According to Albert Kalthoff,242the fire lighted itself—Christianity arose—by spontaneous combustion, when the inflammable material, religious and social, which had collected together in the Roman Empire, came in contact with the Jewish Messianic expectations. Jesus of Nazareth never existed; and even supposing He had been one of the numerous Jewish Messiahs who were put to death by crucifixion, He certainly did not found Christianity. The story of Jesus which lies before us in the Gospels is in reality only the story of the way in which the picture of Christ arose, that is to say, the story of the growth of the Christian community. There is therefore no problem of the Life of Jesus, but only a problem of the Christ.[pg 314]Kalthoff has not indeed always been so negative. When in the year 1880 he gave a series of lectures on the Life of Jesus he felt himself justified“in taking as his basis without further argument the generally accepted results of modern theology.”Afterwards he became so completely doubtful about the Christ after the flesh whom he had at that time depicted before his hearers that he wished to exclude Him even from the register of theological literature, and omitted to enter these lectures in the list of his writings, although they had appeared in print.243His quarrel with the historical Jesus of modern theology was that he could find no connecting link between the Life of Jesus constructed by the latter and primitive Christianity. Modern theology, he remarks in one passage, with great justice, finds itself obliged to assume, at the point where the history of the Church begins,“an immediate declension from, and falsification of, a pure original principle,”and that in so doing“it is deserting the recognised methods of historical science.”If then we cannot trace the path from its beginning onwards, we had better try to work backwards, endeavouring first to define in the theology of the primitive Church the values which we shall look to find again in the Life of Jesus.In that he is right. Modern historical theology will not have refuted him until it has explained how Christianity arose out of the life of Jesus without calling in that theory of an initial“Fall”of which Harnack, Wernle, and all the rest make use. Until this modern theology has made it in some measure intelligible how, under the influence of the Jewish Messiah-sect, in the twinkling of an eye, in every direction at once, Graeco-Roman popular Christianity arose; until at least it has described the popular Christianity of the first three generations, it must concede to all hypotheses which fairly face this problem and endeavour to solve it their formal right of existence.The criticism which Kalthoff directs against the“positive”accounts of the Life of Jesus is, in part, very much to the point.“Jesus,”he says in one place,“has been made the receptacle into which every theologian pours his own ideas.”He rightly remarks that if we follow“the Christ”backwards from the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament right to the apocalyptic vision of Daniel, we always find in Him superhuman traits alongside of the human.“Never and nowhere,”he insists,“is He that which critical theology has endeavoured to make out of Him, a purely natural man, an indivisible historical unit.”“The title of 'Christ' had been raised by the Messianic apocalyptic writings so completely into the sphere of the heroic that it had become impossible to[pg 315]apply it to a mere historical man.”Bruno Bauer had urged the same considerations upon the theology of his time, declaring it to be unthinkable that a man could have arisen among the Jews and declared“I am the Messiah.”But the unfortunate thing is that Kalthoff has not worked through Bruno Bauer's criticism, and does not appear to assume it as a basis, but remains standing half-way instead of thinking the questions through to the end as that keen critic did. According to Kalthoff it would appear that, year in year out, there was a constant succession of Messianic disturbances among the Jews and of crucified claimants of the Messiahship.“There had been many a 'Christ,'”he says in one place,“before there was any question of a Jesus in connexion with this title.”How does Kalthoff know that? If he had fairly considered and felt the force of Bruno Bauer's arguments, he would never have ventured on this assertion; he would have learned that it is not only historically unproved, but intrinsically impossible.But Kalthoff was in far too great a hurry to present to his readers a description of the growth of Christianity, and therewith of the picture of the Christ, to absorb thoroughly the criticism of his great predecessor. He soon leads his reader away from the high road of criticism into a morass of speculation, in order to arrive by a short cut at Graeco-Roman primitive Christianity. But the trouble is that while the guide walks lightly and safely, the ordinary man, weighed down by the pressure of historical considerations, sinks to rise no more.The conjectural argument which Kalthoff follows out is in itself acute, and forms a suitable pendant to Bauer's reconstruction of the course of events. Bauer proposed to derive Christianity from the Graeco-Roman philosophy; Kalthoff, recognising that the origin of popular Christianity constitutes the main question, takes as his starting-point the social movements of the time.In the Roman Empire, so runs his argument, among the oppressed masses of the slaves and the populace, eruptive forces were concentrated under high tension. A communistic movement arose, to which the influence of the Jewish element in the proletariat gave a Messianic-Apocalyptic colouring. The Jewish synagogue influenced Roman social conditions so that“the crude social ferment at work in the Roman Empire amalgamated itself with the religious and philosophical forces of the time to form the new Christian social movement.”Early Christian writers had learned in the synagogue to construct“personifications.”The whole Late-Jewish literature rests upon this principle. Thus“the Christ”became the ideal hero of the Christian community,“from the socio-religious standpoint the figure of Christ is the[pg 316]sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical forces which were at work at a certain period.”The Lord's Supper was the memorial feast of this ideal hero.“As the Christ to whose Parousia the community looks forward this Hero-god of the community bears within Himself the capacity for expansion into the God of the universe, into the Christ of the Church, who is identical in essential nature with God the Father. Thus the belief in the Christ brought the Messianic hope of the future into the minds of the masses, who had already a certain organisation, and by directing their thoughts towards the future it won all those who were sick of the past and despairing about the present.”The death and resurrection of Jesus represent experiences of the community.“For a Jew crucified under Pontius Pilate there was certainly no resurrection. All that is possible is a vague hypothesis of a vision lacking all historical reality, or an escape into the vaguenesses of theological phraseology. But for the Christian community the resurrection was something real, a matter of fact. For the community as such was not annihilated in that persecution: it drew from it, rather, new strength and life.”But what about the foundations of this imposing structure?For what he has to tell us about the condition of the Roman Empire and the social organisation of the proletariat in the time of Trajan—for it was then that the Church first came out into the light—we may leave the responsibility with Kalthoff. But we must inquire more closely how he brings the Jewish apocalyptic into contact with the Roman proletariat.Communism, he says, was common to both. It was the bond which united the apocalyptic“other-worldliness”with reality. The only difficulty is that Kalthoff omits to produce any proof out of the Jewish apocalypses that communism was“the fundamental economic idea of the apocalyptic writers.”He operates from the first with a special preparation of apocalyptic thought, of a socialistic or Hellenistic character. Messianism is supposed to have taken its rise from the Deuteronomic reform as“a social theory which strives to realise itself in practice.”The apocalyptic of Daniel arose, according to him, under Platonic influence.“The figure of the Messiah thus became a human figure; it lost its specifically Jewish traits.”He is the heavenly proto-typal ideal man. Along with this thought, and similarly derived from Plato, the conception of immortality makes its appearance in apocalyptic.244This Platonic apocalyptic never had any existence, or at least,[pg 317]to speak with the utmost possible caution, its existence must not be asserted in the absence of all proof.But, supposing it were admitted that Jewish apocalyptic had some affinity for the Hellenic world, that it was Platonic and communistic, how are we to explain the fact that the Gospels, which describe the genesis of Christ and Christianity, imply a Galilaean and not a Roman environment?As a matter of fact, Kalthoff says, they do imply a Roman environment. The scene of the Gospel history is laid in Palestine, but it is drawn in Rome. The agrarian conditions implied in the narratives and parables are Roman. A vineyard with a wine-press of its own could only be found, according to Kalthoff, on the large Roman estates. So, too, the legal conditions. The right of the creditor to sell the debtor, with his wife and children, is a feature of Roman, not of Jewish law.Peter everywhere symbolises the Church at Rome. The confession of Peter had to be transferred to Caesarea Philippi because this town,“as the seat of the Roman administration,”symbolised for Palestine the political presence of Rome.The woman with the issue was perhaps Poppaea Sabina, the wife of Nero,“who in view of her strong leaning towards Judaism might well be described in the symbolical style of the apocalyptic writings as the woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment.”The story of the unfaithful steward alludes to Pope Callixtus, who, when the slave of a Christian in high position, was condemned to the mines for the crime of embezzlement; that of the woman who was a sinner refers to Marcia, the powerful mistress of Commodus, at whose intercession Callixtus was released, to be advanced soon afterwards to the bishopric of Rome.“These two narratives, therefore,”Kalthoff suggests,“which very clearly allude to events well known at that time, and doubtless much discussed in the Christian community, were admitted into the Gospel to express the views of the Church regarding the life-story of a Roman bishop which had run its course under the eyes of the community, and thereby to give to the events themselves the Church's sanction and interpretation.”Kalthoff does not, unfortunately, mention whether this is a case of simple, ingenuous, or of conscious, didactic, Early Christian imagination.That kind of criticism is a casting out of Satan by the aid of Beelzebub. If he was going to invent on this scale, Kalthoff need not have found any difficulty in accepting the figure of Jesus evolved by modern theology. One feels annoyed with him because, while his thesis is ingenious, and, as against“modern theology”has a considerable measure of justification, he has worked it out in so uninteresting a fashion. He has no one but himself to blame[pg 318]for the fact that instead of leading to the right explanation, it only introduced a wearisome and unproductive controversy.245In the end there remains scarcely a shade of distinction between Kalthoff and his opponents. They want to bring their“historical Jesus”into the midst of our time. He wants to do the same with his“Christ.”“A secularised Christ,”he says,“as the type of the self-determined man who amid strife and suffering carries through victoriously, and fully realises, His own personality in order to give the infinite fullness of love which He bears within Himself as a blessing to mankind—a Christ such as that can awaken to new life the antique Christ-type of the Church. He is no longer the Christ of the scholar, of the abstract theological thinker with his scholastic rules and methods. He is the people's Christ, the Christ of the ordinary man, the figure in which all those powers of the human soul which are most natural and simple—and therefore most exalted and divine—find an expression at once sensible and spiritual.”But that is precisely the description of the Jesus of modern historical theology; why, then, make this long roundabout through scepticism? The Christ of Kalthoff is nothing else than the Jesus of those whom he combats in such a lofty fashion; the only difference is that he draws his figure of Christ in red ink on blotting-paper, and because it is red in colour and smudgy in outline, wants to make out that it is something new.It is on ethical grounds that Eduard von Hartmann246refuses to accept the Jesus of modern theology. He finds fault with it because in its anxiety to retain a personality which would be of value to religion it does not sufficiently distinguish between the authentic and the“historical”Jesus. When criticism has removed the paintings-over and retouchings to which this authentic portrait of Jesus has been subjected, it reaches, according to him, an unrecognisable painting below, in which it is impossible to discover any clear likeness, least of all one of any religious use and value.Were it not for the tenacity and the simple fidelity of the epic tradition, nothing whatever would have remained of the historic Jesus. What has remained is merely of historical and psychological interest.At His first appearance the historic Jesus was, according to[pg 319]Eduard von Hartmann, almost“an impersonal being,”since He regarded Himself so exclusively as the vehicle of His message that His personality hardly came into the question. As time went on, however, He developed a taste for glory and for wonderful deeds, and fell at last into a condition of“abnormal exaltation of personality.”In the end He declares Himself to His disciples and before the council as Messiah.“When He felt His death drawing nigh He struck the balance of His life, found His mission a failure, His person and His cause abandoned by God, and died with the unanswered question on His lips,‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”It is significant that Eduard von Hartmann has not fallen into the mistake of Schopenhauer and many other philosophers, of identifying the pessimism of Jesus with the Indian speculative pessimism of Buddha. The pessimism of Jesus, he says, is not metaphysical, it is“a pessimism of indignation,”born of the intolerable social and political conditions of the time. Von Hartmann also clearly recognises the significance of eschatology, but he does not define its character quite correctly, since he bases his impressions solely on the Talmud, hardly making any use of the Old Testament, of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, or Fourth Ezra. He has an irritating way of still using the name“Jehovah.”Like Reimarus—von Hartmann's positions are simply modernised Reimarus—he is anxious to show that Christian theology has lost the right“to treat the ideal Kingdom of God as belonging to itself.”Jesus and His teaching, so far as they have been preserved, belong to Judaism. His ethic is for us strange and full of stumbling-blocks. He despises work, property, and the duties of family life. His gospel is fundamentally plebeian, and completely excludes the idea of any aristocracy except in so far as it consents to plebeianise itself, and this is true not only as regards the aristocracy of rank, property, and fortune, but also the aristocracy of intellect. Von Hartmann cannot resist the temptation to accuse Jesus of“Semitic harshness,”finding the evidence of this chiefly in Mark iv. 12, where Jesus declares that the purpose of His parables was to obscure His teaching and cause the hearts of the people to be hardened.His judgment upon Jesus is:“He had no genius, but a certain talent which, in the complete absence of any sound education, produced in general only moderate results, and was not sufficient to preserve Him from numerous weaknesses and serious errors; at heart a fanatic and a transcendental enthusiast, who in spite of an inborn kindliness of disposition hates and despises the world and everything it contains, and holds any interest in it to be injurious to the sole true, transcendental interest; an amiable and modest youth who, through a remarkable concatenation of circumstances[pg 320]arrived at the idea, which was at that time epidemic,247that He was Himself the expected Messiah, and in consequence of this met His fate.”It is to be regretted that a mind like Eduard von Hartmann's should not have got beyond the externals of the history, and made an effort to grasp the simple and impressive greatness of the figure of Jesus in its eschatological setting; and that he should imagine he has disposed of the strangeness which he finds in Jesus when he has made it as small as possible. And yet in another respect there is something satisfactory about his book. It is the open struggle of the Germanic spirit with Jesus. In this battle the victory will rest with true greatness. Others wanted to make peace before the struggle, or thought that theologians could fight the battle alone, and spare their contemporaries the doubts about the historical Jesus through which it was necessary to pass in order to reach the eternal Jesus—and to this end they kept preaching reconciliation while fighting the battle. They could only preach it on a basis of postulates, and postulates make poor preaching! Thus, Jülicher, for example, in his latest sketches of the Life of Jesus248distinguishes between“Jewish and supra-Jewish”in Jesus, and holds that Jesus transferred the ideal of the Kingdom of God“to the solid ground of the present, bringing it into the course of historical events,”and further“associated with the Kingdom of God”the idea of development which was utterly opposed to all Jewish ideas about the Kingdom. Jülicher also desires to raise“the strongest protest against the poor little definition of His preaching which makes it consist in nothing further than an announcement of the nearness of the Kingdom, and an exhortation to the repentance necessary as a condition for attaining the Kingdom.”But when has a protest against the pure truth of history ever been of any avail? Why proclaim peace where there is no peace, and attempt to put back the clock of time? Is it not enough that Schleiermacher and Ritschl succeeded again and again in making theology send on earth peace instead of a sword, and does not the[pg 321]weakness of Christian thought as compared with the general culture of our time result from the fact that it did not face the battle when it ought to have faced it, but persisted in appealing to a court of arbitration on which all the sciences were represented, but which it had successfully bribed in advance?Now there comes to join the philosophers a jurist. Herr Doctor jur. De Jonge lends his aid to Eduard von Hartmann in“destroying the ecclesiastical,”and“unveiling the Jewish picture of Jesus.”249De Jonge is a Jew by birth, baptized in 1889, who on the 22nd of November 1902 again separated himself from the Christian communion and was desirous of being received back“with certain evangelical reservations”into the Jewish community. In spite of his faithful observance of the Law, this was refused. Now he is waiting“until in the Synagogue of the twentieth century a freedom of conscience is accorded to him equal to that which in the first century was enjoyed by John, the beloved disciple of Jeschua of Nazareth.”In the meantime he beguiles the period of waiting by describing Jesus and His earliest followers in the character of pattern Jews, and sets them to work in the interest of his“Jewish views with evangelical reservations.”It is the colourless, characterless Jesus of the Superintendents and Konsistorialrats which especially arouses his enmity. With this figure he contrasts his own Jesus, the man of holy anger, the man of holy calm, the man of holy melancholy, the master of dialectic, the imperious ruler, the man of high gifts and practical ability, the man of inexorable consistency and reforming vigour.Jesus was, according to De Jonge, a pupil of Hillel. He demanded voluntary poverty only in special cases, not as a general principle. In the case of the rich young man, He knew“that the property which he had inherited was derived in this particular case from impure sources which must be cut off at once and for ever.”But how does De Jonge know that Jesus knew this?A writer who is attacking the common theological picture of Jesus, and who displays in the process, as De Jonge does, not only[pg 322]wit and address, but historical intuition, ought not to fall into the error of the theology with which he is at feud; he ought to use sober history as his weapon against the supplementary knowledge which his opponents seem to find between the lines, instead of meeting it with an esoteric historical knowledge of his own.De Jonge knows that Jesus possessed property inherited from His father:“One proof may serve where many might be given—the hasty flight into Egypt with his whole family to escape from Herod, and the long sojourn in that country.”De Jonge knows—he is here, however, following the Gospel of John, to which he everywhere gives the preference—that Jesus was between forty and fifty years old at the time of His first coming forward publicly. The statement in Luke iii. 23, that He was ὡσεί thirty years old, can only mislead those who do not remember that Luke was a portrait painter and only meant that“Jeschua, in consequence of His glorious beauty and His ever-youthful appearance, looked ten years younger than He really was.”De Jonge knows also that Jesus, at the time when He first emerged from obscurity, was a widower and had a little son—the“lad”of John vi. 9, who had the five barley loaves and two fishes, was in fact His son. This and many other things the author finds in“the glorious John.”According to De Jonge too we ought to think of Jesus as the aristocratic Jew, more accustomed to a dress coat than to a workman's blouse, something of an expert, as appears from some of the parables, in matters of the table, and conning the menu with interest when He dined with“privy-finance-councillor”Zacchaeus.But this is to modernise more distressingly than even the theologians!De Jonge's one-sided preference for the Fourth Gospel is shared by Kirchbach's book,“What did Jesus teach?”250but here everything, instead of being judaised, is spiritualised. Kirchbach does not seem to have been acquainted with Noack's“History of Jesus,”otherwise he would hardly have ventured to repeat the same experiment without the latter's touch of genius and with much less skill and knowledge.The teaching of Jesus is interpreted on the lines of the Kantian philosophy. The saying,“No man hath seen God at any time,”is to be understood as if it were derived from the same system of thought as the“Critique of Pure Reason.”Jesus always used the[pg 323]words“death”and“life”in a purely metaphorical sense. Eternal life is for Him not a life in another world, but in the present. He speaks of Himself as the Son of God, not as the Jewish Messiah. Son of Man is only the ethical explanation of Son of God. The only reason why a Son-of-Man problem has arisen, is because Matthew translated the ancient term Son of Man in the original collection of Logia“with extreme literality.”The great discourse of Matt. xxiii. with its warnings and threatenings is, according to Kirchbach, merely“a patriotic oration in which Jesus gives expression in moving words to His opposition to the Pharisees and His inborn love of His native land.”The teaching of Jesus is not ascetic, it closely resembles the real teaching of Epicurus,“that is, the rejection of all false metaphysics, and the resulting condition of blessedness, ofmakaria.”The only purpose of the demand addressed to the rich young man was to try him.“If the youth, instead of slinking away dejectedly because he was called upon to sell all his goods, had replied, confident in the possession of a rich fund of courage, energy, ability, and knowledge,‘Right gladly. It will not go to my heart to part with my little bit of property; if I'm not to have it, why then I can do without it,’the Rabbi would probably in that case not have taken him at his word, but would have said,‘Young man, I like you. You have a good chance before you, you may do something in the Kingdom of God, and in any case for My sake you may attach yourself to Me by way of trial. We can talk about your stocks and bonds later.’”Finally, Kirchbach succeeds, though only, it must be admitted, by the aid of some rather awkward phraseology, in spiritualising John vi.“It is not the body,”he explains,“of the long departed thinker, who apparently attached no importance whatever to the question of personal survival, that we, who understand Him in the right Greek sense,‘eat’; in the sense which He intended, we eat and drink, and absorb into ourselves, His teaching, His spirit, His sublime conception of life, by constantly recalling them in connexion with the symbol of bread and flesh, the symbol of blood, the symbol of water.”251Worthless as Kirchbach's Life of Jesus is from an historical point of view, it is quite comprehensible as a phase in the struggle between the modern view of the world and Jesus. The aim of the[pg 324]work is to retain His significance for a metaphysical and non-ascetic time; and since it is not possible to do this in the case of the historical Jesus, the author denies His existence in favour of an apocryphal Jesus.It is, in fact, the characteristic feature of the Life-of-Jesus literature on the threshold of the new century even in the productions of professedly historical and scientific theology, to subordinate the historical interest to the interest of the general world-view. And those who“wrest the Kingdom of Heaven”are beginning to wrest Jesus Himself along with it. Men who have no qualifications for the task, whose ignorance is nothing less than criminal, who loftily anathematise scientific theology instead of making themselves in some measure acquainted with the researches which it has carried out, feel impelled to write a Life of Jesus, in order to set forth their general religious view in a portrait of Jesus which has not the faintest claim to be historical, and the most far-fetched of these find favour, and are eagerly absorbed by the multitude.It would be something to be thankful for if all these Lives of Jesus were based on as definite an idea and as acute historical observation as we find in Albert Dulk's“The Error of the Life of Jesus.”252In Dulk the story of the fate of Jesus is also the story of the fate of religion. The Galilaean teacher, whose true character was marked by deep religious inwardness, was doomed to destruction from the moment when He set Himself upon the dizzy heights of the divine sonship and the eschatological expectation. He died in despair, having vainly expected, down to the very last, a“telegram from heaven.”Religion as a whole can only avoid the same fate by renouncing all transcendental elements.The vast numbers of imaginative Lives of Jesus shrink into remarkably small compass on a close examination. When one knows two or three of them, one knows them all. They have scarcely altered since Venturini's time, except that some of the cures performed by Jesus are handled in the modern Lives from the point of view of the recent investigations in hypnotism and suggestion.253[pg 325]According to Paul de Régla254Jesus was born out of wedlock. Joseph, however, gave shelter and protection to the mother. De Régla dwells on the beauty of the child.“His eyes were not exceptionally large, but were well-opened, and were shaded by long, silky, dark-brown eyelashes, and rather deep-set. They were of a blue-grey colour, which changed with changing emotions, taking on various shades, especially blue and brownish-grey.”He and His disciples were Essenes, as was also the Baptist. That implies that He was no longer a Jew in the strict sense. His preaching dealt with the rights of man, and put forward socialistic and communistic demands: His religion in the pure consciousness of communion with God. With eschatology He had nothing whatever to do, it was first interpolated into His teaching by Matthew.The miracles are all to be explained by suggestion and hypnotism. At the marriage at Cana, Jesus noticed that the guests were taking too much, and therefore secretly bade the servants pour out water instead of wine while He Himself said,“Drink, this is better wine.”In this way He succeeded in suggesting to a part of the company that they were really drinking wine. The feeding of the multitude is explained by striking out a couple of noughts from the numbers; the raising of Lazarus by supposing it a case of premature burial. Jesus Himself when taken down from the cross was not dead, and the Essenes succeeded in reanimating Him. His work is inspired with hatred against Catholicism, but with a real reverence for Jesus.Another mere variant of the plan of Venturini is the fictitious Life of Jesus of Pierre Nahor.255The sentimental descriptions of nature and the long dialogues characteristic of the Lives of Jesus of a hundred years ago are here again in full force. After John had already begun to preach in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, Jesus, in company with a distinguished Brahmin who possessed property at Nazareth and had an influential following in Jerusalem, made a journey to Egypt and was there indoctrinated into all kinds of Egyptian, Essene, and Indian philosophy, thus giving the author,[pg 326]or rather the authoress, an opportunity to develop her ideas on the philosophy of religion in didactic dialogues. When He soon afterwards begins to work in Galilee the young teacher is much aided by the fact that, at the instance of His fellow-traveller, He had acquired from Egyptian mendicants a practical acquaintance with the secrets of hypnotism. By His skill He healed Mary of Magdala, a distinguished courtesan of Tiberias. They had met before at Alexandria. After being cured she left Tiberias and went to live in a small house, inherited from her mother, at Magdala.Jesus Himself never went to Tiberias, but the social world of that place took an interest in Him, and often had itself rowed to the beach when He was preaching. Rich and pious ladies used to inquire of Him where He thought of preaching to the people on a given day, and sent baskets of bread and dried fish to the spot which He indicated, that the multitude might not suffer hunger. This is the explanation of the stories about the feeding of the multitudes; the people had no idea whence Jesus suddenly obtained the supplies which He caused His disciples to distribute.When he became aware that the priests had resolved upon His death, He made His friend Joseph of Arimathea, a leading man among the Essenes, promise that he would take Him down from the cross as soon as possible and lay Him in the grave without other witnesses. Only Nicodemus was to be present. On the cross He put Himself into a cataleptic trance; He was taken down from the cross seemingly dead, and came to Himself again in the grave. After appearing several times to His disciples he set out for Nazareth and dragged His way painfully thither. With a last effort He reaches the house of His mysterious old Indian teacher. At the door He falls helpless, just as the morning dawns. The old slave-woman recognises Him and carries Him into the house, where He dies.“The serene solemn night withdrew and day broke in blinding splendour behind Tiberias.”Nikolas Notowitsch256finds in Luke i. 80 (“And the child grew[pg 327]... and was in the deserts until the day of his shewing unto Israel”) a“gap in the life of Jesus,”in spite of the fact that this passage refers to the Baptist, and proposes to fill it by putting Jesus to school with the Brahmins and Buddhists from His thirteenth to His twenty-ninth year. As evidence for this he refers to statements about Buddhist worship of a certain Issa which he professes to have found in the monasteries of Little Thibet. The whole thing is, as was shown by the experts, a barefaced swindle and an impudent invention.To the fictitious Lives of Jesus belong also in the main the theosophical“Lives,”which equally play fast and loose with the history, though here with a view to proving that Jesus had absorbed the Egyptian and Indian theosophy, and had been indoctrinated with“occult science.”The theosophists, however, have the advantage of escaping the dilemma between reanimation after a trance and resurrection, since they are convinced that it was possible for Jesus to reassume His body after He had really died. But in the touching up and embellishment of the Gospel narratives they out-do even the romancers.Ernest Bosc,257writing as a theosophist, makes it the chief aim of his work to describe the oriental origin of Christianity, and ventures to assert that Jesus was not a Semite, but an Aryan. The Fourth Gospel is, of course, the basis of his representation. He does not hesitate, however, to appeal also to the anonymous“Revelations”published in 1849, which are a mere plagiarism from Venturini.A work which is written with some ability and with much out-of-the-way learning is“Did Jesus live 100b.c.?”258The author compares the Christian tradition with the Jewish, and finds in the latter a reminiscence of a Jesus who lived in the time of Alexander Jannaeus (104-76b.c.). This person was transferred by the earliest Evangelist to the later period, the attempt being facilitated by the fact that during the procuratorship of Pilate a false prophet had attracted some attention. The author, however, only professes to offer it as a hypothesis, and apologises in advance for the offence which it is likely to cause.
According to Albert Kalthoff,242the fire lighted itself—Christianity arose—by spontaneous combustion, when the inflammable material, religious and social, which had collected together in the Roman Empire, came in contact with the Jewish Messianic expectations. Jesus of Nazareth never existed; and even supposing He had been one of the numerous Jewish Messiahs who were put to death by crucifixion, He certainly did not found Christianity. The story of Jesus which lies before us in the Gospels is in reality only the story of the way in which the picture of Christ arose, that is to say, the story of the growth of the Christian community. There is therefore no problem of the Life of Jesus, but only a problem of the Christ.[pg 314]Kalthoff has not indeed always been so negative. When in the year 1880 he gave a series of lectures on the Life of Jesus he felt himself justified“in taking as his basis without further argument the generally accepted results of modern theology.”Afterwards he became so completely doubtful about the Christ after the flesh whom he had at that time depicted before his hearers that he wished to exclude Him even from the register of theological literature, and omitted to enter these lectures in the list of his writings, although they had appeared in print.243His quarrel with the historical Jesus of modern theology was that he could find no connecting link between the Life of Jesus constructed by the latter and primitive Christianity. Modern theology, he remarks in one passage, with great justice, finds itself obliged to assume, at the point where the history of the Church begins,“an immediate declension from, and falsification of, a pure original principle,”and that in so doing“it is deserting the recognised methods of historical science.”If then we cannot trace the path from its beginning onwards, we had better try to work backwards, endeavouring first to define in the theology of the primitive Church the values which we shall look to find again in the Life of Jesus.In that he is right. Modern historical theology will not have refuted him until it has explained how Christianity arose out of the life of Jesus without calling in that theory of an initial“Fall”of which Harnack, Wernle, and all the rest make use. Until this modern theology has made it in some measure intelligible how, under the influence of the Jewish Messiah-sect, in the twinkling of an eye, in every direction at once, Graeco-Roman popular Christianity arose; until at least it has described the popular Christianity of the first three generations, it must concede to all hypotheses which fairly face this problem and endeavour to solve it their formal right of existence.The criticism which Kalthoff directs against the“positive”accounts of the Life of Jesus is, in part, very much to the point.“Jesus,”he says in one place,“has been made the receptacle into which every theologian pours his own ideas.”He rightly remarks that if we follow“the Christ”backwards from the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament right to the apocalyptic vision of Daniel, we always find in Him superhuman traits alongside of the human.“Never and nowhere,”he insists,“is He that which critical theology has endeavoured to make out of Him, a purely natural man, an indivisible historical unit.”“The title of 'Christ' had been raised by the Messianic apocalyptic writings so completely into the sphere of the heroic that it had become impossible to[pg 315]apply it to a mere historical man.”Bruno Bauer had urged the same considerations upon the theology of his time, declaring it to be unthinkable that a man could have arisen among the Jews and declared“I am the Messiah.”But the unfortunate thing is that Kalthoff has not worked through Bruno Bauer's criticism, and does not appear to assume it as a basis, but remains standing half-way instead of thinking the questions through to the end as that keen critic did. According to Kalthoff it would appear that, year in year out, there was a constant succession of Messianic disturbances among the Jews and of crucified claimants of the Messiahship.“There had been many a 'Christ,'”he says in one place,“before there was any question of a Jesus in connexion with this title.”How does Kalthoff know that? If he had fairly considered and felt the force of Bruno Bauer's arguments, he would never have ventured on this assertion; he would have learned that it is not only historically unproved, but intrinsically impossible.But Kalthoff was in far too great a hurry to present to his readers a description of the growth of Christianity, and therewith of the picture of the Christ, to absorb thoroughly the criticism of his great predecessor. He soon leads his reader away from the high road of criticism into a morass of speculation, in order to arrive by a short cut at Graeco-Roman primitive Christianity. But the trouble is that while the guide walks lightly and safely, the ordinary man, weighed down by the pressure of historical considerations, sinks to rise no more.The conjectural argument which Kalthoff follows out is in itself acute, and forms a suitable pendant to Bauer's reconstruction of the course of events. Bauer proposed to derive Christianity from the Graeco-Roman philosophy; Kalthoff, recognising that the origin of popular Christianity constitutes the main question, takes as his starting-point the social movements of the time.In the Roman Empire, so runs his argument, among the oppressed masses of the slaves and the populace, eruptive forces were concentrated under high tension. A communistic movement arose, to which the influence of the Jewish element in the proletariat gave a Messianic-Apocalyptic colouring. The Jewish synagogue influenced Roman social conditions so that“the crude social ferment at work in the Roman Empire amalgamated itself with the religious and philosophical forces of the time to form the new Christian social movement.”Early Christian writers had learned in the synagogue to construct“personifications.”The whole Late-Jewish literature rests upon this principle. Thus“the Christ”became the ideal hero of the Christian community,“from the socio-religious standpoint the figure of Christ is the[pg 316]sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical forces which were at work at a certain period.”The Lord's Supper was the memorial feast of this ideal hero.“As the Christ to whose Parousia the community looks forward this Hero-god of the community bears within Himself the capacity for expansion into the God of the universe, into the Christ of the Church, who is identical in essential nature with God the Father. Thus the belief in the Christ brought the Messianic hope of the future into the minds of the masses, who had already a certain organisation, and by directing their thoughts towards the future it won all those who were sick of the past and despairing about the present.”The death and resurrection of Jesus represent experiences of the community.“For a Jew crucified under Pontius Pilate there was certainly no resurrection. All that is possible is a vague hypothesis of a vision lacking all historical reality, or an escape into the vaguenesses of theological phraseology. But for the Christian community the resurrection was something real, a matter of fact. For the community as such was not annihilated in that persecution: it drew from it, rather, new strength and life.”But what about the foundations of this imposing structure?For what he has to tell us about the condition of the Roman Empire and the social organisation of the proletariat in the time of Trajan—for it was then that the Church first came out into the light—we may leave the responsibility with Kalthoff. But we must inquire more closely how he brings the Jewish apocalyptic into contact with the Roman proletariat.Communism, he says, was common to both. It was the bond which united the apocalyptic“other-worldliness”with reality. The only difficulty is that Kalthoff omits to produce any proof out of the Jewish apocalypses that communism was“the fundamental economic idea of the apocalyptic writers.”He operates from the first with a special preparation of apocalyptic thought, of a socialistic or Hellenistic character. Messianism is supposed to have taken its rise from the Deuteronomic reform as“a social theory which strives to realise itself in practice.”The apocalyptic of Daniel arose, according to him, under Platonic influence.“The figure of the Messiah thus became a human figure; it lost its specifically Jewish traits.”He is the heavenly proto-typal ideal man. Along with this thought, and similarly derived from Plato, the conception of immortality makes its appearance in apocalyptic.244This Platonic apocalyptic never had any existence, or at least,[pg 317]to speak with the utmost possible caution, its existence must not be asserted in the absence of all proof.But, supposing it were admitted that Jewish apocalyptic had some affinity for the Hellenic world, that it was Platonic and communistic, how are we to explain the fact that the Gospels, which describe the genesis of Christ and Christianity, imply a Galilaean and not a Roman environment?As a matter of fact, Kalthoff says, they do imply a Roman environment. The scene of the Gospel history is laid in Palestine, but it is drawn in Rome. The agrarian conditions implied in the narratives and parables are Roman. A vineyard with a wine-press of its own could only be found, according to Kalthoff, on the large Roman estates. So, too, the legal conditions. The right of the creditor to sell the debtor, with his wife and children, is a feature of Roman, not of Jewish law.Peter everywhere symbolises the Church at Rome. The confession of Peter had to be transferred to Caesarea Philippi because this town,“as the seat of the Roman administration,”symbolised for Palestine the political presence of Rome.The woman with the issue was perhaps Poppaea Sabina, the wife of Nero,“who in view of her strong leaning towards Judaism might well be described in the symbolical style of the apocalyptic writings as the woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment.”The story of the unfaithful steward alludes to Pope Callixtus, who, when the slave of a Christian in high position, was condemned to the mines for the crime of embezzlement; that of the woman who was a sinner refers to Marcia, the powerful mistress of Commodus, at whose intercession Callixtus was released, to be advanced soon afterwards to the bishopric of Rome.“These two narratives, therefore,”Kalthoff suggests,“which very clearly allude to events well known at that time, and doubtless much discussed in the Christian community, were admitted into the Gospel to express the views of the Church regarding the life-story of a Roman bishop which had run its course under the eyes of the community, and thereby to give to the events themselves the Church's sanction and interpretation.”Kalthoff does not, unfortunately, mention whether this is a case of simple, ingenuous, or of conscious, didactic, Early Christian imagination.That kind of criticism is a casting out of Satan by the aid of Beelzebub. If he was going to invent on this scale, Kalthoff need not have found any difficulty in accepting the figure of Jesus evolved by modern theology. One feels annoyed with him because, while his thesis is ingenious, and, as against“modern theology”has a considerable measure of justification, he has worked it out in so uninteresting a fashion. He has no one but himself to blame[pg 318]for the fact that instead of leading to the right explanation, it only introduced a wearisome and unproductive controversy.245In the end there remains scarcely a shade of distinction between Kalthoff and his opponents. They want to bring their“historical Jesus”into the midst of our time. He wants to do the same with his“Christ.”“A secularised Christ,”he says,“as the type of the self-determined man who amid strife and suffering carries through victoriously, and fully realises, His own personality in order to give the infinite fullness of love which He bears within Himself as a blessing to mankind—a Christ such as that can awaken to new life the antique Christ-type of the Church. He is no longer the Christ of the scholar, of the abstract theological thinker with his scholastic rules and methods. He is the people's Christ, the Christ of the ordinary man, the figure in which all those powers of the human soul which are most natural and simple—and therefore most exalted and divine—find an expression at once sensible and spiritual.”But that is precisely the description of the Jesus of modern historical theology; why, then, make this long roundabout through scepticism? The Christ of Kalthoff is nothing else than the Jesus of those whom he combats in such a lofty fashion; the only difference is that he draws his figure of Christ in red ink on blotting-paper, and because it is red in colour and smudgy in outline, wants to make out that it is something new.It is on ethical grounds that Eduard von Hartmann246refuses to accept the Jesus of modern theology. He finds fault with it because in its anxiety to retain a personality which would be of value to religion it does not sufficiently distinguish between the authentic and the“historical”Jesus. When criticism has removed the paintings-over and retouchings to which this authentic portrait of Jesus has been subjected, it reaches, according to him, an unrecognisable painting below, in which it is impossible to discover any clear likeness, least of all one of any religious use and value.Were it not for the tenacity and the simple fidelity of the epic tradition, nothing whatever would have remained of the historic Jesus. What has remained is merely of historical and psychological interest.At His first appearance the historic Jesus was, according to[pg 319]Eduard von Hartmann, almost“an impersonal being,”since He regarded Himself so exclusively as the vehicle of His message that His personality hardly came into the question. As time went on, however, He developed a taste for glory and for wonderful deeds, and fell at last into a condition of“abnormal exaltation of personality.”In the end He declares Himself to His disciples and before the council as Messiah.“When He felt His death drawing nigh He struck the balance of His life, found His mission a failure, His person and His cause abandoned by God, and died with the unanswered question on His lips,‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”It is significant that Eduard von Hartmann has not fallen into the mistake of Schopenhauer and many other philosophers, of identifying the pessimism of Jesus with the Indian speculative pessimism of Buddha. The pessimism of Jesus, he says, is not metaphysical, it is“a pessimism of indignation,”born of the intolerable social and political conditions of the time. Von Hartmann also clearly recognises the significance of eschatology, but he does not define its character quite correctly, since he bases his impressions solely on the Talmud, hardly making any use of the Old Testament, of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, or Fourth Ezra. He has an irritating way of still using the name“Jehovah.”Like Reimarus—von Hartmann's positions are simply modernised Reimarus—he is anxious to show that Christian theology has lost the right“to treat the ideal Kingdom of God as belonging to itself.”Jesus and His teaching, so far as they have been preserved, belong to Judaism. His ethic is for us strange and full of stumbling-blocks. He despises work, property, and the duties of family life. His gospel is fundamentally plebeian, and completely excludes the idea of any aristocracy except in so far as it consents to plebeianise itself, and this is true not only as regards the aristocracy of rank, property, and fortune, but also the aristocracy of intellect. Von Hartmann cannot resist the temptation to accuse Jesus of“Semitic harshness,”finding the evidence of this chiefly in Mark iv. 12, where Jesus declares that the purpose of His parables was to obscure His teaching and cause the hearts of the people to be hardened.His judgment upon Jesus is:“He had no genius, but a certain talent which, in the complete absence of any sound education, produced in general only moderate results, and was not sufficient to preserve Him from numerous weaknesses and serious errors; at heart a fanatic and a transcendental enthusiast, who in spite of an inborn kindliness of disposition hates and despises the world and everything it contains, and holds any interest in it to be injurious to the sole true, transcendental interest; an amiable and modest youth who, through a remarkable concatenation of circumstances[pg 320]arrived at the idea, which was at that time epidemic,247that He was Himself the expected Messiah, and in consequence of this met His fate.”It is to be regretted that a mind like Eduard von Hartmann's should not have got beyond the externals of the history, and made an effort to grasp the simple and impressive greatness of the figure of Jesus in its eschatological setting; and that he should imagine he has disposed of the strangeness which he finds in Jesus when he has made it as small as possible. And yet in another respect there is something satisfactory about his book. It is the open struggle of the Germanic spirit with Jesus. In this battle the victory will rest with true greatness. Others wanted to make peace before the struggle, or thought that theologians could fight the battle alone, and spare their contemporaries the doubts about the historical Jesus through which it was necessary to pass in order to reach the eternal Jesus—and to this end they kept preaching reconciliation while fighting the battle. They could only preach it on a basis of postulates, and postulates make poor preaching! Thus, Jülicher, for example, in his latest sketches of the Life of Jesus248distinguishes between“Jewish and supra-Jewish”in Jesus, and holds that Jesus transferred the ideal of the Kingdom of God“to the solid ground of the present, bringing it into the course of historical events,”and further“associated with the Kingdom of God”the idea of development which was utterly opposed to all Jewish ideas about the Kingdom. Jülicher also desires to raise“the strongest protest against the poor little definition of His preaching which makes it consist in nothing further than an announcement of the nearness of the Kingdom, and an exhortation to the repentance necessary as a condition for attaining the Kingdom.”But when has a protest against the pure truth of history ever been of any avail? Why proclaim peace where there is no peace, and attempt to put back the clock of time? Is it not enough that Schleiermacher and Ritschl succeeded again and again in making theology send on earth peace instead of a sword, and does not the[pg 321]weakness of Christian thought as compared with the general culture of our time result from the fact that it did not face the battle when it ought to have faced it, but persisted in appealing to a court of arbitration on which all the sciences were represented, but which it had successfully bribed in advance?Now there comes to join the philosophers a jurist. Herr Doctor jur. De Jonge lends his aid to Eduard von Hartmann in“destroying the ecclesiastical,”and“unveiling the Jewish picture of Jesus.”249De Jonge is a Jew by birth, baptized in 1889, who on the 22nd of November 1902 again separated himself from the Christian communion and was desirous of being received back“with certain evangelical reservations”into the Jewish community. In spite of his faithful observance of the Law, this was refused. Now he is waiting“until in the Synagogue of the twentieth century a freedom of conscience is accorded to him equal to that which in the first century was enjoyed by John, the beloved disciple of Jeschua of Nazareth.”In the meantime he beguiles the period of waiting by describing Jesus and His earliest followers in the character of pattern Jews, and sets them to work in the interest of his“Jewish views with evangelical reservations.”It is the colourless, characterless Jesus of the Superintendents and Konsistorialrats which especially arouses his enmity. With this figure he contrasts his own Jesus, the man of holy anger, the man of holy calm, the man of holy melancholy, the master of dialectic, the imperious ruler, the man of high gifts and practical ability, the man of inexorable consistency and reforming vigour.Jesus was, according to De Jonge, a pupil of Hillel. He demanded voluntary poverty only in special cases, not as a general principle. In the case of the rich young man, He knew“that the property which he had inherited was derived in this particular case from impure sources which must be cut off at once and for ever.”But how does De Jonge know that Jesus knew this?A writer who is attacking the common theological picture of Jesus, and who displays in the process, as De Jonge does, not only[pg 322]wit and address, but historical intuition, ought not to fall into the error of the theology with which he is at feud; he ought to use sober history as his weapon against the supplementary knowledge which his opponents seem to find between the lines, instead of meeting it with an esoteric historical knowledge of his own.De Jonge knows that Jesus possessed property inherited from His father:“One proof may serve where many might be given—the hasty flight into Egypt with his whole family to escape from Herod, and the long sojourn in that country.”De Jonge knows—he is here, however, following the Gospel of John, to which he everywhere gives the preference—that Jesus was between forty and fifty years old at the time of His first coming forward publicly. The statement in Luke iii. 23, that He was ὡσεί thirty years old, can only mislead those who do not remember that Luke was a portrait painter and only meant that“Jeschua, in consequence of His glorious beauty and His ever-youthful appearance, looked ten years younger than He really was.”De Jonge knows also that Jesus, at the time when He first emerged from obscurity, was a widower and had a little son—the“lad”of John vi. 9, who had the five barley loaves and two fishes, was in fact His son. This and many other things the author finds in“the glorious John.”According to De Jonge too we ought to think of Jesus as the aristocratic Jew, more accustomed to a dress coat than to a workman's blouse, something of an expert, as appears from some of the parables, in matters of the table, and conning the menu with interest when He dined with“privy-finance-councillor”Zacchaeus.But this is to modernise more distressingly than even the theologians!De Jonge's one-sided preference for the Fourth Gospel is shared by Kirchbach's book,“What did Jesus teach?”250but here everything, instead of being judaised, is spiritualised. Kirchbach does not seem to have been acquainted with Noack's“History of Jesus,”otherwise he would hardly have ventured to repeat the same experiment without the latter's touch of genius and with much less skill and knowledge.The teaching of Jesus is interpreted on the lines of the Kantian philosophy. The saying,“No man hath seen God at any time,”is to be understood as if it were derived from the same system of thought as the“Critique of Pure Reason.”Jesus always used the[pg 323]words“death”and“life”in a purely metaphorical sense. Eternal life is for Him not a life in another world, but in the present. He speaks of Himself as the Son of God, not as the Jewish Messiah. Son of Man is only the ethical explanation of Son of God. The only reason why a Son-of-Man problem has arisen, is because Matthew translated the ancient term Son of Man in the original collection of Logia“with extreme literality.”The great discourse of Matt. xxiii. with its warnings and threatenings is, according to Kirchbach, merely“a patriotic oration in which Jesus gives expression in moving words to His opposition to the Pharisees and His inborn love of His native land.”The teaching of Jesus is not ascetic, it closely resembles the real teaching of Epicurus,“that is, the rejection of all false metaphysics, and the resulting condition of blessedness, ofmakaria.”The only purpose of the demand addressed to the rich young man was to try him.“If the youth, instead of slinking away dejectedly because he was called upon to sell all his goods, had replied, confident in the possession of a rich fund of courage, energy, ability, and knowledge,‘Right gladly. It will not go to my heart to part with my little bit of property; if I'm not to have it, why then I can do without it,’the Rabbi would probably in that case not have taken him at his word, but would have said,‘Young man, I like you. You have a good chance before you, you may do something in the Kingdom of God, and in any case for My sake you may attach yourself to Me by way of trial. We can talk about your stocks and bonds later.’”Finally, Kirchbach succeeds, though only, it must be admitted, by the aid of some rather awkward phraseology, in spiritualising John vi.“It is not the body,”he explains,“of the long departed thinker, who apparently attached no importance whatever to the question of personal survival, that we, who understand Him in the right Greek sense,‘eat’; in the sense which He intended, we eat and drink, and absorb into ourselves, His teaching, His spirit, His sublime conception of life, by constantly recalling them in connexion with the symbol of bread and flesh, the symbol of blood, the symbol of water.”251Worthless as Kirchbach's Life of Jesus is from an historical point of view, it is quite comprehensible as a phase in the struggle between the modern view of the world and Jesus. The aim of the[pg 324]work is to retain His significance for a metaphysical and non-ascetic time; and since it is not possible to do this in the case of the historical Jesus, the author denies His existence in favour of an apocryphal Jesus.It is, in fact, the characteristic feature of the Life-of-Jesus literature on the threshold of the new century even in the productions of professedly historical and scientific theology, to subordinate the historical interest to the interest of the general world-view. And those who“wrest the Kingdom of Heaven”are beginning to wrest Jesus Himself along with it. Men who have no qualifications for the task, whose ignorance is nothing less than criminal, who loftily anathematise scientific theology instead of making themselves in some measure acquainted with the researches which it has carried out, feel impelled to write a Life of Jesus, in order to set forth their general religious view in a portrait of Jesus which has not the faintest claim to be historical, and the most far-fetched of these find favour, and are eagerly absorbed by the multitude.It would be something to be thankful for if all these Lives of Jesus were based on as definite an idea and as acute historical observation as we find in Albert Dulk's“The Error of the Life of Jesus.”252In Dulk the story of the fate of Jesus is also the story of the fate of religion. The Galilaean teacher, whose true character was marked by deep religious inwardness, was doomed to destruction from the moment when He set Himself upon the dizzy heights of the divine sonship and the eschatological expectation. He died in despair, having vainly expected, down to the very last, a“telegram from heaven.”Religion as a whole can only avoid the same fate by renouncing all transcendental elements.The vast numbers of imaginative Lives of Jesus shrink into remarkably small compass on a close examination. When one knows two or three of them, one knows them all. They have scarcely altered since Venturini's time, except that some of the cures performed by Jesus are handled in the modern Lives from the point of view of the recent investigations in hypnotism and suggestion.253[pg 325]According to Paul de Régla254Jesus was born out of wedlock. Joseph, however, gave shelter and protection to the mother. De Régla dwells on the beauty of the child.“His eyes were not exceptionally large, but were well-opened, and were shaded by long, silky, dark-brown eyelashes, and rather deep-set. They were of a blue-grey colour, which changed with changing emotions, taking on various shades, especially blue and brownish-grey.”He and His disciples were Essenes, as was also the Baptist. That implies that He was no longer a Jew in the strict sense. His preaching dealt with the rights of man, and put forward socialistic and communistic demands: His religion in the pure consciousness of communion with God. With eschatology He had nothing whatever to do, it was first interpolated into His teaching by Matthew.The miracles are all to be explained by suggestion and hypnotism. At the marriage at Cana, Jesus noticed that the guests were taking too much, and therefore secretly bade the servants pour out water instead of wine while He Himself said,“Drink, this is better wine.”In this way He succeeded in suggesting to a part of the company that they were really drinking wine. The feeding of the multitude is explained by striking out a couple of noughts from the numbers; the raising of Lazarus by supposing it a case of premature burial. Jesus Himself when taken down from the cross was not dead, and the Essenes succeeded in reanimating Him. His work is inspired with hatred against Catholicism, but with a real reverence for Jesus.Another mere variant of the plan of Venturini is the fictitious Life of Jesus of Pierre Nahor.255The sentimental descriptions of nature and the long dialogues characteristic of the Lives of Jesus of a hundred years ago are here again in full force. After John had already begun to preach in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, Jesus, in company with a distinguished Brahmin who possessed property at Nazareth and had an influential following in Jerusalem, made a journey to Egypt and was there indoctrinated into all kinds of Egyptian, Essene, and Indian philosophy, thus giving the author,[pg 326]or rather the authoress, an opportunity to develop her ideas on the philosophy of religion in didactic dialogues. When He soon afterwards begins to work in Galilee the young teacher is much aided by the fact that, at the instance of His fellow-traveller, He had acquired from Egyptian mendicants a practical acquaintance with the secrets of hypnotism. By His skill He healed Mary of Magdala, a distinguished courtesan of Tiberias. They had met before at Alexandria. After being cured she left Tiberias and went to live in a small house, inherited from her mother, at Magdala.Jesus Himself never went to Tiberias, but the social world of that place took an interest in Him, and often had itself rowed to the beach when He was preaching. Rich and pious ladies used to inquire of Him where He thought of preaching to the people on a given day, and sent baskets of bread and dried fish to the spot which He indicated, that the multitude might not suffer hunger. This is the explanation of the stories about the feeding of the multitudes; the people had no idea whence Jesus suddenly obtained the supplies which He caused His disciples to distribute.When he became aware that the priests had resolved upon His death, He made His friend Joseph of Arimathea, a leading man among the Essenes, promise that he would take Him down from the cross as soon as possible and lay Him in the grave without other witnesses. Only Nicodemus was to be present. On the cross He put Himself into a cataleptic trance; He was taken down from the cross seemingly dead, and came to Himself again in the grave. After appearing several times to His disciples he set out for Nazareth and dragged His way painfully thither. With a last effort He reaches the house of His mysterious old Indian teacher. At the door He falls helpless, just as the morning dawns. The old slave-woman recognises Him and carries Him into the house, where He dies.“The serene solemn night withdrew and day broke in blinding splendour behind Tiberias.”Nikolas Notowitsch256finds in Luke i. 80 (“And the child grew[pg 327]... and was in the deserts until the day of his shewing unto Israel”) a“gap in the life of Jesus,”in spite of the fact that this passage refers to the Baptist, and proposes to fill it by putting Jesus to school with the Brahmins and Buddhists from His thirteenth to His twenty-ninth year. As evidence for this he refers to statements about Buddhist worship of a certain Issa which he professes to have found in the monasteries of Little Thibet. The whole thing is, as was shown by the experts, a barefaced swindle and an impudent invention.To the fictitious Lives of Jesus belong also in the main the theosophical“Lives,”which equally play fast and loose with the history, though here with a view to proving that Jesus had absorbed the Egyptian and Indian theosophy, and had been indoctrinated with“occult science.”The theosophists, however, have the advantage of escaping the dilemma between reanimation after a trance and resurrection, since they are convinced that it was possible for Jesus to reassume His body after He had really died. But in the touching up and embellishment of the Gospel narratives they out-do even the romancers.Ernest Bosc,257writing as a theosophist, makes it the chief aim of his work to describe the oriental origin of Christianity, and ventures to assert that Jesus was not a Semite, but an Aryan. The Fourth Gospel is, of course, the basis of his representation. He does not hesitate, however, to appeal also to the anonymous“Revelations”published in 1849, which are a mere plagiarism from Venturini.A work which is written with some ability and with much out-of-the-way learning is“Did Jesus live 100b.c.?”258The author compares the Christian tradition with the Jewish, and finds in the latter a reminiscence of a Jesus who lived in the time of Alexander Jannaeus (104-76b.c.). This person was transferred by the earliest Evangelist to the later period, the attempt being facilitated by the fact that during the procuratorship of Pilate a false prophet had attracted some attention. The author, however, only professes to offer it as a hypothesis, and apologises in advance for the offence which it is likely to cause.
According to Albert Kalthoff,242the fire lighted itself—Christianity arose—by spontaneous combustion, when the inflammable material, religious and social, which had collected together in the Roman Empire, came in contact with the Jewish Messianic expectations. Jesus of Nazareth never existed; and even supposing He had been one of the numerous Jewish Messiahs who were put to death by crucifixion, He certainly did not found Christianity. The story of Jesus which lies before us in the Gospels is in reality only the story of the way in which the picture of Christ arose, that is to say, the story of the growth of the Christian community. There is therefore no problem of the Life of Jesus, but only a problem of the Christ.[pg 314]Kalthoff has not indeed always been so negative. When in the year 1880 he gave a series of lectures on the Life of Jesus he felt himself justified“in taking as his basis without further argument the generally accepted results of modern theology.”Afterwards he became so completely doubtful about the Christ after the flesh whom he had at that time depicted before his hearers that he wished to exclude Him even from the register of theological literature, and omitted to enter these lectures in the list of his writings, although they had appeared in print.243His quarrel with the historical Jesus of modern theology was that he could find no connecting link between the Life of Jesus constructed by the latter and primitive Christianity. Modern theology, he remarks in one passage, with great justice, finds itself obliged to assume, at the point where the history of the Church begins,“an immediate declension from, and falsification of, a pure original principle,”and that in so doing“it is deserting the recognised methods of historical science.”If then we cannot trace the path from its beginning onwards, we had better try to work backwards, endeavouring first to define in the theology of the primitive Church the values which we shall look to find again in the Life of Jesus.In that he is right. Modern historical theology will not have refuted him until it has explained how Christianity arose out of the life of Jesus without calling in that theory of an initial“Fall”of which Harnack, Wernle, and all the rest make use. Until this modern theology has made it in some measure intelligible how, under the influence of the Jewish Messiah-sect, in the twinkling of an eye, in every direction at once, Graeco-Roman popular Christianity arose; until at least it has described the popular Christianity of the first three generations, it must concede to all hypotheses which fairly face this problem and endeavour to solve it their formal right of existence.The criticism which Kalthoff directs against the“positive”accounts of the Life of Jesus is, in part, very much to the point.“Jesus,”he says in one place,“has been made the receptacle into which every theologian pours his own ideas.”He rightly remarks that if we follow“the Christ”backwards from the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament right to the apocalyptic vision of Daniel, we always find in Him superhuman traits alongside of the human.“Never and nowhere,”he insists,“is He that which critical theology has endeavoured to make out of Him, a purely natural man, an indivisible historical unit.”“The title of 'Christ' had been raised by the Messianic apocalyptic writings so completely into the sphere of the heroic that it had become impossible to[pg 315]apply it to a mere historical man.”Bruno Bauer had urged the same considerations upon the theology of his time, declaring it to be unthinkable that a man could have arisen among the Jews and declared“I am the Messiah.”But the unfortunate thing is that Kalthoff has not worked through Bruno Bauer's criticism, and does not appear to assume it as a basis, but remains standing half-way instead of thinking the questions through to the end as that keen critic did. According to Kalthoff it would appear that, year in year out, there was a constant succession of Messianic disturbances among the Jews and of crucified claimants of the Messiahship.“There had been many a 'Christ,'”he says in one place,“before there was any question of a Jesus in connexion with this title.”How does Kalthoff know that? If he had fairly considered and felt the force of Bruno Bauer's arguments, he would never have ventured on this assertion; he would have learned that it is not only historically unproved, but intrinsically impossible.But Kalthoff was in far too great a hurry to present to his readers a description of the growth of Christianity, and therewith of the picture of the Christ, to absorb thoroughly the criticism of his great predecessor. He soon leads his reader away from the high road of criticism into a morass of speculation, in order to arrive by a short cut at Graeco-Roman primitive Christianity. But the trouble is that while the guide walks lightly and safely, the ordinary man, weighed down by the pressure of historical considerations, sinks to rise no more.The conjectural argument which Kalthoff follows out is in itself acute, and forms a suitable pendant to Bauer's reconstruction of the course of events. Bauer proposed to derive Christianity from the Graeco-Roman philosophy; Kalthoff, recognising that the origin of popular Christianity constitutes the main question, takes as his starting-point the social movements of the time.In the Roman Empire, so runs his argument, among the oppressed masses of the slaves and the populace, eruptive forces were concentrated under high tension. A communistic movement arose, to which the influence of the Jewish element in the proletariat gave a Messianic-Apocalyptic colouring. The Jewish synagogue influenced Roman social conditions so that“the crude social ferment at work in the Roman Empire amalgamated itself with the religious and philosophical forces of the time to form the new Christian social movement.”Early Christian writers had learned in the synagogue to construct“personifications.”The whole Late-Jewish literature rests upon this principle. Thus“the Christ”became the ideal hero of the Christian community,“from the socio-religious standpoint the figure of Christ is the[pg 316]sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical forces which were at work at a certain period.”The Lord's Supper was the memorial feast of this ideal hero.“As the Christ to whose Parousia the community looks forward this Hero-god of the community bears within Himself the capacity for expansion into the God of the universe, into the Christ of the Church, who is identical in essential nature with God the Father. Thus the belief in the Christ brought the Messianic hope of the future into the minds of the masses, who had already a certain organisation, and by directing their thoughts towards the future it won all those who were sick of the past and despairing about the present.”The death and resurrection of Jesus represent experiences of the community.“For a Jew crucified under Pontius Pilate there was certainly no resurrection. All that is possible is a vague hypothesis of a vision lacking all historical reality, or an escape into the vaguenesses of theological phraseology. But for the Christian community the resurrection was something real, a matter of fact. For the community as such was not annihilated in that persecution: it drew from it, rather, new strength and life.”But what about the foundations of this imposing structure?For what he has to tell us about the condition of the Roman Empire and the social organisation of the proletariat in the time of Trajan—for it was then that the Church first came out into the light—we may leave the responsibility with Kalthoff. But we must inquire more closely how he brings the Jewish apocalyptic into contact with the Roman proletariat.Communism, he says, was common to both. It was the bond which united the apocalyptic“other-worldliness”with reality. The only difficulty is that Kalthoff omits to produce any proof out of the Jewish apocalypses that communism was“the fundamental economic idea of the apocalyptic writers.”He operates from the first with a special preparation of apocalyptic thought, of a socialistic or Hellenistic character. Messianism is supposed to have taken its rise from the Deuteronomic reform as“a social theory which strives to realise itself in practice.”The apocalyptic of Daniel arose, according to him, under Platonic influence.“The figure of the Messiah thus became a human figure; it lost its specifically Jewish traits.”He is the heavenly proto-typal ideal man. Along with this thought, and similarly derived from Plato, the conception of immortality makes its appearance in apocalyptic.244This Platonic apocalyptic never had any existence, or at least,[pg 317]to speak with the utmost possible caution, its existence must not be asserted in the absence of all proof.But, supposing it were admitted that Jewish apocalyptic had some affinity for the Hellenic world, that it was Platonic and communistic, how are we to explain the fact that the Gospels, which describe the genesis of Christ and Christianity, imply a Galilaean and not a Roman environment?As a matter of fact, Kalthoff says, they do imply a Roman environment. The scene of the Gospel history is laid in Palestine, but it is drawn in Rome. The agrarian conditions implied in the narratives and parables are Roman. A vineyard with a wine-press of its own could only be found, according to Kalthoff, on the large Roman estates. So, too, the legal conditions. The right of the creditor to sell the debtor, with his wife and children, is a feature of Roman, not of Jewish law.Peter everywhere symbolises the Church at Rome. The confession of Peter had to be transferred to Caesarea Philippi because this town,“as the seat of the Roman administration,”symbolised for Palestine the political presence of Rome.The woman with the issue was perhaps Poppaea Sabina, the wife of Nero,“who in view of her strong leaning towards Judaism might well be described in the symbolical style of the apocalyptic writings as the woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment.”The story of the unfaithful steward alludes to Pope Callixtus, who, when the slave of a Christian in high position, was condemned to the mines for the crime of embezzlement; that of the woman who was a sinner refers to Marcia, the powerful mistress of Commodus, at whose intercession Callixtus was released, to be advanced soon afterwards to the bishopric of Rome.“These two narratives, therefore,”Kalthoff suggests,“which very clearly allude to events well known at that time, and doubtless much discussed in the Christian community, were admitted into the Gospel to express the views of the Church regarding the life-story of a Roman bishop which had run its course under the eyes of the community, and thereby to give to the events themselves the Church's sanction and interpretation.”Kalthoff does not, unfortunately, mention whether this is a case of simple, ingenuous, or of conscious, didactic, Early Christian imagination.That kind of criticism is a casting out of Satan by the aid of Beelzebub. If he was going to invent on this scale, Kalthoff need not have found any difficulty in accepting the figure of Jesus evolved by modern theology. One feels annoyed with him because, while his thesis is ingenious, and, as against“modern theology”has a considerable measure of justification, he has worked it out in so uninteresting a fashion. He has no one but himself to blame[pg 318]for the fact that instead of leading to the right explanation, it only introduced a wearisome and unproductive controversy.245In the end there remains scarcely a shade of distinction between Kalthoff and his opponents. They want to bring their“historical Jesus”into the midst of our time. He wants to do the same with his“Christ.”“A secularised Christ,”he says,“as the type of the self-determined man who amid strife and suffering carries through victoriously, and fully realises, His own personality in order to give the infinite fullness of love which He bears within Himself as a blessing to mankind—a Christ such as that can awaken to new life the antique Christ-type of the Church. He is no longer the Christ of the scholar, of the abstract theological thinker with his scholastic rules and methods. He is the people's Christ, the Christ of the ordinary man, the figure in which all those powers of the human soul which are most natural and simple—and therefore most exalted and divine—find an expression at once sensible and spiritual.”But that is precisely the description of the Jesus of modern historical theology; why, then, make this long roundabout through scepticism? The Christ of Kalthoff is nothing else than the Jesus of those whom he combats in such a lofty fashion; the only difference is that he draws his figure of Christ in red ink on blotting-paper, and because it is red in colour and smudgy in outline, wants to make out that it is something new.It is on ethical grounds that Eduard von Hartmann246refuses to accept the Jesus of modern theology. He finds fault with it because in its anxiety to retain a personality which would be of value to religion it does not sufficiently distinguish between the authentic and the“historical”Jesus. When criticism has removed the paintings-over and retouchings to which this authentic portrait of Jesus has been subjected, it reaches, according to him, an unrecognisable painting below, in which it is impossible to discover any clear likeness, least of all one of any religious use and value.Were it not for the tenacity and the simple fidelity of the epic tradition, nothing whatever would have remained of the historic Jesus. What has remained is merely of historical and psychological interest.At His first appearance the historic Jesus was, according to[pg 319]Eduard von Hartmann, almost“an impersonal being,”since He regarded Himself so exclusively as the vehicle of His message that His personality hardly came into the question. As time went on, however, He developed a taste for glory and for wonderful deeds, and fell at last into a condition of“abnormal exaltation of personality.”In the end He declares Himself to His disciples and before the council as Messiah.“When He felt His death drawing nigh He struck the balance of His life, found His mission a failure, His person and His cause abandoned by God, and died with the unanswered question on His lips,‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”It is significant that Eduard von Hartmann has not fallen into the mistake of Schopenhauer and many other philosophers, of identifying the pessimism of Jesus with the Indian speculative pessimism of Buddha. The pessimism of Jesus, he says, is not metaphysical, it is“a pessimism of indignation,”born of the intolerable social and political conditions of the time. Von Hartmann also clearly recognises the significance of eschatology, but he does not define its character quite correctly, since he bases his impressions solely on the Talmud, hardly making any use of the Old Testament, of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, or Fourth Ezra. He has an irritating way of still using the name“Jehovah.”Like Reimarus—von Hartmann's positions are simply modernised Reimarus—he is anxious to show that Christian theology has lost the right“to treat the ideal Kingdom of God as belonging to itself.”Jesus and His teaching, so far as they have been preserved, belong to Judaism. His ethic is for us strange and full of stumbling-blocks. He despises work, property, and the duties of family life. His gospel is fundamentally plebeian, and completely excludes the idea of any aristocracy except in so far as it consents to plebeianise itself, and this is true not only as regards the aristocracy of rank, property, and fortune, but also the aristocracy of intellect. Von Hartmann cannot resist the temptation to accuse Jesus of“Semitic harshness,”finding the evidence of this chiefly in Mark iv. 12, where Jesus declares that the purpose of His parables was to obscure His teaching and cause the hearts of the people to be hardened.His judgment upon Jesus is:“He had no genius, but a certain talent which, in the complete absence of any sound education, produced in general only moderate results, and was not sufficient to preserve Him from numerous weaknesses and serious errors; at heart a fanatic and a transcendental enthusiast, who in spite of an inborn kindliness of disposition hates and despises the world and everything it contains, and holds any interest in it to be injurious to the sole true, transcendental interest; an amiable and modest youth who, through a remarkable concatenation of circumstances[pg 320]arrived at the idea, which was at that time epidemic,247that He was Himself the expected Messiah, and in consequence of this met His fate.”It is to be regretted that a mind like Eduard von Hartmann's should not have got beyond the externals of the history, and made an effort to grasp the simple and impressive greatness of the figure of Jesus in its eschatological setting; and that he should imagine he has disposed of the strangeness which he finds in Jesus when he has made it as small as possible. And yet in another respect there is something satisfactory about his book. It is the open struggle of the Germanic spirit with Jesus. In this battle the victory will rest with true greatness. Others wanted to make peace before the struggle, or thought that theologians could fight the battle alone, and spare their contemporaries the doubts about the historical Jesus through which it was necessary to pass in order to reach the eternal Jesus—and to this end they kept preaching reconciliation while fighting the battle. They could only preach it on a basis of postulates, and postulates make poor preaching! Thus, Jülicher, for example, in his latest sketches of the Life of Jesus248distinguishes between“Jewish and supra-Jewish”in Jesus, and holds that Jesus transferred the ideal of the Kingdom of God“to the solid ground of the present, bringing it into the course of historical events,”and further“associated with the Kingdom of God”the idea of development which was utterly opposed to all Jewish ideas about the Kingdom. Jülicher also desires to raise“the strongest protest against the poor little definition of His preaching which makes it consist in nothing further than an announcement of the nearness of the Kingdom, and an exhortation to the repentance necessary as a condition for attaining the Kingdom.”But when has a protest against the pure truth of history ever been of any avail? Why proclaim peace where there is no peace, and attempt to put back the clock of time? Is it not enough that Schleiermacher and Ritschl succeeded again and again in making theology send on earth peace instead of a sword, and does not the[pg 321]weakness of Christian thought as compared with the general culture of our time result from the fact that it did not face the battle when it ought to have faced it, but persisted in appealing to a court of arbitration on which all the sciences were represented, but which it had successfully bribed in advance?Now there comes to join the philosophers a jurist. Herr Doctor jur. De Jonge lends his aid to Eduard von Hartmann in“destroying the ecclesiastical,”and“unveiling the Jewish picture of Jesus.”249De Jonge is a Jew by birth, baptized in 1889, who on the 22nd of November 1902 again separated himself from the Christian communion and was desirous of being received back“with certain evangelical reservations”into the Jewish community. In spite of his faithful observance of the Law, this was refused. Now he is waiting“until in the Synagogue of the twentieth century a freedom of conscience is accorded to him equal to that which in the first century was enjoyed by John, the beloved disciple of Jeschua of Nazareth.”In the meantime he beguiles the period of waiting by describing Jesus and His earliest followers in the character of pattern Jews, and sets them to work in the interest of his“Jewish views with evangelical reservations.”It is the colourless, characterless Jesus of the Superintendents and Konsistorialrats which especially arouses his enmity. With this figure he contrasts his own Jesus, the man of holy anger, the man of holy calm, the man of holy melancholy, the master of dialectic, the imperious ruler, the man of high gifts and practical ability, the man of inexorable consistency and reforming vigour.Jesus was, according to De Jonge, a pupil of Hillel. He demanded voluntary poverty only in special cases, not as a general principle. In the case of the rich young man, He knew“that the property which he had inherited was derived in this particular case from impure sources which must be cut off at once and for ever.”But how does De Jonge know that Jesus knew this?A writer who is attacking the common theological picture of Jesus, and who displays in the process, as De Jonge does, not only[pg 322]wit and address, but historical intuition, ought not to fall into the error of the theology with which he is at feud; he ought to use sober history as his weapon against the supplementary knowledge which his opponents seem to find between the lines, instead of meeting it with an esoteric historical knowledge of his own.De Jonge knows that Jesus possessed property inherited from His father:“One proof may serve where many might be given—the hasty flight into Egypt with his whole family to escape from Herod, and the long sojourn in that country.”De Jonge knows—he is here, however, following the Gospel of John, to which he everywhere gives the preference—that Jesus was between forty and fifty years old at the time of His first coming forward publicly. The statement in Luke iii. 23, that He was ὡσεί thirty years old, can only mislead those who do not remember that Luke was a portrait painter and only meant that“Jeschua, in consequence of His glorious beauty and His ever-youthful appearance, looked ten years younger than He really was.”De Jonge knows also that Jesus, at the time when He first emerged from obscurity, was a widower and had a little son—the“lad”of John vi. 9, who had the five barley loaves and two fishes, was in fact His son. This and many other things the author finds in“the glorious John.”According to De Jonge too we ought to think of Jesus as the aristocratic Jew, more accustomed to a dress coat than to a workman's blouse, something of an expert, as appears from some of the parables, in matters of the table, and conning the menu with interest when He dined with“privy-finance-councillor”Zacchaeus.But this is to modernise more distressingly than even the theologians!De Jonge's one-sided preference for the Fourth Gospel is shared by Kirchbach's book,“What did Jesus teach?”250but here everything, instead of being judaised, is spiritualised. Kirchbach does not seem to have been acquainted with Noack's“History of Jesus,”otherwise he would hardly have ventured to repeat the same experiment without the latter's touch of genius and with much less skill and knowledge.The teaching of Jesus is interpreted on the lines of the Kantian philosophy. The saying,“No man hath seen God at any time,”is to be understood as if it were derived from the same system of thought as the“Critique of Pure Reason.”Jesus always used the[pg 323]words“death”and“life”in a purely metaphorical sense. Eternal life is for Him not a life in another world, but in the present. He speaks of Himself as the Son of God, not as the Jewish Messiah. Son of Man is only the ethical explanation of Son of God. The only reason why a Son-of-Man problem has arisen, is because Matthew translated the ancient term Son of Man in the original collection of Logia“with extreme literality.”The great discourse of Matt. xxiii. with its warnings and threatenings is, according to Kirchbach, merely“a patriotic oration in which Jesus gives expression in moving words to His opposition to the Pharisees and His inborn love of His native land.”The teaching of Jesus is not ascetic, it closely resembles the real teaching of Epicurus,“that is, the rejection of all false metaphysics, and the resulting condition of blessedness, ofmakaria.”The only purpose of the demand addressed to the rich young man was to try him.“If the youth, instead of slinking away dejectedly because he was called upon to sell all his goods, had replied, confident in the possession of a rich fund of courage, energy, ability, and knowledge,‘Right gladly. It will not go to my heart to part with my little bit of property; if I'm not to have it, why then I can do without it,’the Rabbi would probably in that case not have taken him at his word, but would have said,‘Young man, I like you. You have a good chance before you, you may do something in the Kingdom of God, and in any case for My sake you may attach yourself to Me by way of trial. We can talk about your stocks and bonds later.’”Finally, Kirchbach succeeds, though only, it must be admitted, by the aid of some rather awkward phraseology, in spiritualising John vi.“It is not the body,”he explains,“of the long departed thinker, who apparently attached no importance whatever to the question of personal survival, that we, who understand Him in the right Greek sense,‘eat’; in the sense which He intended, we eat and drink, and absorb into ourselves, His teaching, His spirit, His sublime conception of life, by constantly recalling them in connexion with the symbol of bread and flesh, the symbol of blood, the symbol of water.”251Worthless as Kirchbach's Life of Jesus is from an historical point of view, it is quite comprehensible as a phase in the struggle between the modern view of the world and Jesus. The aim of the[pg 324]work is to retain His significance for a metaphysical and non-ascetic time; and since it is not possible to do this in the case of the historical Jesus, the author denies His existence in favour of an apocryphal Jesus.It is, in fact, the characteristic feature of the Life-of-Jesus literature on the threshold of the new century even in the productions of professedly historical and scientific theology, to subordinate the historical interest to the interest of the general world-view. And those who“wrest the Kingdom of Heaven”are beginning to wrest Jesus Himself along with it. Men who have no qualifications for the task, whose ignorance is nothing less than criminal, who loftily anathematise scientific theology instead of making themselves in some measure acquainted with the researches which it has carried out, feel impelled to write a Life of Jesus, in order to set forth their general religious view in a portrait of Jesus which has not the faintest claim to be historical, and the most far-fetched of these find favour, and are eagerly absorbed by the multitude.It would be something to be thankful for if all these Lives of Jesus were based on as definite an idea and as acute historical observation as we find in Albert Dulk's“The Error of the Life of Jesus.”252In Dulk the story of the fate of Jesus is also the story of the fate of religion. The Galilaean teacher, whose true character was marked by deep religious inwardness, was doomed to destruction from the moment when He set Himself upon the dizzy heights of the divine sonship and the eschatological expectation. He died in despair, having vainly expected, down to the very last, a“telegram from heaven.”Religion as a whole can only avoid the same fate by renouncing all transcendental elements.The vast numbers of imaginative Lives of Jesus shrink into remarkably small compass on a close examination. When one knows two or three of them, one knows them all. They have scarcely altered since Venturini's time, except that some of the cures performed by Jesus are handled in the modern Lives from the point of view of the recent investigations in hypnotism and suggestion.253[pg 325]According to Paul de Régla254Jesus was born out of wedlock. Joseph, however, gave shelter and protection to the mother. De Régla dwells on the beauty of the child.“His eyes were not exceptionally large, but were well-opened, and were shaded by long, silky, dark-brown eyelashes, and rather deep-set. They were of a blue-grey colour, which changed with changing emotions, taking on various shades, especially blue and brownish-grey.”He and His disciples were Essenes, as was also the Baptist. That implies that He was no longer a Jew in the strict sense. His preaching dealt with the rights of man, and put forward socialistic and communistic demands: His religion in the pure consciousness of communion with God. With eschatology He had nothing whatever to do, it was first interpolated into His teaching by Matthew.The miracles are all to be explained by suggestion and hypnotism. At the marriage at Cana, Jesus noticed that the guests were taking too much, and therefore secretly bade the servants pour out water instead of wine while He Himself said,“Drink, this is better wine.”In this way He succeeded in suggesting to a part of the company that they were really drinking wine. The feeding of the multitude is explained by striking out a couple of noughts from the numbers; the raising of Lazarus by supposing it a case of premature burial. Jesus Himself when taken down from the cross was not dead, and the Essenes succeeded in reanimating Him. His work is inspired with hatred against Catholicism, but with a real reverence for Jesus.Another mere variant of the plan of Venturini is the fictitious Life of Jesus of Pierre Nahor.255The sentimental descriptions of nature and the long dialogues characteristic of the Lives of Jesus of a hundred years ago are here again in full force. After John had already begun to preach in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, Jesus, in company with a distinguished Brahmin who possessed property at Nazareth and had an influential following in Jerusalem, made a journey to Egypt and was there indoctrinated into all kinds of Egyptian, Essene, and Indian philosophy, thus giving the author,[pg 326]or rather the authoress, an opportunity to develop her ideas on the philosophy of religion in didactic dialogues. When He soon afterwards begins to work in Galilee the young teacher is much aided by the fact that, at the instance of His fellow-traveller, He had acquired from Egyptian mendicants a practical acquaintance with the secrets of hypnotism. By His skill He healed Mary of Magdala, a distinguished courtesan of Tiberias. They had met before at Alexandria. After being cured she left Tiberias and went to live in a small house, inherited from her mother, at Magdala.Jesus Himself never went to Tiberias, but the social world of that place took an interest in Him, and often had itself rowed to the beach when He was preaching. Rich and pious ladies used to inquire of Him where He thought of preaching to the people on a given day, and sent baskets of bread and dried fish to the spot which He indicated, that the multitude might not suffer hunger. This is the explanation of the stories about the feeding of the multitudes; the people had no idea whence Jesus suddenly obtained the supplies which He caused His disciples to distribute.When he became aware that the priests had resolved upon His death, He made His friend Joseph of Arimathea, a leading man among the Essenes, promise that he would take Him down from the cross as soon as possible and lay Him in the grave without other witnesses. Only Nicodemus was to be present. On the cross He put Himself into a cataleptic trance; He was taken down from the cross seemingly dead, and came to Himself again in the grave. After appearing several times to His disciples he set out for Nazareth and dragged His way painfully thither. With a last effort He reaches the house of His mysterious old Indian teacher. At the door He falls helpless, just as the morning dawns. The old slave-woman recognises Him and carries Him into the house, where He dies.“The serene solemn night withdrew and day broke in blinding splendour behind Tiberias.”Nikolas Notowitsch256finds in Luke i. 80 (“And the child grew[pg 327]... and was in the deserts until the day of his shewing unto Israel”) a“gap in the life of Jesus,”in spite of the fact that this passage refers to the Baptist, and proposes to fill it by putting Jesus to school with the Brahmins and Buddhists from His thirteenth to His twenty-ninth year. As evidence for this he refers to statements about Buddhist worship of a certain Issa which he professes to have found in the monasteries of Little Thibet. The whole thing is, as was shown by the experts, a barefaced swindle and an impudent invention.To the fictitious Lives of Jesus belong also in the main the theosophical“Lives,”which equally play fast and loose with the history, though here with a view to proving that Jesus had absorbed the Egyptian and Indian theosophy, and had been indoctrinated with“occult science.”The theosophists, however, have the advantage of escaping the dilemma between reanimation after a trance and resurrection, since they are convinced that it was possible for Jesus to reassume His body after He had really died. But in the touching up and embellishment of the Gospel narratives they out-do even the romancers.Ernest Bosc,257writing as a theosophist, makes it the chief aim of his work to describe the oriental origin of Christianity, and ventures to assert that Jesus was not a Semite, but an Aryan. The Fourth Gospel is, of course, the basis of his representation. He does not hesitate, however, to appeal also to the anonymous“Revelations”published in 1849, which are a mere plagiarism from Venturini.A work which is written with some ability and with much out-of-the-way learning is“Did Jesus live 100b.c.?”258The author compares the Christian tradition with the Jewish, and finds in the latter a reminiscence of a Jesus who lived in the time of Alexander Jannaeus (104-76b.c.). This person was transferred by the earliest Evangelist to the later period, the attempt being facilitated by the fact that during the procuratorship of Pilate a false prophet had attracted some attention. The author, however, only professes to offer it as a hypothesis, and apologises in advance for the offence which it is likely to cause.
According to Albert Kalthoff,242the fire lighted itself—Christianity arose—by spontaneous combustion, when the inflammable material, religious and social, which had collected together in the Roman Empire, came in contact with the Jewish Messianic expectations. Jesus of Nazareth never existed; and even supposing He had been one of the numerous Jewish Messiahs who were put to death by crucifixion, He certainly did not found Christianity. The story of Jesus which lies before us in the Gospels is in reality only the story of the way in which the picture of Christ arose, that is to say, the story of the growth of the Christian community. There is therefore no problem of the Life of Jesus, but only a problem of the Christ.
Kalthoff has not indeed always been so negative. When in the year 1880 he gave a series of lectures on the Life of Jesus he felt himself justified“in taking as his basis without further argument the generally accepted results of modern theology.”Afterwards he became so completely doubtful about the Christ after the flesh whom he had at that time depicted before his hearers that he wished to exclude Him even from the register of theological literature, and omitted to enter these lectures in the list of his writings, although they had appeared in print.243
His quarrel with the historical Jesus of modern theology was that he could find no connecting link between the Life of Jesus constructed by the latter and primitive Christianity. Modern theology, he remarks in one passage, with great justice, finds itself obliged to assume, at the point where the history of the Church begins,“an immediate declension from, and falsification of, a pure original principle,”and that in so doing“it is deserting the recognised methods of historical science.”If then we cannot trace the path from its beginning onwards, we had better try to work backwards, endeavouring first to define in the theology of the primitive Church the values which we shall look to find again in the Life of Jesus.
In that he is right. Modern historical theology will not have refuted him until it has explained how Christianity arose out of the life of Jesus without calling in that theory of an initial“Fall”of which Harnack, Wernle, and all the rest make use. Until this modern theology has made it in some measure intelligible how, under the influence of the Jewish Messiah-sect, in the twinkling of an eye, in every direction at once, Graeco-Roman popular Christianity arose; until at least it has described the popular Christianity of the first three generations, it must concede to all hypotheses which fairly face this problem and endeavour to solve it their formal right of existence.
The criticism which Kalthoff directs against the“positive”accounts of the Life of Jesus is, in part, very much to the point.“Jesus,”he says in one place,“has been made the receptacle into which every theologian pours his own ideas.”He rightly remarks that if we follow“the Christ”backwards from the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament right to the apocalyptic vision of Daniel, we always find in Him superhuman traits alongside of the human.“Never and nowhere,”he insists,“is He that which critical theology has endeavoured to make out of Him, a purely natural man, an indivisible historical unit.”“The title of 'Christ' had been raised by the Messianic apocalyptic writings so completely into the sphere of the heroic that it had become impossible to[pg 315]apply it to a mere historical man.”Bruno Bauer had urged the same considerations upon the theology of his time, declaring it to be unthinkable that a man could have arisen among the Jews and declared“I am the Messiah.”
But the unfortunate thing is that Kalthoff has not worked through Bruno Bauer's criticism, and does not appear to assume it as a basis, but remains standing half-way instead of thinking the questions through to the end as that keen critic did. According to Kalthoff it would appear that, year in year out, there was a constant succession of Messianic disturbances among the Jews and of crucified claimants of the Messiahship.“There had been many a 'Christ,'”he says in one place,“before there was any question of a Jesus in connexion with this title.”
How does Kalthoff know that? If he had fairly considered and felt the force of Bruno Bauer's arguments, he would never have ventured on this assertion; he would have learned that it is not only historically unproved, but intrinsically impossible.
But Kalthoff was in far too great a hurry to present to his readers a description of the growth of Christianity, and therewith of the picture of the Christ, to absorb thoroughly the criticism of his great predecessor. He soon leads his reader away from the high road of criticism into a morass of speculation, in order to arrive by a short cut at Graeco-Roman primitive Christianity. But the trouble is that while the guide walks lightly and safely, the ordinary man, weighed down by the pressure of historical considerations, sinks to rise no more.
The conjectural argument which Kalthoff follows out is in itself acute, and forms a suitable pendant to Bauer's reconstruction of the course of events. Bauer proposed to derive Christianity from the Graeco-Roman philosophy; Kalthoff, recognising that the origin of popular Christianity constitutes the main question, takes as his starting-point the social movements of the time.
In the Roman Empire, so runs his argument, among the oppressed masses of the slaves and the populace, eruptive forces were concentrated under high tension. A communistic movement arose, to which the influence of the Jewish element in the proletariat gave a Messianic-Apocalyptic colouring. The Jewish synagogue influenced Roman social conditions so that“the crude social ferment at work in the Roman Empire amalgamated itself with the religious and philosophical forces of the time to form the new Christian social movement.”Early Christian writers had learned in the synagogue to construct“personifications.”The whole Late-Jewish literature rests upon this principle. Thus“the Christ”became the ideal hero of the Christian community,“from the socio-religious standpoint the figure of Christ is the[pg 316]sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical forces which were at work at a certain period.”The Lord's Supper was the memorial feast of this ideal hero.
“As the Christ to whose Parousia the community looks forward this Hero-god of the community bears within Himself the capacity for expansion into the God of the universe, into the Christ of the Church, who is identical in essential nature with God the Father. Thus the belief in the Christ brought the Messianic hope of the future into the minds of the masses, who had already a certain organisation, and by directing their thoughts towards the future it won all those who were sick of the past and despairing about the present.”
The death and resurrection of Jesus represent experiences of the community.“For a Jew crucified under Pontius Pilate there was certainly no resurrection. All that is possible is a vague hypothesis of a vision lacking all historical reality, or an escape into the vaguenesses of theological phraseology. But for the Christian community the resurrection was something real, a matter of fact. For the community as such was not annihilated in that persecution: it drew from it, rather, new strength and life.”
But what about the foundations of this imposing structure?
For what he has to tell us about the condition of the Roman Empire and the social organisation of the proletariat in the time of Trajan—for it was then that the Church first came out into the light—we may leave the responsibility with Kalthoff. But we must inquire more closely how he brings the Jewish apocalyptic into contact with the Roman proletariat.
Communism, he says, was common to both. It was the bond which united the apocalyptic“other-worldliness”with reality. The only difficulty is that Kalthoff omits to produce any proof out of the Jewish apocalypses that communism was“the fundamental economic idea of the apocalyptic writers.”He operates from the first with a special preparation of apocalyptic thought, of a socialistic or Hellenistic character. Messianism is supposed to have taken its rise from the Deuteronomic reform as“a social theory which strives to realise itself in practice.”The apocalyptic of Daniel arose, according to him, under Platonic influence.“The figure of the Messiah thus became a human figure; it lost its specifically Jewish traits.”He is the heavenly proto-typal ideal man. Along with this thought, and similarly derived from Plato, the conception of immortality makes its appearance in apocalyptic.244This Platonic apocalyptic never had any existence, or at least,[pg 317]to speak with the utmost possible caution, its existence must not be asserted in the absence of all proof.
But, supposing it were admitted that Jewish apocalyptic had some affinity for the Hellenic world, that it was Platonic and communistic, how are we to explain the fact that the Gospels, which describe the genesis of Christ and Christianity, imply a Galilaean and not a Roman environment?
As a matter of fact, Kalthoff says, they do imply a Roman environment. The scene of the Gospel history is laid in Palestine, but it is drawn in Rome. The agrarian conditions implied in the narratives and parables are Roman. A vineyard with a wine-press of its own could only be found, according to Kalthoff, on the large Roman estates. So, too, the legal conditions. The right of the creditor to sell the debtor, with his wife and children, is a feature of Roman, not of Jewish law.
Peter everywhere symbolises the Church at Rome. The confession of Peter had to be transferred to Caesarea Philippi because this town,“as the seat of the Roman administration,”symbolised for Palestine the political presence of Rome.
The woman with the issue was perhaps Poppaea Sabina, the wife of Nero,“who in view of her strong leaning towards Judaism might well be described in the symbolical style of the apocalyptic writings as the woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment.”
The story of the unfaithful steward alludes to Pope Callixtus, who, when the slave of a Christian in high position, was condemned to the mines for the crime of embezzlement; that of the woman who was a sinner refers to Marcia, the powerful mistress of Commodus, at whose intercession Callixtus was released, to be advanced soon afterwards to the bishopric of Rome.“These two narratives, therefore,”Kalthoff suggests,“which very clearly allude to events well known at that time, and doubtless much discussed in the Christian community, were admitted into the Gospel to express the views of the Church regarding the life-story of a Roman bishop which had run its course under the eyes of the community, and thereby to give to the events themselves the Church's sanction and interpretation.”
Kalthoff does not, unfortunately, mention whether this is a case of simple, ingenuous, or of conscious, didactic, Early Christian imagination.
That kind of criticism is a casting out of Satan by the aid of Beelzebub. If he was going to invent on this scale, Kalthoff need not have found any difficulty in accepting the figure of Jesus evolved by modern theology. One feels annoyed with him because, while his thesis is ingenious, and, as against“modern theology”has a considerable measure of justification, he has worked it out in so uninteresting a fashion. He has no one but himself to blame[pg 318]for the fact that instead of leading to the right explanation, it only introduced a wearisome and unproductive controversy.245
In the end there remains scarcely a shade of distinction between Kalthoff and his opponents. They want to bring their“historical Jesus”into the midst of our time. He wants to do the same with his“Christ.”“A secularised Christ,”he says,“as the type of the self-determined man who amid strife and suffering carries through victoriously, and fully realises, His own personality in order to give the infinite fullness of love which He bears within Himself as a blessing to mankind—a Christ such as that can awaken to new life the antique Christ-type of the Church. He is no longer the Christ of the scholar, of the abstract theological thinker with his scholastic rules and methods. He is the people's Christ, the Christ of the ordinary man, the figure in which all those powers of the human soul which are most natural and simple—and therefore most exalted and divine—find an expression at once sensible and spiritual.”But that is precisely the description of the Jesus of modern historical theology; why, then, make this long roundabout through scepticism? The Christ of Kalthoff is nothing else than the Jesus of those whom he combats in such a lofty fashion; the only difference is that he draws his figure of Christ in red ink on blotting-paper, and because it is red in colour and smudgy in outline, wants to make out that it is something new.
It is on ethical grounds that Eduard von Hartmann246refuses to accept the Jesus of modern theology. He finds fault with it because in its anxiety to retain a personality which would be of value to religion it does not sufficiently distinguish between the authentic and the“historical”Jesus. When criticism has removed the paintings-over and retouchings to which this authentic portrait of Jesus has been subjected, it reaches, according to him, an unrecognisable painting below, in which it is impossible to discover any clear likeness, least of all one of any religious use and value.
Were it not for the tenacity and the simple fidelity of the epic tradition, nothing whatever would have remained of the historic Jesus. What has remained is merely of historical and psychological interest.
At His first appearance the historic Jesus was, according to[pg 319]Eduard von Hartmann, almost“an impersonal being,”since He regarded Himself so exclusively as the vehicle of His message that His personality hardly came into the question. As time went on, however, He developed a taste for glory and for wonderful deeds, and fell at last into a condition of“abnormal exaltation of personality.”In the end He declares Himself to His disciples and before the council as Messiah.“When He felt His death drawing nigh He struck the balance of His life, found His mission a failure, His person and His cause abandoned by God, and died with the unanswered question on His lips,‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”
It is significant that Eduard von Hartmann has not fallen into the mistake of Schopenhauer and many other philosophers, of identifying the pessimism of Jesus with the Indian speculative pessimism of Buddha. The pessimism of Jesus, he says, is not metaphysical, it is“a pessimism of indignation,”born of the intolerable social and political conditions of the time. Von Hartmann also clearly recognises the significance of eschatology, but he does not define its character quite correctly, since he bases his impressions solely on the Talmud, hardly making any use of the Old Testament, of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, or Fourth Ezra. He has an irritating way of still using the name“Jehovah.”
Like Reimarus—von Hartmann's positions are simply modernised Reimarus—he is anxious to show that Christian theology has lost the right“to treat the ideal Kingdom of God as belonging to itself.”Jesus and His teaching, so far as they have been preserved, belong to Judaism. His ethic is for us strange and full of stumbling-blocks. He despises work, property, and the duties of family life. His gospel is fundamentally plebeian, and completely excludes the idea of any aristocracy except in so far as it consents to plebeianise itself, and this is true not only as regards the aristocracy of rank, property, and fortune, but also the aristocracy of intellect. Von Hartmann cannot resist the temptation to accuse Jesus of“Semitic harshness,”finding the evidence of this chiefly in Mark iv. 12, where Jesus declares that the purpose of His parables was to obscure His teaching and cause the hearts of the people to be hardened.
His judgment upon Jesus is:“He had no genius, but a certain talent which, in the complete absence of any sound education, produced in general only moderate results, and was not sufficient to preserve Him from numerous weaknesses and serious errors; at heart a fanatic and a transcendental enthusiast, who in spite of an inborn kindliness of disposition hates and despises the world and everything it contains, and holds any interest in it to be injurious to the sole true, transcendental interest; an amiable and modest youth who, through a remarkable concatenation of circumstances[pg 320]arrived at the idea, which was at that time epidemic,247that He was Himself the expected Messiah, and in consequence of this met His fate.”
It is to be regretted that a mind like Eduard von Hartmann's should not have got beyond the externals of the history, and made an effort to grasp the simple and impressive greatness of the figure of Jesus in its eschatological setting; and that he should imagine he has disposed of the strangeness which he finds in Jesus when he has made it as small as possible. And yet in another respect there is something satisfactory about his book. It is the open struggle of the Germanic spirit with Jesus. In this battle the victory will rest with true greatness. Others wanted to make peace before the struggle, or thought that theologians could fight the battle alone, and spare their contemporaries the doubts about the historical Jesus through which it was necessary to pass in order to reach the eternal Jesus—and to this end they kept preaching reconciliation while fighting the battle. They could only preach it on a basis of postulates, and postulates make poor preaching! Thus, Jülicher, for example, in his latest sketches of the Life of Jesus248distinguishes between“Jewish and supra-Jewish”in Jesus, and holds that Jesus transferred the ideal of the Kingdom of God“to the solid ground of the present, bringing it into the course of historical events,”and further“associated with the Kingdom of God”the idea of development which was utterly opposed to all Jewish ideas about the Kingdom. Jülicher also desires to raise“the strongest protest against the poor little definition of His preaching which makes it consist in nothing further than an announcement of the nearness of the Kingdom, and an exhortation to the repentance necessary as a condition for attaining the Kingdom.”
But when has a protest against the pure truth of history ever been of any avail? Why proclaim peace where there is no peace, and attempt to put back the clock of time? Is it not enough that Schleiermacher and Ritschl succeeded again and again in making theology send on earth peace instead of a sword, and does not the[pg 321]weakness of Christian thought as compared with the general culture of our time result from the fact that it did not face the battle when it ought to have faced it, but persisted in appealing to a court of arbitration on which all the sciences were represented, but which it had successfully bribed in advance?
Now there comes to join the philosophers a jurist. Herr Doctor jur. De Jonge lends his aid to Eduard von Hartmann in“destroying the ecclesiastical,”and“unveiling the Jewish picture of Jesus.”249
De Jonge is a Jew by birth, baptized in 1889, who on the 22nd of November 1902 again separated himself from the Christian communion and was desirous of being received back“with certain evangelical reservations”into the Jewish community. In spite of his faithful observance of the Law, this was refused. Now he is waiting“until in the Synagogue of the twentieth century a freedom of conscience is accorded to him equal to that which in the first century was enjoyed by John, the beloved disciple of Jeschua of Nazareth.”In the meantime he beguiles the period of waiting by describing Jesus and His earliest followers in the character of pattern Jews, and sets them to work in the interest of his“Jewish views with evangelical reservations.”
It is the colourless, characterless Jesus of the Superintendents and Konsistorialrats which especially arouses his enmity. With this figure he contrasts his own Jesus, the man of holy anger, the man of holy calm, the man of holy melancholy, the master of dialectic, the imperious ruler, the man of high gifts and practical ability, the man of inexorable consistency and reforming vigour.
Jesus was, according to De Jonge, a pupil of Hillel. He demanded voluntary poverty only in special cases, not as a general principle. In the case of the rich young man, He knew“that the property which he had inherited was derived in this particular case from impure sources which must be cut off at once and for ever.”
But how does De Jonge know that Jesus knew this?
A writer who is attacking the common theological picture of Jesus, and who displays in the process, as De Jonge does, not only[pg 322]wit and address, but historical intuition, ought not to fall into the error of the theology with which he is at feud; he ought to use sober history as his weapon against the supplementary knowledge which his opponents seem to find between the lines, instead of meeting it with an esoteric historical knowledge of his own.
De Jonge knows that Jesus possessed property inherited from His father:“One proof may serve where many might be given—the hasty flight into Egypt with his whole family to escape from Herod, and the long sojourn in that country.”
De Jonge knows—he is here, however, following the Gospel of John, to which he everywhere gives the preference—that Jesus was between forty and fifty years old at the time of His first coming forward publicly. The statement in Luke iii. 23, that He was ὡσεί thirty years old, can only mislead those who do not remember that Luke was a portrait painter and only meant that“Jeschua, in consequence of His glorious beauty and His ever-youthful appearance, looked ten years younger than He really was.”
De Jonge knows also that Jesus, at the time when He first emerged from obscurity, was a widower and had a little son—the“lad”of John vi. 9, who had the five barley loaves and two fishes, was in fact His son. This and many other things the author finds in“the glorious John.”According to De Jonge too we ought to think of Jesus as the aristocratic Jew, more accustomed to a dress coat than to a workman's blouse, something of an expert, as appears from some of the parables, in matters of the table, and conning the menu with interest when He dined with“privy-finance-councillor”Zacchaeus.
But this is to modernise more distressingly than even the theologians!
De Jonge's one-sided preference for the Fourth Gospel is shared by Kirchbach's book,“What did Jesus teach?”250but here everything, instead of being judaised, is spiritualised. Kirchbach does not seem to have been acquainted with Noack's“History of Jesus,”otherwise he would hardly have ventured to repeat the same experiment without the latter's touch of genius and with much less skill and knowledge.
The teaching of Jesus is interpreted on the lines of the Kantian philosophy. The saying,“No man hath seen God at any time,”is to be understood as if it were derived from the same system of thought as the“Critique of Pure Reason.”Jesus always used the[pg 323]words“death”and“life”in a purely metaphorical sense. Eternal life is for Him not a life in another world, but in the present. He speaks of Himself as the Son of God, not as the Jewish Messiah. Son of Man is only the ethical explanation of Son of God. The only reason why a Son-of-Man problem has arisen, is because Matthew translated the ancient term Son of Man in the original collection of Logia“with extreme literality.”
The great discourse of Matt. xxiii. with its warnings and threatenings is, according to Kirchbach, merely“a patriotic oration in which Jesus gives expression in moving words to His opposition to the Pharisees and His inborn love of His native land.”
The teaching of Jesus is not ascetic, it closely resembles the real teaching of Epicurus,“that is, the rejection of all false metaphysics, and the resulting condition of blessedness, ofmakaria.”The only purpose of the demand addressed to the rich young man was to try him.“If the youth, instead of slinking away dejectedly because he was called upon to sell all his goods, had replied, confident in the possession of a rich fund of courage, energy, ability, and knowledge,‘Right gladly. It will not go to my heart to part with my little bit of property; if I'm not to have it, why then I can do without it,’the Rabbi would probably in that case not have taken him at his word, but would have said,‘Young man, I like you. You have a good chance before you, you may do something in the Kingdom of God, and in any case for My sake you may attach yourself to Me by way of trial. We can talk about your stocks and bonds later.’”
Finally, Kirchbach succeeds, though only, it must be admitted, by the aid of some rather awkward phraseology, in spiritualising John vi.“It is not the body,”he explains,“of the long departed thinker, who apparently attached no importance whatever to the question of personal survival, that we, who understand Him in the right Greek sense,‘eat’; in the sense which He intended, we eat and drink, and absorb into ourselves, His teaching, His spirit, His sublime conception of life, by constantly recalling them in connexion with the symbol of bread and flesh, the symbol of blood, the symbol of water.”251
Worthless as Kirchbach's Life of Jesus is from an historical point of view, it is quite comprehensible as a phase in the struggle between the modern view of the world and Jesus. The aim of the[pg 324]work is to retain His significance for a metaphysical and non-ascetic time; and since it is not possible to do this in the case of the historical Jesus, the author denies His existence in favour of an apocryphal Jesus.
It is, in fact, the characteristic feature of the Life-of-Jesus literature on the threshold of the new century even in the productions of professedly historical and scientific theology, to subordinate the historical interest to the interest of the general world-view. And those who“wrest the Kingdom of Heaven”are beginning to wrest Jesus Himself along with it. Men who have no qualifications for the task, whose ignorance is nothing less than criminal, who loftily anathematise scientific theology instead of making themselves in some measure acquainted with the researches which it has carried out, feel impelled to write a Life of Jesus, in order to set forth their general religious view in a portrait of Jesus which has not the faintest claim to be historical, and the most far-fetched of these find favour, and are eagerly absorbed by the multitude.
It would be something to be thankful for if all these Lives of Jesus were based on as definite an idea and as acute historical observation as we find in Albert Dulk's“The Error of the Life of Jesus.”252In Dulk the story of the fate of Jesus is also the story of the fate of religion. The Galilaean teacher, whose true character was marked by deep religious inwardness, was doomed to destruction from the moment when He set Himself upon the dizzy heights of the divine sonship and the eschatological expectation. He died in despair, having vainly expected, down to the very last, a“telegram from heaven.”Religion as a whole can only avoid the same fate by renouncing all transcendental elements.
The vast numbers of imaginative Lives of Jesus shrink into remarkably small compass on a close examination. When one knows two or three of them, one knows them all. They have scarcely altered since Venturini's time, except that some of the cures performed by Jesus are handled in the modern Lives from the point of view of the recent investigations in hypnotism and suggestion.253
According to Paul de Régla254Jesus was born out of wedlock. Joseph, however, gave shelter and protection to the mother. De Régla dwells on the beauty of the child.“His eyes were not exceptionally large, but were well-opened, and were shaded by long, silky, dark-brown eyelashes, and rather deep-set. They were of a blue-grey colour, which changed with changing emotions, taking on various shades, especially blue and brownish-grey.”
He and His disciples were Essenes, as was also the Baptist. That implies that He was no longer a Jew in the strict sense. His preaching dealt with the rights of man, and put forward socialistic and communistic demands: His religion in the pure consciousness of communion with God. With eschatology He had nothing whatever to do, it was first interpolated into His teaching by Matthew.
The miracles are all to be explained by suggestion and hypnotism. At the marriage at Cana, Jesus noticed that the guests were taking too much, and therefore secretly bade the servants pour out water instead of wine while He Himself said,“Drink, this is better wine.”In this way He succeeded in suggesting to a part of the company that they were really drinking wine. The feeding of the multitude is explained by striking out a couple of noughts from the numbers; the raising of Lazarus by supposing it a case of premature burial. Jesus Himself when taken down from the cross was not dead, and the Essenes succeeded in reanimating Him. His work is inspired with hatred against Catholicism, but with a real reverence for Jesus.
Another mere variant of the plan of Venturini is the fictitious Life of Jesus of Pierre Nahor.255The sentimental descriptions of nature and the long dialogues characteristic of the Lives of Jesus of a hundred years ago are here again in full force. After John had already begun to preach in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, Jesus, in company with a distinguished Brahmin who possessed property at Nazareth and had an influential following in Jerusalem, made a journey to Egypt and was there indoctrinated into all kinds of Egyptian, Essene, and Indian philosophy, thus giving the author,[pg 326]or rather the authoress, an opportunity to develop her ideas on the philosophy of religion in didactic dialogues. When He soon afterwards begins to work in Galilee the young teacher is much aided by the fact that, at the instance of His fellow-traveller, He had acquired from Egyptian mendicants a practical acquaintance with the secrets of hypnotism. By His skill He healed Mary of Magdala, a distinguished courtesan of Tiberias. They had met before at Alexandria. After being cured she left Tiberias and went to live in a small house, inherited from her mother, at Magdala.
Jesus Himself never went to Tiberias, but the social world of that place took an interest in Him, and often had itself rowed to the beach when He was preaching. Rich and pious ladies used to inquire of Him where He thought of preaching to the people on a given day, and sent baskets of bread and dried fish to the spot which He indicated, that the multitude might not suffer hunger. This is the explanation of the stories about the feeding of the multitudes; the people had no idea whence Jesus suddenly obtained the supplies which He caused His disciples to distribute.
When he became aware that the priests had resolved upon His death, He made His friend Joseph of Arimathea, a leading man among the Essenes, promise that he would take Him down from the cross as soon as possible and lay Him in the grave without other witnesses. Only Nicodemus was to be present. On the cross He put Himself into a cataleptic trance; He was taken down from the cross seemingly dead, and came to Himself again in the grave. After appearing several times to His disciples he set out for Nazareth and dragged His way painfully thither. With a last effort He reaches the house of His mysterious old Indian teacher. At the door He falls helpless, just as the morning dawns. The old slave-woman recognises Him and carries Him into the house, where He dies.“The serene solemn night withdrew and day broke in blinding splendour behind Tiberias.”
Nikolas Notowitsch256finds in Luke i. 80 (“And the child grew[pg 327]... and was in the deserts until the day of his shewing unto Israel”) a“gap in the life of Jesus,”in spite of the fact that this passage refers to the Baptist, and proposes to fill it by putting Jesus to school with the Brahmins and Buddhists from His thirteenth to His twenty-ninth year. As evidence for this he refers to statements about Buddhist worship of a certain Issa which he professes to have found in the monasteries of Little Thibet. The whole thing is, as was shown by the experts, a barefaced swindle and an impudent invention.
To the fictitious Lives of Jesus belong also in the main the theosophical“Lives,”which equally play fast and loose with the history, though here with a view to proving that Jesus had absorbed the Egyptian and Indian theosophy, and had been indoctrinated with“occult science.”The theosophists, however, have the advantage of escaping the dilemma between reanimation after a trance and resurrection, since they are convinced that it was possible for Jesus to reassume His body after He had really died. But in the touching up and embellishment of the Gospel narratives they out-do even the romancers.
Ernest Bosc,257writing as a theosophist, makes it the chief aim of his work to describe the oriental origin of Christianity, and ventures to assert that Jesus was not a Semite, but an Aryan. The Fourth Gospel is, of course, the basis of his representation. He does not hesitate, however, to appeal also to the anonymous“Revelations”published in 1849, which are a mere plagiarism from Venturini.
A work which is written with some ability and with much out-of-the-way learning is“Did Jesus live 100b.c.?”258The author compares the Christian tradition with the Jewish, and finds in the latter a reminiscence of a Jesus who lived in the time of Alexander Jannaeus (104-76b.c.). This person was transferred by the earliest Evangelist to the later period, the attempt being facilitated by the fact that during the procuratorship of Pilate a false prophet had attracted some attention. The author, however, only professes to offer it as a hypothesis, and apologises in advance for the offence which it is likely to cause.