Book One: The Person of Jesus
I. The Pagan Sources
WHATEVER one’s position may be with respect to
Christianity, it certainly must be recognized as one of the most
titanic phenomena in all human history. One can not resist a deep
feeling of wonder when one thinks of the Christian Church, now almost
two thousand years old and still vigorous, more powerful than the
governments of many countries. Anything that helps us to understand
this colossal phenomenon, including the study of its origin, is of
great and immediate practical significance, even though it takes us
back thousands of years.
This makes researches into the beginnings of Christianity of far
greater interest than any other historical question that goes back
further than the last two hundred years; it also however makes finding
the beginnings even more difficult than it would otherwise be.
The Christian Church has become a sovereign organisation serving the
needs either of its own rulers or those of other, secular rulers who
have been able to gain control over it. Any one who opposes these
rulers must oppose the church as well. The struggle about the church
and the struggle against the church have become matters of dispute
bound up with the most important economic interests. It thus becomes
only too easy to abandon impartiality in historical studies of the
church and this long ago led the ruling classes to interdict the study
of the beginnings of Christianity and to ascribe to the church a divine
nature, standing above and outside all human criticism.
The bourgeois age of reason in the eighteenth century finally
succeeded in getting rid of this halo. For the first time scientific
study of the genesis of Christianity became possible. But it is
remarkable how secular science avoided this field during the nineteenth
century, acting as though it still belonged exclusively to the realm of
theology. A whole series of historical works written by the most
eminent bourgeois historians of the nineteenth century dealing with the
Roman Empire quietly pass over the most important happening of the
time, the rise of Christianity. For instance, in the fifth volume of
his Roman History Mommsen gives a very extensive
account of the history of the Jews under the Caesars, and in so doing
can not avoid mentioning Christianity occasionally; but it appears only
as something already existing, something assumed to be already known.
By and large only the theologians and their adversaries, the
propagandists of free thought, have taken an interest in the beginnings
of Christianity.
It need not necessarily have been cowardice that kept bourgeois
historians from taking up the origin of Christianity; it could also
have been the desire to write history and not polemics. The hopeless
state of the sources out of which we have to get our information in
this field must alone have frightened them off.
The traditional view sees Christianity as the creation of a single
man, Jesus Christ. This view persists even today. It is true that
Jesus, at least in “enlightened” and “educated” circles, is no longer
considered a deity, but he is still held to have been an extraordinary
personality, who came to the fore with the intention of founding a new
religion, and did so, with tremendous success. Liberal theologians hold
this view, and so do radical free-thinkers; and the latter differ from
the theologians only with respect to the criticism they make of Christ
as a person, whom they seek to deprive of all the sublimity they can.
And yet, at the end of the eighteenth century the English historian Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(written 1774 to 1788), had ironically pointed out how striking it is
that none of Jesus’ contemporaries mentions him, although he is said to
have accomplished such remarkable feats.
“But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of
the Pagan and philosophic world to those evidences which were presented
by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses.
During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first
disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by
innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were
healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of
Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church. But the
sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and,
pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared
unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of
the world. At Jesus’ death, according to the Christian tradition, the
whole earth, or at least all Palestine, was in darkness for three
hours. This took place in the days of the elder Pliny, who devoted a
special chapter of his Natural History to eclipses; but of this eclipse he says nothing.” (Gibbon, Chap. 15).
But even if we leave miracles out of account, it is hard
to see how a personality like the Jesus of the gospels, who according
to them aroused such excitement in people’s minds, could carry on his
work and finally die as a martyr for his cause and yet not have pagan
and Jewish contemporaries devote a single word to him.
The first mention of Jesus by a non-Christian is found in the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus. The third chapter of book 18 deals with the procurator Pontius Pilate, and says among other things:
“About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if he can
be called human, for he worked miracles and was a teacher of men, who
received the truth gladly; and he found many followers among Jews and
Greeks. This was the Christ. Although later Pilate sentenced him to the
cross on the complaint of the noblest of our people, those who had
loved him remained true to him. For he appeared again to them on the
third day, risen to new life, as the prophets of God had prophesied
this and thousands of other wonderful things about him. From him comes
the name of the Christians, whose sect (phylon) has continued to exist ever since.”
Josephus speaks of Christ again in the 20th book, ch.9,
1, where the high priest Ananus is said in the time of the procurator
Albinus to have brought it about that “James, the brother of Jesus,
said to be the Christ (tou logomenou christou), together with some others, was brought to court, accused as a breaker of the law and delivered over to be stoned to death.”
These pieces of evidence have always been highly prized by
Christians; for they come from a non-Christian, a Jew and Pharisee,
born in the year 87 of our era and living in Jerusalem, and so very
well able to have authentic facts about Jesus. And his testimony was
the more valuable in that as a Jew he had no reason to falsify on
behalf of the Christians.
But it was precisely the exaggerated exaltation of Christ on the
part of a pious Jew that made the first passage suspect, and quite
early. Its authenticity was disputed even in the sixteenth century, and
today it is agreed that it is a forgery and does not stem from
Josephus. It was inserted in the third century by a Christian copyist, who
obviously took offense at the fact that Josephus, who repeats the most
trivial gossip from Palestine, says nothing at all about the person of
Jesus. The pious Christian felt with justice that the absence of any
such mention weighed against the existence or at least the significance
of his Savior. Now the discovery of his forgery has become testimony
against Jesus.
But the passage concerning James is also dubious. It is true that
Origen (185 to 254 A.D.) mentions testimony by Josephus concerning
James; this occurs in his commentary on Matthew. He remarks that it is
surprising that nonetheless Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the
Christ. In his polemic against Celsus, Origen cites this statement of
Josephus about James and again notes Josephus’ unbelief. These
statements by Origen constitute one of the proofs that the striking
passage about Jesus in which Josephus recognizes him as the Messiah,
the Christ, could not have been in the original text of Josephus. It
follows at once that the passage about James that Origen found in
Josephus was also a Christian forgery. For this passage he cites runs
quite differently from what we find in the manuscript of Josephus that
has come down to us. In it the destruction of Jerusalem is said to be a
punishment for the execution of James; but this fabrication is not
found in the other manuscripts of Josephus. The passage as it occurs in
the manuscripts of Josephus that have come down to us is not cited by
Origen, while he mentions the other version three times on different
occasions. And yet he carefully assembled all the testimony that could
be got from Josephus that had value for the Christian faith. It would
seem likely that the passage of Josephus about James that has come down
to us is also fraudulent, and was first inserted by a pious Christian,
to the greater glory of God, some time after Origen, but before
Eusebius, who cites the passage.
Like the mention of Jesus and James, the reference to John the Baptist in Josephus (Antiquities, XVIII, 5.2) is also suspect as an “interpolation”.
Thus Christian frauds had crept into Josephus as early as the end of
the second century. His silence concerning the chief figures in the
Gospels was too conspicuous, and required correction.
But even if the statement about James was genuine, it would prove at
most that there was a Jesus, whom people called Christ, that is, the
Messiah. It could not prove anything more. “If the passage actually had
to be ascribed to Josephus, all that critical theology would get from
it would be the thread of a web that could catch a whole generation.
There were so many would-be Christs at Josephus’ time and all the way
deep into the second century, that in many of the cases we have only
sketchy information left about them. There is a Judas of Galilee, a
Theudas, a nameless Egyptian, a Samaritan, a Bar Kochba, – why should
there not have been a Jesus among them as well? Jesus was a common
Jewish personal name.”
The second passage of Josephus tells us at best that among the
agitators in Palestine coming forward at that time as the Messiah, the
Lord’s anointed, there was also a Jesus. We learn nothing at all about
his life and work.
The next mention of Jesus by a non-Christian writer is found in the Annals
of the Roman historian Tacitus, composed around the year too. In the
fifteenth book the conflagration of Rome under Nero is described, and
chapter 44 says:
“In order to counteract the rumor [that blamed Nero
for the fire] he brought forward as the guilty ones men hated for their
crimes and called Christians by tile people; and punished them with the
most exquisite torments. The founder of their name, Christ, was
executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius; the
superstition was thereby suppressed for the moment, but broke out
again, not only in Judea, the land in which this evil originated, but
in Rome itself, to which everything horrible or shameful streams from
all sides and finds increase. First a few were taken, who made
confessions; then on their indications an enormous throng, who were not
accused directly of the crime of arson, but of hatred of humanity.
Their execution became a pastime; they were covered with the skins of
wild beasts and then torn to pieces by dogs, or they were crucified, or
prepared for burning and set on fire as soon as it was dark, to give
light in the night. Nero lent his gardens for this spectacle and
arranged circus games, in which he mingled among the crowd in the
clothing of a charioteer or drove a chariot himself. Although these
were criminals who deserved the severest punishments, sympathy arose
for them as being sacrificed not so much for the general good but to
satisfy the rage of an individual.”
This testimony is certainly not something falsified by
Christians in their favor. However its authenticity too is disputed,
since Dio Cassius knows nothing of a persecution of Christians under
Nero, although he lived a hundred years later than Tacitus. Suetonius,
writing shortly after Tacitus, also speaks, in his biography of Nero,
of a persecution of Christians, “men who had given themselves over to a
new and evil superstition” (chap. 16).
But Suetonius tells us nothing at all of Jesus and Tacitus does not
even hand down his name to us. Christ, the Greek word for “the
anointed”, is merely the Greek translation of the Hebrew word
“Messiah”. As to Christ’s work and the content of his doctrine Tacitus
says nothing.
And that is all that we learn about Jesus from non-Christian sources of the first century of our era.
II. The Christian Sources
BUT DO NOT the Christian sources gush forth all the more
richly? Do we not have in the Gospels the most extensive descriptions
of the teachings and deeds of Jesus?
It is true they are extensive; but as for credibility, there’s the
rub. The example of the falsification of Josephus showed us a character
trait of ancient Christian historians, their complete indifference to
the truth. It was not the truth, but effectiveness, that they were
interested in, and they were not too delicate in the choice of their
means.
To be fair, it must be granted that they were not alone in their
age. The Jewish religious literature had no higher standards, and the
“heathen” mystical tendencies in the centuries preceding and following
the beginning of our era were guilty of the same sins. Credulousness on
the part of the public, sensationalism together with lack of confidence
in their own powers, the need to cling to superhuman authority, lack of
a sense of reality (qualities whose causes we shall soon come to
learn), infected all of literature at that time, and the more it left
the ground of the traditional the more it was so infected. We shall
find numerous proofs of this in the Christian and Jewish literature.
But the same tendency appears in the mystical philosophy, which to be
sure had an inner affinity to Christianity. We see this in the
neo-Pythagoreans, a trend that began in the last century before our
era, a mixture of Platonism and Stoicism, full of revelations and
hungry for miracles, professing to be the doctrine of the old
philosopher Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century before our era –
or before Christ, as they say-and of whom extremely little was known.
That made it all the easier to attribute to him anything that needed
the authority of a great name.
“The neo-Pythagoreans wanted to be considered
faithful followers of the old Samian philosopher: in order to present
their theories as the old Pythagorean ones, those countless forged
documents were produced that put anything at all into the mouth of a
Pythagoras or an Archytas, no matter how recent it was or how well
known as stemming from Plate or Aristotle."
We see exactly the same phenomenon in the early
Christian literature, where it has produced such a chaos that for over
a hundred years a series of the keenest minds have been working on it
without getting very far in attaining any definitive results.
How the most discordant notions as to the origin of the early
Christian writings still exist side by side can be shown by the case of
the Revelation of St. John, an especially hard nut to crack anyway.
Pfleiderer says of it in his book on Early Christianity, Its Writings and Doctrines:
“The book of Daniel was the oldest of such
apocalypses and the model for the whole genus. Just as the key to the
visions of Daniel was found in the events of the Jewish war under
Antiochus Epiphanes, so the conclusion was correctly drawn that the
apocalypse of John too must be explained by means of the conditions of
its time. Now since the mystic number 666 in the eighteenth verse of
the thirteenth chapter was interpreted almost simultaneously by various
scholars (Benary, Hitzig and Reuss) as indicating the Emperor Nero in
Hebrew letters, a comparison of chapters l6 and 17 led to the
conclusion that Revelation was written soon after Nero’s death in 68.
This long remained the dominant view, in particular in the old Tübingen
school, which still assumed that the book was written by the apostle
John and thought it had the key to the whole book in the party battles
between Judaists and Paulinists; this of course was not done without
crass arbitrariness (especially in Volkmar). A new step toward the
thorough study of the problem was made in 1882 by a student of
Weizsäcker. Daniel Völter, who used the hypothesis of a repeated
expansion and revision of a basic document between the years 66 and 170
(later up to 140), at the hands of various authors. The literary method
thus introduced was varied in the extreme during the next fifteen
years: Vischer would have it that an original Jewish document had been
worked over by a Christian editor; Sabatier and Schön postulated a
Christian document as the basis, into which Jewish elements had been
inserted; Weyland distinguished two Jewish sources from the times of
Nero and Titus, and a Christian editor in Trajan’s reign; Spitta saw a
Christian original of the year 60 and Jewish sources of 63 B.C. and 40
A.D., with a Christian editor in Trajan’s time; Schmidt, three Jewish
sources and two Christian; Völter, in a new work in 1893, an original
apocalypse dating from the year 62 and four revisions under Titus,
Domitian, Trajan and Hadrian. These mutually contradictory and
competing hypotheses had the sole result that ‘the unprejudiced got the
impression that in the field of New Testament scholarship there was
nothing sure and one could be sure of nothing’ (Jülicher).”
Pfleiderer believes none the less that “the strenuous
researches of the last twenty years” have given a “definite result,”
but does not venture to say definitely what it is, but opines that it
“seems” so to him. Almost the only definitive conclusions one can reach
with respect to early Christian literature are negative ones; that is,
we can find out definitely what is spurious.
It is certain that almost none of the early Christian writings are
by the authors whose names they bear; that most of them were written in
later times than the dates given them; and that their original text was
often distorted in the crudest way by later revisions and additions.
Finally, it is certain that none of the Gospels or other early
Christian writings comes from a contemporary of Jesus.
The so-called Gospel according to St. Mark is now regarded as the
oldest of the gospels, but was not in any case composed before the
destruction of Jerusalem, which the author has Jesus predict, which, in
other words, had already happened when the author began to write. It
was probably written not less than half a century after the time
assigned for the death of Jesus. What we see is thus the product of
half a century of legend-making.
Mark is followed by Luke, then by the so-called Matthew, and last of
all by John, in the middle of the second century, at least a century
after the birth of Christ. The further we get from the beginning, the
more miraculous the gospel stories become. Mark tells us of miracles,
but they are puny ones compared to those that follow. Take the raising
of the dead as an example. In Mark, Jesus is called to the bedside of
Jairus’ daughter, who is at the point of death. Everyone thinks she is
dead already, but Jesus says: “the damsel … but sleepeth,” reaches
out his hand, and she arises (Mark, Chap.5).
In Luke it is the young man of Nain who is waked. He is so long dead
that he is being borne to his grave as Jesus meets him. Then Jesus
makes him rise from the bier (Luke, Chap. 7).
That is not enough for John. In his eleventh chapter he shows us the
raising of Lazarus, who has been in his grave for four days already and
beginning to stink. That breaks the record.
In addition, the evangelists were extremely ignorant people, who had
thoroughly twisted ideas about many of the things they wrote of. Thus
Luke has Joseph leave Nazareth with Mary on account of a census in the
Roman Empire, and go to Bethlehem, where Jesus is born. But there was
no such census under Augustus. Moreover, Judea became a Roman province
only after the date given for the birth of Jesus. A census was held in
the year 7 A.D., but in the places where people lived, and thus did not
require the trip to Bethlehem. We shall have more to say on this topic.
The procedure of Jesus’ trial before Pontius Pilate is not in
conformity either with Jewish or with Roman law. Thus even where the
evangelists do not tell of miracles, they often relate what is false
and impossible.
And what was concocted as “Gospel” in this fashion later suffered
all sorts of alterations at the hands of “editors”, to the edification
of the faithful.
For example, the best manuscripts of Mark close with the eighth
verse of the sixteenth chapter, where the women seek the dead Jesus in
the grave, but find a youth in a long white robe instead. Then they
left the grave and “were afraid.”
What follows in the traditional editions was added later. It is
impossible however that the work ended with this eighth verse. Renan
already assumed that the remaining portion had been stricken out in the
interests of the good cause, since it contained an account that seemed
obnoxious to later views.
From another angle Pfleiderer, after intensive studies, came to the
conclusion, as did others, “that the Gospel of Luke said nothing of the
supernatural conception of Jesus, that this story came up only later
and was then inserted into the text by adding verse I, 34 ff. and the words ‘as was supposed’ in III, 29.“
In view of all this it is no wonder that by the first decades of the
nineteenth century many scholars had already recognized the complete
uselessness of the gospels as sources for the history of Jesus, and
Bruno Bauer could even go so far as to deny the existence of Jesus
altogether. It is understandable nevertheless that the theologians can
not dispense with the gospels, and even the liberals among them do all
they can to maintain their authority. For what is left of Christianity
if the person of Christ is given up? But in order to save this latter
point, they have to go through some strange contortions.
Thus Harnack in his lectures on the Wesen des Christentums
(1900) explains that David Friedrich Strauss thought he had succeeded
in demolishing the reliability of the gospels as history; but the
historical and critical work of two generations had succeeded in
restoring it to a great extent. The gospels were not historical works
anyway; they were not written to report how things happened, but were
works of edification. “Accordingly they are not useless as historical
sources, especially since their purpose is not borrowed from outside,
but coincides in part with the views of Jesus” (p.14).
But all we know of these views is what the gospels tell us!
Harnack’s whole argument for the credibility of the gospels as sources
for the person of Jesus only proves how impossible it is to offer
anything solid and penetrating in that direction.
Later in his essay Harnack is compelled to abandon everything that
the gospels say of Jesus’ first thirty years as unhistorical, as well
as everything regarding the following years that can be proved to be
impossible or invented. But he would like to save the rest as
historical fact. He thinks we still have left “a vivid picture of
Jesus’ teaching, the end of his life and the impression he made on his
disciples” (p.20).
But how does Harnack know that Jesus’ teaching is so faithfully
reported in the gospels? The theologians are more skeptical about the
reproduction of other teachings of the time. Harnack’s colleague
Pfleiderer says in his book on early Christianity:
“It does not really make sense to argue over the
historical reliability of these and other sermons in the apostolic
history; we need only think of all the conditions required for a
literally exact, or even an approximately correct, transmission of such
a sermon: it would have had to be written down immediately by an
auditor (properly speaking, it should be stenographic), and these
records of the various sermons would have to be preserved for more than
half a century in circles of hearers who were for the most part Jews
and heathen and indifferent or hostile to what they had heard, and
finally collected by the historian from the most scattered points! Any
one who has realized how impossible all these things are will know once
for all what to think of all these sermons: that is, in the stories of
the apostles as in all the secular historians of antiquity these
speeches are free compositions, in which the author has his heroes
speak in the way that he himself thinks they could have spoken in the
given situation” (p.500f.).
Right! But why should not all this apply to the sermons
of Jesus too, which were still further in the past for the authors of
the gospels than the sermons ascribed to the apostles? Why should
Jesus’ sermons in the gospels be anything more than speeches that the
authors of the reports wished Jesus had made? Actually, we find all
sorts of contradictions in the sermons that have come down to us, for
example both rebellious and submissive speeches, which can only be
explained by the fact that divergent tendencies existed among the
Christians, each group composing and handing down speeches for Christ
in accordance with its own requirements. How free and easy the
evangelists were in such matters can be seen from an example. Compare
the Sermon on the Mount in Luke and in Matthew, which is later. In the
first it is still a glorification of the poor and a damning of the
rich. By Matthew’s time this had become a touchy subject for many
Christians, and the Gospel according to Matthew baldly turns the poor
who are blessed into the poor of spirit, and leaves the damning of the
rich out altogether.
That is the sort of manipulation that went on with sermons that had
already been written down; and then we are asked to believe that
sermons that Jesus is said to have given half a century before they
were written down are faithfully reported in the gospels? It is clearly
impossible to keep the words of a speech straight merely by oral
tradition for fifty years. Anyone who writes down such a speech at the
end of such an interval shows thereby that he feels justified in
writing down what suits him, or that he is credulous enough to take at
face value everything he hears.
What is more, it can be shown that many of Jesus’ sayings do not originate with him, but were in circulation previously.
For instance, the Lord’s Prayer is regarded as a specific product of
Jesus. But Pfleiderer shows that an Aramaic Kaddish prayer going far
back into antiquity ended with the words: “Exalted and blessed be His
great name in the world that He created according to His will. May he
set up His kingdom in your lifetime and the lifetime of the whole house
of Israel.”
As we see, the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer is an imitation. But
if nothing is left of Jesus’ sermons, nothing left of the story of his
youth, certainly nothing left of his miracles, then what is left of the
gospels altogether? According to Harnack there is left the impression
Jesus made on his disciples, and the story of his Passion. But the
gospels were not written by disciples of Christ, they do not reflect
the impression made by the person of Christ, but that made by the story
of the person of Christ on the members of the Christian community. Even
the strongest impression does not testify to the historical truth of
any story. The story of an imaginary person is capable of producing the
deepest impression on society, if historical conditions for it are
present. Goethe’s Werther made a tremendous impression. Everyone knew that it was only a novel, nevertheless he had many disciples and followers.
In Judaism, and precisely in the centuries directly before and after
Jesus, fictitious personalities had tremendous influence when the deeds
and doctrines attributed to them corresponded to the deeply-felt needs
of the Jewish people. This is shown for example by the figure of the
prophet Daniel, of whom the book of Daniel reports that he lived under
Nebuchadnezzar, Darius and Cyrus, that is in the sixth century B.C.,
worked the greatest of miracles and made prophecies that were fulfilled
later in the most amazing way, ending with the prediction that great
afflictions would come to Judaism, out of which a savior would rescue
·them and raise them to new glory. This Daniel never lived; the book
dealing with him was written about 165, at the time of the Maccabean
uprising; and it is no wonder that all the prophecies that the prophet
ostensibly made in the sixth century were so strikingly confirmed up to
that year, and convinced the pious reader that the final prediction of
so infallible a prophet must come to pass without fail. The whole thing
is a bold fabrication and yet had the greatest effect; the belief in
the Messiah, the belief in a Savior to come, got its strongest
sustenance from it, and it became the model for all future prophecies
of a Messiah. The book of Daniel also shows, however, how casually
fraud was practiced in pious circles when it was a question of
attaining an end. The effect produced by the figure of Jesus is
therefore no proof at all of its historical accuracy.
Hence the only thing left of what Harnack thought could still be
rescued from the gospels as an historical nucleus is the Passion of
Christ. But this is so filled with miracles from beginning to end, up
to the Resurrection and Ascension, that even here it is virtually
impossible to get any kind of reliable historical nucleus. We shall
look further into the credibility of this story of the Passion later on.
Matters are in no better shape with the rest of early Christian
literature. Everything that ostensibly comes from contemporaries of
Jesus, as from his apostles for instance, is known to be spurious, at
least in the sense that it is a production of some later time.
And as for the letters that are attributed to the apostle Paul,
there is not one whose authenticity is not in dispute, and many of them
have been shown by historical criticism to be altogether false. The
baldest of these forgeries is the second letter to the Thessalonians.
In this counterfeit letter the author, using the name of Paul, warns:
“That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit,
nor by word, nor by letter as from us” (2, 2). And at the end the
forger adds: “The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the
token in every epistle: so I write.” It was just these words that
betrayed the forger.
A number of other letters of Paul are perhaps the earliest literary
evidence of Christianity. About Jesus however they tell us virtually
nothing, except that he was crucified and rose again.
It will not be necessary, at least for our readers, to go into
details as to what to think about the Resurrection. In a word, there is
hardly anything left in the Christian literature that can be said to be
a solidly established fact about Jesus.
III. The Dispute over the Concept of Jesus
THE factual core of the early Christian reports about
Jesus is at best no more than what Tacitus tells us: that in the days
of Tiberius a prophet was executed, from whom the sect of Christians
took their inspiration. As to what this prophet taught and did, we are
not yet able, even today, to say anything definite. Certainly he could
not have made the sensation the early Christian reports describe, or
Josephus who relates so many trivialities, would certainly have spoken
of it. Jesus’ agitation and his execution did not get the slightest
attention from his contemporaries. But if Jesus really was an agitator
that a sect honored as its champion and guide, the significance of his
person must have grown as the sect grew. Now a garland of legends began
to form around this person, pious minds weaving into it anything they
wished their model had said and done. The more this idealization went
on, the more each of the many currents within the sect tried to put
into the picture those features that were dearest to it, ill order to
lend them the authority of Jesus. The picture of Jesus, at it was
painted in the legends that were first passed from mouth to mouth, and
then put down in writing, became more and more the picture of a
superhuman person, the epitome of all the ideals the new sect
developed; but in the process it became an increasingly contradictory
picture, whose several features no longer harmonized.
When the sect achieved firm organization and became a comprehensive
church in which one definite tendency prevailed, one of its tasks was
the formation of a fixed canon, a list of all the early Christian
writings that it recognized as genuine. Naturally this included only
works in agreement with the prevailing tendency. All the gospels and
other writings that gave a different picture of Jesus were rejected as
“heretical”, as spurious, or as “apocryphal”, not quite trustworthy;
they were no longer disseminated, in fact they were suppressed so far
as that was possible, and copies of them were destroyed, so that only a
few of them have come down to us. The works received into the canon
were then “edited,” to get them into as much concordance as possible;
but fortunately the job was done so clumsily that traces of earlier,
divergent accounts may be seen here and there and betray the course of
development.
The aim of the Church, namely to assure the unity of opinions within
it by this process, was not attained and could not be. The development
of social relations kept producing new diversities of views and
endeavors in the Church. And thanks to the contradictions that remained
in the picture of Jesus recognized by the Church despite all the
editing and expurgating, these variations could always find something
in that picture they could use as a point of attachment. Thus the clash
of social contradictions came to appear within the framework of the
Christian Church as a mere dispute over the interpretation of the words
of Jesus, and superficial historians think that all the great (and so
often bloody) battles that were fought in Christendom under the flag of
religion were nothing but battles over words, a sad sign of mankind’s
stupidity. But wherever a social mass phenomenon is reduced to the mere
stupidity of the men involved, this alleged stupidity merely shows lack
of understanding on the part of the observer and critic, who has not
been able to orient himself in a way of thinking that is strange to
him, and to penetrate to the material conditions and forces that
underlie it. As a rule it was very real interests that were at grips
when the various Christian sects fell out over the interpretation of
Christ’s words.
It is true that with the rise of the modern way of thinking and the
eclipse of the clerical mode of thought the conflicts over the
conception of Jesus have lost more and more of their practical
importance and sunk to mere hair-splitting on the part of theologians,
who are paid precisely to keep the clerical mode of thought alive as
long as possible, and have to do something for their money.
Recent Bible criticism, which applies the methods of historical
research and analysis of sources to the biblical writings, has given
the dispute over the personality of Jesus a new fillip. It shook the
traditional picture of Jesus; but since it was carried on, for the most
part, by theologians, it stopped short of the position first formulated
by Bruno Bauer and later by others, in particular by A. Kalthoff: this
was the position that, in view of the condition of the source
materials, no new conception of Jesus could be formulated. The new
Bible criticism keeps searching for such a new conception, always with
the same result that the Christendom of previous centuries had
produced: each theologian painted into the picture of Jesus his own
private ideals and spirit. Like second century descriptions of Jesus,
twentieth-century ones do not show what Jesus really taught, but what
the makers of these descriptions wish he had taught.
Kalthoff points up these vagaries keenly:
“From the standpoint of social theology the
conception of Christ is the most sublimated religious expression of
every active social and ethical force in an epoch; and in the
transformations that this conception has constantly undergone, in the
fading of its old features and its illumination in new colors, we have
the most delicate instrument for measuring the changes in contemporary
life, from the heights of its spiritual ideals to the depths of its
most material actions. This picture of Christ some times has the
lineaments of a Creek thinker, then those of the Roman Emperor, then
those of the feudal lord of the manor, of the guild master, of the
tormented villein and of the free citizen; and these traits are all
true, all living, so long as the theologians of the school do not
undertake to prove that the single traits of their time are just the
ones which are the original and historical traits of the Christ of the
gospels. At most these traits acquire an appearance of being historical
from the fact that at the time when Christian society was developing
and taking form the most divergent and even contradictory forces
collaborated, each one having a certain similarity with forces
operating today. Now the picture of Christ we have today seems very
contradictory at first glance. It still has some of the traits of the
old saint or the heavenly monarch, together with the modern features of
the friend of the proletariat, or even of the labor leader. But that is
only the expression of the innermost contradictions that our time is
shot through with.”
And earlier he says:
“Most representatives of so-called modern theology
use the scissors on their excerpts in accordance with the critical
method dear to David Strauss: the mythical part of the gospels is cut
away, and what is left is supposed to be the historical nucleus. But
finally even this nucleus got to be too thin in the hands of the
theologians…. In the absence of all historical precision, the name of
Jesus has become an empty vessel for Protestant theology, into which
every theologian pours his own thoughts. One of them makes Jesus a
modern Spinozist, another makes him a socialist, while the official
professorial theology naturally looks at him in the religious light of
the modern state and recently has come to present him more and more as
the religious representative of all those efforts that today claim a
leading place in the State theology of Greater Prussia.”
It is no wonder then that secular historiography feels
no great need for investigating the origins of Christianity if it
starts from the view that Christianity was the creation of a single
person. If this view were correct, we could give up studying the rise
of Christianity and leave its description to our poetic theologians.
But it is a different matter as soon as we think of a world-wide
religion not as the product of a single superman but as a product of
society. Social conditions at the time of the rise of Christianity are
very well known. And the social character of early Christianity can be
studied with some degree of accuracy from its literature.
To be sure, the historical value of the gospels and the Acts of the
Apostles can not be set as any higher than that of the Homeric poems or
the Nibelungenlied. They may deal with historical
personages, but their actions are related with such poetic freedom that
it is impossible to get anything like a historical description of those
personages, quite apart from the fact that they are so mixed up with
fabulous creatures that on the basis of these stories alone it can
never be determined which of the characters are historical and which
are invented. If we knew nothing about Attila but what the Nibelungenlied
says about him, we should have to say, as we must about Jesus, we do
not even definitely know whether he lived or not, or whether he is just
as mythical a character as Siegfried.
But such poetical accounts are invaluable for the understanding of
the social conditions under which they arose, and of which they give a
true reflection no matter how freely their authors may have invented
individual facts and personages. The extent to which the story of the
Trojan War and its heroes rests on a historical basis is obscure,
perhaps for ever. But as for the nature of social conditions in the
Heroic Age, we have two first-class historical sources in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Poetical creations are often far more important for understanding a
period than the most faithful historical accounts. For the latter
merely communicate the personal, the striking, the unusual, which has
the least permanent historical effect; the former furnish us with a
look into the daily life and labor of the masses, which works
continually and lastingly and has the most permanent effect on society,
but which the historian does not take note of because it seems to him
to be so obvious and wellknown. Thus in Balzac’s novels we have one of
the most important historical sources for the social life of France in
the first decades of the nineteenth century.
And out of the gospels and the acts of the apostles, similarly, we
can not learn anything definite as to the life and doctrine of Jesus,
but very valuable things about the social character, the ideals and
aspirations of the primitive Christian communities. When Bible
criticism uncovers the different layers that lie one on top of the
other in these writings, it enables us to follow the development of
these communities, at least to a certain extent, while the “heathen”
and Jewish sources make possible an insight into the social driving
forces that were acting upon primitive Christianity at the same time.
So we are able to see and understand it as the product of its time, and
that is the basis of any historical knowledge. Individuals can
influence society too, and the portrayal of outstanding individuals is
indispensable for a complete picture of their time. But in terms of
historical epochs, their influence is only transitory, merely the outer
ornament which strikes the eye first in a building but says nothing
about its foundations. But it is the foundations that determine the
character of the structure and its permanence. If we can lay them bare,
we have done the most important part toward understanding the whole
edifice.
