the Jesus of modern theology. He finds fault with it because in its
anxiety to retain a personality which would be of value to religion it
does not sufficiently distinguish between the authentic and the
“historical” Jesus. When criticism has removed the paintings‐over and
retouchings to which this authentic portrait of Jesus has been subjected,
it reaches, according to him, an unrecognisable painting below, in which
it is impossible to discover any clear likeness, least of all one of any
religious use and value.
Were it not for the tenacity and the simple fidelity of the epic
tradition, nothing whatever would have remained of the historic Jesus.
What has remained is merely of historical and psychological interest.
At His first appearance the historic Jesus was, according to Eduard von
Hartmann, almost “an impersonal being,” since He regarded Himself so
exclusively as the vehicle of His message that His personality hardly came
into the question. As time went on, however, He developed a taste for
glory and for wonderful deeds, and fell at last into a condition of
“abnormal exaltation of personality.” In the end He declares Himself to
His disciples and before the council as Messiah. “When He felt His death
drawing nigh He struck the balance of His life, found His mission a
failure, His person and His cause abandoned by God, and died with the
unanswered question on His lips, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”
It is significant that Eduard von Hartmann has not fallen into the mistake
of Schopenhauer and many other philosophers, of identifying the pessimism
of Jesus with the Indian speculative pessimism of Buddha. The pessimism of
Jesus, he says, is not metaphysical, it is “a pessimism of indignation,”
born of the intolerable social and political conditions of the time. Von
Hartmann also clearly recognises the significance of eschatology, but he
does not define its character quite correctly, since he bases his
impressions solely on the Talmud, hardly making any use of the Old
Testament, of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, or Fourth Ezra. He has
an irritating way of still using the name “Jehovah.”
Like Reimarus—von Hartmann’s positions are simply modernised Reimarus—he
is anxious to show that Christian theology has lost the right “to treat
the ideal Kingdom of God as belonging to itself.” Jesus and His teaching,
so far as they have been preserved, belong to Judaism. His ethic is for us
strange and full of stumbling‐blocks. He despises work, property, and the
duties of family life. His gospel is fundamentally plebeian, and
completely excludes the idea of any aristocracy except in so far as it
consents to plebeianise itself, and this is true not only as regards the
aristocracy of rank, property, and fortune, but also the aristocracy of
intellect. Von Hartmann cannot resist the temptation to accuse Jesus of
“Semitic harshness,” finding the evidence of this chiefly in Mark iv. 12,
where Jesus declares that the purpose of His parables was to obscure His
teaching and cause the hearts of the people to be hardened.
His judgment upon Jesus is: “He had no genius, but a certain talent which,
in the complete absence of any sound education, produced in general only
moderate results, and was not sufficient to preserve Him from numerous
weaknesses and serious errors; at heart a fanatic and a transcendental
enthusiast, who in spite of an inborn kindliness of disposition hates and
despises the world and everything it contains, and holds any interest in
it to be injurious to the sole true, transcendental interest; an amiable
and modest youth who, through a remarkable concatenation of circumstances
arrived at the idea, which was at that time epidemic,(247) that He was
Himself the expected Messiah, and in consequence of this met His fate.”
It is to be regretted that a mind like Eduard von Hartmann’s should not
have got beyond the externals of the history, and made an effort to grasp
the simple and impressive greatness of the figure of Jesus in its
eschatological setting; and that he should imagine he has disposed of the
strangeness which he finds in Jesus when he has made it as small as
possible. And yet in another respect there is something satisfactory about
his book. It is the open struggle of the Germanic spirit with Jesus. In
this battle the victory will rest with true greatness. Others wanted to
make peace before the struggle, or thought that theologians could fight
the battle alone, and spare their contemporaries the doubts about the
historical Jesus through which it was necessary to pass in order to reach
the eternal Jesus—and to this end they kept preaching reconciliation while
fighting the battle. They could only preach it on a basis of postulates,
and postulates make poor preaching! Thus, Jülicher, for example, in his
latest sketches of the Life of Jesus(248) distinguishes between “Jewish
and supra‐Jewish” in Jesus, and holds that Jesus transferred the ideal of
the Kingdom of God “to the solid ground of the present, bringing it into
the course of historical events,” and further “associated with the Kingdom
of God” the idea of development which was utterly opposed to all Jewish
ideas about the Kingdom. Jülicher also desires to raise “the strongest
protest against the poor little definition of His preaching which makes it
consist in nothing further than an announcement of the nearness of the
Kingdom, and an exhortation to the repentance necessary as a condition for
attaining the Kingdom.”
But when has a protest against the pure truth of history ever been of any
avail? Why proclaim peace where there is no peace, and attempt to put back
the clock of time? Is it not enough that Schleiermacher and Ritschl
succeeded again and again in making theology send on earth peace instead
of a sword, and does not the weakness of Christian thought as compared
with the general culture of our time result from the fact that it did not
face the battle when it ought to have faced it, but persisted in appealing
to a court of arbitration on which all the sciences were represented, but
which it had successfully bribed in advance?
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Now there comes to join the philosophers a jurist. Herr Doctor jur. De
Jonge lends his aid to Eduard von Hartmann in “destroying the
ecclesiastical,” and “unveiling the Jewish picture of Jesus.”(249)
De Jonge is a Jew by birth, baptized in 1889, who on the 22nd of November
1902 again separated himself from the Christian communion and was desirous
of being received back “with certain evangelical reservations” into the
Jewish community. In spite of his faithful observance of the Law, this was
refused. Now he is waiting “until in the Synagogue of the twentieth
century a freedom of conscience is accorded to him equal to that which in
the first century was enjoyed by John, the beloved disciple of Jeschua of
Nazareth.” In the meantime he beguiles the period of waiting by describing
Jesus and His earliest followers in the character of pattern Jews, and
sets them to work in the interest of his “Jewish views with evangelical
reservations.”
It is the colourless, characterless Jesus of the Superintendents and
Konsistorialrats which especially arouses his enmity. With this figure he
contrasts his own Jesus, the man of holy anger, the man of holy calm, the
man of holy melancholy, the master of dialectic, the imperious ruler, the
man of high gifts and practical ability, the man of inexorable consistency
and reforming vigour.
Jesus was, according to De Jonge, a pupil of Hillel. He demanded voluntary
poverty only in special cases, not as a general principle. In the case of
the rich young man, He knew “that the property which he had inherited was
derived in this particular case from impure sources which must be cut off
at once and for ever.”
But how does De Jonge know that Jesus knew this?
A writer who is attacking the common theological picture of Jesus, and who
displays in the process, as De Jonge does, not only wit and address, but
historical intuition, ought not to fall into the error of the theology
with which he is at feud; he ought to use sober history as his weapon
against the supplementary knowledge which his opponents seem to find
between the lines, instead of meeting it with an esoteric historical
knowledge of his own.
De Jonge knows that Jesus possessed property inherited from His father:
“One proof may serve where many might be given—the hasty flight into Egypt
with his whole family to escape from Herod, and the long sojourn in that
country.”
De Jonge knows—he is here, however, following the Gospel of John, to which
he everywhere gives the preference—that Jesus was between forty and fifty
years old at the time of His first coming forward publicly. The statement
in Luke iii. 23, that He was ὡσεί thirty years old, can only mislead those
who do not remember that Luke was a portrait painter and only meant that
“Jeschua, in consequence of His glorious beauty and His ever‐youthful
appearance, looked ten years younger than He really was.”
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De Jonge knows also that Jesus, at the time when He first emerged from
obscurity, was a widower and had a little son—the “lad” of John vi. 9, who
had the five barley loaves and two fishes, was in fact His son. This and
many other things the author finds in “the glorious John.” According to De
Jonge too we ought to think of Jesus as the aristocratic Jew, more
accustomed to a dress coat than to a workman’s blouse, something of an
expert, as appears from some of the parables, in matters of the table, and
conning the menu with interest when He dined with “privy‐finance‐
councillor” Zacchaeus.
But this is to modernise more distressingly than even the theologians!
De Jonge’s one‐sided preference for the Fourth Gospel is shared by
Kirchbach’s book, “What did Jesus teach?”(250) but here everything,
instead of being judaised, is spiritualised. Kirchbach does not seem to
have been acquainted with Noack’s “History of Jesus,” otherwise he would
hardly have ventured to repeat the same experiment without the latter’s
touch of genius and with much less skill and knowledge.
The teaching of Jesus is interpreted on the lines of the Kantian
philosophy. The saying, “No man hath seen God at any time,” is to be
understood as if it were derived from the same system of thought as the
“Critique of Pure Reason.” Jesus always used the words “death” and “life”
in a purely metaphorical sense. Eternal life is for Him not a life in
another world, but in the present. He speaks of Himself as the Son of God,
not as the Jewish Messiah. Son of Man is only the ethical explanation of
Son of God. The only reason why a Son‐of‐Man problem has arisen, is
because Matthew translated the ancient term Son of Man in the original
collection of Logia “with extreme literality.”
The great discourse of Matt. xxiii. with its warnings and threatenings is,
according to Kirchbach, merely “a patriotic oration in which Jesus gives
expression in moving words to His opposition to the Pharisees and His
inborn love of His native land.”
The teaching of Jesus is not ascetic, it closely resembles the real
teaching of Epicurus, “that is, the rejection of all false metaphysics,
and the resulting condition of blessedness, of _makaria_.” The only
purpose of the demand addressed to the rich young man was to try him. “If
the youth, instead of slinking away dejectedly because he was called upon
to sell all his goods, had replied, confident in the possession of a rich
fund of courage, energy, ability, and knowledge, ‘Right gladly. It will
not go to my heart to part with my little bit of property; if I’m not to
have it, why then I can do without it,’ the Rabbi would probably in that
case not have taken him at his word, but would have said, ‘Young man, I
like you. You have a good chance before you, you may do something in the
Kingdom of God, and in any case for My sake you may attach yourself to Me
by way of trial. We can talk about your stocks and bonds later.’ ”
Finally, Kirchbach succeeds, though only, it must be admitted, by the aid
of some rather awkward phraseology, in spiritualising John vi. “It is not
the body,” he explains, “of the long departed thinker, who apparently
attached no importance whatever to the question of personal survival, that
we, who understand Him in the right Greek sense, ‘eat’; in the sense which
He intended, we eat and drink, and absorb into ourselves, His teaching,
His spirit, His sublime conception of life, by constantly recalling them
in connexion with the symbol of bread and flesh, the symbol of blood, the
symbol of water.”(251)
Worthless as Kirchbach’s Life of Jesus is from an historical point of
view, it is quite comprehensible as a phase in the struggle between the
modern view of the world and Jesus. The aim of the work is to retain His
significance for a metaphysical and non‐ascetic time; and since it is not
possible to do this in the case of the historical Jesus, the author denies
His existence in favour of an apocryphal Jesus.
It is, in fact, the characteristic feature of the Life‐of‐Jesus literature
on the threshold of the new century even in the productions of professedly
historical and scientific theology, to subordinate the historical interest
to the interest of the general world‐view. And those who “wrest the
Kingdom of Heaven” are beginning to wrest Jesus Himself along with it. Men
who have no qualifications for the task, whose ignorance is nothing less
than criminal, who loftily anathematise scientific theology instead of
making themselves in some measure acquainted with the researches which it
has carried out, feel impelled to write a Life of Jesus, in order to set
forth their general religious view in a portrait of Jesus which has not
the faintest claim to be historical, and the most far‐fetched of these
find favour, and are eagerly absorbed by the multitude.
It would be something to be thankful for if all these Lives of Jesus were
based on as definite an idea and as acute historical observation as we
find in Albert Dulk’s “The Error of the Life of Jesus.”(252) In Dulk the
story of the fate of Jesus is also the story of the fate of religion. The
Galilaean teacher, whose true character was marked by deep religious
inwardness, was doomed to destruction from the moment when He set Himself
upon the dizzy heights of the divine sonship and the eschatological
expectation. He died in despair, having vainly expected, down to the very
last, a “telegram from heaven.” Religion as a whole can only avoid the
same fate by renouncing all transcendental elements.
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The vast numbers of imaginative Lives of Jesus shrink into remarkably
small compass on a close examination. When one knows two or three of them,
one knows them all. They have scarcely altered since Venturini’s time,
except that some of the cures performed by Jesus are handled in the modern
Lives from the point of view of the recent investigations in hypnotism and
suggestion.(253)
According to Paul de Régla(254) Jesus was born out of wedlock. Joseph,
however, gave shelter and protection to the mother. De Régla dwells on the
beauty of the child. “His eyes were not exceptionally large, but were
well‐opened, and were shaded by long, silky, dark‐brown eyelashes, and
rather deep‐set. They were of a blue‐grey colour, which changed with
changing emotions, taking on various shades, especially blue and brownish‐
grey.”
He and His disciples were Essenes, as was also the Baptist. That implies
that He was no longer a Jew in the strict sense. His preaching dealt with
the rights of man, and put forward socialistic and communistic demands:
His religion in the pure consciousness of communion with God. With
eschatology He had nothing whatever to do, it was first interpolated into
His teaching by Matthew.
The miracles are all to be explained by suggestion and hypnotism. At the
marriage at Cana, Jesus noticed that the guests were taking too much, and
therefore secretly bade the servants pour out water instead of wine while
He Himself said, “Drink, this is better wine.” In this way He succeeded in
suggesting to a part of the company that they were really drinking wine.
The feeding of the multitude is explained by striking out a couple of
noughts from the numbers; the raising of Lazarus by supposing it a case of
premature burial. Jesus Himself when taken down from the cross was not
dead, and the Essenes succeeded in reanimating Him. His work is inspired
with hatred against Catholicism, but with a real reverence for Jesus.
Another mere variant of the plan of Venturini is the fictitious Life of
Jesus of Pierre Nahor.(255) The sentimental descriptions of nature and the
long dialogues characteristic of the Lives of Jesus of a hundred years ago
are here again in full force. After John had already begun to preach in
the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, Jesus, in company with a distinguished
Brahmin who possessed property at Nazareth and had an influential
following in Jerusalem, made a journey to Egypt and was there
indoctrinated into all kinds of Egyptian, Essene, and Indian philosophy,
thus giving the author, or rather the authoress, an opportunity to develop
her ideas on the philosophy of religion in didactic dialogues. When He
soon afterwards begins to work in Galilee the young teacher is much aided
by the fact that, at the instance of His fellow‐traveller, He had acquired
from Egyptian mendicants a practical acquaintance with the secrets of
hypnotism. By His skill He healed Mary of Magdala, a distinguished
courtesan of Tiberias. They had met before at Alexandria. After being
cured she left Tiberias and went to live in a small house, inherited from
her mother, at Magdala.
Jesus Himself never went to Tiberias, but the social world of that place
took an interest in Him, and often had itself rowed to the beach when He
was preaching. Rich and pious ladies used to inquire of Him where He
thought of preaching to the people on a given day, and sent baskets of
bread and dried fish to the spot which He indicated, that the multitude
might not suffer hunger. This is the explanation of the stories about the
feeding of the multitudes; the people had no idea whence Jesus suddenly
obtained the supplies which He caused His disciples to distribute.
When he became aware that the priests had resolved upon His death, He made
His friend Joseph of Arimathea, a leading man among the Essenes, promise
that he would take Him down from the cross as soon as possible and lay Him
in the grave without other witnesses. Only Nicodemus was to be present. On
the cross He put Himself into a cataleptic trance; He was taken down from
the cross seemingly dead, and came to Himself again in the grave. After
appearing several times to His disciples he set out for Nazareth and
dragged His way painfully thither. With a last effort He reaches the house
of His mysterious old Indian teacher. At the door He falls helpless, just
as the morning dawns. The old slave‐woman recognises Him and carries Him
into the house, where He dies. “The serene solemn night withdrew and day
broke in blinding splendour behind Tiberias.”
Nikolas Notowitsch(256) finds in Luke i. 80 (“And the child grew ... and
was in the deserts until the day of his shewing unto Israel”) a “gap in
the life of Jesus,” in spite of the fact that this passage refers to the
Baptist, and proposes to fill it by putting Jesus to school with the
Brahmins and Buddhists from His thirteenth to His twenty‐ninth year. As
evidence for this he refers to statements about Buddhist worship of a
certain Issa which he professes to have found in the monasteries of Little
Thibet. The whole thing is, as was shown by the experts, a barefaced
swindle and an impudent invention.
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To the fictitious Lives of Jesus belong also in the main the theosophical
“Lives,” which equally play fast and loose with the history, though here
with a view to proving that Jesus had absorbed the Egyptian and Indian
theosophy, and had been indoctrinated with “occult science.” The
theosophists, however, have the advantage of escaping the dilemma between
reanimation after a trance and resurrection, since they are convinced that
it was possible for Jesus to reassume His body after He had really died.
But in the touching up and embellishment of the Gospel narratives they
out‐do even the romancers.
Ernest Bosc,(257) writing as a theosophist, makes it the chief aim of his
work to describe the oriental origin of Christianity, and ventures to
assert that Jesus was not a Semite, but an Aryan. The Fourth Gospel is, of
course, the basis of his representation. He does not hesitate, however, to
appeal also to the anonymous “Revelations” published in 1849, which are a
mere plagiarism from Venturini.
A work which is written with some ability and with much out‐of‐the‐way
learning is “Did Jesus live 100 B.C.?”(258) The author compares the
Christian tradition with the Jewish, and finds in the latter a
reminiscence of a Jesus who lived in the time of Alexander Jannaeus
(104‐76 B.C.). This person was transferred by the earliest Evangelist to
the later period, the attempt being facilitated by the fact that during
the procuratorship of Pilate a false prophet had attracted some attention.
The author, however, only professes to offer it as a hypothesis, and
apologises in advance for the offence which it is likely to cause.
XIX. THOROUGHGOING SCEPTICISM AND THOROUGHGOING ESCHATOLOGY
_W. Wrede._ Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien. Zugleich ein
Beitrag zum Verständnis des Markusevangeliums. (The Messianic
Secret in the Gospels. Forming a contribution also to the
understanding of the Gospel of Mark.) Göttingen, 1901. 286 pp.
_Albert Schweitzer._ Das Messianitäts‐ und Leidensgeheimnis. Eine
Skizze des Lebens Jesu. (The Secret of the Messiahship and the
Passion. A Sketch of the Life of Jesus.) Tübingen and Leipzig,
1901. 109 pp.
The coincidence between the work of Wrede(259) and the “Sketch of the Life
of Jesus” is not more surprising in regard to the time of their appearance
than in regard to the character of their contents. They appeared upon the
self‐same day, their titles are almost identical, and their agreement in
the criticism of the modern historical conception of the life of Jesus
extends sometimes to the very phraseology. And yet they are written from
quite different standpoints, one from the point of view of literary
criticism, the other from that of the historical recognition of
eschatology. It seems to be the fate of the Marcan hypothesis that at the
decisive periods its problems should always be attacked simultaneously and
independently from the literary and the historical sides, and the results
declared in two different forms which corroborate each other. So it was in
the case of Weisse and Wilke; so it is again now, when, retaining the
assumption of the priority of Mark, the historicity of the hitherto
accepted view of the life of Jesus, based upon the Marcan narrative, is
called in question.
The meaning of that is that the literary and the eschatological view,
which have hitherto been marching parallel, on either flank, to the
advance of modern theology, have now united their forces, brought theology
to a halt, surrounded it, and compelled it to give battle.
That in the last three or four years so much has been written in which
this enveloping movement has been ignored does not alter the real position
of modern historical theology in the least. The fact is deserving of
notice that during this period the study of the subject has not made a
step in advance, but has kept moving to and fro upon the old lines with
wearisome iteration, and has thrown itself with excessive zeal into the
work of popularisation, simply because it was incapable of advancing.