By Dr. Schweitzer’s account, the great mass of the German specialists for a century past have been unable to see contradictions and incompatibilities in the Gospels which leap to the eyes; to himself, Wrede’s statement of some of them appears to be a revelation. It would seem that the simple old “Secularist” method of exposing these had covered ground which for the specialists was wholly unexplored. Thus it comes about that the myth theory, addressed to men who had never realized the character of their own perpetually conned documents, fared as it might have done if addressed to the Council of Trent.
Of no myth-theories save those of Bruno Bauer and Pastor Kalthoff, which alike ignore the clues of mythology and anthropology, does Dr. Schweitzer seem to have any knowledge. He is capable of giving a senseless account of a book he has not seen, and, it may be, of one he has seen. Of Christianity and Mythology he alleges that “according to that work the Christ-myth is merely a form of the Krishna-myth”—a proposition which tells only of absolute ignorance concerning the book. If, as I suspect, he has no better ground for his account of Hennell’s Inquiry as “nothing more than Venturini’s ‘Non-miraculous History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth’ tricked out with a fantastic paraphernalia of learning,”[5] it speaks ill for the regular functioning of his critical conscience. But where he has to deal with concrete arguments he is straightforward, alert, and readily appreciative; and his survey as a whole leads up to a complete dismissal of the whole work of the liberal school so-called. In his summing-up, the only critical choice left is between “complete scepticism” and “complete eschatology”—that is, between the avowal that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus, and the conviction that the historical Jesus was purely and simply a Jewish “hero and dreamer,” whose entire doctrine was the advent of the kingdom of God, the ending of the old order, in which consummation he secretly believed he was to figure as the Messiah.
The bare statement of the proposition hardly reveals its significance. Dr. Schweitzer’s “dreamer” is not M. Loisy’s, who is conceived as having had something to teach to his disciples, and even to the multitude. Dr. Schweitzer’s Jesus has, indeed, disciples for no assignable reason, but he is expressly declared to be no Teacher, even as Wrede’s Teacher is expressly declared to be no Messiah. The joint result is to leave the ground tolerably clear for the scientific myth theory, of which Dr. Schweitzer has not come within sight, having omitted to inquire about it. As he sums up:—
Supposing that only a half—nay, only a third—of the critical arguments which are common to Wrede and the “Sketch of the Life of Jesus” [by Schweitzer] are sound, then the modern historical view of the history is wholly ruined. The reader of Wrede’s book cannot help feeling that here no quarter is given; and any one who goes carefully through the present writer’s “Sketch” must come to see that between the modern historical and the eschatological life of Jesus no compromise is possible.[6]
Let us see, then, to what the eschatological theory amounts, considered as a residual historical explanation.
[1] Wieland was something of a Freethinker; but when Napoleon in the famous interview mooted the problem raised by Dupuis and Volney, Wieland treated it as pure absurdity. He was then an old man. [↑]
[2] The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Eng. tr. of Von Reimarus zu Wrede), 1910, p. 153. [↑]