According to Albert Kalthoff,[242] the fire lighted itself—Christianity arose—by spontaneous combustion, when the inflammable material, religious and social, which had collected together in the Roman Empire, came in contact with the Jewish Messianic expectations. Jesus of Nazareth never existed; and even supposing He had been one of the numerous Jewish Messiahs who were put to death by crucifixion, He certainly did not found Christianity. The story of Jesus which lies before us in the Gospels is in reality only the story of the way in which the picture of Christ arose, that is to say, the story of the growth of the Christian community. There is therefore no problem of the Life of Jesus, but only a problem of the Christ.
Kalthoff has not indeed always been so negative. When in the year 1880 he gave a series of lectures on the Life of Jesus he felt himself justified “in taking as his basis without further argument the generally accepted results of modern theology.” Afterwards he became so completely doubtful about the Christ after the flesh whom he had at that time depicted before his hearers that he wished to exclude Him even from the register of theological literature, and omitted to enter these lectures in the list of his writings, although they had appeared in print.[243]
His quarrel with the historical Jesus of modern theology was that he could find no connecting link between the Life of Jesus constructed by the latter and primitive Christianity. Modern theology, he remarks in one passage, with great justice, finds itself obliged to assume, at the point where the history of the Church begins, “an immediate declension from, and falsification of, a pure original principle,” and that in so doing “it is deserting the recognised methods of historical science.” If then we cannot trace the path from its beginning onwards, we had better try to work backwards, endeavouring first to define in the theology of the primitive Church the values which we shall look to find again in the Life of Jesus.
In that he is right. Modern historical theology will not have refuted him until it has explained how Christianity arose out of the life of Jesus without calling in that theory of an initial “Fall” of which Harnack, Wernle, and all the rest make use. Until this modern theology has made it in some measure intelligible how, under the influence of the Jewish Messiah-sect, in the twinkling of an eye, in every direction at once, Graeco-Roman popular Christianity arose; until at least it has described the popular Christianity of the first three generations, it must concede to all hypotheses which fairly face this problem and endeavour to solve it their formal right of existence.
The criticism which Kalthoff directs against the “positive” accounts of the Life of Jesus is, in part, very much to the point. “Jesus,” he says in one place, “has been made the receptacle into which every theologian pours his own ideas.” He rightly remarks that if we follow “the Christ” backwards from the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament right to the apocalyptic vision of Daniel, we always find in Him superhuman traits alongside of the human. “Never and nowhere,” he insists, “is He that which critical theology has endeavoured to make out of Him, a purely natural man, an indivisible historical unit.” “The title of 'Christ' had been raised by the Messianic apocalyptic writings so completely into the sphere of the heroic that it had become impossible to [pg 315] apply it to a mere historical man.” Bruno Bauer had urged the same considerations upon the theology of his time, declaring it to be unthinkable that a man could have arisen among the Jews and declared “I am the Messiah.”
But the unfortunate thing is that Kalthoff has not worked through Bruno Bauer's criticism, and does not appear to assume it as a basis, but remains standing half-way instead of thinking the questions through to the end as that keen critic did. According to Kalthoff it would appear that, year in year out, there was a constant succession of Messianic disturbances among the Jews and of crucified claimants of the Messiahship. “There had been many a 'Christ,'” he says in one place, “before there was any question of a Jesus in connexion with this title.”
How does Kalthoff know that? If he had fairly considered and felt the force of Bruno Bauer's arguments, he would never have ventured on this assertion; he would have learned that it is not only historically unproved, but intrinsically impossible.
But Kalthoff was in far too great a hurry to present to his readers a description of the growth of Christianity, and therewith of the picture of the Christ, to absorb thoroughly the criticism of his great predecessor. He soon leads his reader away from the high road of criticism into a morass of speculation, in order to arrive by a short cut at Graeco-Roman primitive Christianity. But the trouble is that while the guide walks lightly and safely, the ordinary man, weighed down by the pressure of historical considerations, sinks to rise no more.
The conjectural argument which Kalthoff follows out is in itself acute, and forms a suitable pendant to Bauer's reconstruction of the course of events. Bauer proposed to derive Christianity from the Graeco-Roman philosophy; Kalthoff, recognising that the origin of popular Christianity constitutes the main question, takes as his starting-point the social movements of the time.
In the Roman Empire, so runs his argument, among the oppressed masses of the slaves and the populace, eruptive forces were concentrated under high tension. A communistic movement arose, to which the influence of the Jewish element in the proletariat gave a Messianic-Apocalyptic colouring. The Jewish synagogue influenced Roman social conditions so that “the crude social ferment at work in the Roman Empire amalgamated itself with the religious and philosophical forces of the time to form the new Christian social movement.” Early Christian writers had learned in the synagogue to construct “personifications.” The whole Late-Jewish literature rests upon this principle. Thus “the Christ” became the ideal hero of the Christian community, “from the socio-religious standpoint the figure of Christ is the [pg 316] sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical forces which were at work at a certain period.” The Lord's Supper was the memorial feast of this ideal hero.