The Christ Myth

by Arthur Drews

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.