger very justly remarks, “That is more even than our Gospels say. For these are content to prove that Jesus did not come for the righteous by saying that he ate with publicans and was anointed by women of evil life; while in this Epistle even the Apostles must be most wicked sinners, so that grace may shine forth to them. This passage was quite certainly written neither by an Apostle nor by a pupil of an Apostle; and also it was not written after our Gospels, but at a time when the learned Masters of the Church had still a free hand to show their spirit and ingenuity in giving form to the evangelical story” (“Die hist. Tradition,” 236 sq.). But also the so-called Epistle of Clement, which must have been written at about the same time, is completely silent as to the Gospels, while the “Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles,” which perhaps also belongs to the end of the first century, cites Christ’s words, such as stand in the Gospels, but not as sayings of Jesus. Moreover, according to Harnack, the “Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles” is the Christian elaboration of an early Jewish document; whence we may conclude that its Words of Christ have a similar origin in Jewish thought to that from which the Gospels obtained them. (Cf. Lützelberger, op. cit., 259–271.) [↑]
[23] The laity has, as is well known, but a slight suspicion of this. So S. E. Verus’ “Vergleichende Übersicht der vier Evangelien” (1897), with the commentary, is to be recommended. [↑]
[27] “Jesus u. d. neutestamentl. Schriftsteller,” ii. 43. Let us take the final paragraph in E. Petersen’s “Die wunderbare Geburt des Heilandes,” which reaches the zenith in proving the mythical nature of the evangelical account of the Saviour’s birth: “If, not because we wish it, but because we are forced to do so by the necessity of History, we remove the sentence, ‘Conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary’—Jesus nevertheless remains the ‘Son of God.’ He remains such because he experienced God as his father, and because he stands at God’s side for us. Also, in spite of our setting aside the miraculous birth as unhistorical, we are quite justified in declaring ‘Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God.’” M. Brückner speaks similarly at the close of his otherwise excellent work. “Der sterbende und auferstehende Gottheiland.” For the person to whom such phraseology is not—futile, there is no help. [↑]
[28] Cf. “Jesus Christus,” a course of lectures delivered at the University of Freiburg i. B., 1908. [↑]
[29] Schäfer, “Die Evangelien und die Evangelienkritik,” 1908, 123. The story of the Church’s development in the first century is a story of shameless literary falsifications, of rough violence in matters of faith, of unlimited trial of the credence of the masses. So that for those who know history the iteration of the “credibility” of the Christian writers of the age raises at most but an ironical smile. Cf. Robertson, “History of Christianity,” 1910. [↑]
[30] Cf. Hochart, “Études au sujet de la persécution des Chrétiens sous Néron,” 1885, cp. 4. [↑]
[31] A. Kalthoff, “Das Christusproblem, Grundzüge zu einer Sozialtheologie,” 1902, 14 sq. [↑]
[32] Kalthoff, “Die Entstehung des Christentums: Neue Beiträge zum Christusproblem,” 1904, 8. [↑]
[33] If v. Soden (“Hat Jesus gelebt?” vii. 45) has proved wrong the comparison with the Tell-legend, and thinks I have “probably once more” forgotten that Schiller first transformed a very meagre legend, which was bound up in a single incident, from grey antiquity into a living picture, he can know neither Tschudi nor J. v. Müller. Cf. Hertslet, “Der Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte,” 6 Aufl., 1905, 216 sqq. [↑]
[34] The passage runs: “At this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if he may be called a man, for he accomplished miracles and was a teacher of men who joyously embrace the truth, and he found a great following among Jews and Greeks. This one was the Christ. Although at the accusation of the leading men of our people Pilate sentenced him to the cross, those who had first loved him remained still faithful. For he appeared again to them on the third day, risen again to a new life, as the prophets of God had foretold of him, with a thousand other prophecies. After him are called the Christians, whose sect has not come to an end.” [↑]
[35] “Einl. ins N.T.,” 1836, 581. [↑]
[36] “Gesch. d. jüd. Volkes,” i. 548. [↑]
[37] Origen, though he collected all Josephus’ assertions which could serve as support to the Christian religion, does not know the passage, but probably another, in which the destruction of Jerusalem was represented as a punishment for James’ execution, which is certainly a forgery. [↑]
[38] Cf. Kalthoff, “Entstehung d. Chr.,” 16 sq. As to the whole matter, Schürer, op. cit., 544–549. [↑]
[39] V. Soden proves the contrary in his work, “Hat Jesus gelebt?” (1910), “in order to show the reliability of Drew’s assertions,” from Clement’s letter of 96 A.D., from Dionysius of Corinth (about 170) from Tertullion and Eusebius (early fourth century, not third, as v. Soden writes); and wishes to persuade his readers that the persecution under Nero is testified to. The authenticity of the letter of Clement is, however, quite uncertain, and has been most actively combated, from its first publication in 1633 till the present day, by investigators of repute, such as Semler, Baur, Schwegler, Volkmar, Keim, &c. But as for the above-cited authors, the unimportance of their assertions on the point is so strikingly exhibited by Hochart that we have no right to call them up as witnesses for the authenticity of the passage of Tacitus. [↑]
[40] Cf. Hochart, op. cit., 280 sqq.; H. Schiller, “Gesch. d. röm. Kaiserzeit,” 447, note. [↑]
[41] “Consulting the archives has been but little customary among ancient historians; and Tacitus has bestowed but little consideration on the Acta Diurna and the protocols of the Senate” (“Handb. d. klass. Altertumsw.,” viii., 2 Abt., Aft. 2, under “Tacitus”). Moreover, the difficulties of the passage from Tacitus have been fully realised by German historians (H. Schiller, op. cit., 449; “De. Gesch. d. röm. Kaiserreiches unter der Regierung des Nero,” 1872, 434 sqq., 583 sq.), even if they do not generally go as far as to say that the passage is completely unauthentic, as Volney did at the end of the eighteenth century (“Ruinen,” Reclam, 276). Cf. also Arnold, “Die neronische Christenverfolgung. Eine historiche Untersuchung zur Geschichte d. ältesten Kirche,” 1888. The author does indeed adhere to the authenticity of the passage in Tacitus, but as a matter of fact he presupposes it rather than attempts to prove it; while in many isolated reflections he gives an opinion against the correctness of the account given by Tacitus, and busies himself principally in disproving false inferences connected with that passage, such as the connection of the Neronic persecution with the Book of Revelation. The conceivable possibility that the persecution actually took place, but that at all events the sentence of Tacitus may be a Christian interpolation, Arnold seems never to have considered. [↑]
[43] Kalthoff, “Christusproblem,” 17. [↑]
[44] Weinel, “Jesus im 19 Jahrhundert,” 1907, 68. [↑]
[45] “Babylonisches im Neuen Testament,” 109 sq. [↑]
[46] “Zerduscht Nameh,” ch. xxvi. [↑]
[47] Gfrörer, “Jahrhundert des Heils,” Part II., 380 sqq. [↑]
[50] [Matt. xxi. 12] sqq. [↑]
[51] [Zech. xiv. 21] runs in the Targum translation: “Every vessel in Jerusalem will be consecrated to the Lord, &c., and at that time there will no longer be shopkeepers in the House of the Lord.” In this there may have been a further inducement for the Evangelists to state that Jesus chases the tradesmen from the Temple. [↑]
[52] [2 Sam. xvii. 23]; cf. also [Zech. xi. 12] sq.; [Psa. xli. 10]. [↑]
[53] Gfrörer, “Jahr. d. Heils,” ii. 318 sqq. [↑]
[54] Cf. [1 Cor. x. 1] sq. [↑]
[55] [2 Kings iv. 19] sqq. [↑]
[56] [Numb. i. 44]; [Jos. iii. 12]; [iv. 1] sqq. Cf. “Petrus-legende,” 51 sq. [↑]
[58] Josephus, “Antiq.,” iv. 8, 48; Philo, “Vita Mos.,” iii. [↑]
[60] E.g. also the account of the arrest of Jesus ([Matt. xxvi. 51] sqq.) cf. [2 Kings vi. 10–22]. [↑]
[61] [Matt. ix. 11] sq., xii. 8 sq., xv. 1 sqq., 11 and 20, xxviii. 18. [↑]
[63] Bereshith Rabba zu [Gen. xli. 1]. [↑]
[64] Cf. esp. [Acts xi. 2] sqq. [↑]
[65] [Matt. v. 17] sqq. [↑]
[66] Id. viii. 11 sqq., x. 5, xxiii. 34 sqq., xxviii. 19 sqq. [↑]
[67] Cf. Lützelberger, “Jesus, was er war und wollte,” 1842, 16 sqq. [↑]
[69] It is given as a reason for his appearing first in Galilee that the Galileans were first led into exile, and so should first be comforted, as all divine action conforms to the law of requital (Gfrörer, “Jahr. d. Heils,” 230 sq. Cf. also [Isa. viii. 23]). [↑]
[72] [Exod. xvi. 17] sqq.; [Numb. xxi. 1] sqq.; [Exod. vii. 17] sqq. [1 Kings xvii. 5] sqq. [↑]
[76] [Isa. 1. 6] sq. [↑]
[78] Cf. “Petruslegende,” 24. [↑]
[79] [Gen. xxvi. 6]; cf. also Tertullian, “Adv. Jud.,” 10. [↑]
[80] Cf. for this Brandt, “Die Evangelische Geschichte,” esp. 53 sqq. Even such a cautious investigator as Gfrörer confesses that, after his searching examination of the historical content of the Synoptics, he is obliged to close “with the sad admission” that their testimony does not give sufficient assurance to enable us to pronounce anything they contain to be true, so far as they are concerned, with a good historical conscience. “In this it is by no means asserted that many may not think their views correct, but only that we cannot rely on them sufficiently to rest a technically correct proof on them alone. They tell us too many things which are purely legendary, and too many others which are at least suspicious, for a prudent historian to feel justified in a construction based on their word alone. This admission may be disagreeable—it is also unpleasant to me—but it is genuine, and it is demanded by the rules which hold everywhere before a good tribunal, and in the sphere of history” (“Die hl. Sage,” 1838, ii. 243). [↑]
[81] This is the case with the corresponding account in Mark, while in Luke the dramatic presentation seems to be more worked away, and the coherence, through the introduction of descriptions and episodes (disciples at Emmaus) bears more the character of a simple narrative. Cf. Robertson, “Pagan Christs,” 186 sqq.; “A Short History,” 87 sqq. The fact that in almost all representations of this kind both the scene at Gethsemane and the words spoken by Jesus usually serve as signs of his personality (e.g. also Bousset’s “Jesus”—Rel. Volksb., 1904, 56), shows what we must think of the historical value of the accounts of the life of Jesus; especially when we consider that certainly no listeners were there, and Jesus cannot himself have told his experience to his disciples, as the arrest is supposed to have taken place on the spot. [↑]
[82] “Messiasgeheimnis,” 143. [↑]
[84] E. v. Hartmann, “Das Christentum des Neuen Testaments,” 1905, 22. [↑]
[86] Cf. H. Jordan, “Jesus und die modernen Jesusbilder, Bibl. Zeit- u. Streitfragen,” 1909, 38. [↑]
[87] [Mark vi. 1] sq. [↑]
[90] [1 Kings xix].; cf. also [Isa. xlii. 4]. [↑]
[91] Cf. Brandt, op. cit., 553 sq. [↑]
[92] Hertlein treats of these Bases of Schmiedel in the “Prot. Monatsheften,” 1906, 386 sq.; cf. also Schmiedel’s reply. [↑]
[94] Bousset agrees with this in his work “Was wissen wir von Jesus?” (1901). “Jesus’ speeches are for the most part creations of the communities, placed together by the community from isolated words of Jesus.” “In this, apart from all the rest, there was a powerful and decided alteration of the speeches” (47 sqq.). [↑]
[95] Cf. Robertson, “Christianity and Mythology,” 424 sqq., 429. [↑]
[97] “Protest. Monatshefte,” 1903, Märzheft. [↑]
[99] [Matt. xviii. 15] sqq. [↑]
[101] Cf. Pfleiderer, “Urchristentum,” i. 447 sq.; van den Bergh van Eysinga, op. cit., 57 sqq. [↑]
[102] Smith, op. cit., 107 sqq. [↑]
[103] Cf. Nork, “Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen zu neutestamentlichen Schriftstellen,” 1839. [↑]
[104] Cf. Robertson, “Christianity and Mythology,” 440–457. [↑]
[105] Cf. v. Hartmann, op. cit., 131–143. It will always be a telling argument against the historical nature of the sayings of Jesus that Paul seems to know nothing of them, that he never refers to them exactly; and that even up to the beginning of the second century, with the exception of a few remarks in Clement and Polycarp, the Apostles and Fathers in all their admonitions, consolations, and reprimands, never make use of Jesus’ sayings to give greater force to their own words. [↑]
[106] V. Hartmann, op. cit., 44 sq. [↑]
[107] Let us hear what Clemen says against this: “In its reduction of the Law to the Commandment of love, though this was already prominent in the Old Testament [!] and even earlier had here and there [!] been characterised as the chief Commandment, Christianity is completely original [!]. And for Jesus the subordination of religious duties to moral was consequent on this, though in this respect he would have been equally influenced by the prophets of the Old Testament” (op. cit., 135 sq.). [↑]
[108] “We must (as regards the moral ideals of Jesus) pay just as much attention to what he does not treat of, to what he set aside, as to what he clung to, indeed, setting it in opposition to all the rest. At least this wonderfully sure selection is Jesus’ own. We may produce analogies for each individual thing, but the whole is unique and cannot be invented” (v. Soden, op. cit., 51 sq.). This method, practised by liberal theology, of extolling their Jesus as against all other mortals, and of raising him up to a “uniqueness” in the absolute sense, can make indeed but a small impression on the impartial. [↑]
[109] Wrede, “Paulus,” 91. [↑]
[110] We admit that besides the eschatological grounding of his moral demands, Jesus also makes use occasionally of expressions that pass beyond the idea of reward. But they are quite isolated—as, e.g., [Matt. v. 48], “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” a phrase which is, moreover, in accord with [Lev. xi. 44] and xix. 3—and without any fundamental significance. In general, and in particular even in the Sermon on the Mount, that “Diamond in the Crown of Jesus’ ethics,” the idea of reward and punishment is prevalent ([Matt. v. 12] and 46; vi. 1, 4, 6, 14, 18; v. 20; vi. 15; vii. 1, &c.). Views may still differ widely as to whether it is historically correct to estimate, as Weinel would like to, Jesus’ ethics in this connection really by the few sayings which go beyond that idea. (Cf. v. Hartmann, op. cit., 116–124.) The favourite declaration, however, is quite unhistorical, that Jesus was the first who introduced into the world the principle of active love; and that the Stoics, as Weinel represents, only taught the doing away with all our passions, even that of love; or indeed that Jesus, who wished salvation only to benefit the Jews, who forbade his people to walk in the ways of the Gentiles, and who hesitated to comply with the Canaanite woman’s prayer, “raised to the highest degree of sincerity” the “altruistic ideal,” and that in principle he broke down the boundaries between peoples and creeds with his “Love thy enemy,” (Weinel, op. cit., 55, 57). As against this cf. the following passage from Seneca: “Everything which we must do and avoid may be reduced to this short formula of human obligation: We are members of a mighty body. Nature has made us kindred, having produced us from the same stuff and for the same ends. She has implanted in us a mutual love, and has arranged it socially. She has founded right and equity. Because of her commands to do evil is worse than to suffer evil. Hands ready to aid are raised at her call. Let that verse be in our mouths and our hearts: I am a man, nothing human do I despise! Human life consists in well-doing and striving. It will be cemented into a society of general aid not by fear but by mutual love. What is the rightly constituted, good and high-minded soul, but a God living as a guest in a human body? Such a soul may appear just as well in a knight as in a freedman or in a slave. We can soar upwards to heaven from any corner. Make this your rule, to treat the lower classes even as you would wish the higher to treat you. Even if we are slaves, we may yet be free in spirit. The slaves are men, inferior relatives, friends; indeed, our fellow-slaves in a like submission to the tyranny of fate. A friendship based on virtue exists between the good man and God, yes, more than a friendship, a kinship and likeness; for the good man is really his pupil, imitator, and scion, differing from God only because of the continuance of time. Him the majestic father brings up, a little severely, as is the strict father’s wont. God cherishes a fatherly affection towards the good man, and loves him dearly. If you wish to imitate the gods, give also to the ungrateful; for the sun rises even on the ungodly and the seas lie open even to the pirate, the wind blows not only in favour of the good, and the rain falls even on the fields of the unjust. If you wish to have the gods well-disposed towards you, be good: he has enough, who honours and who imitates them.” Cf. also Epictetus: “Dare, raising your eyes to God, to say, Henceforth make use of me to what end thou wilt! I assent, I am thine, I draw back from nothing which thy will intends. Lead me whithersoever thou wilt! For I hold God’s will to be better than mine.” (Cf. also [Matt. xxvi. 39].) [↑]
[111] Kautsky, “Ursprung des Christentums,” 17. [↑]
[113] “How is it conceivable,” even Pfleiderer asks, “that the new community should have fashioned itself from the chaos of material without some definite fact, some foundation-giving event which could form the nucleus for the genesis of the new ideas? Everywhere in the case of a new historical development the powers and impulses which are present in the crowd are first directed to a definite end and fastened into an organism that can survive by the purpose-giving action of heroic personalities. And so the impulse for the formation of the Christian community must have come from some definite point, which, from the testimony of the Apostle Paul and of the earliest Gospels, we can only find in the life and death of Jesus” (“Entstehung des Chr.,” 11). But that the “testimony” for an historical Jesus is not testimony, and that the “definite fact,” the “foundation-giving event,” is to be looked for, if anywhere, in Paul himself and nowhere else—such is the central point of all this analysis. [↑]
[115] “Von Reimarus bis Wrede,” 396. [↑]
[117] “Gesch. Israels,” ii. 1 sqq. [↑]
[118] Holtzmann, “Zum Thema ‘Jesus und Paulus’” (“Prot. Monatsheft,” iv., 1900, 465). [↑]
[120] Neutest. Theol. ii. 4. Cf. R. H. Grützmacher: “Ist das liberale Christusbild modern? Bibl. Zeit- und Streitfragen,” 39 sq. [↑]
[121] Pfleiderer, “Entstehung d. Chr.,” 108 sqq. [↑]
[122] Cf. Stendel, op. cit., 22. [↑]
[123] “Von Reimarus bis Wrede,” 313. [↑]
[125] [1 Cor. ii. 1]; [2 Cor. xix. 9]. [↑]
[126] [Acts i. 3], [x. 41]. [↑]
[127] [Acts i. 21] sq. [↑]
[128] Seufert, “Der Ursprung und die Bedeutung des Apostolates in der christlichen Kirche der ersten Jahrhunderte,” 1887, 143. Cf. also my “Petruslegende,” in which the unhistorical nature of the disciples and apostles is shown, 50 sqq. [↑]
[130] Cf. my work “Die Petruslegende.” [↑]
[131] Cf. Hausrath, “Jesus und die neutestamentl. Schriftsteller,” ii. 203 sqq. [↑]