religious consciousness to heaven, who, even if He comes down to earth to
do miracles, to teach, and to suffer, is no longer true man. The Son of
Man of religion, even though His mission be to reconcile, is man as
alienated from himself. This Christ of the Gospel history, the ego exalted
to heaven and become God, overthrew antiquity, and conquered the world in
the sense that He exhausted it of all its vitality. This magnified ego
would have fulfilled its historical vocation if, by means of the terrible
disorganisation into which it threw the real spirit of mankind, it had
compelled the latter to come to a knowledge of itself, to become self‐
conscious with a thoroughness and decisiveness which had not been possible
to the simple spirit of antiquity. It was disastrous that the figure which
stood for the first emancipation of the ego, remained alive. That
transformation of the human spirit which was brought about by the
encounter of the world‐power of Rome with philosophy was represented by
the Gospels, under the influence of the Old Testament, as realised in a
single historic Personality; and the strength of the spirit of mankind was
swallowed up by the omnipotence of the pure absolute ego, an ego which was
alien from actual humanity. The self‐consciousness of humanity finds
itself reflected in the Gospels, a self, indeed, in alienation from
itself, and therefore a grotesque parody of itself, but, after all, in
some sense, itself; hence the magical charm which attracted mankind and
enchained it, and, so long as it had not truly found itself, urged it to
sacrifice everything to grasp the image of itself, to prefer it to all
other and all else, counting all, as the apostle says, but “dung” in
comparison with it.
Even when the Roman world was no more, and a new world had come into
being, the Christ so created did not die. The magic of His enchantment
became only more terrible, and as new strength came flooding into the old
world, the time arrived when it was to accomplish its greatest work of
destruction. Spirit, in its abstraction, became a vampire, the destroyer
of the world. Sap and strength, blood and life, it sucked, to the last
drop, out of humanity. Nature and art, family, nation, state, all were
destroyed by it; and in the ruins of the fallen world the ego, exhausted
by its efforts, remained the only surviving power.
Having made a desert all about it, the ego could not immediately create
anew, out of the depths of its inner consciousness, nature and art, nation
and state; the awful process which now went on, the only activity of which
it was now capable, was the absorption into itself of all that had
hitherto had life in the world. The ego was now everything; and yet it was
a void. It had become the universal power, and yet as it brooded over the
ruins of the world it was filled with horror at itself and with despair at
all that it had lost. The ego which had devoured all things and was still
a void now shuddered at itself.
Under the oppression of this awful power the education of mankind has been
going on; under this grim task‐master it has been preparing for true
freedom, preparing to rouse itself from the depths of its distress, to
escape from its opposition to itself and cast out that alien ego which is
wasting its substance. Odysseus has now returned to his home, not by
favour of the gods, not laid on the shore in sleep, but awake, by his own
thought and his own strength. Perchance, as of yore, he will have need to
fight with the suitors who have devoured his substance and sought to rob
him of all he holds most dear. Odysseus must string the bow once more.
The baleful charm of the self‐alienated ego is broken the moment any one
proves to the religious sense of mankind that the Jesus Christ of the
Gospels is its creation and ceases to exist as soon as this is recognised.
The formation of the Church and the arising of the idea that the Jesus of
the Gospels is the Messiah are not two different things, they are one and
the same thing, they coincide and synchronise; but the idea was only the
imaginative conception of the Church, the first movement of its life, the
religious expression of its experience.
The question which has so much exercised the minds of men—whether Jesus
was the historic Christ (= Messiah)—is answered in the sense that
everything that the historical Christ is, everything that is said of Him,
everything that is known of Him, belongs to the world of imagination, that
is, of the imagination of the Christian community, and therefore has
nothing to do with any man who belongs to the real world.
The world is now free, and ripe for a higher religion in which the ego
will overcome nature, not by self‐alienation, but by penetrating it and
ennobling it. To the theologian we may fling as a gift the shreds of his
former science, when we have torn it to pieces; that will be something to
occupy himself with, that time may not hang heavy upon his hands in the
new world whose advent is steadily drawing nearer.
Thus the task which Bauer had set himself at the beginning of his
criticism of the Gospel history, turned, before he had finished, into
something different. When he began, he thought to save the honour of Jesus
and to restore His Person from the state of inanition to which the
apologists had reduced it, and hoped by furnishing a proof that the
historical Jesus could not have been the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, to
bring Him into a living relation with history. This task, however, was
given up in favour of the larger one of freeing the world from the
domination of the Judaeo‐Roman idol, Jesus the Messiah, and in carrying
out this endeavour the thesis that Jesus Christ is a product of the
imagination of the early Church is formulated in such a way that the
existence of a historic Jesus becomes problematical, or, at any rate,
quite indifferent.
At the end of his study of the Gospels, Bauer is inclined to make the
decision of the question whether there ever was a historic Jesus depend on
the result of a further investigation which he proposed to make into the
Pauline Epistles. It was not until ten years later (1850‐1851) that he
accomplished this task,(94) and applied the result in his new edition of
the “Criticism of the Gospel History.”(95) The result is negative: there
never was any historical Jesus. While criticising the four great Pauline
Epistles, which the Tübingen school fondly imagined to be beyond the reach
of criticism, Bauer shows, however, his inability to lay a positive
historic foundation for his view of the origin of Christianity. The
transference of the Epistles to the second century is effected in so
arbitrary a fashion that it refutes itself. However, this work professes
to be only a preliminary study for a larger one in which the new theory
was to be fully worked out. This did not appear until 1877; it was
entitled “Christ and the Caesars; How Christianity originated from Graeco‐
Roman Civilisation.”(96) The historical basis for his theory, which he
here offers, is even more unsatisfactory than that suggested in the
preliminary work on the Pauline Epistles. There is no longer any pretence
of following an historical method, the whole thing works out into an
imaginary picture of the life of Seneca. Nero’s tutor had, Bauer thinks,
already in his inmost consciousness fully attained to inner opposition to
the world. There are expressions in his works which, in their mystical
emancipation from the world, prelude the utterances of Paul. The same
thoughts, since they belong not to Seneca only, but to his time, are found
also in the works of the three poets of the Neronian period, Persius,
Lucan, and Petronius. Though they had but a feeble breath of the divine
afflatus, they are interesting witnesses to the spiritual condition of the
time. They, too, contributed to the making of Christianity.
But Seneca, in spite of his inner alienation from the world, remained in
active relations with the world. He desired to found a kingdom of virtue
upon earth. At the courts of Claudius and Nero he used the arts of
intrigue to further his ends, and even quietly approved deeds of violence
which he thought likely to serve his cause. Finally, he grasped at the
supreme power; and paid the supreme penalty. Stoicism had made an attempt
to reform the world, and had failed. The great thinkers began to despair
of exercising any influence upon history, the Senate was powerless, all
public bodies were deprived of their rights. Then a spirit of resignation
came over the world. The alienation from the world, which in Seneca had
still been only half serious, was come in earnest. The time of Nero and
Domitian was a great epoch in that hidden spiritual history which goes
silently forward side by side with the noisy outward history of the world.
When Stoicism, in this development, had been deepened by the introduction
of neo‐Platonic ideas, it was on its way to become the Gospel.
But by itself it would not have given birth to that new thing. It attached
itself as a formative principle to Judaism, which was then just breaking
loose from the limitations of nationality. Bauer points to Josephus as a
type of this new Roman Judaism. This “neo‐Roman” lived in the conviction
that his God, who had withdrawn from His Temple, would take possession of
the world, and make the Roman Empire submit to His law. Josephus realised
in his life that for which the way had been spiritually prepared by Philo.
The latter did not merely effect a fusion of Jewish ideas with Greek
speculations; he took advantage of the universal dominion established by
the Romans to found upon it his spiritual world. Bauer had already
pictured him in this rôle in his work “Philo, Strauss, and Renan, and
Primitive Christianity.”
Thus was the new religion formed. The spirit of it came from the west, the
outward frame was furnished by Judaism. The new movement had two foci,
Rome and Alexandria. Philo’s “Therapeutae” were real people; they were the
forerunners of Christianity. Under Trajan the new religion began to be
known. Pliny’s letter asking for instructions as to how to deal with the
new movement is its certificate of birth—the original form of the letter,
it must be understood, not the present form, which has undergone editing
at the hands of Christians.
The literary process by which the origin of the movement was thrown back
to an earlier date in history lasted about fifty years.
When this latest work of Bauer’s appeared he had long been regarded by
theologians as an extinct force; nay, more, had been forgotten. And he had
not even kept his promise. He had not succeeded in showing what that
higher form of victory over the world was, which he declared superior to
Christianity; and in place of the personality of Jesus he had finally set
up a hybrid thing, laboriously compounded out of two personalities of so
little substance as those of Seneca and Josephus. That was the end of his
great undertaking.
But it was a mistake to bury, along with the Bauer of the second period,
also the Bauer of the first period, the critic—for the latter was not
dead. It was, indeed, nothing less than a misfortune that Strauss and
Bauer appeared within so short a time of one another. Bauer passed
practically unnoticed, because every one was preoccupied with Strauss.
Another unfortunate thing was that Bauer overthrew with his powerful
criticism the hypothesis which attributed real historical value to Mark,
so that it lay for a long time disregarded, and there ensued a barren
period of twenty years in the critical study of the Life of Jesus.
The only critic with whom Bauer can be compared is Reimarus. Each
exercised a terrifying and disabling influence upon his time. No one else
had been so keenly conscious as they of the extreme complexity of the
problem offered by the life of Jesus. In view of this complexity they
found themselves compelled to seek a solution outside the confines of
verifiable history. Reimarus, by finding the basis of the story of Jesus
in a deliberate imposture on the part of the disciples; Bauer, by
postulating an original Evangelist who invented the history. On this
ground it was just that they should lose their case. But in dismissing the
solutions which they offered, their contemporaries also dismissed the
problems which had necessitated such solutions; they dismissed them
because they were as little able to grasp as to remove these difficulties.
But the time is past for pronouncing judgment upon Lives of Christ on the
ground of the solutions which they offer. For us the great men are not
those who solved the problems, but those who discovered them. Bauer’s
“Criticism of the Gospel History” is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus,
because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a
century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of
the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.
Unfortunately, by the independent, the too loftily independent way in
which he developed his ideas, he destroyed the possibility of their
influencing contemporary theology. The shaft which he had driven into the
mountain broke down behind him, so that it needed the work of a whole
generation to lay bare once more the veins of ore which he had struck. His
contemporaries could not suspect that the abnormality of his solutions was
due to the intensity with which he grasped the problems as problems, and
that he had become blind to history by examining it too microscopically.
Thus for his contemporaries he was a mere eccentric.
But his eccentricity concealed a penetrating insight. No one else had as
yet grasped with the same completeness the idea that primitive
Christianity and early Christianity were not merely the direct outcome of
the preaching of Jesus, not merely a teaching put into practice, but more,
much more, since to the experience of which Jesus was the subject there
allied itself the experience of the world‐soul at a time when its
body—humanity under the Roman Empire—lay in the throes of death. Since
Paul, no one had apprehended so powerfully the mystic idea of the super‐
sensible σῶμα Χριστοῦ. Bauer transferred it to the historical plane and
found the “body of Christ” in the Roman Empire.
XII. FURTHER IMAGINATIVE LIVES OF JESUS
_Charles Christian Hennell._ Untersuchungen über den Ursprung des
Christentums. (An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity.)
1840. With a preface by David Friedrich Strauss. English edition,
1838.
Wichtige Enthüllungen über die wirkliche Todesart Jesu. Nach einem
alten zu Alexandria gefundenen Manuskripte von einem Zeitgenossen
Jesu aus dem heiligen Orden der Essäer. (Important Disclosures
concerning the Manner of Jesus’ Death. From an ancient MS. found
at Alexandria, written by a contemporary of Jesus belonging to the
sacred Order of the Essenes.) 1849. 5th ed., Leipzig. (Anonymous.)
Historische Enthüllungen über die wirklichen Ereignisse der Geburt
und Jugend Jesu. Als Fortsetzung der zu Alexandria aufgefundenen
alten Urkunden aus dem Essäerorden. (Historical Disclosures
concerning the real circumstances of the Birth and Youth of Jesus.
A Continuation of the ancient Essene MS. discovered at
Alexandria.) 1849. 2nd ed., Leipzig.
_August Friedrich Gfrörer._ Kritische Geschichte des
Urchristentums. (Critical History of Primitive Christianity.)
Vol. i. 1st ed., 1831; 2nd, 1835. Part i. 543 pp.; Part ii. 406
pp. Vol. ii. 1838. Part i. 452 pp.; Part ii. 417 pp.
_Richard von der Alm._ (Pseudonym of _Friedrich Wilhelm
Ghillany_.) Theologische Briefe an die Gebildeten der deutschen
Nation, 1863. (Theological Letters to the Cultured Classes of the
German People, 1863.) Vol. i. 929 pp.; Vol. ii. 656 pp.; Vol. iii.
802 pp.
_Ludwig Noack._ Die Geschichte Jesu auf Grund freier
geschichtlicher Untersuchungen über das Evangelium und die
Evangelien. (The History of Jesus on the Basis of a free
Historical Inquiry regarding the Gospel and the Gospels.) 2nd ed.,
1876, Mannheim. Book i. 251 pp.; Book ii. 187 pp.; Book iii. 386
pp.; Book iv. 285 pp.
Strauss can hardly be said to have done himself honour by contributing a
preface to the translation of Hennell’s work, which is nothing more than
Venturini’s “Non‐miraculous History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth”
tricked out with a fantastic paraphernalia of learning.(97)
The two series of “Important Disclosures” also are really “conveyed” with
no particular ability from that classic romance of the Life of Jesus, but
that did not prevent their making something of a sensation at the time
when they appeared.(98) Jesus, according to his narrative, was the son of
a member of the Essene Order. The child was watched over by the Order and
prepared for His future mission. He entered on His public ministry as a
tool of the Essenes, who after the crucifixion took Him down from the
cross and resuscitated Him.
These “Disclosures” only preserve the more external features of
Venturini’s representation. His Life of Jesus had been more than a mere
romance, it had been an imaginative solution of problems which he had
intuitively perceived. It may be regarded as the Forerunner of
rationalistic criticism. The problems which Venturini had intuitively
perceived were not solved either by the rationalists, or by Strauss, or by
Weisse. These writers had not succeeded in providing that of which
Venturini had dreamed—a living purposeful connexion between the events of
the life of Jesus—or in explaining His Person and Work as having a
relation, either positive or negative, to the circumstances of Late
Judaism. Venturini’s plan, however fantastic, connects the life of Jesus
with Jewish history and contemporary thought much more closely than any
other Life of Jesus, for that connexion is of course vital to the plot of
the romance. In Weisse’s “Gospel History” criticism had deliberately
renounced the attempt to explain Jesus directly from Judaism, finding
itself unable to establish any connexion between His teachings and
contemporary Jewish ideas. The way was therefore once more open to the
imagination. Accordingly several imaginative Lives preluded a new era in
the study of the subject, in so far as they endeavoured to understand
Jesus on the basis of purely Jewish ideas, in some cases as affirming
these, in others as opposing them in favour of a more spiritual
conception. In Gfrörer, Richard von der Alm, and Noack, begins the
skirmishing preparatory to the future battle over eschatology.(99)
August Friedrich Gfrörer, born in 1803 at Calw, was “Repetent” at the
Tübingen theological seminary at the time when Strauss was studying there.
After being curate at the principal church in Stuttgart for a year he gave
up, in 1830, the clerical profession in order to devote himself wholly to
his clerical studies.
By that time he had abandoned Christianity. In the preface to the first
edition of the first volume of his work, he describes Christianity as a
system which now only maintains itself by the force of custom, after
having commended itself to antiquity “by the hope of the mystic Kingdom of
the future world and having ruled the middle ages by the fear of the same
future.” By enunciating this view he has made an end, he thinks, of all
high‐flying Hegelian ideas, and being thus freed from all speculative
prejudices he feels himself in a position to approach his task from a
purely historical standpoint, with a view to showing how much of
Christianity is the creation of one exceptional Personality, and how much
belongs to the time in which it arose. In the first volume he describes
how the transformation of Jewish theology in Alexandria reacted upon
Palestinian theology, and how it came to its climax in Philo. The great
Alexandrian anticipated, according to Gfrörer, the ideas of Paul. His
“Therapeutae” are identical with the Essenes. At the same period Judaea
was kept in a ferment by a series of risings, to all of which the
incentive was found in Messianic expectations. Then Jesus appeared. The
three points to be investigated in His history are: what end He had in
view; why He died; and what modifications His work underwent at the hands
of the Apostles.
The second volume, entitled “The Sacred Legend,” does not, however, carry
out this plan. The works of Strauss and Weisse necessitated a new method
of treatment. The fame of Strauss’s achievement stirred Gfrörer to
emulation, and Weisse, with his priority of Mark and rejection of John,
must be refuted. The work is therefore almost a polemic against Weisse for
his “want of historic sense,” and ends in setting up views which had not
entered into Gfrörer’s mind at the time when he wrote his first volume.
The statements of Papias regarding the Synoptists, which Weisse followed,
are not deserving of credence. For a whole generation and more the
tradition about Jesus had passed from mouth to mouth, and it had absorbed
much that was legendary. Luke was the first—as his preface shows—who
checked that process, and undertook to separate what was genuine from what
was not. He is the most trustworthy of the Evangelists, for he keeps
closely to his sources and adds nothing of his own, in contrast with
Matthew who, writing at a later date, used sources of less value and
invented matter of his own, which Gfrörer finds especially in the story of
the passion in this Gospel. The lateness of Matthew is also evident from
his tendency to carry over the Old Testament into the New. In Luke, on the
other hand, the sources are so conscientiously treated that Gfrörer finds
no difficulty in analysing the narrative into its component parts,
especially as he always has a purely instinctive feeling “whenever a
different wind begins to blow.”
Both Gospels, however, were written long after the destruction of the holy
city, since they do not draw their material from the Jerusalem tradition,
but “from the Christian legends which had grown up in the neighbourhood of
the Sea of Tiberias,” and in consequence “mistakenly transferred the scene
of Jesus’ ministry to Galilee.” For this reason it is not surprising “that
even down into the second century many Christians had doubts about the
truth of the Synoptics and ventured to express their doubts.” Such doubts
only ceased when the Church became firmly established and began to use its
authority to suppress the objections of individuals. Mark is the earliest
witness to doubts within the primitive Christian community regarding the
credibility of his predecessors. Luke and Matthew are for him not yet
sacred books; he desires to reconcile their inconsistencies, and at the
same time to produce “a Gospel composed of materials of which the
authenticity could be maintained even against the doubters.” For this
reason he omits most of the discourses, ignores the birth‐story, and of
the miracles retains only those which were most deeply embedded in the
tradition. His Gospel was probably produced between 110 and 120. The “non‐
genuine” conclusion was a later addition, but by the Evangelist himself.
Thus Mark proves that the Synoptists contain legendary matter even though
they are separated from the events which they relate only by a generation
and a half, or at most two generations. To show that there is nothing
strange in this, Gfrörer gives a long catalogue of miracles found in
historians who were contemporaries of the events which they describe, and
in some cases were concerned in them—in this connexion Cortez affords him
a rich storehouse of material. On the other hand, all objections against
the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel collapse miserably. It is true that,
like the others, it offers no historically accurate report of the
discourses of Jesus. It pictures Him as the Logos‐Christ and makes Him
speak in this character; which Jesus certainly did not do. Inadvertently
the author makes John the Baptist speak in the same way. That does not
matter, however, for the historical conditions are rightly represented;
rightly, because Jerusalem was the scene of the greater part of the
ministry, and the five Johannine miracles are to be retained. The healing
of the nobleman’s son, that of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda, and
that of the man blind from birth happened just as they are told. The story
of the miracle at Cana rests on a misunderstanding, for the wine which
Jesus provided was really the wedding‐gift which He had brought with Him.
In the raising of Lazarus a real case of apparent death is combined with a
polemical exaggeration of it, the restoration to life becoming, in the
course of controversy with the Jews, an actual resurrection. Having thus
won free, dragging John along with him, from the toils of the Hegelian
denial of miracle—only, it is true, by the aid of Venturini—and being
prepared to explain the feeding of the multitude on the most commonplace
rationalistic lines, he may well boast that he has “driven the doubt
concerning the Fourth Gospel into a very small corner.”