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]