The Christ Myth

by Arthur Drews

[133] Cf. above, p. 31. sqq. [↑]

THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF THE PRESENT

In the opinion of liberal theologians, not the God but rather the man Jesus forms the valuable religious essence of Christianity.[1] In saying this it says nothing less than that the whole of Christendom up to the present day—that is, till the appearance of a Harnack, Bousset, Wernle, and others of like mind—was in error about itself, and did not recognise its own essence. For Christianity, as the present account shows, from the very first conceived the God Jesus, or rather the God-man, the Incarnate, the God-redeemer, suffering with man and sacrificing himself for humanity, as the central point of its doctrine. The declaration of the real manhood of Jesus appears, on the other hand, but as an after-concession of this religion to outer circumstances, wrung from it only later by its opponents, and so expressly championed by it only because of its forming the unavoidable condition of its permanence in history and of its practical success. Only the God, therefore, not the man Jesus, can be termed the “founder” of the Christian religion.

It is in fact the fundamental error of the liberal theology to think that the development of the Christian Church took its rise from an historical individual, from the man Jesus. The view is becoming more common that the original Christian movement under the name of Jesus would have remained an insignificant and transient movement within Judaism but for Paul, who first gave it a religious view of the world by his metaphysics of redemption, and who by his break with the Jewish Law really founded the new religion. It will not be long before the further concession is found necessary, that an historical Jesus, as the Gospels portray him, and as he lives in the minds of the liberal theologians of to-day, never existed at all; so that he never founded the insignificant and diminutive community of the Messiah at Jerusalem. It will be necessary to concede that the Christ-faith arose quite independently of any historical personality known to us; that indeed Jesus was in this sense a product of the religious “social soul” and was made by Paul, with the required amount of reinterpretation and reconstruction, the chief interest of those communities founded by him. The “historical” Jesus is not earlier but later than Paul; and as such he has always existed merely as an idea, as a pious fiction in the minds of members of the community. The New Testament with its four Gospels is not previous to the Church, but the latter is antecedent to them; and the Gospels are the derivatives, consequently forming a support for the propaganda of the Church, and being without any claim to historical significance.

Nothing at all, as Kalthoff shows, is to be gained for the understanding of Christianity from the completely modern view that religion is an entirely personal life and experience. Religion is such personal life only in an age which is differentiated into personalities; it is such only in so far as this differentiation has been accomplished. From the very beginning religion makes its appearance as a phenomenon of social life; it is a group-religion, a folk-religion, a State religion; and this social character is naturally transferred to the free associations which are formed within the limits of tribe and the State. The talk about personality as the centre of all religious life is with regard to the origin of Christianity absurd and unhistorical, for the reason that Christianity grew up in religious associations, in communities. From this social religion our personal religion has only been developed in a history lasting centuries. Only after great struggles has personal religion been able to succeed against an essentially older form. What devout people of to-day call Christianity, a religion of the individual, a principle of personal salvation, would have been an offence and an absurdity to the whole of ancient Christendom. It would have been to it the sin against the Holy Ghost which was never to be forgiven; for the Holy Ghost was the spirit of the Church’s unity, the connection of the religious community, the spirit of the subordination of the flock to the shepherd. For this reason individual religion existed in old Christendom only through the medium of the association of the community of the Church. A private setting up of one’s own religion was heresy, separation from the body of Christ.[2]

We cannot refuse to concede to the “Catholic” Church, both Roman and Greek, that in this respect it has most faithfully preserved the spirit of the earliest Christendom. This alone is to-day what Christianity in essence once was—the religion of an association in the sense to which we have referred. Thus Catholicism justly refers to “tradition” for the truth of its religious view of the world and for the correctness of its hierarchical claims. But Catholicism itself beyond doubt first established this “tradition” in its own interests. It teaches also an “historical” Jesus, but clearly one that is historical merely by tradition, and of whose actual historical existence not the least indication has yet been established. Protestantism, on the other hand, is completely unhistoric in passing off the Gospels as the sources, as the “revealed” basis of the faith in Christ, as if they had arisen independently of the Church and represented the true beginnings of Christianity. Consequently one cannot base one’s religious faith on the Gospel and wish nevertheless to stand outside of that community, since the writings of the New Testament can only pass as the expression of the community’s life. One cannot therefore be Christian in the sense of the original community without obliterating one’s own personality and uniting oneself as a member with the “Body of Christ”—that is, with the Church. The spirit of obedience and humility, which Christ demanded of his followers, is nothing but the spirit of subordination to the system of rules of conduct observed by the society of worship passing under his name. Christianity in the original sense is nothing but—“Catholic” Christianity; and this is the faith of the Church in the work of redemption accomplished by the God-man Christ in his Church and by means of the organisation infused with his “spirit.”

On purely religious grounds the wrongly so-called “Catholicism” could very probably dispense with the fiction of an historical Jesus, and go back to Paul’s standpoint before the origin of the Gospels, if it could have faith to-day in its mythological conception, of the God sacrificing himself for mankind, without that fiction. In its present form, however, it stands or falls as a Church with the belief in the historical truth of the God-redeemer; because all the Church’s hierarchical claims and authority are based on this authority having been entrusted to her by an historical Jesus through the apostles. Catholicism relies for this, as it has been said, on “tradition.” But Catholicism itself called this tradition into life, just as the priests at Jerusalem worked up the tradition of an historical Moses in order to trace back to him their claim to authority. It is the “Irony of World-History” that that very tradition soon afterwards forced the Church, with regard to the historical Christ, to conceal its real nature from the crowd, and to forbid the laity to read the Gospels, on account of the contradiction between the power of the Church and the traditional Christ it had produced. But the position of Protestantism is even more contradictory and more desperate than that of the Catholic Church, in view of our insight into the fictitious character of the Gospels. For Protestantism has no means but history for the foundation of its religious metaphysics; and history, viewed impartially, leads away from those roots of Christianity to which Protestantism strives, instead of towards them.

If this is true of Protestant orthodoxy it is even more true of that form of Protestantism which thinks it can maintain Christianity apart from its metaphysical doctrine of redemption because this doctrine is “no longer suitable to the age.” Liberal Protestantism is and wishes to be nothing but a mere faith in the historical personality of a man who is supposed to have been born 1,900 years ago in Palestine, and through his exemplary life to have become the founder of a new religion; being crucified and dying in conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem, being raised up then as a God in the minds of his enthusiastic disciples. It is a faith in the “loving God the Father,” because Jesus is supposed to have believed in him; in the personal immortality of man, because this is supposed to have been the presupposition of Jesus’ appearance and doctrines; in the “incomparable” value of moral instructions, because they stand in a book which is supposed to have been produced under the immediate influence of the prophet of Nazareth. Liberal Protestantism supports morality on this, that Jesus was such a good man, and that for this reason it is necessary for each individual man to follow the call of Jesus. But it bases the faith in Jesus once and for all on the historical significance of the Gospels; though it cannot conceal from itself, after careful consideration, that the belief in their historical value rests on extremely weak grounds, and that we know nothing of that Jesus, not even that he ever lived. In any case we know nothing which could be of influential religious significance, and which could not be put together just as well or better from other less doubtful sources.[3] It is pierced to the heart by the denial of the historical personality of Jesus, not, like Catholicism, merely as a Church, but in its very essence, as a Religion. And as to its real religious kernel it consists in a few fine-sounding phrases and some scattered references to a metaphysics which was once living, but which is now degraded into a mere ornament for modest minds. And after disposing of its would-be historical value there is left only a dimly smouldering spark of “homeless sentiments,” which would suit any style of religious faith. Liberal Protestantism proclaims itself as the really “modern” Christianity. Confronted by the philosophic spirit of our day, it lays stress upon having no philosophy. It sets aside all religious speculation as “Myth,” if possible with reference to Kant, as this is “modern,” without noticing that it is itself most deeply imbedded in mythology with its “historical” Jesus. It believes that, in its exclusive reverence for the man Jesus, it has brought Christianity to the “height of present culture.” As to this Stendel justly says: “Of the whole apologetic art with which the modern Jesus-theology undertakes to save Christianity for our time, it can be said that there is no historical religion which could not just as well be brought into accord with the modern mind as that of the New Testament.”[4] We have no occasion to weep for the complete collapse of such a “religion.” This form of Christianity has already been proved by Hartmann to be worthless from the religious point of view;[5] and it is only a proof of the fascinating power of phrases, of the laxity in our creeds, and the thoughtlessness of the mob in religious matters, that it is even yet alive. For such reasons it is even allowed, under the lead of the so-called critical theology, to proclaim itself as the pure Christianity, now known for the first time. Thus it finds sympathy. This unsystematic collection of thoughts, arbitrarily selected from the view of the world and of life given by the Gospels, which even so requires to be rhetorically puffed out and artistically modified before it is made acceptable to the present age,—this unspeculative doctrine of redemption, which at bottom is uncertain of itself,—this sentimental, æsthetic, Jesus-worship of a Harnack, Bousset, and the rest on whom W. v. Schnehen so pitilessly broke his lance;[6] this whole so-called Christianity of cultured pastors and a laity in need of redemption, would have long since come to grief through its poverty of ideas, its sickening sweetness, if it were not considered necessary to maintain Christianity at all costs, were it even that of the complete deprivation of its spiritual content. The recognition of the fact that the “historical” Jesus has no religious interest at all, but at most concerns historians and philologists, is indeed at present commencing to make its way into wider circles.[7] If one only knew a way out of the difficulty! If one were only not afraid of following a clear lead just because one might then possibly be forced beyond the existing religion in the course of his ideas—as the example of Kalthoff showed! If only one had not such a fearful respect for the past and such a tender “historic unconsciousness” and such immense respect for the “historical basis” of existing religion! The reference to history and the so-called “historical continuity of the religious development” is indeed on the face of it merely a way out of a difficulty, and another way of putting the fact that one is not desired to draw the consequences of his presuppositions. As if there can still be talk of a “historical basis” where there is no history, but pure myth! As if the “preservation of historical continuity” could consist in maintaining as history what are mythical fictions, just because they have hitherto passed for historic truth, though we have seen through their purely fictitious and unreal character! As if the difficulty of the redemption of present-day civilisation from the chaos of superstition, social deceit, cowardice, and intellectual servitude which are connected with the name of Christianity, lay in a purely spiritual sphere and not rather in the sentiment, in the slovenly piety, in the heavy weight of ancient tradition, above all in the economic, social, and practical relations which unite our churches with the past! Faith in the future of Christianity is still built not so much on the persuasive inner truth of its doctrine, but much more on the inborn religious feeling of the members of the community, on the religious education in school and home, and the consequent increasing store of metaphysical and ethical ideas, on protection by the State and—on the law of inertia in the spiritual life of the mob. For the rest, in pulpit, in parish papers, and in public life, a method of expression is used which is not essentially different from that of orthodoxy, but is so adapted as to allow every man to think what he deems best for himself. We are enthusiastically told that thus we are able to keep the rudderless ship of Protestantism still a while above water, and that we have “reconciled” faith with modern culture in “the further development of Christianity.”

Thus nineteen hundred years of religious development were completely in error. Is no other course open to us but a complete break with the Christian doctrine of redemption? This doctrine, however—such was the result of our previous examination—is independent of the belief in an historical Jesus. Its centre of gravity lies in the conception of the “incarnation” of God, who suffers in the world but is finally victorious over this suffering; and through union with whom Mankind also “prevails over the world” and gains a new life in a higher sphere of existence. That the form of this divine Redeemer of the world coalesced, in the minds of the Christian community, with that of a man Jesus; that, consequent on this, the act of redemption was fixed as to time and place, is only the consequence of the conditions under which the new religion appeared.

For this reason it can only claim, in and for itself, a transient practical significance, and not a special religious value; while on the other hand it has become the doom of Christianity that just this making into history of the principle of redemption makes it impossible for us still to acknowledge this religion. But then the preservation of historical continuity or the “further development” of Christianity in its proper sense probably does not consist in separating this chance historical side of the Christian doctrine of redemption from its connection with the whole Christian view of the world and setting it up by itself, but only in going back to the essential and fundamental idea of the Christian religion, and stating its metaphysical doctrine of redemption in a manner more nearly answering to the ideas of the day.