The Christ Myth

by Arthur Drews

If with this purpose, as Seufert showed, the organisation of the Apostleship of Twelve arose—an organisation which has no satisfactory basis or foundation in the Gospels or in the Pauline epistles—then it is from this purpose also that we can find cause for the God Jesus to become a human founder of the apostleship. “An apostle was to be only such an one as had seen and heard Jesus himself, or had learnt from those who had been his immediate disciples. A literature of Judaism arose which had at quite an early stage the closest interest in the historical determination of Jesus’ life; and this formed the lowest stratum on which our canonical Gospels are based.”[128] Judaism in general, and the form of it at Jerusalem in particular, needed a legal title on which to base its commanding position as contrasted with the Gentile Christianity of Paul; and so its founders were obliged to have been companions of Jesus in person, and to have been selected for their vocation by him. For this reason Jesus could not remain a mere God, but had to be drawn down into historical actuality. Seufert thinks that the tracing of the Apostleship of Twelve back to an “historical” Jesus, and the setting up of the demand for an apostle of Jesus to have been a companion of his journeying, took place in Paul’s lifetime in the sixth, or perhaps even in the fifth decade.[129] In this he presupposes the existence of an historical Jesus, while the Pauline epistles themselves contain nothing to lead one to believe that the transformation of the Jesus-faith into history took place in Paul’s lifetime. In early Christianity exactly the same incident took place here, on the soil of Palestine and at Jerusalem, as took place later in “eternal” Rome, when the bishop of this city, in order to establish his right of supremacy in the Church, proclaimed himself to be the direct successor of the Apostle Peter, and caused the “possession of the keys” to have been given to this latter by Jesus himself.[130]

So that there were very mundane and very practical reasons which after all gave the impulse for the God Jesus to be transformed into an historical individual, and for the central point of his action, the crisis in his life, his death and his resurrection, which alone affected religious considerations, to be placed in the capital of the Jewish state, the “City of God,” the Holy City of David, of the “ancestors” of the Messiah, with which now the Jews connected religious salvation. But how could this fiction succeed and maintain its ground, so that it was able to become an absolutely vital question for the new religion, an indestructible dogma, a self-evident “fact,” so that its very calling in question seems to the critical theologians of our time a perfect absurdity?

Before we can answer this question we must turn our attention to the Gnostic movement and its relations to the growing Church.

(d) Gnosticism and the Johannine Jesus.

Christianity was originally developed from Gnosticism (Mandaism). The Pauline religion was only one form of the many syncretising efforts to satisfy contemporary humanity’s need of redemption by a fusion of religious conceptions derived from different sources. So much the greater was the danger which threatened to spring up on this side of the youthful Church.

Gnosticism agreed with Christianity in its pessimistic valuation of the world, in its belief in the inability of man to obtain religious salvation by himself, in the necessity for a divine mediation of “Life.” Like Christianity, it expected the deliverance of the oppressed souls of men by a supernatural Redeemer. He came down from Heaven upon earth and assumed a human form, establishing, through a mystic union with himself, the connection between the spheres of heaven and earth. He thereby guarantees to mankind an eternal life in a bliss to come. Gnosticism also involves a completely dualistic philosophy in its opposition of God and world, of spirit and matter, of soul and body, &c.; but all its efforts are directed to overcoming these contradictions by supernatural mediation and magical contrivances. It treats the “Gnosis,” the knowledge, the proper insight into the coherence of things, as the necessary condition of redemption. The individual must know that his soul comes from God, that it is only temporarily confined in this prison of the body, and that it is intended for something higher than to be lost here in the obscurity of ignorance, of evil and of sin; so that he is already freed from the trammels of the flesh, and finds a new life for himself. The God-Redeemer descended upon earth to impart this knowledge to mankind; and Gnosticism pledges itself, on the basis of the “revelation” received directly from God, to open to those who strive for the highest knowledge all the heights and depths of Heaven and of earth.

This Gnosticism of the first century after Christ was a wonderfully opalescent and intricate structure—half religious speculation, half religion, a mixture of Theosophy, uncritical mythological superstition, and deep religious mysticism. In it Babylonian beliefs as to Gods and stars, Parsee mythology, and Indian doctrines of metempsychosis and Karma were combined with Jewish theology and Mystery-rites of Western Asia; and through the whole blew a breath of Hellenic philosophy, which chiefly strove to fix the fantastic creatures of speculation in a comprehensible form, and to work up the confusion of Oriental licence and extravagance of thought into the form of a philosophical view of the world. The Gnostics also called their mediating deity, as we have already seen of the Mandaic sect of the Nassenes, “Jesus,” and indulged in a picture rendering of his pre-worldly existence and supernatural divine majesty. They agreed with the Christians that Jesus had been “human.”

The extravagant metaphysical conception which they had of Jesus at the same time prevented them from dealing seriously with the idea of his manhood. So that they either maintained that the celestial Christ had attached himself to the man Jesus in a purely external way, and indeed, first on the occasion of the baptism in the Jordan, and only temporarily, i.e., up to the Passion—it being only the “man” Jesus who suffered death (Basilides, Cerinthus); or they thought of Jesus as having assumed merely a ghostly body—and consequently thought that all his human actions took place merely as pure appearance (Saturninus, Valentinus, Marcion). But how little they managed to penetrate into the centre of the Christian doctrine of redemption and to value the fundamental significance of the Christ-figure, is shown by the fact that they thought of Christ merely as one mediator among countless others. It is shown also by the romantic and florid description of the spirits or “æons,” who are supposed to travel backwards and forwards between heaven and earth, leading their lives apart. These played a great part in the Gnostic systems.

It was a matter of course that the Christian faith had to take exception to such a fantastic and external treatment of the idea of the God-man. The Pauline Christianity was distinct from Gnosticism, with which it was most closely connected, just in this, that it was in earnest with the “manhood” of Jesus. It was still more serious that the Gnostics combined with their extreme dualism an outspokenly anti-Jewish character. For this in the close relationship between Gnosticism and Christianity would necessarily frighten the Jews from the Gospel, and incite only too many against the young religion. But the Jews formed the factor with which early Christianity had first of all to reckon. In addition to this the Gnostics, from the standpoint of their spiritualistic conception of God, turned to contempt of the world and asceticism. They commended sexual continence, rejected marriage, and wished to know nothing either of Christ’s or of man’s bodily resurrection. But in the West no propaganda of an ascetic religion could succeed. And yet even with the Gnostics, as is so often the case, asceticism only too frequently degenerated into unbridled voluptuousness and libertinage, and the spiritual pride of those chosen by God to knowledge, who were raised above the Mosaic Law, threatened completely to tear apart the connection with Judaism by its radical criticism of the Old Testament. In this Gnosticism not only undermined the moral life of the communities, but also brought the Gospel into discredit in other parts of the world. As an independent religion, which expressly opposed all other worships, and the adherents of which withdrew from the religious practices of the State, even from any political activity whatsoever, Christianity brought on itself the suspicion of the authorities and the hate of the people, and incurred the prohibition of new religions and secret sects (lex Julia majestatis).[131] So that Gnosticism, by taking it from its Jewish native soil, drove Christianity into a conflict with the Roman civil laws.