knew quite well what he was doing. His object was to show how an unseen
enemy had pushed his parallels up to the very walls, and to summon to the
defence “some one who should be as nearly the ideal defender of religion
as the Fragmentist was the ideal assailant.” Once, with prophetic insight
into the future, he says: “The Christian traditions must be explained by
the inner truth of Christianity, and no written traditions can give it
that inner truth, if it does not itself possess it.”
Reimarus takes as his starting‐point the question regarding the content of
the preaching of Jesus. “We are justified,” he says, “in drawing an
absolute distinction between the teaching of the Apostles in their
writings and what Jesus Himself in His own lifetime proclaimed and
taught.” What belongs to the preaching of Jesus is clearly to be
recognised. It is contained in two phrases of identical meaning, “Repent,
and believe the Gospel,” or, as it is put elsewhere, “Repent, for the
Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”
The Kingdom of Heaven must however be understood “according to Jewish ways
of thought.” Neither Jesus nor the Baptist ever explain this expression;
therefore they must have been content to have it understood in its known
and customary sense. That means that Jesus took His stand within the
Jewish religion, and accepted its Messianic expectations without in any
way correcting them. If He gives a new development to this religion it is
only in so far that He proclaims as near at hand the realisation of ideals
and hopes which were alive in thousands of hearts.
There was thus no need for detailed instruction regarding the nature of
the Kingdom of Heaven; the catechism and confession of the Church at its
commencement consisted of a single phrase. Belief was not difficult: “they
need only believe the Gospel, namely that Jesus was about to bring in the
Kingdom of God.”(17)
As there were many among the Jews who were already waiting for the Kingdom
of God, it was no wonder that in a few days, nay in a few hours, some
thousands believed, although they had been told only that Jesus was the
promised prophet.
This was the sum total of what the disciples knew about the Kingdom of God
when they were sent out by their Master to proclaim its coming. Their
hearers would naturally think of the customary meaning of the term and the
hopes which attached themselves to it. “The purpose of sending out such
propagandists could only be that the Jews who groaned under the Roman yoke
and had long cherished the hope of deliverance should be stirred up all
over Judaea and assemble themselves in their thousands.”
Jesus must have known, too, that if the people believed His messengers
they would look about for an earthly deliverer and turn to Him for this
purpose. The Gospel, therefore, meant nothing more or less to all who
heard it than that, under the leadership of Jesus, the Kingdom of Messiah
was about to be brought in. For them there was no difficulty in accepting
the belief that He was the Messiah, the Son of God, for this belief did
not involve anything metaphysical. The nation was the Son of God; the
kings of the covenant‐people were Sons of God; the Messiah was in a pre‐
eminent sense the Son of God. Thus even in His Messianic claims Jesus
remained “within the limits of humanity.”
The fact that He did not need to explain to His contemporaries what He
meant by the Kingdom of God constitutes a difficulty for us. The parables
do not enlighten us, for they presuppose a knowledge of the conception.
“If we could not gather from the writings of the Jews some further
information as to what was understood at that time by the Messiah and the
Kingdom of God, these points of primary importance would be very obscure
and incomprehensible.”
“If, therefore, we desire to gain a historical understanding of Jesus’
teaching, we must leave behind what we learned in our catechism regarding
the metaphysical Divine Sonship, the Trinity, and similar dogmatic
conceptions, and go out into a wholly Jewish world of thought. Only those
who carry the teachings of the catechism back into the preaching of the
Jewish Messiah will arrive at the idea that He was the founder of a new
religion. To all unprejudiced persons it is manifest that Jesus had not
the slightest intention of doing away with the Jewish religion and putting
another in its place.”
From Matt. v. 18 it is evident that Jesus did not break with the Law, but
took His stand upon it unreservedly. If there was anything at all new in
His preaching, it was the righteousness which was requisite for the
Kingdom of God. The righteousness of the Law will no longer suffice in the
time of the coming Kingdom; a new and deeper morality must come into
being. This demand is the only point in which the preaching of Jesus went
beyond the ideas of His contemporaries. But this new morality does not do
away with the Law, for He explains it as a fulfilment of the old
commandments. His followers, no doubt, broke with the Law later on. They
did so, however, not in pursuance of a command of Jesus, but under the
pressure of circumstances, at the time when they were forced out of
Judaism and obliged to found a new religion.
Jesus shared the Jewish racial exclusiveness wholly and unreservedly.
According to Matt. x. 5 He forbade His disciples to declare to the
Gentiles the coming of the Kingdom of God. Evidently, therefore, His
purpose did not embrace them. Had it been otherwise, the hesitation of
Peter in Acts x. and xi., and the necessity of justifying the conversion
of Cornelius, would be incomprehensible.
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are no evidence that Jesus intended to found
a new religion. In the first place the genuineness of the command to
baptize in Matt. xxviii. 19 is questionable, not only as a saying ascribed
to the risen Jesus, but also because it is universalistic in outlook, and
because it implies the doctrine of the Trinity and, consequently, the
metaphysical Divine Sonship of Jesus. In this it is inconsistent with the
earliest traditions regarding the practice of baptism in the Christian
community, for in the earliest times, as we learn from the Acts and from
Paul, it was the custom to baptize, not in the name of the Trinity, but in
the name of Jesus, the Messiah.
But, furthermore, it is questionable whether Baptism really goes back to
Jesus at all. He Himself baptized no one in His own lifetime, and never
commanded any of His converts to be baptized. So we cannot be sure about
the origin of Baptism, though we can be sure of its meaning. Baptism in
the name of Jesus signified only that Jesus was the Messiah. “For the only
change which the teaching of Jesus made in their religion was that whereas
they had formerly believed in a Deliverer of Israel who was to come in the
future, they now believed in a Deliverer who was already present.”
The “Lord’s Supper,” again, was no new institution, but merely an episode
at the last Paschal Meal of the Kingdom which was passing away, and was
intended “as an anticipatory celebration of the Passover of the New
Kingdom.” A Lord’s Supper in our sense, “cut loose from the Passover,”
would have been inconceivable to Jesus, and not less so to His disciples.
It is useless to appeal to the miracles, any more than to the
“Sacraments,” as evidence for the founding of a new religion. In the first
place, we have to remember what happens in the case of miracles handed
down by tradition. That Jesus effected cures, which in the eyes of His
contemporaries were miraculous, is not to be denied. Their purpose was to
prove Him to be the Messiah. He forbade these miracles to be made known,
even in cases where they could not possibly be kept hidden, “with the sole
purpose of making people more eager to talk of them.” Other miracles,
however, have no basis in fact, but owe their place in the narrative to
the feeling that the miracle‐stories of the Old Testament must be repeated
in the case of Jesus, but on a grander scale. He did no really miraculous
works; otherwise, the demands for a sign would be incomprehensible. In
Jerusalem when all the people were looking eagerly for an overwhelming
manifestation of His Messiahship, what a tremendous effect a miracle would
have produced! If only a single miracle had been publicly, convincingly,
undeniably, performed by Jesus before all the people on one of the great
days of the Feast, such is human nature that all the people would at once
have flocked to His standard.
For this popular uprising, however, He waited in vain. Twice He believed
that it was near at hand. The first time was when He was sending out the
disciples and said to them: “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of
Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matt. x. 23). He thought that, at the
preaching of the disciples, the people would flock to Him from every
quarter and immediately proclaim Him Messiah; but His expectation was
disappointed.
The second time, He thought to bring about the decisive issue in
Jerusalem. He made His entry riding on an ass’s colt, that the Messianic
prophecy of Zechariah might be fulfilled. And the people actually did cry
“Hosanna to the Son of David!” Relying on the support of His followers He
might now, He thought, bid defiance to the authorities. In the temple He
arrogates to Himself supreme power, and in glowing words calls for an open
revolt against the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees, on the ground that they
have shut the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven and forbidden others to go
in. There is no doubt, now, that He will carry the people with Him!
Confident in the success of His cause, He closes the great incendiary
harangue in Matt. xxiii. with the words “Truly from henceforth ye shall
not see me again until ye shall say Blessed is he that cometh in the name
of the Lord”; that is, until they should hail Him as Messiah.
But the people in Jerusalem refused to rise, as the Galilaeans had refused
at the time when the disciples were sent out to rouse them. The Council
prepared for vigorous action. The voluntary concealment by which Jesus had
thought to whet the eagerness of the people became involuntary. Before His
arrest He was overwhelmed with dread, and on the cross He closed His life
with the words “My God! my God! why hast Thou forsaken me?” “This avowal
cannot, without violence, be interpreted otherwise than as meaning that
God had not aided Him in His aim and purpose as He had hoped. That shows
that it had not been His purpose to suffer and die, but to establish an
earthly kingdom and deliver the Jews from political oppression—and in that
God’s help had failed Him.”
For the disciples this turn of affairs meant the destruction of all the
dreams for the sake of which they had followed Jesus. For if they had
given up anything on His account, it was only in order to receive it again
an hundredfold when they should openly take their places in the eyes of
all the world as the friends and ministers of the Messiah, as the rulers
of the twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus never disabused them of this
sensuous hope, but, on the contrary, confirmed them in it. When He put an
end to the quarrel about pre‐eminence, and when He answered the request of
the sons of Zebedee, He did not attack the assumption that there were to
be thrones and power, but only addressed Himself to the question how men
were in the present to establish their claims to that position of
authority.
All this implies that the time of the fulfilment of these hopes was not
thought of by Jesus and His disciples as at all remote. In Matt. xvi. 28,
for example, He says: “Truly I say unto you there are some standing here
who shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his
kingdom.” There is no justification for twisting this about or explaining
it away. It simply means that Jesus promises the fulfilment of all
Messianic hopes before the end of the existing generation.
Thus the disciples were prepared for anything rather than that which
actually happened. Jesus had never said a word to them about His dying and
rising again, otherwise they would not have so played the coward at His
death, nor have been so astonished at His “resurrection.” The three or
four sayings referring to these events must therefore have been put into
His mouth later, in order to make it appear that He had foreseen these
events in His original plan.
How, then, did they get over this apparently annihilating blow? By falling
back upon the second form of the Jewish Messianic hope. Hitherto their
thoughts, like those of their Master, had been dominated by the political
ideal of the prophets—the scion of David’s line who should appear as the
political deliverer of the nation. But alongside of that there existed
another Messianic expectation which transferred everything to the
supernatural sphere. Appearing first in Daniel, this expectation can still
be traced in the Apocalypses, in Justin’s “Dialogue with Trypho,” and in
certain Rabbinic sayings. According to these—Reimarus makes use especially
of the statements of Trypho—the Messiah is to appear twice; once in human
lowliness, the second time upon the clouds of heaven. When the first
_systema_, as Reimarus calls it, was annihilated by the death of Jesus,
the disciples brought forward the second, and gathered followers who
shared their expectation of a second coming of Jesus the Messiah. In order
to get rid of the difficulty of the death of Jesus, they gave it the
significance of a spiritual redemption—which had not previously entered
their field of vision or that of Jesus Himself.
But this spiritual interpretation of His death would not have helped them
if they had not also invented the resurrection. Immediately after the
death of Jesus, indeed, such an idea was far from their thoughts. They
were in deadly fear and kept close within doors. “Soon, however, one and
another ventures to slip out. They learn that no judicial search is being
made for them.” Then they consider what is to be done. They did not take
kindly to the idea of returning to their old haunts; on their journeyings
the companions of the Messiah had forgotten how to work. They had seen
that the preaching of the Kingdom of God will keep a man. Even when they
had been sent out without wallet or money they had not lacked. The women
who are mentioned in Luke viii. 2, 3, had made it their business to make
good provision for the Messiah and His future ministers.
Why not, then, continue this mode of life? They would surely find a
sufficient number of faithful souls who would join them in directing their
hopes towards a second coming of the Messiah, and while awaiting the
future glory, would share their possessions with them. So they stole the
body of Jesus and hid it, and proclaimed to all the world that He would
soon return. They prudently waited, however, for fifty days before making
this announcement, in order that the body, if it should be found, might be
unrecognisable.
What was much in their favour was the complete disorganisation of the
Jewish state. Had there been an efficient police administration the
disciples would not have been able to plan this fraud and organise their
communistic fellowship. But, as it was, the new society was not even
subjected to any annoyance in consequence of the remarkable death of a
married couple who were buried from the apostles’ house, and the
brotherhood was even allowed to confiscate their property to its own uses.
It appears, then, that the hope of the Parousia was the fundamental thing
in primitive Christianity, which was a product of that hope much more than
of the teaching of Jesus. Accordingly, the main problem of primitive
dogmatics was the delay of the Parousia. Already in Paul’s time the
problem was pressing, and he had to set to work in 2 Thessalonians to
discover all possible and impossible reasons why the Second Coming should
be delayed. Reimarus mercilessly exposes the position of the apostle, who
was obliged to fob people off somehow or other. The author of 2 Peter has
a much clearer notion of what he would be at, and undertakes to restore
the confidence of Christendom once for all with the sophism of the
thousand years which are in the sight of God as one day, ignoring the fact
that in the promise the reckoning was by man’s years, not by God’s.
“Nevertheless it served the turn of the Apostles so well with those simple
early Christians, that after the first believers had been bemused with it,
and the period originally fixed had elapsed, the Christians of later
generations, including Fathers of the Church, could continue ever after to
feed themselves with empty hopes.” The saying of Christ about the
generation which should not die out before His return clearly fixes this
event at no very distant date. But since Jesus has not yet appeared upon
the clouds of heaven “these words must be strained into meaning, not that
generation, but the Jewish people. Thus by exegetical art they are saved
for ever, for the Jewish race will never die out.”
In general, however, “the theologians of the present day skim lightly over
the eschatological material in the Gospels because it does not chime in
with their views, and assign to the coming of Christ upon the clouds quite
a different purpose from that which it bears in the teaching of Christ and
His apostles.” Inasmuch as the non‐fulfilment of its eschatology is not
admitted, our Christianity rests upon a fraud. In view of this fact, what
is the evidential value of any miracle, even if it could be held to be
authentic? “No miracle would prove that two and two make five, or that a
circle has four angles; and no miracles, however numerous, could remove a
contradiction which lies on the surface of the teachings and records of
Christianity.” Nor is there any weight in the appeal to the fulfilment of
prophecy, for the cases in which Matthew countersigns it with the words
“that the Scripture might be fulfilled” are all artificial and unreal; and
for many incidents the stage was set by Jesus, or His disciples, or the
Evangelists, with the deliberate purpose of presenting to the people a
scene from the fulfilment of prophecy.
The sole argument which could save the credit of Christianity would be a
proof that the Parousia had really taken place at the time for which it
was announced; and obviously no such proof can be produced.
Such is Reimarus’ reconstruction of the history. We can well understand
that his work must have given offence when it appeared, for it is a
polemic, not an objective historical study. But we have no right simply to
dismiss it in a word, as a Deistic production, as Otto Schmiedel, for
example, does;(18) it is time that Reimarus came to his own, and that we
should recognise a historical performance of no mean order in this piece
of Deistic polemics. His work is perhaps the most splendid achievement in
the whole course of the historical investigation of the life of Jesus, for
he was the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which
Jesus moved was essentially eschatological. There is some justification
for the animosity which flames up in his writing. This historical truth
had taken possession of his mind with such overwhelming force that he
could no longer understand his contemporaries, and could not away with
their profession that their beliefs were, as they professed to be,
directly derived from the preaching of Jesus.
What added to the offence was that he saw the eschatology in a wrong
perspective. He held that the Messianic ideal which dominated the
preaching of Jesus was that of the political ruler, the son of David. All
his other mistakes are the consequence of this fundamental error. It was,
of course, a mere makeshift hypothesis to derive the beginnings of
Christianity from an imposture. Historical science was not at that time
sufficiently advanced to lead even the man who had divined the
fundamentally eschatological character of the preaching of Jesus onward to
the historical solution of the problem; it needed more than a hundred and
twenty years to fill in the chasm which Reimarus had been forced to bridge
with that makeshift hypothesis of his.
In the light of the clear perception of the elements of the problem which
Reimarus had attained, the whole movement of theology, down to Johannes
Weiss, appears retrograde. In all its work the thesis is ignored or
obscured that Jesus, as a historical personality, is to be regarded, not
as the founder of a new religion, but as the final product of the
eschatological and apocalyptic thought of Late Judaism. Every sentence of
Johannes Weiss’s _Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes_ (1892) is a
vindication, a rehabilitation, of Reimarus as a historical thinker.
Even so the traveller on the plain sees from afar the distant range of
mountains. Then he loses sight of them again. His way winds slowly upwards
through the valleys, drawing ever nearer to the peaks, until at last, at a
turn of the path, they stand before him, not in the shapes which they had
seemed to take from the distant plain, but in their actual forms. Reimarus
was the first, after eighteen centuries of misconception, to have an
inkling of what eschatology really was. Then theology lost sight of it
again, and it was not until after the lapse of more than a hundred years
that it came in view of eschatology once more, now in its true form, so
far as that can be historically determined, and only after it had been led
astray, almost to the last, in all its historical researches by the sole
mistake of Reimarus—the assumption that the eschatology was earthly and
political in character. Thus theology shared at least the error of the man
whom it knew only as a Deist, not as an historian, and whose true
greatness was not recognised even by Strauss, though he raised a literary
monument to him.
The solution offered by Reimarus may be wrong; the data of observation
from which he starts out are, beyond question, right, because the primary
datum of all is genuinely historical. He recognised that two systems of
Messianic expectation were present side by side in Late Judaism. He
endeavoured to bring them into mutual relations in order to represent the
actual movement of the history. In so doing he made the mistake of placing
them in consecutive order, ascribing to Jesus the political Son‐of‐David
conception, and to the Apostles, after His death, the apocalyptic system
based on Daniel, instead of superimposing one upon the other in such a way
that the Messianic King might coincide with the Son of Man, and the
ancient prophetic conception might be inscribed within the circumference
of the Daniel‐descended apocalyptic, and raised along with it to the
supersensuous plane. But what matters the mistake in comparison with the
fact that the problem was really grasped?
Reimarus felt that the absence in the preaching of Jesus of any definition
of the principal term (the Kingdom of God), in conjunction with the great
and rapid success of His preaching constituted a problem, and he
formulated the conception that Jesus was not a religious founder and
teacher, but purely a preacher.
He brought the Synoptic and Johannine narratives into harmony by
practically leaving the latter out of account. The attitude of Jesus
towards the law, and the process by which the disciples came to take up a
freer attitude, was grasped and explained by him so accurately that modern
historical science does not need to add a word, but would be well pleased
if at least half the theologians of the present day had got as far.
Further, he recognised that primitive Christianity was not something which
grew, so to speak, out of the teaching of Jesus, but that it came into
being as a new creation, in consequence of events and circumstances which
added something to that preaching which it did not previously contain; and
that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, in the historical sense of these
terms, were not instituted by Jesus, but created by the early Church on
the basis of certain historical assumptions.