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]