affirmation begins. We are ascending the eastern mountains from which the
pure airs of heaven breathe upon the spirit. Our guide shall be historical
mathematics, a science which is as yet known to few, and has not been
applied by any one to the New Testament.” This “mathematic” of Gfrörer’s
consists in developing his whole argument out of a single postulate. Let
it be granted to him that all other claimants of the Messiahship—Gfrörer,
in defiance of the evidence of Josephus, makes all the leaders of revolt
in Palestine claimants of the Messiahship—were put to death by the Romans,
whereas Jesus was crucified by His own people: it follows that the
Messiahship of Jesus was not political, but spiritual. He had declared
Himself to be in a certain sense the longed‐for Messiah, but in another
sense He was not so. His preaching moved in the sphere of Philonian ideas;
although He did not as yet explicitly apply the Logos doctrine, it was
implicit in His thought, so that the discourses of the Fourth Gospel have
an essential truth. All Messianic conceptions, the Kingdom of God, the
judgment, the future world, are sublimated into the spiritual region. The
resurrection of the dead becomes a present eternal life. The saying in
John v. 24, “He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me,
hath eternal life and cometh not into judgment; but is passed from death
into life,” is the only authentic part of that discourse. The reference
which follows to the coming judgment and the resurrection of the dead is a
Jewish interpolation. Jesus did not believe that He Himself was to rise
from the dead. Nevertheless, the “resurrection” is historic; Joseph of
Arimathea, a member of the Essene Order, whose tool Jesus unconsciously
was, had bribed the Romans to make the crucifixion of Jesus only a
pretence, and to crucify two others with Him in order to distract
attention from Him. After He was taken down from the cross, Joseph removed
Him to a tomb of his own which had been hewn out for the purpose in the
neighbourhood of the cross, and succeeded in resuscitating Him. The
Christian Church grew out of the Essene Order by giving a further
development to its ideas, and it is impossible to explain the organisation
of the Church without taking account of the regulations of the Order. The
work closes with a rhapsody on the Church and its development into the
Papal system.
Gfrörer thus works into Venturini’s plan a quantity of material drawn from
Philo. His first volume would have led one to expect a more original and
scientific result. But the author is one of those “epileptics of
criticism” for whom criticism is not a natural and healthy means of
arriving at a result, but who, in consequence of the fits of criticism to
which they are subject, and which they even endeavour to intensify, fall
into a condition of exhaustion, in which the need for some fixed point
becomes so imperative that they create it for themselves by self‐
suggestion—as they previously did their criticism—and then flatter
themselves that they have really found it.
This need for a fixed point carried the former rival of Strauss into
Catholicism, for which his “General History of the Church” (1841‐1846)
already shows a strong admiration. After the appearance of this work
Gfrörer became Professor of History in the University of Freiburg. In 1848
he was active in the German Parliament in endeavouring to promote a
reunion of the Protestants with the Catholics. In 1853 he went over to the
Roman Church. His family had already gone over, at Strassburg, during the
revolutionary period. In the conflict of the church with the Baden
Government he vehemently supported the claims of the Pope. He died in
1861.
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Incomparably better and more thorough is the attempt to write a Life of
Jesus embodied in the “Theological Letters to the Cultured Classes of the
German Nation.” Their writer takes Gfrörer’s studies as his starting‐
point, but instead of spiritualising unjustifiably he ventures to conceive
the Jewish world of thought in which Jesus lived in its simple realism. He
was the first to place the eschatology recognised by Strauss and Reimarus
in an historical setting—that of Venturini’s plan—and to write a Life of
Jesus entirely governed by the idea of eschatology.
The author, Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany, was born in 1807 at Erlangen. His
first studies were in theology. His rationalistic views, however,
compelled him to abandon the clerical profession. He became librarian at
Nuremberg in 1841 and engaged in controversial writing of an anti‐orthodox
character, but distinguished himself also by historical work of
outstanding merit. A year after the publication of the “Theological
Letters,” which he issued under the pseudonym of Richard von der Alm, he
published a collection of “The Opinions of Heathen and Christian Writers
of the first Christian Centuries about Jesus Christ” (1864), a work which
gives evidence of a remarkable range of reading. In 1855 he removed to
Munich in the hope of obtaining a post in the diplomatic service, but in
spite of his solid acquirements he did not succeed. No one would venture
to appoint a man of such outspoken anti‐ecclesiastical views. He died in
1876.
As regards the question of the sources, Ghillany occupies very nearly the
Tübingen standpoint, except that he holds Matthew to be later than Luke,
and Mark to be extracted, not from these Gospels in their present form,
but from their sources. John is not authentic.
The worship offered to Jesus after His death by the Christian community
is, according to Ghillany, not derived from pure Judaism, but from a
Judaism influenced by oriental religions. The influence of the cult of
Mithra, for example, is unmistakable. In it, as in Christianity, we find
the virgin‐birth, the star, the wise men, the cross, and the resurrection.
Were it not for the human sacrifice of the Mithra cult, the idea which is
operative in the Supper, of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the
Son of Man, would be inexplicable.
The whole Eastern world was at that time impregnated with Gnostic ideas,
which centred in the revelation of the Divine in the human. In this way
there arose, for example, a Samaritan Gnosis, independent of the
Christian. Christianity itself is a species of Gnosis. In any case the
metaphysical conception of the Divine Sonship of Jesus is of secondary
origin. If He was in any sense the Son of God for the disciples, they can
only have thought of this sonship in a Gnostic fashion, and supposed that
the “highest angel,” the Son of God, had taken up His abode in Him.
John the Baptist had probably come forth from among the Essenes, and he
preached a spiritualised Kingdom of Heaven. He held himself to be Elias.
Jesus’ aims were originally similar; He came forward “in the cause of
sound religious teaching for the people.” He made no claim to Davidic
descent; that is to be credited to dogmatic theology. Similarly Papias is
wrong in ascribing to Jesus the crude eschatological expectations implied
in the saying about the miraculous vine in the Messianic Kingdom.
It is certain, however, that Jesus held Himself to be Messiah and expected
the early coming of the Kingdom. His teaching is Rabbinic; all His ideas
have their source in contemporary Judaism, whose world of thought we can
reconstruct from the Rabbinic writings; for even if these only became
fixed at a later period, the thoughts on which they are based were already
current in the time of Jesus. Another source of great importance is
Justin’s “Dialogue with the Jew Trypho.”
The starting‐point in interpreting the teaching of Jesus is the idea of
repentance. In the tractate “Sanhedrin” we find: “The set time of the
Messiah is already here; His coming depends now upon repentance and good
works. Rabbi Eleazer says, ‘When the Jews repent they shall be
redeemed.’ ” The Targum of Jonathan observes, on Zech. x. 3, 4,(100) “The
Messiah is already born, but remains in concealment because of the sins of
the Hebrews.” We find the same thoughts put into the mouth of Trypho in
Justin. In the same Targum of Jonathan, Isa. liii. is interpreted with
reference to the sufferings of the Messiah. Judaism, therefore, was not
unacquainted with the idea of a suffering Messiah. He was not identified,
however, with the heavenly Messiah of Daniel. The Rabbis distinguished two
Messiahs, one of Israel and one of Judah. First the Messiah of the Kingdom
of Israel, denominated the Son of Joseph, was to come from Galilee to
suffer death at the hands of the Gentiles in order to make atonement for
the sins of the Hebrew nation. Only after that would the Messiah predicted
by Daniel, the son of David, of the tribe of Judah, appear in glory upon
the clouds of heaven. Finally, He also, after two‐and‐sixty weeks of
years, should be taken away, since the Messianic Kingdom, even as
conceived by Paul, was only a temporary supernatural condition of the
world.
The Messianic expectation, being directed to supernatural events, had no
political character, and one who knew Himself to be the Messiah could
never dream of using earthly means for the attainment of His ends; He
would expect all things to be brought about by the Divine intervention. In
this respect Ghillany grasps clearly the character of the eschatology of
Jesus—more clearly than any one had ever done before.
The rôle of the Messiah, who prior to His supernatural manifestation
remains in concealment upon earth, is therefore passive. He who is
conscious of a Messianic vocation does not seek to found a Kingdom among
men. He waits with confidence. He issues forth from His passivity with the
sole purpose of making atonement, by vicarious suffering, for the sins of
the people, in order that it may be possible for God to bring about the
new condition of things. If, in spite of the repentance of the people and
the occurrence of the signs which pointed to its being at hand, the coming
of the Kingdom should be delayed, the man who is conscious of a Messianic
vocation must, by His death, compel the intervention of God. His vocation
in this world is to die.
Brought within the lines of these reflections the Life of Jesus shapes
itself as follows.
Jesus was the tool of a mystical sect allied to the Essenes, the head of
which was doubtless that Joseph of Arimathea who makes so sudden and
striking an appearance in the Gospel narrative. This party desired to
bring about the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven by mystical means, whereas
the mass of the people, led astray by the Pharisees, thought to force on
its coming by means of a rising. In the preacher of a spiritual Kingdom of
Heaven, who was resolved to go to death for His cause, the mystical party
discovered Messiah the son of Joseph, and they recognised that His death
was necessary to make possible the coming of the heavenly Messiah
predicted by Daniel. That Jesus Himself was the Messiah of Daniel, that He
would immediately rise again in order to ascend to His heavenly throne,
and would come thence with the hosts of heaven to establish the Kingdom of
Heaven, these people did not themselves believe. But they encouraged Him
in this belief, thinking that He would hardly commit Himself to a
sacrificial death from which there was to be no resurrection. It was left
uncertain to His mind whether Jehovah would be content with the repentance
of the people, in so far as it had taken place, as realising the necessary
condition for the bringing in of the Kingdom of Heaven, or whether an
atonement by blood, offered by the death of Messiah the son of Joseph,
would be needful. It had been explained to Him that when the calculated
year of grace arrived, He must go up to Jerusalem and endeavour to rouse
the Jews to Messianic enthusiasm in order to compel Jehovah to come to
their aid with His heavenly hosts. From the action of Jehovah it could
then be discovered whether the preaching of repentance and baptism would
suffice to make atonement for the people before God or not. If Jehovah did
not appear, a deeper atonement must be made; Jesus must pay the penalty of
death for the sins of the Jews, but on the third day would rise again from
the dead and ascend to the throne of God and come again thence to found
the Kingdom of Heaven. “Any one can see,” concludes Ghillany, “that our
view affords a very natural explanation of the anxiety of the disciples,
the suspense of Jesus Himself, and the prayer, ‘If it be possible let this
cup pass from me.’ ”
“It was apparently only towards the close of His life that Jesus revealed
to the disciples the possibility that the Son of Man might have to suffer
and die before He could found the Messianic Kingdom.”
With this possibility before Him, He came to Jerusalem and there awaited
the Divine intervention. Meanwhile Joseph of Arimathea lent his aid
towards securing His condemnation in the Sanhedrin. He must die on the day
of the Passover; on the day of the Preparation He must be at hand and
ready in Jerusalem. He held, with His disciples, a love‐feast after the
Essene custom, not a Paschal meal, and in doing so associated thoughts of
His death with the breaking of bread and the pouring out of the wine. “He
did not lay upon His disciples any injunction to continue the celebration
of a feast of this kind until the time of His return, because He thought
of His resurrection and His heavenly glory as about to take place after
three days. But when His return was delayed the early Christians attached
these sayings of His about the bread and wine to their Essene love‐feast,
and explained this common meal of the community as a commemoration of the
Last Supper of Jesus and His disciples, a memorial Feast in honour of
their Saviour, the celebration of which must be continued until His
coming.”
When the armed band came to arrest Him, Jesus surrendered to His fate.
Pilate almost set Him free, holding Him to be a mere enthusiast who placed
His hopes only in the Divine intervention. Joseph of Arimathea, however,
succeeded in averting this danger. “Even on the cross Jesus seems to have
continued to hope for the Divine intervention, as is evidenced by the cry,
‘My God! My God! why hast thou forsaken me?’ ” Joseph of Arimathea
provided for His burial.
The belief in His resurrection rests upon the visions of the disciples,
which are to be explained by their intense desire for the Parousia, of
which He had given them the promise. After setting their affairs in order
in Galilee they returned at the Feast of Pentecost to Jerusalem, which
they had left in alarm, in order there to await the Parousia in company
with other Galilaean believers.
The confession of faith of the primitive Christian community was the
simplest conceivable: Jesus the Messiah had come, not as a temporal
conqueror, but as the Son of Man foretold by Daniel, and had died for the
sins of the people. In other respects they were strict Jews, kept the Law,
and were constantly in the Temple. Only the community of goods and the
brotherhood‐meal are of an Essene character.
“The Christianity of the original community in Jerusalem was thus a
mixture of Zealotism and Mysticism which did not include any wholly new
element, and even in its conception of the Messiah had nothing peculiar to
itself except the belief that the Son of Man predicted by Daniel had
already come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth ... that He was now
enthroned at the right hand of God, and would again appear as the expected
Son of Man upon the clouds of heaven according to Daniel’s prophecy.”
Jesus, therefore, had triumphed over the mystical party who desired to
make use of Him in the character of Messiah the son of Joseph—their
Messiah, the heavenly Son of Man, had not come. Jesus, in virtue of what
He had done, had taken His place both in heaven and in earth.
How much of Venturini’s plan is here retained? Only the “mystical part”
which serves the purpose of setting the action of the drama in motion. All
the rest of it, the rationalistic part, has been transmuted into an
historical conception. Miracle and trickery, along with the stage‐play
resurrection, have been purged away in the fires of Strauss’s criticism.
There remains only a fundamental conception which has a certain
greatness—a brotherhood which looks for the coming of the Kingdom of
Heaven appoints one of its members to undergo as Messiah an atoning death,
that the coming of the Kingdom, for which the time is at hand, may not be
delayed. This brotherhood is the only fictitious element in the whole
construction—much as in the primitive steam‐engine the valves were still
worked by hand while the rest of the machinery was actuated by its own
motive‐power. So in this Life of Jesus the motive‐power is drawn entirely
from historical sources, and the want of an automatic starting arrangement
is a mere anachronism. Strike out the superfluous rôle of Joseph of
Arimathea, and the distinction of the two Messiahs, which is not clear
even in the Rabbis, and substitute the simple hypothesis that Jesus, in
the course of His Messianic vocation, when He thinks the time for the
coming of the Kingdom has arrived, goes freely to Jerusalem, and, as it
were, compels the secular power to put Him to death, in order by this act
of atonement to win for the world the immediate coming of the Kingdom, and
for Himself the glory of the Son of Man—make these changes, and you have a
life of Jesus in which the motive‐power is a purely historical force. It
is impossible to indicate briefly all the parts of which the seemingly
complicated, but in reality impressively simple, mechanism of this Life of
Jesus is composed. The conduct of Jesus, alike in its resolution and in
its hesitation, becomes clear, and not less so that of the disciples. All
far‐fetched historical ingenuity is dispensed with. Jesus acts “because
His hour is come.” This decisive placing of the Life of Jesus in the “last
time” (_cf._ 1 Peter i. 20 φανερωθέντος δὲ ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτων τῶν χρόνων δἰ ὑμᾶς)
is an historical achievement without parallel. Not less so is the placing
of the thought of the passion in its proper eschatological setting as an
act of atonement. Where had the character and origin of the primitive
community ever been brought into such clear connexion with the death of
Jesus? Who had ever before so earnestly considered the problem why the
Christian community arose in Jerusalem and not in Galilee? “But the
solution is too simple, and, moreover, is not founded on a severely
scientific chain of reasoning, but on historical intuition and experiment,
the simple experiment of introducing the Life of Jesus into the Jewish
eschatological world of thought”—so the theologians replied, or so, at
least, they might have replied if they had taken this curious work
seriously, if, indeed, they had read it at all. But how were they to
suspect that in a book which seemed to aim at founding a new Deistic
Church, and which went out with the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist into the
desert of the most barren natural religion, a valuable historical
conception might be found? It is true that no one suspected at that time
that in the forgotten work of Reimarus there lay a dangerous historical
discovery, a kind of explosive material such as can only be collected by
those who stand free from every responsibility towards historical
Christianity, who have abandoned every prejudice, in the good sense as
well as in the bad—and whose one desire in regard to the Gospel history is
to be “spirits that constantly deny.”(101) Such thinkers, if they have
historical gifts, destroy artificial history in the cause of true history
and, willing evil, do good—if it be admitted that the discovery of truth
is good. If this negative work is a good thing, the author of the “Letters
to the German People” performed a distinguished service, for his negation
is radical. The new Church which was to be founded on this historic
overcoming of historic Christianity was to combine “only what was
according to reason in Judaism and Christianity.” From Judaism it was to
take the belief in one sole, spiritual, perfect God; from Christianity the
requirement of brotherly love to all men. On the other hand, it was to
eliminate what was contrary to reason in each: from Judaism the ritual
system and the sacrifices; from Christianity the deification of Jesus and
the teaching of redemption through His blood. How comes so completely
unhistorical a temperament to be combined with so historical an intellect?
His Jesus, after all, has no individuality; He is a mere eschatological
machine.
In accordance with the confession of faith of the new Church of which
Ghillany dreamed, the calendar of the Feasts is to be transformed as
follows:—
1. Feast of the Deity, the first and second of January.
2. Feast of the Dignity of Man and Brotherly Love, first and second of
April.
3. Feast of the Divine Blessing in Nature, first and second of July.
4. Feast of Immortality, first and second of October.
Apart from these eight Feast days, and the Sundays, all the other days of
the year are working days.
From the order of divine service we may note the following: “The sermon,
which should begin with instruction and exhortation and close with
consolation and encouragement, must not last longer than half an hour.”
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The series of Lives of Jesus which combine criticism with fiction is
closed by Noack’s Story of Jesus. A freethinker like Ghillany, but lacking
the financial independence which a kindly fate had conferred upon the
latter, Noack led a life which may properly be described as a constant
martyrdom, lightened only by his intense love of theological studies,
which nevertheless were responsible for all his troubles. Born in 1819, of
a clerical family in Hesse, he became in 1842 Pastor’s assistant and
teacher of religion at Worms in the Hessian Palatinate. The Darmstadt
reactionaries drove him out of this position in 1844 without his having
given any ground of offence. In 1849 he became “Repetent” in Philosophy at
the University of Giessen at a salary of four hundred gulden. In 1855 he
was promoted to be Professor Extraordinary without having his salary
raised. In 1870, at the age of 51, he was appointed assistant at the
University Library and received at the same time the title of Ordinary
Professor. He died in 1885. He was an extremely prolific writer, always
ingenious, and possessed of wide knowledge, but he never did anything of
real permanent value either in philosophy or theology. He was not without
critical acumen, but there was too much of the poet in him; a critical
discovery was an incitement to an imaginative reconstruction of the
history. In 1870‐1871 he published, after many preliminary studies, his
chief work, “From the Jordan Uplands to Golgotha; four books on the Gospel
and the Gospels.”(102) It passed unnoticed. Attributing its failure to the
excitement aroused by the war, which ousted all other interests, he issued
a revised edition in 1876 under the title “The History of Jesus, on the
Basis of Free Historical Inquiry concerning the Gospel and the
Gospels,”(103) but with hardly greater success.
And yet the fundamental critical ideas which can be detected beneath this
narrative, in spite of its having the form of fiction, give this work a
significance such as the contemporary Lives of Jesus which won the
applause of theologians did not possess. It is the only Life of Jesus
hitherto produced which is written consistently from the Johannine point
of view from beginning to end. Strauss had not, after all, in Noack’s
opinion, conclusively shown the absolute incompatibility of the Synoptics
with the Fourth Gospel; neither he nor any other critic had felt the full
difficulty of the question why the Fourth Evangelist should be at pains to
invent the numerous journeys to the Feasts, seeing that the development of
the Logos Christology did not necessarily involve any alteration of the
scene of the ministry; on the contrary, it would, one might think, have
been the first care of the Evangelist to inweave his novel theory with the
familiar tradition in order to avoid discrediting his narrative in advance
by his innovations. Noack’s conclusion is that the inconsistency is not
due to a single author; it is the result of a long process of redaction in
which various divergent tendencies have been at work. But as the Fourth
Gospel is not the logical terminus of the process of alteration, the only
alternative is to place it at the beginning. What we have to seek in it is
the original Gospel from which the process of transforming the tradition
started.