Kalthoff does not, unfortunately, mention whether this is a case of simple, ingenuous, or of conscious, didactic, Early Christian imagination.
That kind of criticism is a casting out of Satan by the aid of Beelzebub. If he was going to invent on this scale, Kalthoff need not have found any difficulty in accepting the figure of Jesus evolved by modern theology. One feels annoyed with him because, while his thesis is ingenious, and, as against “modern theology” has a considerable measure of justification, he has worked it out in so uninteresting a fashion. He has no one but himself to blame [pg 318] for the fact that instead of leading to the right explanation, it only introduced a wearisome and unproductive controversy.[245]
In the end there remains scarcely a shade of distinction between Kalthoff and his opponents. They want to bring their “historical Jesus” into the midst of our time. He wants to do the same with his “Christ.” “A secularised Christ,” he says, “as the type of the self-determined man who amid strife and suffering carries through victoriously, and fully realises, His own personality in order to give the infinite fullness of love which He bears within Himself as a blessing to mankind—a Christ such as that can awaken to new life the antique Christ-type of the Church. He is no longer the Christ of the scholar, of the abstract theological thinker with his scholastic rules and methods. He is the people's Christ, the Christ of the ordinary man, the figure in which all those powers of the human soul which are most natural and simple—and therefore most exalted and divine—find an expression at once sensible and spiritual.” But that is precisely the description of the Jesus of modern historical theology; why, then, make this long roundabout through scepticism? The Christ of Kalthoff is nothing else than the Jesus of those whom he combats in such a lofty fashion; the only difference is that he draws his figure of Christ in red ink on blotting-paper, and because it is red in colour and smudgy in outline, wants to make out that it is something new.
It is on ethical grounds that Eduard von Hartmann[246] refuses to accept the Jesus of modern theology. He finds fault with it because in its anxiety to retain a personality which would be of value to religion it does not sufficiently distinguish between the authentic and the “historical” Jesus. When criticism has removed the paintings-over and retouchings to which this authentic portrait of Jesus has been subjected, it reaches, according to him, an unrecognisable painting below, in which it is impossible to discover any clear likeness, least of all one of any religious use and value.
Were it not for the tenacity and the simple fidelity of the epic tradition, nothing whatever would have remained of the historic Jesus. What has remained is merely of historical and psychological interest.
At His first appearance the historic Jesus was, according to [pg 319] Eduard von Hartmann, almost “an impersonal being,” since He regarded Himself so exclusively as the vehicle of His message that His personality hardly came into the question. As time went on, however, He developed a taste for glory and for wonderful deeds, and fell at last into a condition of “abnormal exaltation of personality.” In the end He declares Himself to His disciples and before the council as Messiah. “When He felt His death drawing nigh He struck the balance of His life, found His mission a failure, His person and His cause abandoned by God, and died with the unanswered question on His lips, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”
It is significant that Eduard von Hartmann has not fallen into the mistake of Schopenhauer and many other philosophers, of identifying the pessimism of Jesus with the Indian speculative pessimism of Buddha. The pessimism of Jesus, he says, is not metaphysical, it is “a pessimism of indignation,” born of the intolerable social and political conditions of the time. Von Hartmann also clearly recognises the significance of eschatology, but he does not define its character quite correctly, since he bases his impressions solely on the Talmud, hardly making any use of the Old Testament, of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, or Fourth Ezra. He has an irritating way of still using the name “Jehovah.”
Like Reimarus—von Hartmann's positions are simply modernised Reimarus—he is anxious to show that Christian theology has lost the right “to treat the ideal Kingdom of God as belonging to itself.” Jesus and His teaching, so far as they have been preserved, belong to Judaism. His ethic is for us strange and full of stumbling-blocks. He despises work, property, and the duties of family life. His gospel is fundamentally plebeian, and completely excludes the idea of any aristocracy except in so far as it consents to plebeianise itself, and this is true not only as regards the aristocracy of rank, property, and fortune, but also the aristocracy of intellect. Von Hartmann cannot resist the temptation to accuse Jesus of “Semitic harshness,” finding the evidence of this chiefly in Mark iv. 12, where Jesus declares that the purpose of His parables was to obscure His teaching and cause the hearts of the people to be hardened.
His judgment upon Jesus is: “He had no genius, but a certain talent which, in the complete absence of any sound education, produced in general only moderate results, and was not sufficient to preserve Him from numerous weaknesses and serious errors; at heart a fanatic and a transcendental enthusiast, who in spite of an inborn kindliness of disposition hates and despises the world and everything it contains, and holds any interest in it to be injurious to the sole true, transcendental interest; an amiable and modest youth who, through a remarkable concatenation of circumstances [pg 320] arrived at the idea, which was at that time epidemic,[247] that He was Himself the expected Messiah, and in consequence of this met His fate.”