the personality of Jesus. Weisse left Him still some greatness, something
unexplained, and did not venture to apply to everything the petty
standards of inquisitive modern psychology. In the ’sixties psychology
became more confident and Jesus smaller; at the close of the century the
confidence of psychology is at its greatest and the figure of Jesus at its
smallest—so small, that Frenssen ventures to let His life be projected and
written by one who is in the midst of a love affair!
This human life of Jesus is to be “heart‐stirring” from beginning to end,
and “in no respect to go beyond human standards”! And this Jesus who
“racks His brains and shapes His plans” is to contribute to bring about a
re‐birth of the German people. How could He? He is Himself only a phantom
created by the Germanic mind in pursuit of a religious will‐o’‐the‐wisp.
It is possible, however, to do injustice to Frenssen’s presentation, and
to the whole of the confident, unconsciously modernising criticism of
which he here acts as the mouthpiece. These writers have the great merit
of having brought certain cultured circles nearer to Jesus and made them
more sympathetic towards Him. Their fault lies in their confidence, which
has blinded them to what Jesus is and is not, what He can and cannot do,
so that in the end they fail to understand “the signs of the times” either
as historians or as men of the present.
If the Jesus who owes His birth to the Marcan hypothesis and modern
psychology were capable of regenerating the world He would have done it
long ago, for He is nearly sixty years old and his latest portraits are
much less life‐like than those drawn by Weisse, Schenkel, and Renan, or by
Keim, the most brilliant painter of them all.
For the last ten years modern historical theology has more and more
adapted itself to the needs of the man in the street. More and more, even
in the best class of works, it makes use of attractive head‐lines as a
means of presenting its results in a lively form to the masses.
Intoxicated with its own ingenuity in inventing these, it becomes more and
more confident in its cause, and has come to believe that the world’s
salvation depends in no small measure upon the spreading of its own
“assured results” broad‐cast among the people. It is time that it should
begin to doubt itself, to doubt its “historical” Jesus, to doubt the
confidence with which it has looked to its own construction for the moral
and religious regeneration of our time. Its Jesus is not alive, however
Germanic they may make Him.
It was no accident that the chief priest of “German art for German people”
found himself at one with the modern theologians and offered them his
alliance. Since the ’sixties the critical study of the Life of Jesus in
Germany has been unconsciously under the influence of an imposing modern‐
religious nationalism in art. It has been deflected by it as by an
underground magnetic current. It was in vain that a few purely historical
investigators uplifted their voices in protest. The process had to work
itself out. For historical criticism had become, in the hands of most of
those who practised it, a secret struggle to reconcile the Germanic
religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.(239) It was
concerned for the religious interests of the present. Therefore its error
had a kind of greatness, it was in fact the greatest thing about it; and
the severity with which the pure historian treats it is in proportion to
his respect for its spirit. For this German critical study of the Life of
Jesus is an essential part of German religion. As of old Jacob wrestled
with the angel, so German theology wrestles with Jesus of Nazareth and
will not let Him go until He bless it—that is, until He will consent to
serve it and will suffer Himself to be drawn by the Germanic spirit into
the midst of our time and our civilisation. But when the day breaks, the
wrestler must let Him go. He will not cross the ford with us. Jesus of
Nazareth will not suffer Himself to be modernised. As an historic figure
He refuses to be detached from His own time. He has no answer for the
question, “Tell us Thy name in our speech and for our day!” But He does
bless those who have wrestled with Him, so that, though they cannot take
Him with them, yet, like men who have seen God face to face and received
strength in their souls, they go on their way with renewed courage, ready
to do battle with the world and its powers.
But the historic Jesus and the Germanic spirit cannot be brought together
except by an act of historic violence which in the end injures both
religion and history. A time will come when our theology, with its pride
in its historical character, will get rid of its rationalistic bias. This
bias leads it to project back into history what belongs to our own time,
the eager struggle of the modern religious spirit with the Spirit of
Jesus, and seek in history justification and authority for its beginning.
The consequence is that it creates the historical Jesus in its own image,
so that it is not the modern spirit influenced by the Spirit of Jesus, but
the Jesus of Nazareth constructed by modern historical theology, that is
set to work upon our race.
Therefore both the theology and its picture of Jesus are poor and weak.
Its Jesus, because He has been measured by the petty standard of the
modern man, at variance with himself, not to say of the modern candidate
in theology who has made shipwreck; the theologians themselves, because
instead of seeking, for themselves and others, how they may best bring the
Spirit of Jesus in living power into our world, they keep continually
forging new portraits of the historical Jesus, and think they have
accomplished something great when they have drawn an Oh! of astonishment
from the multitude, such as the crowds of a great city emit on catching
sight of a new advertisement in coloured lights.
Anyone who, admiring the force and authority of genuine rationalism, has
got rid of the naïve self‐satisfaction of modern theology, which is in
essence only the degenerate offspring of rationalism with a tincture of
history, rejoices in the feebleness and smallness of its professedly
historical Jesus, rejoices in all those who are beginning to doubt the
truth of this portrait, rejoices in the over‐severity with which it is
attacked, rejoices to take a share in its destruction.
Those who have begun to doubt are many, but most of them only make known
their doubts by their silence. There is one, however, who has spoken out,
and one of the greatest—Otto Pfleiderer.(240)
In the first edition of his _Urchristentum_, published in 1887, he still
shared the current conceptions and constructions, except that he held the
credibility of Mark to be more affected than was usually supposed by
hypothetical Pauline influences. In the second edition(241) his positive
knowledge has been ground down in the struggle with the sceptics—it is
Brandt who has especially affected him—and with the partisans of
eschatology. This is the first advance‐guard action of modern theology
coming into touch with the troops of Reimarus and Bruno Bauer.
Pfleiderer accepts the purely eschatological conception of the Kingdom of
God and holds also that the ethics of Jesus were wholly conditioned by
eschatology. But in regard to the question of the Messiahship of Jesus he
takes his stand with the sceptics. He rejects the hypothesis of a Messiah
who, as being a “spiritual Messiah,” conceals His claim, but on the other
hand, he cannot accept the eschatological Son‐of‐Man Messiahship having
reference to the future, which the eschatological school finds in the
utterances of Jesus, since it implies prophecies of His suffering, death,
and resurrection which criticism cannot admit. “Instead of finding the
explanation of how the Messianic title arose in the reflections of Jesus
about the death which lay before Him,” he is inclined to find it “rather
in the reflection of the Christian community upon the catastrophic death
and exaltation of its Lord after this had actually taken place.”
Even the Marcan narrative is not history. The scepticism in regard to the
main source, with which writers like Oskar Holtzmann, Schmiedel, and von
Soden conduct a kind of intellectual flirtation, is here erected into a
principle. “It must be recognised,” says Pfleiderer, “that in respect of
the recasting of the history under theological influences, the whole of
our Gospels stand in principle on the same footing. The distinction
between Mark, the other two Synoptists, and John is only relative—a
distinction of degree corresponding to different stages of theological
reflection and the development of the ecclesiastical consciousness.” If
only Bruno Bauer could have lived to see this triumph of his opinions!
Pfleiderer, however, is conscious that scepticism, too, has its
difficulties. He wishes, indeed, to reject the confession of Jesus before
the Sanhedrin “because its historicity is not well established (none of
the disciples were present to hear it, and the apocalyptic prophecy which
is added, Mark xiv. 62, is certainly derived from the ideas of the
primitive Church)”; on the other hand, he is inclined to admit as
possibilities—though marking them with a note of interrogation—that Jesus
may have accepted the homage of the Passover pilgrims, and that the
controversy with the Scribes about the Son of David had some kind of
reference to Jesus Himself.
On the other hand, he takes it for granted that Jesus did not prophesy His
death, on the ground that the arrest, trial, and betrayal must have lain
outside all possibility of calculation even for Him. All these, he thinks,
came upon Jesus quite unexpectedly. The only thing that He might have
apprehended was “an attack by hired assassins,” and it is to this that He
refers in the saying about the two swords in Luke xxii. 36 and 38, seeing
that two swords would have sufficed as a protection against such an attack
as that, though hardly for anything further. When, however, he remarks in
this connexion that “this has been constantly overlooked” in the romances
dealing with the Life of Jesus, he does injustice to Bahrdt and Venturini,
since according to them the chief concern of the secret society in the
later period of the life of Jesus was to protect Jesus from the
assassination with which He was menaced, and to secure His formal arrest
and trial by the Sanhedrin. Their view of the historical situation is
therefore identical with Pfleiderer’s, viz. that assassination was
possible, but that administrative action was unexpected and is
inexplicable.
But how is this Jesus to be connected with primitive Christianity? How did
the primitive Church’s belief in the Messiahship of Jesus arise? To that
question Pfleiderer can give no other answer than that of Volkmar and
Brandt, that is to say, none. He laboriously brings together wood, straw,
and stubble, but where he gets the fire from to kindle the whole into the
ardent faith of primitive Christianity he is unable to make clear.
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According to Albert Kalthoff,(242) the fire lighted itself—Christianity
arose—by spontaneous combustion, when the inflammable material, religious
and social, which had collected together in the Roman Empire, came in
contact with the Jewish Messianic expectations. Jesus of Nazareth never
existed; and even supposing He had been one of the numerous Jewish
Messiahs who were put to death by crucifixion, He certainly did not found
Christianity. The story of Jesus which lies before us in the Gospels is in
reality only the story of the way in which the picture of Christ arose,
that is to say, the story of the growth of the Christian community. There
is therefore no problem of the Life of Jesus, but only a problem of the
Christ.
Kalthoff has not indeed always been so negative. When in the year 1880 he
gave a series of lectures on the Life of Jesus he felt himself justified
“in taking as his basis without further argument the generally accepted
results of modern theology.” Afterwards he became so completely doubtful
about the Christ after the flesh whom he had at that time depicted before
his hearers that he wished to exclude Him even from the register of
theological literature, and omitted to enter these lectures in the list of
his writings, although they had appeared in print.(243)
His quarrel with the historical Jesus of modern theology was that he could
find no connecting link between the Life of Jesus constructed by the
latter and primitive Christianity. Modern theology, he remarks in one
passage, with great justice, finds itself obliged to assume, at the point
where the history of the Church begins, “an immediate declension from, and
falsification of, a pure original principle,” and that in so doing “it is
deserting the recognised methods of historical science.” If then we cannot
trace the path from its beginning onwards, we had better try to work
backwards, endeavouring first to define in the theology of the primitive
Church the values which we shall look to find again in the Life of Jesus.
In that he is right. Modern historical theology will not have refuted him
until it has explained how Christianity arose out of the life of Jesus
without calling in that theory of an initial “Fall” of which Harnack,
Wernle, and all the rest make use. Until this modern theology has made it
in some measure intelligible how, under the influence of the Jewish
Messiah‐sect, in the twinkling of an eye, in every direction at once,
Graeco‐Roman popular Christianity arose; until at least it has described
the popular Christianity of the first three generations, it must concede
to all hypotheses which fairly face this problem and endeavour to solve it
their formal right of existence.
The criticism which Kalthoff directs against the “positive” accounts of
the Life of Jesus is, in part, very much to the point. “Jesus,” he says in
one place, “has been made the receptacle into which every theologian pours
his own ideas.” He rightly remarks that if we follow “the Christ”
backwards from the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament right to the
apocalyptic vision of Daniel, we always find in Him superhuman traits
alongside of the human. “Never and nowhere,” he insists, “is He that which
critical theology has endeavoured to make out of Him, a purely natural
man, an indivisible historical unit.” “The title of ’Christ’ had been
raised by the Messianic apocalyptic writings so completely into the sphere
of the heroic that it had become impossible to apply it to a mere
historical man.” Bruno Bauer had urged the same considerations upon the
theology of his time, declaring it to be unthinkable that a man could have
arisen among the Jews and declared “I am the Messiah.”
But the unfortunate thing is that Kalthoff has not worked through Bruno
Bauer’s criticism, and does not appear to assume it as a basis, but
remains standing half‐way instead of thinking the questions through to the
end as that keen critic did. According to Kalthoff it would appear that,
year in year out, there was a constant succession of Messianic
disturbances among the Jews and of crucified claimants of the Messiahship.
“There had been many a ’Christ,’” he says in one place, “before there was
any question of a Jesus in connexion with this title.”
How does Kalthoff know that? If he had fairly considered and felt the
force of Bruno Bauer’s arguments, he would never have ventured on this
assertion; he would have learned that it is not only historically
unproved, but intrinsically impossible.
But Kalthoff was in far too great a hurry to present to his readers a
description of the growth of Christianity, and therewith of the picture of
the Christ, to absorb thoroughly the criticism of his great predecessor.
He soon leads his reader away from the high road of criticism into a
morass of speculation, in order to arrive by a short cut at Graeco‐Roman
primitive Christianity. But the trouble is that while the guide walks
lightly and safely, the ordinary man, weighed down by the pressure of
historical considerations, sinks to rise no more.
The conjectural argument which Kalthoff follows out is in itself acute,
and forms a suitable pendant to Bauer’s reconstruction of the course of
events. Bauer proposed to derive Christianity from the Graeco‐Roman
philosophy; Kalthoff, recognising that the origin of popular Christianity
constitutes the main question, takes as his starting‐point the social
movements of the time.
In the Roman Empire, so runs his argument, among the oppressed masses of
the slaves and the populace, eruptive forces were concentrated under high
tension. A communistic movement arose, to which the influence of the
Jewish element in the proletariat gave a Messianic‐Apocalyptic colouring.
The Jewish synagogue influenced Roman social conditions so that “the crude
social ferment at work in the Roman Empire amalgamated itself with the
religious and philosophical forces of the time to form the new Christian
social movement.” Early Christian writers had learned in the synagogue to
construct “personifications.” The whole Late‐Jewish literature rests upon
this principle. Thus “the Christ” became the ideal hero of the Christian
community, “from the socio‐religious standpoint the figure of Christ is
the sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical
forces which were at work at a certain period.” The Lord’s Supper was the
memorial feast of this ideal hero.
“As the Christ to whose Parousia the community looks forward this Hero‐god
of the community bears within Himself the capacity for expansion into the
God of the universe, into the Christ of the Church, who is identical in
essential nature with God the Father. Thus the belief in the Christ
brought the Messianic hope of the future into the minds of the masses, who
had already a certain organisation, and by directing their thoughts
towards the future it won all those who were sick of the past and
despairing about the present.”
The death and resurrection of Jesus represent experiences of the
community. “For a Jew crucified under Pontius Pilate there was certainly
no resurrection. All that is possible is a vague hypothesis of a vision
lacking all historical reality, or an escape into the vaguenesses of
theological phraseology. But for the Christian community the resurrection
was something real, a matter of fact. For the community as such was not
annihilated in that persecution: it drew from it, rather, new strength and
life.”
But what about the foundations of this imposing structure?
For what he has to tell us about the condition of the Roman Empire and the
social organisation of the proletariat in the time of Trajan—for it was
then that the Church first came out into the light—we may leave the
responsibility with Kalthoff. But we must inquire more closely how he
brings the Jewish apocalyptic into contact with the Roman proletariat.
Communism, he says, was common to both. It was the bond which united the
apocalyptic “other‐worldliness” with reality. The only difficulty is that
Kalthoff omits to produce any proof out of the Jewish apocalypses that
communism was “the fundamental economic idea of the apocalyptic writers.”
He operates from the first with a special preparation of apocalyptic
thought, of a socialistic or Hellenistic character. Messianism is supposed
to have taken its rise from the Deuteronomic reform as “a social theory
which strives to realise itself in practice.” The apocalyptic of Daniel
arose, according to him, under Platonic influence. “The figure of the
Messiah thus became a human figure; it lost its specifically Jewish
traits.” He is the heavenly proto‐typal ideal man. Along with this
thought, and similarly derived from Plato, the conception of immortality
makes its appearance in apocalyptic.(244) This Platonic apocalyptic never
had any existence, or at least, to speak with the utmost possible caution,
its existence must not be asserted in the absence of all proof.
But, supposing it were admitted that Jewish apocalyptic had some affinity
for the Hellenic world, that it was Platonic and communistic, how are we
to explain the fact that the Gospels, which describe the genesis of Christ
and Christianity, imply a Galilaean and not a Roman environment?
As a matter of fact, Kalthoff says, they do imply a Roman environment. The
scene of the Gospel history is laid in Palestine, but it is drawn in Rome.
The agrarian conditions implied in the narratives and parables are Roman.
A vineyard with a wine‐press of its own could only be found, according to
Kalthoff, on the large Roman estates. So, too, the legal conditions. The
right of the creditor to sell the debtor, with his wife and children, is a
feature of Roman, not of Jewish law.
Peter everywhere symbolises the Church at Rome. The confession of Peter
had to be transferred to Caesarea Philippi because this town, “as the seat
of the Roman administration,” symbolised for Palestine the political
presence of Rome.
The woman with the issue was perhaps Poppaea Sabina, the wife of Nero,
“who in view of her strong leaning towards Judaism might well be described
in the symbolical style of the apocalyptic writings as the woman who
touched the hem of Jesus’ garment.”
The story of the unfaithful steward alludes to Pope Callixtus, who, when
the slave of a Christian in high position, was condemned to the mines for
the crime of embezzlement; that of the woman who was a sinner refers to
Marcia, the powerful mistress of Commodus, at whose intercession Callixtus
was released, to be advanced soon afterwards to the bishopric of Rome.
“These two narratives, therefore,” Kalthoff suggests, “which very clearly
allude to events well known at that time, and doubtless much discussed in
the Christian community, were admitted into the Gospel to express the
views of the Church regarding the life‐story of a Roman bishop which had
run its course under the eyes of the community, and thereby to give to the
events themselves the Church’s sanction and interpretation.”
Kalthoff does not, unfortunately, mention whether this is a case of
simple, ingenuous, or of conscious, didactic, Early Christian imagination.
That kind of criticism is a casting out of Satan by the aid of Beelzebub.
If he was going to invent on this scale, Kalthoff need not have found any
difficulty in accepting the figure of Jesus evolved by modern theology.
One feels annoyed with him because, while his thesis is ingenious, and, as
against “modern theology” has a considerable measure of justification, he
has worked it out in so uninteresting a fashion. He has no one but himself
to blame for the fact that instead of leading to the right explanation, it
only introduced a wearisome and unproductive controversy.(245)
In the end there remains scarcely a shade of distinction between Kalthoff
and his opponents. They want to bring their “historical Jesus” into the
midst of our time. He wants to do the same with his “Christ.” “A
secularised Christ,” he says, “as the type of the self‐determined man who
amid strife and suffering carries through victoriously, and fully
realises, His own personality in order to give the infinite fullness of
love which He bears within Himself as a blessing to mankind—a Christ such
as that can awaken to new life the antique Christ‐type of the Church. He
is no longer the Christ of the scholar, of the abstract theological
thinker with his scholastic rules and methods. He is the people’s Christ,
the Christ of the ordinary man, the figure in which all those powers of
the human soul which are most natural and simple—and therefore most
exalted and divine—find an expression at once sensible and spiritual.” But
that is precisely the description of the Jesus of modern historical
theology; why, then, make this long roundabout through scepticism? The
Christ of Kalthoff is nothing else than the Jesus of those whom he combats
in such a lofty fashion; the only difference is that he draws his figure
of Christ in red ink on blotting‐paper, and because it is red in colour
and smudgy in outline, wants to make out that it is something new.
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