Messiah must die and rise again, in order that the false conceptions of
the Messiah which were cherished by the multitude might be destroyed in
the moment of their fulfilment—that is, might be spiritualised. Nicodemus,
Haram, and Luke met in a cave in order to take counsel how they might
bring about the death of Jesus in a way favourable to their plans. Luke
guaranteed that by the aid of powerful drugs which he would give Him the
Lord should be enabled to endure the utmost pain and suffering and yet
resist death for a long time. Nicodemus undertook so to work matters in
the Sanhedrin that the execution should follow immediately upon the
sentence, and the crucified remain only a short time upon the cross. At
this moment Jesus rushed into the cave. He had scarcely had time to
replace the stone which concealed the entrance, so closely had He been
pursued over the rocks by hired assassins. He Himself is firmly resolved
to die, but care must be taken that He shall not be simply assassinated,
or the whole plan fails. If He falls by the assassin’s knife, no
resurrection will be possible.
In the end, the piece is staged to perfection. Jesus provokes the
authorities by His triumphal Messianic entry. The unsuspected Essenes in
the council urge on His arrest and secure His condemnation—though Pilate
almost frustrates all their plans by acquitting Him. Jesus, by uttering a
loud cry and immediately afterwards bowing His head, shows every
appearance of a sudden death. The centurion has been bribed not to allow
any of His bones to be broken. Then comes Joseph of Ramath, as Bahrdt
prefers to call Joseph of Arimathea, and removes the body to the cave of
the Essenes, where he immediately commences measures of resuscitation. As
Luke had prepared the body of the Messiah by means of strengthening
medicines to resist the fearful ill‐usage which He had gone through—the
being dragged about and beaten and finally crucified—these efforts were
crowned with success. In the cave the most strengthening nutriment was
supplied to Him. “Since the humours of the body were in a thoroughly
healthy condition, His wounds healed very readily, and by the third day He
was able to walk, in spite of the fact that the wounds made by the nails
were still open.”
On the morning of the third day they forced away the stone which closed
the mouth of the grave. As Jesus was descending the rocky slopes the watch
awakened and took to flight in alarm. One of the Essenes appeared, in the
garb of an angel, to the women and announced to them the resurrection of
Jesus. Shortly afterwards the Lord appeared to Mary. At the sound of His
voice she recognises Him. “Thereupon Jesus tells her that He is going to
His Father (to heaven—in the mystic sense of the word—that is to say, to
the Chosen Ones in their peaceful dwellings of truth and blessedness—to
the circle of His faithful friends, among whom He continued to live,
unseen by the world, but still working for the advancement of His
purpose). He bade her tell His disciples that He was alive.”
From His place of concealment He appeared several times to His disciples.
Finally He bade them meet Him at the Mount of Olives, near Bethany, and
there took leave of them. After exhorting them, and embracing each of them
in turn, He tore Himself away from them and walked away up the mountain.
“There stood those poor men, amazed—beside themselves with sorrow—and
looked after Him as long as they could. But as He mounted higher, He
entered ever deeper into the cloud which lay upon the hill‐top, until
finally He was no longer to be seen. The cloud received Him out of their
sight.”
From the mountain He returned to the chief lodge of the Brotherhood. Only
at rare intervals did He again intervene in active life—as on the occasion
when He appeared to Paul upon the road to Damascus. But, though unseen, He
continued to direct the destinies of the community until His death.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
Venturini’s “Non‐supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth” is
related to Bahrdt’s work as the finished picture to the sketch.
Karl Heinrich Venturini was born at Brunswick in 1768. On the completion
of his theological studies he vainly endeavoured to secure a post as
Docent in the theological faculty at Helmstadt, or as Librarian at
Wolfenbüttel.
His life was blameless and his personal piety beyond reproach, but he was
considered to be too free in his ideas. The Duke of Brunswick was
personally well disposed towards him, but did not venture to give him a
post on the teaching staff in face of the opposition of the consistories.
He was reduced to earning a bare pittance by literary work, and finally in
1806 was thankful to accept a small living in Hordorf near Brunswick. He
then abandoned theological writing and devoted his energies to recording
the events of contemporary history, of which he published a yearly
chronicle—a proceeding which under the Napoleonic _régime_ was not always
unattended with risk, as he more than once had occasion to experience. He
continued this undertaking till 1841. In 1849 death released him from his
tasks.
Venturini’s fundamental assumption is that it was impossible, even for the
noblest spirit of mankind, to make Himself understood by the Judaism of
His time except by clothing His spiritual teaching in a sensuous garb
calculated to please the oriental imagination, “and, in general, by
bringing His higher spiritual world into such relations with the lower
sensuous world of those whom He wished to teach as was necessary to the
accomplishment of His aims.” “God’s Messenger was morally bound to perform
miracles for the Jews. These miracles had an ethical purpose, and were
especially designed to counteract the impression made by the supposed
miracles of the deceivers of the people, and thus to hasten the overthrow
of the kingdom of Satan.”
For modern medical science the miracles are not miraculous. He never
healed without medicaments and always carried His “portable medicine
chest” with Him. In the case of the Syro‐phoenician woman’s daughter, for
example, we can still detect in the narrative a hint of the actual course
of events. The mother explains the case to Jesus. After enquiring where
her dwelling was he made a sign to John, and continued to hold her in
conversation. The disciple went to the daughter and gave her a sedative,
and when the mother returned she found her child cured.
The raisings from the dead were cases of coma. The nature‐miracles were
due to a profound acquaintance with the powers of Nature and the order of
her processes. They involve fore‐knowledge rather than control.
Many miracle stories rest on obvious misunderstandings. Nothing could be
simpler than the explanation of the miracle at Cana. Jesus had brought
with Him as a wedding‐gift some jars of good wine and had put them aside
in another room. When the wine was finished and His mother became anxious,
He still allowed the guests to wait a little, as the stone vessels for
purification had not yet been filled with water. When that had been done
He ordered the servants to pour out some of his wine, but to tell no one
whence it came. When John, as an old man, wrote his Gospel, he got all
this rather mixed up—had not indeed observed it very closely at the time,
“had perhaps been the least thing merry himself,” says Venturini, and had
believed in the miracle with the rest. Perhaps, too, he had not ventured
to ask Jesus for an explanation, for he had only become His disciple a few
days before.
The members of the Essene Order had watched over the child Jesus even in
Egypt. As He grew older they took charge of His education along with that
of His cousin, John, and trained them both for their work as deliverers of
the people. Whereas the nation as a whole looked to an insurrection as the
means of its deliverance, they knew that freedom could only be achieved by
means of a spiritual renewal. Once Jesus and John met a band of
insurgents: Jesus worked on them so powerfully by His fervid speech that
they recognised the impiousness of their purpose. One of them sprang
towards Him and laid down his arms; it was Simon, who afterwards became
His disciple.
When Jesus was about thirty years old, and, owing to the deep experiences
of His inner life, had really far outgrown the aims of the Essene Order,
He entered upon His office by demanding baptism from John. Just as this
was taking place a thunderstorm broke, and a dove, frightened by the
lightning, fluttered round the head of Jesus. Both Jesus and John took
this as a sign that the hour appointed by God had come.
The temptations in the wilderness, and upon the pinnacle of the Temple,
were due to the machinations of the Pharisee Zadok, who pretended to enter
into the plans of Jesus and feigned admiration for Him in order the more
surely to entrap Him. It was Zadok, too, who stirred up opposition to Him
in the Sanhedrin.
But Jesus did not succeed in destroying the old Messianic belief with its
earthly aims. The hatred of the leading circles against Him grew, although
He avoided everything “that could offend their prejudices.” It was for
this reason that He even forbade His disciples to preach the Gospel beyond
the borders of Jewish territory. He paid the temple‐tax, also, although he
had no fixed abode. When the collector went to Peter about it, the
following dialogue took place.
_Tax‐collector_ (_drawing Peter aside_). Tell me, Simon, does the Rabbi
pay the didrachma to the Temple treasury, or should we not trouble Him
about it?
_Peter._ Why shouldn’t He pay it? Why do you ask?
_Tax‐collector._ It’s been owing from both of you since last Nisan, as our
books show. We did not like to remind your Master, out of reverence.
_Peter._ I’ll tell Him at once. He will certainly pay the tax. You need
have no fear about that.
_Tax‐collector._ That’s good. That will put everything straight, and we
shall have no trouble over our accounts. Good‐bye!
When Jesus hears of it He commands Peter to go and catch a fish, and to
take care, in removing the hook, not to tear its mouth, that it may be fit
for salting (!) In that case it will doubtless be worth a _stater_.
The time arrived when an important move must be made. In full conclave of
the Secret Society it was resolved that Jesus should go up to Jerusalem
and there publicly proclaim Himself as the Messiah. Then He was to
endeavour to disabuse the people of their earthly Messianic expectations.
The triumphal entry succeeded. The whole people hailed Him with
acclamations. But when He tried to substitute for their picture of the
Messiah one of a different character, and spoke of times of severe trial
which should come upon all, when He showed Himself but seldom in the
Temple, instead of taking His place at the head of the people, they began
to doubt Him.
Jesus was suddenly arrested and put to death. Here, then, the death is
not, as in Bahrdt, a piece of play‐acting, stage‐managed by the Secret
Society. Jesus really expected to die, and only to meet His disciples
again in the eternal life of the other world. But when He so soon gave up
the ghost, Joseph of Arimathea was moved by some vague premonition to
hasten at once to Pontius Pilate and make request for His body. He offers
the Procurator money. _Pilate_ (_sternly and emphatically_): “Dost thou
also mistake me? Am I, then, such an insatiable miser? Still, thou art a
Jew—how could this people do me justice? Know, then, that a Roman can
honour true nobility wherever he may find it. (_He sits down and writes
some words on a strip of parchment._) Give this to the captain of the
guard. Thou shall be permitted to remove the body. I ask nothing for this.
It is granted to thee freely.”
“A tender embrace from his wife rewarded the noble deed of the Roman,
while Joseph left the Praetorium, and with Nicodemus, who was impatiently
awaiting him, hastened to Golgotha.” There he received the body; he washed
it, anointed it with spices, and laid it on a bed of moss in the rock‐hewn
grave. From the blood which was still flowing from the wound in the side,
he ventured to draw a hopeful augury, and sent word to the Essene
Brethren. They had a hold close by, and promised to watch over the body.
In the first four‐and‐twenty hours no movement of life showed itself. Then
came the earthquake. In the midst of the terrible commotion a Brother, in
the white robes of the Order, was making his way to the grave by a secret
path. When he, illumined by a flash of lightning, suddenly appeared above
the grave, and at the same moment the earth shook violently, panic seized
the watch, and they fled. In the morning the Brother hears a sound from
the grave: Jesus is moving. The whole Order hastens to the spot, and Jesus
is removed to their Lodge. Two brethren remain at the grave—these were the
“angels” whom the women saw later. Jesus, in the dress of a gardener, is
afterwards recognised by Mary Magdalene. Later, He comes out at intervals
from the hiding‐place, where He is kept by the Brethren, and appears to
the disciples. After forty days He took His leave of them: His strength
was exhausted. The farewell scene gave rise to the mistaken impression of
His Ascension.
From the historical point of view these lives are not such contemptible
performances as might be supposed. There is much penetrating observation
in them. Bahrdt and Venturini are right in feeling that the connexion of
events in the life of Jesus has to be discovered; the Gospels give only a
series of occurrences, and offer no explanation why they happened just as
they did. And if, in making Jesus subservient to the plans of a secret
society, they represented Him as not acting with perfect freedom, but as
showing a certain passivity, this assumption of theirs was to be
brilliantly vindicated, a hundred years later, by the eschatological
school, which asserts the same remarkable passivity on the part of Jesus,
in that He allows His actions to be determined, not indeed by a secret
society, but by the eschatological plan of God. Bahrdt and Venturini were
the first to see that, of all Jesus’ acts, His death was most
distinctively His own, because it was by this that He purposed to found
the kingdom.
Venturini’s “Non‐supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth”
may almost be said to be reissued annually down to the present day, for
all the fictitious “Lives” go back directly or indirectly to the type
which he created. It is plagiarised more freely than any other Life of
Jesus, although practically unknown by name.
V. FULLY DEVELOPED RATIONALISM—PAULUS
_Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus._ Das Leben Jesu als Grundlage
einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums. Heidelberg, C. F.
Winter. (The Life of Jesus as the Basis of a purely Historical
Account of Early Christianity.) 1828. 2 vols., 1192 pp.
Freut euch mit Gottesandacht, wenn es gewährt euch ist,
Dem, so kurz er war, weltumschaffenden Lebensgang
Nach Jahrhunderten fern zu folgen,
Denket, glaubet, folget des Vorbildes Spur!
(Closing words of vol. ii.)
(Rejoice with grateful devotion, if unto you ’tis permitted,
After the lapse of centuries, still to follow afar off
That Life which, short as it was, changed the course of the ages;
Think ye well, and believe; follow the path of our Pattern.)
Paulus was not the mere dry‐as‐dust rationalist that he is usually
represented to have been, but a man of very versatile abilities. His
limitation was that, like Reinhard, he had an unconquerable distrust of
anything that went outside the boundaries of logical thought. That was due
in part to the experiences of his youth. His father, a deacon in Leonberg,
half‐mystic, half‐rationalist, had secret difficulties about the doctrine
of immortality, and made his wife promise on her death‐bed that, if it
were possible, she would appear to him after her death in bodily form.
After she was dead he thought he saw her raise herself to a sitting
posture, and again sink down. From that time onwards he firmly believed
himself to be in communication with departed spirits, and he became so
dominated by this idea that in 1771 he had to be removed from his office.
His children suffered sorely from a _régime_ of compulsory spiritualism,
which pressed hardest upon Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, born in 1761, who,
for the sake of peace, was obliged to pretend to his father that he was in
communication with his mother’s spirit.
He himself had inherited only the rationalistic side of his father’s
temperament. As a student at the Tübingen Stift (theological institute) he
formed his views on the writings of Semler and Michaelis. In 1789 he was
called to Jena as Professor of Oriental Languages, and succeeded in 1793
to the third ordinary professorship of theology. The naturalistic
interpretation of miracles which he upheld in his commentary on the
Synoptic Gospels, published in 1800‐1802, aroused the indignation of the
consistories of Meiningen and Eisenach. But their petition for his removal
from the professorship was unsuccessful, since Herder, who was president
of the consistorium, used his influence to protect him. In 1799 Paulus, as
Pro‐rector, used his influence on behalf of his colleague Fichte, who was
attacked on the ground of atheism; but in vain, owing to the passionate
conduct of the accused.
With Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland, Paulus and his wife, a lively lady of
some literary talents, stood in the most friendly relations.
When the Jena circle began to break up, he accepted, in 1803, an
invitation from the Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian Joseph II., to go to
Würzburg as Konsistorialrat and professor. There the liberal minister,
Montgelas, was desirous of establishing a university founded on the
principles of illuminism—Schelling, Hufeland, and Schleiermacher were
among those whom he contemplated appointing as Docents. Here the Catholic
theological students were obliged to attend the lectures of the Protestant
professor of theology, as there were no Protestants to form an audience.
His first course was on “Encyclopädie” (_i.e._ introduction to the
literature of theology).
The plan failed. Paulus resigned his professorship and became in 1807 a
member of the Bavarian educational council (_Schulrat_). In this capacity
he worked at the reorganisation of the Bavarian school system at the time
when Hegel was similarly engaged. He gave four years to this task, which
he felt to be laid upon him as a duty. Then, in 1811, he went to
Heidelberg as professor of theology; and he remained there until his
death, in 1851, at the age of ninety. One of his last sayings, a few hours
before he died, was, “I am justified before God, through my desire to do
right.” His last words were, “There is another world.”
The forty years of his Heidelberg period were remarkably productive; there
was no department of knowledge on which he did not write. He expressed his
views about homoeopathy, about the freedom of the Press, about academic
freedom, and about the duelling nuisance. In 1831, he wrote upon the
Jewish Question; and there the veteran rationalist showed himself a bitter
anti‐Semite, and brought upon himself the scorn of Heine. On politics and
constitutional questions he fought for his opinions so openly and manfully
that he had to be warned to be more discreet. In philosophy he took an
especially keen interest. When in Jena he had, in conjunction with
Schiller, busied himself in the study of Kant. He did a particularly
meritorious service in preparing an edition of Spinoza’s writings, with a
biography of that thinker, in 1803, at the time when neo‐Spinozism was
making its influence felt in German philosophy. He constituted himself the
special guardian of philosophy, and the moment he detected the slightest
hint of mysticism, he sounded the alarm. His pet aversion was Schelling,
who was born fourteen years later than he, in the very same house at
Leonberg, and whom he had met as colleague at Jena and at Würzburg. The
works, avowed and anonymous, which he directed against this “charlatan,
juggler, swindler, and obscurantist,” as he designated him, fill an entire
library.
In 1841, Schelling was called to the chair of philosophy in Berlin, and in
the winter of 1841‐1842 he gave his lectures on “The Philosophy of
Revelation” which caused the Berlin reactionaries to hail him as their
great ally. The veteran rationalist—he was eighty years old—was
transported with rage. He had had the lectures taken down for him, and he
published them with critical remarks under the title “The Philosophy of
Revelation at length Revealed, and set forth for General Examination, by
Dr. H. E. G. Paulus” (Darmstadt, 1842). Schelling was furious, and dragged
“the impudent scoundrel” into a court of law on the charge of illicit
publication. In Prussia the book was suppressed. But the courts decided in
favour of Paulus, who coolly explained that “the philosophy of Schelling
appeared to him an insidious attack upon sound reason, the unmasking of
which by every possible means was a work of public utility, nay, even a
duty.” He also secured the result at which he aimed; Schelling resigned
his lectureship.
In his last days the veteran rationalist was an isolated survival from an
earlier age into a period which no longer understood him. The new men
reproached him for standing in the old ways; he accused them of a want of
honesty. It was just in his immobility and his one‐sidedness that his
significance lay. By his consistent carrying through of the rationalistic
explanation he performed a service to theology more valuable than those
who think themselves so vastly his superiors are willing to acknowledge.
His Life of Jesus is awkwardly arranged. The first part gives a historical
exposition of the Gospels, section by section. The second part is a
synopsis interspersed with supplementary matter. There is no attempt to
grasp the life of Jesus as a connected whole. In that respect he is far
inferior to Venturini. Strictly regarded, his work is only a harmony of
the gospels with explanatory comments, the ground plan of which is taken
from the Fourth Gospel.(22)
The main interest centres in the explanations of the miracles, though the
author, it must be admitted, endeavoured to guard against this. “It is my
chief desire,” he writes in his preface, “that my views regarding the
miracle stories should not be taken as by any means the principal thing.
How empty would devotion or religion be if one’s spiritual well‐being
depended on whether one believed in miracles or no!” “The truly miraculous
thing about Jesus is Himself, the purity and serene holiness of His
character, which is, notwithstanding, genuinely human, and adapted to the
imitation and emulation of mankind.”
The question of miracle is therefore a subsidiary question. Two points of
primary importance are certain from the outset: (1) that unexplained
alterations of the course of nature can neither overthrow nor attest a
spiritual truth, (2) that everything which happens in nature emanates from
the omnipotence of God.
The Evangelists intended to relate miracles; of that there can be no
doubt. Nor can any one deny that in their time miracles entered into the
plan of God, in the sense that the minds of men were to be astounded and
subdued by inexplicable facts. This effect, however, is past. In periods
to which the miraculous makes less appeal, in view of the advance in
intellectual culture of the nations which have been led to accept
Christianity, the understanding must be satisfied if the success of the
cause is to be maintained.
Since that which is produced by the laws of nature is really produced by
God, the Biblical miracles consist merely in the fact that eyewitnesses
report events of which they did not know the secondary causes. Their
knowledge of the laws of nature was insufficient to enable them to
understand what actually happened. For one who has discovered the
secondary causes, the fact remains, as such, but not the miracle.
The question of miracle, therefore, does not really exist, or exists only
for those “who are under the influence of the sceptical delusion that it
is possible really to think any kind of natural powers as existing apart
from God, or to think the Being of God apart from the primal
potentialities which unfold themselves in the never‐ceasing process of
Becoming.” The difficulty arises from the “original sin” of dissolving the
inner unity of God and nature, of denying the equivalence implied by
Spinoza in his “Deus sive Natura.”
For the normal intelligence the only problem is to discover the secondary
causes of the “miracles” of Jesus. It is true there is one miracle which
Paulus retains—the miracle of the birth, or at least the possibility of
it; in the sense that it is through holy inspiration that Mary receives
the hope and the power of conceiving her exalted Son, in whom the spirit
of the Messiah takes up its dwelling. Here he indirectly denies the
natural generation, and regards the conception as an act of the self‐
consciousness of the mother.