The faith in a Jesus had been for a long time in existence among
innumerable Mandaic sects in Asia Minor, which differed in many
ways from each other, before this faith obtained a definite shape in
the religion of Jesus, and its adherents became conscious of their
religious peculiarities and their divergence from the official Jewish
religion. The first evidence of such a consciousness, and also the
first brilliant outline of a new religion developed with Jesus as
its central idea, lies in the epistles of the tent-maker of Tarsus,
the pilgrim-apostle Paul.
Of the epistles in his name which have been handed down to us, that to
the Hebrews is quite certainly not Paul's. But also the two epistles
to the Thessalonians, that to the Ephesians, as well as the so-called
pastoral epistles (to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon), are considered
by the overwhelming majority of theologians to be forgeries; and also
the authenticity of the epistles to the Colossians and Philippians
is negatived by considerations of great weight. But with all the
more certainty modern critical theologians believe that Paul was the
writer of the four great didactic epistles--one to the Galatians,
two to the Corinthians, and one to the Romans; and they are wont
to set aside all suspicion of these epistles as a "grave error"
of historical hypercriticism.
In opposition to this view the authenticity of even these epistles is
contested, apart from Bruno Bauer, especially by Dutch theologians,
by Pierson, Loman, von Mauen, Meyboom, Matthes, and others; and, in
addition, recently the Bern theologian R. Steck, and B. W. Smith,
Professor of Mathematics in the Tulane University of New Orleans,
with whom the late Pastor Albert Kalthoff of Bremen was associated,
have contested the traditional view with objections that deserve
consideration. They have attempted to prove the Pauline epistles, as a
literary product, to be the work of a whole school of second-century
theologians, authors who either simultaneously or successively wrote
for the growing Church.
This much is certain--a conclusive proof that Paul was really the
author of the epistles current in his name cannot be given. With
regard to this it must always remain a ground for doubt that Luke,
who accompanied Paul on his missionary travels, was completely silent
as to such literary activity of the apostle; and this, although he
devoted the greatest portion of his account in the Acts to Paul's
activities. [293] Also the proof given by Smith, that the Pauline
epistles were as yet completely unknown in the first century a.d.,
that in particular the existence of the Epistle to the Romans is not
testified to before the middle of the second century, must speak
seriously against Paul's authorship, and is evidence that those
epistles cannot be accepted as the primary source of the Pauline
doctrines. For this reason it can in no way be asserted that the
critical theology of last century has "scientifically and beyond
question established" [294] the authenticity of the Pauline writings.
It is well known that the ancient world was not as yet in possession of
the idea of literary individuality in our sense of the word. At that
time innumerable works were circulated bearing famous names, whose
authors had neither at the time nor probably at any time anything
to do with the men who bore those names. Many such productions were
circulated among the members of Sects of antiquity, which passed,
for example, under the names of Orpheus, of Pythagoras, of Zoroaster,
&c., and thereby sought to procure the canonical acceptance of their
contents! Of the works of the Old Testament neither the Psalms, nor
the Proverbs, nor the so-called Preacher, nor the Book of Wisdom,
can be connected with the historical kings David and Solomon, whose
names they bear; and the prophet Daniel is just such a fictitious
personality as the Enoch and the Ezra of the Apocalypses known under
their names. Even the so-called Five Books of Moses are the literary
product of an age much later than the one in which Moses is supposed
to have lived, while Joshua is the name of an old Israelite God after
whom the book in question is called. [295] There has never anywhere
been such a Moses as the one described in the Old Testament.
The possibility of the so-called Pauline epistles having been the work
of later theologians, and of having been christened in the name of
Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, only to increase their authority in
the community, is therefore by no means excluded; especially when we
consider how exuberantly literary falsifications and "pious frauds"
flourished in the first century, and at other times also, in the
interests of the Christian Church. Indeed, at that time they even
dared, as is shown by Christian documents of the second century,
to alter the very text of the Old Testament, and thereby, as they
used to say, to "elucidate" it. Already in the middle of the second
century Marcion, the Gnostic, reproached the Church with possessing
the Pauline epistles only in a garbled form, and who can say whether
it was a false accusation? He himself undertook to restore the correct
text by excisions and completions. [296]
But let us leave completely on one side the question of the
authenticity of the Pauline epistles, a question absolute agreement
on which will probably never be attained, for the simple reason
that we lack any certain basis for its decision. Instead of this let
us turn rather to what we learn from these epistles concerning the
historical Jesus.
There we meet in the first place with the fact, testified to by Paul
himself, that the Saviour revealed himself in person to him, and at
the same time caused him to enter his service (Gal. i. 12). It was,
as is stated in the Acts, on the way to Damascus that suddenly there
shone round about him a light out of heaven, while a voice summoned
him to cease his former persecution of the community of the Messiah,
and revealed itself to him as Jesus. [297] There is no need to doubt
the fact itself; but to see in it a proof of the historical Jesus
is reserved for those theologians who have discovered the splendid
conception of an "objective vision," basing the objective reality of
the vision in question on Paul's life in the desert. It was obviously
only an "inner vision," which the "visionary" and "epileptic" Paul
attributed to Jesus; and for this reason it proves nothing as to
the existence of an historical Jesus when he asks, 1 Cor. ix. 1,
"Have I not seen our Lord Jesus?" and remarks, 1 Cor. xv. 9, "Last
of all he appeared to me also."
It only proves the dilemma of theologians on the whole question
that they have recently asserted that Paul, notwithstanding his own
protestations (Gal. i.), must have had a personal knowledge of the
historical Jesus, as otherwise on the occasion at Damascus he could
not have recognised the features and voice of the transfigured Jesus,
not being already acquainted with them from some other quarter! With
equal justice we might assert that the heathens also, who had visions
of their Gods, must previously have known them personally, as otherwise
they could not have known that Zeus or Athene or any other definite
God had appeared to them. In the Acts we read only of an apparition
of light which Paul saw, and of a voice which called to him, "Saul,
why persecutest thou me?" Is the supposition referred to necessary
to account for the fact that Paul, the persecutor of Jesus, referred
the voice and the vision to Jesus?
The case is similar with Paul's testimony as to those who, like
him, saw the Saviour after his death. [298] It is possible that
the people concerned saw something, that they saw a Jesus "risen
up" in heavenly transfiguration; but that this was the Jesus of the
so-called historical theology, whose existence is hereby established,
even its supporters would not in all probability insist upon; for in
their view the historical Jesus had in no way risen from the dead:
but here also there would only be question of a purely subjective
vision of the ecstatically excited disciples. Moreover, the passage
of the Epistle to the Corinthians in question (5-11) seems clearly
to be one at least very much interpolated, if it is not entirely
an after-insertion. Thus, the Risen Jesus is said to have been seen
by "more than five hundred Brethren at once." But of this the four
Gospels know nothing; and also, according to xv. 5, that "the twelve"
had the vision, would lead us to suspect that it was first inserted
in the text at a much later date. [299]
Paul himself never disguised the fact that he had seen Jesus, not
with mortal eyes, but only with those of the Spirit, as an inner
revelation. "It has pleased God," he says (Gal. i. 16), "to reveal his
Son within me." [300] He confesses that the Gospel preached by him was
not "of men," that he neither received nor learnt it from any man,
but that he had obtained it directly from the heavenly Christ and
was inspired by the Holy Ghost. [301] He seems also to have had no
interest at all in giving accurate information as to the personality
of Jesus, as to his fortunes and teachings. When three years after
his conversion he first returns to Jerusalem, he visits only Peter
and makes the acquaintance of James during the fourteen days of his
stay there, troubling himself about none of the other apostles. [302]
But when, fourteen years after, he meets with the "First Apostles" in
the so-called Council of the Apostles in Jerusalem, he does not set
about learning from them, but teaching them and procuring from them
recognition of his own missionary activity; and he himself declares
that he spoke with them only on the method of proclaiming the Gospel,
but not on its religious content or on the personality of the historic
Jesus. [303]
Certainly that James whose acquaintance Paul made in Jerusalem is
designated by him as the "Brother of the Lord"; [304] and from this it
seems to follow that Jesus must have been an historical person. The
expression "Brother," however, is possibly in this case, as so
often in the Gospels, [305] only a general expression to designate a
follower of Jesus, as the members of a religious society in antiquity
frequently called each other "Brother" and "Sister" among themselves. 1
Cor. ix. 5 runs: "Have we [i.e., Paul and Barnabas] not also right to
take about with us a wife that is a sister, even as the other Apostles
and Brothers of the Lord and Cephas?" There it is evident that the
expression by no means necessarily refers to bodily relationship,
but that "Brother" serves only to designate the followers of the
religion of Jesus. [306] Accordingly Jerome seems to have hit the
truth exactly when, commenting on Gal. i. 19, he writes: "James was
called the Brother of the Lord on account of his great character
[though the Pauline epistles certainly show the opposite of this],
of his incomparable faith and extraordinary wisdom. The other Apostles
were as a matter of fact also called Brothers, but he was specially so
called, because the Lord at his death had confided to him the sons of
his mother" (i.e., the members of the community at Jerusalem). [307]
And how then should Paul have met with a physical brother of that
very Jesus whom, as will be shown, he could only treat as a myth in
other respects? The thing is, considered now purely psychologically,
so improbable that no conclusion can in any case be drawn from the
expression concerning James as the Brother of the Lord as to the
historical existence of Jesus; especially in view of the fact that
theologians from the second century to the present day have been unable
to come to an agreement as to the true blood-relationship between
James and Jesus. [308] Moreover, if we consider how the glorification
of James came into fashion in anti-Pauline circles of the second
century, and how customary it was to connect the chief of the Jewish
Christians at Jerusalem as closely as possible with Jesus himself
(e.g., Hegesippus, in the so-called Epistles of Clement, in the Gospel
of the Nazarenes, &c.), the suspicion forces itself on us that the
Pauline mention of James as "the Brother of the Lord" is perhaps only
an after-insertion in the Epistle to the Galatians in order thereby
to have the bodily relationship between James and Jesus confirmed by
Paul himself. [309] Jesus' parents are not historical personalities
(see above, 117 ff.); and it is probably the same with his brothers
and sisters. Also Paul never refers to the testimony of the brothers
or of the disciples of Jesus concerning their Master; though this
would have been most reasonable had they really known any more of
Jesus than he himself did. "He bases," as Kalthoff justly objects,
"not a single one of his most incisive polemical arguments against
the adherents of the law on the ground that he had the historical
Jesus on his side; but he gives his own detailed theological ideas
without mentioning an historical Jesus, he gives a gospel of Christ,
not the gospel which he had heard at first, second, or third hand
concerning a human individual Jesus." [310]
From Paul, therefore, there is nothing of a detailed nature to be
learnt about the historical Jesus. The apostle does indeed occasionally
refer to the words and opinions of the "Lord," as with regard to the
prohibition of divorce, [311] or to the right of the apostles to be
fed by the community. [312] But as the exact words are not given there
is no express reference to an historical individual of the name of
Jesus; and so we are persuaded that we here have to do with mere rules
of a community such as were current and had canonical significance
everywhere in the religious unions as "Words of the Master," i.e., of
the patrons and celebrities of the community (cf. the "autos epha:
he himself, viz., the Master, has said it" of the Pythagoreans). Only
once, 1 Cor. xi. 23 sq., where Paul quotes the words at the Last
Supper, does the apostle apparently refer to an experience of the
"historical" Jesus: "The Lord Jesus, in the night in which he was
betrayed, took bread," &c. [313] Unfortunately here we have to do with
what is clearly a later insertion. The passage is obscure throughout
(vers. 23-32), and through its violent and confusing interruption of
the Pauline line of thought may be recognised as an after-insertion in
the original text, as is even acknowledged by many on the theological
side. [314] Paul says that he had obtained these things from the
"Lord" himself. Does this mean that they were directly "revealed"
to him by the transfigured Jesus? It seems much more reasonable to
believe that he took them from a religion already existing. This
could indeed refer at most only to the words of the Last Supper in
themselves. On the other hand, the words "in the night in which he
was betrayed" are certainly an addition. They will do neither in the
connection of a "revelation" nor of an existing religion, but stand
there completely by themselves as a reference to a real event in the
life of Jesus; and so, for this alone, they form much too small a
basis for testimony as to its historical truth. [315]
All expressions concerning Jesus which are found in Paul are
accordingly of no consequence for the hypothesis of an historical
person of that name. The so-called "words of the Lord" quoted by him
refer to quite unimportant points in the teachings of Jesus. And, on
the other hand, Paul is just as silent on those points in which modern
critical theology finds the particular greatness and importance of
this teaching; as, e.g., on Jesus' confidence in the divine goodness
of the Father, his command of the love of our neighbours as the
fulfilment of the Law, his sermon about humility and charity, his
warning against the over-esteem of worldly goods, &c., as on Jesus'
personality, his trust in God, and his activity among his people. [316]
Paul did not give himself the least trouble to bring the Saviour as a
man nearer to his readers. He seems to know nothing of any miraculous
power in Jesus. He says nothing of his sympathy with the poor and
oppressed, though surely just this would have been specially adapted
to turn the hearts of men towards his Jesus and to make an impression
on the multitude that sought for miracles. All the moral-religious
precepts and exhortations of Jesus are neither employed by Paul as
a means of proselytising for him, nor in any way used to place his
individuality in opposition to his prophetic precursors in a right
light, as is the case in the Christian literature of the present
day. "Thus, just those thoughts, which Protestant theologians
claim as the particular domain of their historical Jesus, appear
in the epistles independently of this Jesus, as individual moral
effusions of the apostolic consciousness; while Christian social
rules, which the same theologians consider additions to the story,
are introduced directly as rules of the Lord. For this reason the
Christ of the Pauline epistles may rather be cited as a case against
critical theologians than serve as a proof for the historical Jesus
in their sense." [317] Even so zealous a champion of this theology
as Wernle must admit: "We learn from Paul least of all concerning
the person and life of Jesus. Were all his epistles lost we should
know not much less of Jesus than at present." Immediately after this,
however, this very author consoles himself with the consideration that
in a certain sense Paul gave us even more than the most exact and
the most copious records could give. "We learn from him that a man
(?) Jesus, in spite of his death on the cross, was able to develop
such a power after his death, that Paul knew himself to be mastered,
redeemed, and blessed by him; and this in so marked a way that he
separated his own life and the whole world into two parts: without
Jesus, with Jesus. This is a fact which, explain it as we may, purely
as a fact excites our wonder (!) and compels us to think highly of
Jesus." [318] What does excite our wonder is this style of historical
"demonstration." And then how peculiar it is to read, from the silence
of an author like Paul concerning the historical Jesus, an argument
in its favour! As if it does not rather prove the unimportance of
such a personality for the genesis of Christianity! As if the fact
that Paul erected a religious-metaphysical thought construction of
undoubted magnificence must necessarily be based on the "overwhelming
impression of the person of Jesus," of the same Jesus of whom Paul had
no personal knowledge at all! The disciples--who are supposed to have
been in touch with Jesus for many years--Paul strenuously avoided, and
of the existence of this Jesus no other signs are to be found in his
epistles but such as may have quite a different meaning. Or did Paul,
as historical theology says, reveal more of Jesus in his sermons than
he did in the epistles? Surely that could only be maintained after
it was first established that in his account Paul had in view any
historical Jesus at all.
This seems to be completely problematic. The "humanity" of Jesus stands
as the central point of the Pauline idea. And yet the Jesus painted by
Paul is not a man, but a purely divine personality, a heavenly spirit
without flesh and blood, an unindividual superhuman phantom. He is
the "Son of God" made manifest in Paul; the Messiah foretold by the
Jewish Apocalyptics; the pre-existing "Son of Man" of Daniel and his
followers; the spiritual "ideal man" as he appeared in the minds of
the Jews influenced by Platonic ideas; whom also Philo knew as the
metaphysical prototype of ordinary sensual humanity and thought he had
found typified to in Gen. i. 27. He is the "great man" of the Indian
legends, who was supposed to have appeared also in Buddha and in other
Redeemer figures--the Purusha of the Vedic Brahmans, the Mandâ de hajjê
and Hibil Ziwâ of the Mandaic religion influenced by Indian ideas, the
tribe-God of syncretised Judaism. The knowledge which Paul has of this
Being is for this reason not an ordinary acquaintance from teachings,
but a Gnosis, an immediate consciousness, a "knowledge inspired";
and all the statements which he makes concerning it fall within the
sphere of theosophy, of religious speculation or metaphysics, but not
of history. As we have stated, the belief in such a Jesus had been
for a long time the property of Jewish sects, when Paul succeeded,
on the ground of his astounding personal experiences, in drawing it
into the light from the privacy of religious arcana, and setting it
up as the central point of a new religion distinct from Judaism.
"There was already in their minds a faith in a divine revealer,
a divine-human activity, in salvation to be obtained through
sacraments." [319] Among the neighbouring heathen peoples for a
very long time, and in Jewish circles at least since the days of the
prophets, there had existed a belief in a divine mediator, a "Son of
God," a "First-born of all creation," in whom was made all that exists,
who came down upon earth, humbled himself in taking on a human form,
suffered for mankind a shameful death, but rose again victorious,
and in his elevation and transfiguration simultaneously renewed and
spiritualised the whole earth. [320] Then Paul appeared--in an age
which was permeated as no other with a longing for redemption; which,
overwhelmed by the gloom of its external relations, was possessed
with the fear of evil powers; which, penetrated with terror of the
imminent end of the world, was anxiously awaiting this event and
had lost faith in the saving power of the old religion--then he gave
such an expression to that belief as made it appear the only means of
escape from the confusion of present existence. Can the assumption
of an historical Jesus in the sense of the traditional conception
really be necessary, in order to account for the fact that men fled
impetuously to this new religion of Paul's? Is it even probable that
the intelligent populations of the sea-ports of Asia Minor and Greece,
among whom in particular Paul preached the Gospel of Jesus, would
have turned towards Christianity for the reason that at some time or
other, ten or twenty years before, an itinerant preacher of the name
of Jesus had made an "overpowering" impression on ignorant fisher-folk
and workmen in Galilee or Jerusalem by his personal bearing and his
teachings, and had been believed by them to be the expected Messiah,
the renowned divine mediator and redeemer of the world? Paul did not
preach the man Jesus, but the heavenly spiritual being, Christ. [321]
The public to which Paul turned consisted for the most part of
Gentiles; and to these the conception of a spiritual being presented
no difficulties. It could have no strengthening, no guarantee, of
its truth, through proof of the manhood of Jesus. If the Christians
of the beginning of our own historical epoch had only been able to
gain faith in the God Christ through the Man Jesus, Paul would have
turned his attention from that which, to him, particularly mattered;
he would have obscured the individual meaning of his Gospel and brought
his whole religious speculation into a false position, by substituting
a man Jesus for the God-man Jesus as he understood him. [322]
Paul is said to have been born in the Greek city of Tarsus in Cilicia,
the son of Jewish parents. At that time Tarsus was, like Alexandria,
an important seat of Greek learning.
Here flourished the school of the younger Stoics, with its mixture of
old Stoic, Orphic, and Platonic ideas. Here the ethical principles
of that school were preached in a popular form, in street and
market-place, by orators of the people. It was not at all necessary for
Paul, brought up in the austerity of the Jewish religion of the Law,
to visit the lecture-rooms of the Stoic teachers in order to gain
a knowledge of Stoic views, for in Tarsus it was as though the air
was filled with that doctrine. Paul was certainly acquainted with
it. It sank so deeply into his mind, perhaps unknown to himself,
that his epistles are full of the expressions and ideas of the Stoic
philosopher Seneca, and to this are due the efforts which have been
made to make Seneca a pupil of Paul's, or the reverse, to make Paul
a pupil of Seneca's. A correspondence exists, which is admittedly a
forgery, pretending to have passed between the two.
Tarsus, in spite of its Eastern character, was a city saturated
with Greek learning and ways of thought, but not these alone. The
religious ideas and motives of the time found also a fruitful soil
there. In Tarsus the Hittite Sandan (Sardanapal) was worshipped,
a human being upon whom Dionysus had bestowed the godhead of life
and fecundity, who was identified by the Greeks either with Zeus, or
with Heracles, the divine "Son" of the "Father" Zeus. He passed as
the founder of the city, and was represented as a bearded man with
bunches of grapes and ears of corn, with a double-headed axe in his
right hand, standing on a lion or a funeral pyre; and every year it
was the custom for a human representative of the God, or in later
times his effigy, to be ceremoniously burnt on a pyre. [323] But
Tarsus was also at the same time a centre for the mystery-religions
of the East. The worship of Mithras, in particular, flourished there,
with its doctrine of the mystic death and re-birth of those received
into the communion, who were thereby purified from the guilt of
their past life and won a new immortal life in the "Spirit"; with
its sacred feast, at which the believers entered into a communion of
life with Mithra by partaking of the consecrated bread and chalice;
with its conception of the magic effect of the victim's blood, which
washed away all sins; and with its ardent desire for redemption,
purification, and sanctification of the soul. [324] Paul was not
unaffected by these and similar ideas. His conception of the mystic
significance of Christ's death shows that; in which conception the
whole of this type of religious thought is expressed, although in
a new setting. Indeed, the expression (Gal. iii. 27), in which the
baptized are said to have "put on" Christ, seems to be borrowed
directly from the Mithraic Mysteries. For in these, according to a
primitive animistic custom, the initiated of different degrees used
to be present in the masks of beasts, representing God's existence
under diverse attributes; that is, they used to "put on" the Lord
in order to place themselves in innermost communion with him. Again,
the Pauline expression, that the consecrated chalice and bread at the
Lord's Supper are the "communion of the blood and body of Christ,"
[325] reminds us too forcibly of the method of expression in the
Mysteries for this agreement to be purely a coincidence. [326]
If in such circumstances Paul, the citizen of Tarsus, heard of a Jewish
God of the name of Jesus, the ideas which were connected with him
were in no way quite new and unaccustomed. Nearer Asia was, indeed,
as we have seen, filled with the idea of a young and beautiful God,
who reanimated Nature by his death; with popular legends connected with
his violent end and glorious resurrection: and not merely in Tarsus,
but also in Cyprus and in countless other places of the Western Asiatic
civilised world, there was the yearly celebration in most impressive
fashion of the feast of this God, who was called Tammuz, Adonis,
Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, &c. Nowhere, perhaps, was the celebration
more magnificent than at Antioch, the Syrian capital. But at Antioch,
if we may believe the Acts [327] on this point, the Gospel of Jesus had
been preached even before Paul. Men of Cyprus and Cyrene are said to
have spoken there the Word of the dead and risen Christ, not only to
the Jews but also to the Greeks, and they are said to have converted
many of the heathens to the new "Lord." The Acts tells us this after
it has recounted the persecution of the community of the Messiah at
Jerusalem; representing the spreading of the Gospel as a consequence
of the dispersion of the community that followed the persecution. It
seems, however, that Cyprus--where Adonis was particularly worshipped,
at Paphos--and Cyrene were very early centres from which missionaries
carried abroad the faith in Christ. [328] Consequently the Gospel was
in origin nothing but a Judaised and spiritualised Adonis cult. [329]
Those earliest missionaries of whom we hear would not have attacked
the faith of the Syrian heathens: they would have declared that Christ,
the Messiah, the God of the Jewish religions, was Adonis: Christ is the
"Lord"! They would only have attempted to draw the old native religion
of Adonis into the Jewish sphere of thought, and by this means to
carry on the Jewish propaganda which they could find everywhere at
work, and which developed an efficacy about the beginning of our
epoch such as it had never before possessed. They would carry on the
propaganda, not in the sense of the strict standpoint of the Law,
but of the Jewish Apocalypses and their religious teachings. [330]
Such a man as Paul, who had been educated in the school of Gamaliel
as a teacher of the Law of the strict Pharisaical sort, could not
indeed calmly look on while the heathen belief in Adonis, which he
must surely, even in his native city of Tarsus, have despised as a
blasphemous superstition, was uniting itself, in the new religious
sects, with the Jewish conceptions. "Cursed is he who is hung upon
the tree," so it stood written in the Law; [331] and the ceremony of
the purification--at which one criminal was hung, amid the insults of
the people, as the scapegoat of the old year, while another was set
free as Mordecai, and driven with regal honours through the city,
being revered as representative of the new year--must have been in
his eyes only another proof of the disgrace of the tree, and of the
blasphemous character of a belief that honoured in the hanged man the
divine Saviour of the world, the Messiah expected by the Jews. Then
on a sudden there came over him as it were enlightenment. What if
the festivals of the Syrian Adonis, of the Phrygian Attis, and so on,
really treated of the self-sacrifice of a God who laid down his life
for the world? The guiltless martyrdom of an upright man as expiatory
means to the justification of his people was also not unknown to the
adherents of the Law since the days of the Maccabean martyrs. The
"suffering servant of God," as Isaiah had portrayed him, suggests as
quite probable the idea that, just as among the heathen peoples, in
Israel also an individual might renew the life of all others by his
voluntary sacrifice. Might it not be true, as the adherents of the
Jesus-religions maintained, that the Messiah was really a "servant
of God," and had already accomplished the work of redemption by
his own voluntary death? According to the heathen view, the people
were atoned for by the vicarious sacrifice of their God, and that
"justification" of all in the sight of the Godhead took place which
the pious Pharisee expected from the strict fulfilment of the Jewish
Law. And yet, when Paul compared the "righteousness" actually achieved
by himself and others with the ideal of righteousness for which they
strove, as it was required in the Law, then terror at the greatness
of the contrast between the ideal and the reality must have seized
him; and at the same time he might well have despaired of the divine
righteousness, which required of the people the fulfilment of the
Law, which weighed the people down with the thought of the imminent
end of the world, and which, through the very nature of its commands,
excluded the possibility of the Messiah meeting on his arrival, as he
should have done, with a "righteous" people. Were those who expected
the sanctification of humanity not from the fulfilment of the Law,
but immediately, through an infusion of God himself, really so much
in the wrong? It was not unusual among the heathen peoples for a
man to be sacrificed, in the place of the Deity, as a symbolical
representative; although already at the time of Paul it was the custom
to represent the self-sacrificing God only by an effigy, instead of
a real man. The important point, however, was not this, but the idea
which lay at the foundation of this divine self-sacrifice. And this
was not affected by the victim's being a criminal, who was killed in
the rôle of the guiltless and upright man, and by the voluntariness
of his death being completely fictitious. Might it not also be,
as the believers in Jesus asserted, that the Messiah was not still
to be expected, and that only on the ground of human righteousness;
but that rather he had already appeared, and had already accomplished
the righteousness unattainable by the individual through his shameful
death and his glorious resurrection?
The moment in which this idea flashed through Paul's mind was the
moment of the birth of Christianity as Paul's religion. The form in
which he grasped that conception was that of an Incarnation of God;
and at the same time this form was such that he introduced with it
quite a new impulse into the former mode of thought. According to the
heathen conception a God did indeed sacrifice himself for his people,
without thereby ceasing to be God; and here the man sacrificed in the
place of God was considered merely as a chance representative of the
self-sacrificing God. According to the old view of the Jewish faith it
was really the "Son of Man," a being of human nature, who was to come
down from heaven and effect the work of redemption, without, however,
being a real man and without suffering and dying in human form. With
Paul, on the contrary, the stress lay just on this, that the Redeemer
should be himself really a man, and that the man sacrificed in God's
place should be equally the God appearing in human form: the man was
not merely a representation of God's as a celestial and supernatural
being, but God himself appearing in human form. God himself becomes
man, and thereby a man is exalted to the Deity, and, as expiatory
representative for his people, can unite mankind with God. [332] The
man who is sacrificed for his people represents on the one hand his
people in the eyes of God, but on the other hand the God sacrificing
himself for mankind in the eyes of this people. And thereby, in the
idea of the representative expiatory victim, the separation between God
and Man is blotted out, and both fuse directly in the conception of
the "God-man." God becomes man, and by this means mankind is enabled
to become God. The man is sacrificed as well in the place of God as
in that of mankind, and so unites both contradictories in a unity
within himself.
It is evident that in reality it was merely a new setting to the old
conception of the representative self-sacrifice of God--in which the
genitive is to be taken both in its subjective and objective sense. No
historical personality, who should, so to say, have lived as an example
of the God-man, was in any way necessary to produce that Pauline
development of the religion of Jesus. For the chance personalities
of the men representing the God came under consideration just as
little for Paul as for the heathens; and when he also, with the other
Jews, designated the Messiah Jesus as the bodily descendant of David
"according to the flesh," [333] i.e., as a man; when he treated him as
"born of woman," he thought not at all of any concrete individuality,
which had at a certain time embodied the divinity within itself, but
purely of the idea of a Messiah in the flesh; just as the suffering
servant of God of Isaiah, even in spite of the connection of this idea
with an actually accomplished human sacrifice, had possessed only
an ideal imaginary or typical significance. The objection is always
being raised that Paul must have conceived of Jesus as an historical
individual because he designates him as the bodily descendant of
David, and makes him "born of woman" (Gal. iv. 4). But how else could
he have been born? (Cf. Job xiv. 1.) The bringing into prominence
the birth from woman, as well as the general emphasis laid by the
Apostle on the humanity of Jesus, is directed against the Gnostics
in the Corinthian community, but proves nothing whatsoever as to
the historical Jesus. And the descent from David was part of the
traditional characteristics of the Messiah; so that Paul could say it
of Jesus without referring to a real descendant of David. But even
less is proved by Paul's, in Gal. iii. 1, reproaching the Galatians
with having seen the crucified Christ "set forth openly"; we would
then have to declare also that there was an actual devil and a hell,
because these are set forth to the faithful by the "caretakers of
their souls" when preaching. Here then lies the explanation for the
fact that the "man" Jesus remained an intangible phantom to Paul,
and that he can speak of Christ as a man, without thinking of an
historical personality in the sense of the liberal theology of the
present day. The ideal man, as Paul represented Jesus to himself--the
essence of all human existence--the human race considered as a person,
who represented humanity to God, just as the man sacrificed in his
rôle had represented the Deity to the people--the "Man" on whom alone
redemption depended--is and remains a metaphysical Being--just as the
Idea of Plato or the Logos of Philo are none the less metaphysical
existences because of their descent into the world of the senses and
of their assuming in it a definite individual corporality. And what
Paul teaches concerning the "man" Jesus is only a detailed development
and deepening of what the Mandæi believed of their Mandä de hajjê
or Hibil Ziwâ, and of what the Jewish religions under the influence
of the Apocalypses involved in their mysterious doctrines of the
Messiah. For Paul the descent, death, and resurrection of Jesus
represented an eternal but not an actual story in time; and so to
search Paul for the signs of an historical Jesus is to misunderstand
the chief point in his religious view of the world.
God, the "father" of our "Lord" Jesus Christ, "awakened" his son and
sent him down upon the earth for the redemption of mankind. Although
originally one with God, and for that reason himself a divine being,
Christ nevertheless renounced his original supernatural existence. In
contradiction to his real Being he changed his spiritual nature for
"the likeness of sinful flesh," gave up his heavenly kingdom for
the poverty and misery of human existence, and came to mankind in
the form of a servant, "being found in fashion as a man," in order
to bring redemption. [334] For man is unable to obtain religious
salvation through himself alone. In him the spirit is bound to the
flesh, his divine supersensible Being is bound down to the material
of sensible actuality, and for that reason he is subject "by nature"
to misfortune and sin. All flesh is necessarily "sinful flesh." Man is
compelled to sin just in so far as he is a being of the flesh. Adam,
moreover, is the originator of all human sin only for the reason
that he was "in the flesh"--that is, a finite Being imprisoned in
corporality. Probably God gave the Law unto mankind, in order to
show them the right path in their obscurity; and thereby opened the
possibility of being declared righteous or "justified" before his
court, through the fulfilment of his commands; but it is impossible
to keep the commandments in their full severity.
And yet only the ceaseless fulfilment of the whole Law can save mankind
from justice. We are all sinners. [335] So the Law indeed awakened the
knowledge of guilt, and brought sin to light through its violation;
but it has at the same time increased the guilt. [336] It has shown
itself to be a strict teacher and taskmaster in righteousness, without,
however, itself leading to righteousness. So little has it proved to
be the desired means of salvation, that it may equally be said of it
that it was given by God not for the purpose of saving mankind, but
only to make it still more miserable. Consequently Paul would rather
attribute the mediation of the Law of Moses not to God himself but to
his angels, in order to relieve God of the guilt of the Law. [337]
This circumstance is of so much the more consequence for mankind,
because the sin aroused by the Law unresistingly drew death in its
train; and that deprived them also of the last possibility of becoming
equal to their higher spiritual nature. So is man placed midway between
light and darkness--a pitiable Being. His spirit, that is kin with God,
draws him upwards; and the evil spirit and dæmons drag him downwards,
the evil spirits who rule this world and who lure him into sin--and
who are at bottom nothing but mythical personifications of man's
sinful and fleshly desires.
Christ now enters this world of darkness and of sin. As a man among
men, he enters the sphere over which the flesh and sin have power,
and must die as other men. But for the incarnate God death is not what
it is in the ordinary sense. For him it is only the liberation from
the incongruous condition of the flesh. When Christ dies, he merely
strips off the fetters of the flesh and leaves the prison of the
body, leaves the sphere over which sin, death, and evil spirits hold
their sway. He, the God-man, dies to the sin, which was once unknown
to him, once and for all. By prevailing over the power of death in
his resurrection, the Son regains, by means of death, his original
individual existence, perpetual life in and with the Father. [338]
Thus also does he attain mastery over the Law, for this rules only
in so far as there are fleshly men of earth, and ceases to hold good
for him at the moment when Christ raises himself above the flesh and
returns to his pure spiritual nature. Were there the possibility for
mankind of similarly dying to their flesh, then would they be redeemed,
as Christ was, from sin, death, and the Law.
There is, in fact, such a possibility. It lies in this: even Christ
himself is nothing but the idea of the human race conceived as
a personality, the Platonic idea of Humanity personified, the
ideal man as a metaphysical essence; and so in his fate the fate
of all mankind is fulfilled. In this sense the saying holds, "If
one has died for all, then have they all died." [339] In order to
become partakers of the fruit of this Jesus' death, it is certainly
necessary that the individual man become really one with Christ;
that he enter into an inner unity with the representative, with
the divine type of the human race, not merely subjectively, but
objectively and actually; and this takes place, according to Paul,
by means of "faith." Faith, as Paul understands it, is not a purely
external belief in the actuality of Jesus' death as a victim and
of his resurrection, but the turning of the whole man to Jesus, the
spiritual unification with him and the divine disposition produced
thereby, from which the corresponding moral action proceeds of
itself. It is only in this sense that Paul sets faith above works
as demanded by the Law. An action that does not proceed from faith,
from the deepest conviction of the divine, has no religious value,
be it ever so conformable to the letter of the Law. That is a view
which Paul completely shared with the Stoic philosophy of his age,
and which was at that time being brought more and more to the front
in the more advanced circles of the old civilisation. Man is justified
not through the Law, not through works, but through faith; faith, even
without works, is reckoned as righteousness. [340] It is only another
expression for the same thought when Paul says that God justifies man,
not according to his merit and actions, but "gratuitously," "of his
grace." In the conception of the Jewish religion of the Law the idea
of justification has a purely juridical significance. Reward here
answers exactly to merit. Justification is nothing but an "obligation"
according to an irrevocable standard. In Paul's new conception it is,
on the contrary, a natural product of God's mercy. But mercy consists
finally in this, that God of his own accord sacrificed his Son, so
that mankind may share in the effects of his work of redemption by
"faith" in him, and by the unity with him thus brought about. But faith
is only one way of becoming one with Christ; and real unity with him
must also be externally effected. Baptism and the Lord's Supper must
be added to faith. There Paul directly follows the Mysteries and
their sacramental conception of man's unification with the deity;
and shows the connection of his own doctrines with those of the
heathen religions. By his baptism, his immersion and disappearance
in the depths of the water, man is "buried in death" with Christ. In
that he rises once more from the water, the resurrection with Christ
to a new life is fulfilled, not merely in a symbolic but also in
a magical mystic fashion. [341] And Christ is as it were "put on"
[342] through Baptism, so that henceforth the baptized is, no longer
potentially but actually, one with Christ; Christ is in him, and
he is in Christ. The Lord's Supper is indeed on one hand a feast of
fraternal love and recollection, in memory of the Saviour; just as the
adherents of Mithras used to hold their love-feasts (Agape) in memory
of their God's parting feast with his own people. [343] But on the
other hand it is a mystic communion of the blood and body of Christ,
through the drinking of the sacramental chalice and the eating of the
sacramental bread--a mystic communion in no other sense than that in
which the heathens thought they entered into inner connection with
their Gods through sacrificial feasts, and in which savages generally
even to-day believe that through the eating of another's flesh,
be it beast's or man's, and through the drinking of his blood, they
become partakers of the power residing in him. [344] Even for Paul
baptism and the Lord's Supper are to such an extent purely natural
processes or magic practices, that he does not object to the heathen
custom of baptizing, by proxy, living Christians for dead ones; and
in his opinion unworthy eating and drinking of the Lord's Supper
produce sickness and death. [345] In this respect, consequently,
there can be no talk of a "transcending of the naturalism of the
heathen mysteries" in Paul; and to attribute to him a much higher
or more spiritual conception of the sacrament than the heathens had
seems difficult to reconcile with his express statements. [346]
Now Christ, as already stated, is for Paul only a comprehensive
expression for the ideal totality of men, which is therein represented
as an individual personal being. It is clearly the Platonic idea
of humanity, and nothing else; just as Philo personified the divine
intelligence and made this coalesce with the "ideal man," with the
idea of humanity. [347] As in the Platonic view the union of man with
the ideal takes place through love, through immediate intellectual
perception on the basis of ideal knowledge, and the contradiction
between the world of sense and the world of ideas is overcome
by the same means; as also thereby man is raised to membership
in the cosmos of ideas; in just such a manner, according to Paul,
Christians unite together by means of faith and the sacraments into
constitutive moments of the ideal humanity. Thus they realise the
idea of humanity, and enter into a mystic communion with Jesus, who
himself, as we have already said, represents this idea in its united
compass. The consequence of this is, that all that is fulfilled in
Christ is equally experienced along with him, in mysterious fashion,
by those men who are united with him. Consequently they can now be
termed "members of the one body of Christ," who is its "head" or
"Soul"; and this indeed in the same sense as with Plato the different
ideas form but members and moments of the one world of ideas, and
their plurality is destroyed in the unity of the comprehensive and
determining idea of the One or the Good.
Just what an elevation of the spirit to the world of ideas is for
Plato, the union of mankind with Christ is for Paul. What the man
actually in possession of knowledge, the "wise man," is for the
former, "Christ" is for the latter. What is there called Eros--the
mediator of the unity between the world of ideas and the sense-world,
of Being and Conscious Being, of objective and subjective thought,
and at the same time the very essence of all objective thought--is
here called Christ. Eros is called by Plato the son of riches and
poverty, who bears the "nature and signs" of both: "He is quite poor,
runs around barefoot and homeless, and must sleep on the naked earth
without a roof, in the open air, at the doors and on the streets,
in conformity with his mother's nature." "As, however, he is neither
mortal nor immortal, at one moment he is flourishing and full of
life, at another he is weary and dies away, and all that often on the
self-same day; but ever he rises up again in life in conformity with
his father's nature." [348] So also the Pauline Christ contains all
the fulness of the Godhead [349] and is himself the "Son of God"; yet
nevertheless Christ debases himself, takes on the form of a servant,
becomes Man, and dies, thereby placing himself in direct opposition to
his real nature, but only to rise again continually in each individual
man and allow mankind to participate in his own life. And as Christ
(in 1 Tim. ii. 5) is the "mediator" between God and men, so also the
Platonic Eros "is midway between the immortal and the mortal." "Eros,
O Socrates, is a daimon, a great daimon, and everything of this nature
is intermediate between God and man. The daimon transfers to the Gods
what comes from man, and to man what comes from the Gods; from the
one prayer and sacrifice, from the other the orders and rewards for
the sacrifice. Midway, he fills the gap between the immortal and the
mortal, and everything is through him bound into one whole. By his
mediation is disseminated every prophecy and the religious skill which
has reference to sacrifice, sanctification, sacred maxims, and each
prediction and magic spell. God himself does not mix with mankind,
but all intercourse and all speech between God and man, as well in
waking as in sleep, takes place in the way mentioned. Whoever has
experienced this, in him is the daimon." In this connection we recall
to our minds that Eros appears in the "Timæus" under the name of the
"world-soul," and this is supposed by Plato to have the form of an
oblique cross. [350]
The Platonic Eros is the mythical personification of the conception
that the contemplation of Being (obj. gen.) as such is at the
same time a contemplation of Being's (sub. gen.); or that in the
contemplation of the Ideas the subjective thought of the Philosopher
and the objective ideal Reality as it were meet each other from
two sides and fuse directly into a unity. [351] It is thus only the
scientific and theoretical formulation of the fundamental idea of the
old Aryan Fire Cult. According to this the sacrifice of Agni--that
is, the victim which man offers to God--is as such equally Agni's
sacrifice, the victim which God offers, and in which he sacrifices
himself for humanity. It is in agreement with this that according to
Paul the death and resurrection of Christ, as they take place in the
consciousness of the believer, represent a death and resurrection of
Christ as a divine personality: man dies and lives again with Christ,
and God and man are completely fused together in the believer. As
mankind by this means becomes a "member" of the "Body of Christ,"
so in the Vedic conception the partaker of the Fire-God's sacrifice,
by the tasting of the blood and the eating of the sacred bread, is
associated with a mystic body, and is infused with the one Spirit of
God, which destroys his sins in its sacred fire, and flows through
him with new life-power. In India, from the cult of the Fire-God and
the complete unity of God and man thereby attained, Brahmanism was
developed, and gained an influence over all the Indian peoples. In
Plato intellectual contemplation formed the basis of cognition. He
placed the wise man at the head of the social organism, and regarded
the philosopher as the only man fitted for the government of the
world. And the future development of the Church as a "Communion of
Saints" appears already in the Pauline conception of the faithful as
the "Body of Christ," in which the Idea of the human race (Christ)
is realised, as the kingdom of God upon earth, as the true humanity,
as the material appearance of the divine ideal man, to belong to
which is mankind's duty, and without which it is impossible for man
to live in his real ideal nature.
Ancient philosophy had attempted until now in vain to overcome the
contradiction between the sense-world and the world of ideas, and
to destroy the uncertainty of human thought and life which results
from this contradiction. From the time of Plato it had worked at the
problem of uniting, without contradiction, Nature and Spirit, whose
contradictory nature had first been brought to notice by the founder
of metaphysical idealism. Religion, particularly in the Mystery Cults,
had tried to solve in a practical way the problem that seemed insoluble
by abstract means, and had sought to secure for man a new basis and
resting-place by means of devotion and "revelation"--a mystic sinking
into the depths of God. But Paul's Christianity first gave a form to
all this obscure desire, a form which united the thrills and joy of
mystic ecstasy with the certainty of a comprehensive religious view
of the world, and enlightened men as to the deepest meaning of their
emotional impulse towards certainty: man obtains unity with God and
certainty as to the true reality, not by an abstract dialectic, as
Plato supposed; not by logical insight into the cosmos in the sense of
an abstract knowledge attainable only by the few, but through faith,
through the divine act of redemption. To adopt this internally, thereby
to live with it directly--this alone can give man the possibility
of emerging from the uncertainty and darkness of corporeal existence
into the clear light of the spiritual. All certainty of the true or
essential being is consequently a certainty of faith, and there is
no higher certainty than that which is given to men in faith and
piety. As Christ died and was thereby freed from the bonds of the
body and of the world, so also must man die in the spirit. He must
lay aside the burden of this body, the real cause of all his ethical
and intellectual shortcomings. He must inwardly rise with Christ and
be born again, thereby taking part in his spiritual certitude and
gaining together with the "Life in the Spirit" salvation from all his
present shortcomings. It is true that outwardly the body still exists,
even after the inner act of redemption has taken place. Even when the
man who died with Christ has arisen and has become a new man, he is
nevertheless still subject to corporeal limitations. The redeemed
man is still in the world and must fight with its influences. But
what man gains in the union with the body of Christ is the "Spirit"
of Christ, which holds the members of the body together, shows itself
to be active in everything which belongs to the body, and acts in man
as a supernatural power. This spirit, as it dwells henceforth in the
redeemed man, works and directs and drives him on to every action;
lifts man in idea far above all the limitations of his fleshly nature;
strengthens him in his weakness; shows him existence in a new light,
so that henceforth he feels himself no longer bound; gives him the
victory over the powers of earth, and enables him to anticipate,
even in this life, the blessedness of his real and final redemption
in a life to come. [352] But the spirit of Christ as such is equally
the divine spirit. So that the redeemed, as they receive the spirit
of Christ, are the "sons" of God himself, and this is expressed by
saying that with the spirit they "inherit the glorious freedom of the
children of God." [353] For, as Paul says, "the Lord is the spirit;
but where the spirit is, there is freedom." [354]
So that when the Christian feels himself transformed into a "new
creature," equipped with power of knowledge and of virtue, blest in
the consciousness of his victorious strength over carnal desires,
and wins his peace in faith, this is only the consequence of a
superhuman spirit working in him. Hence the Christian virtues of
Brotherly Love, Humility, Obedience, &c., are necessary consequences
of the possession of the Spirit: "If we live by the Spirit, by the
Spirit let us also walk." [355] And if the faithful suddenly develop
a fulness of new and wonderful powers, which exceed man's ordinary
nature--such as facility in "tongues," in prophecy, and in the
healing of the sick--this is, in the superstitious view of the age,
only to be explained by the indwelling activity of a supernatural
spirit-being that has entered man from the outside. Certainly it
does not seem clear, in the Pauline conception of the redemption, how
this heavenly spirit can at the same time be the spirit of man--how
it can be active in man without removing the particular and original
spirit of man, and without reducing the individual to a passive tool,
to a lifeless puppet without self-determination and responsibility;
how the man "possessed" by such a spirit can nevertheless feel himself
free and redeemed by the Spirit. For it is in truth an alien spirit,
one that does not in essence belong to him, which enters man through
the union with Christ. Yet it is supposed to be the spirit, not merely
of the individual man, but also Christ's personal spirit. One and the
same spirit putting on a celestial body of light must be enthroned on
the right hand of the Father in heaven, and must also be on earth the
spirit of those who believe in it, setting itself to work in them as
the source of Gnosis, of full mystic knowledge; and, as the power of
God, as the spirit of salvation, must produce in them supernatural
effects. [356] It must be on the one hand an objective and actual
spirit-being which in Christ becomes man, dies, and rises again; and
on the other hand an inner subjective power, which produces in each
individual man the extinction of the flesh and a new birth which
is to be shared by the faithful as the fruit of their individual
redemption. That is perhaps comprehensible in the mode of thought
of an age for which the idea of personality had as yet no definite
meaning, and which consequently saw no contradiction in this, that
a personal Christ-spirit should at the same time inhabit a number of
individual spirits; and which did not differentiate between the one,
or rather the continual, act of redemption by God and its continual
temporal repetition in the individual. We can understand this only
if the Pauline Christ is a purely metaphysical being. It is, on the
contrary, quite incomprehensible if Paul is supposed to have gained
his idea of the mediator of salvation from any experience of an
historical Jesus and his actual death. Only because in his doctrine
of the saving power of the Christ-spirit Paul had thought of no
particular human personality could he imagine the immanence of the
divine in the world to be mediated by that spirit. Only because he
connected no other idea with the personality of Jesus than the Book
of Wisdom or Philo did with their particular immanence principles,
does he declare that Christ brings about salvation. So that Christ,
as the principle of redemption, is for Paul only an allegorical or
symbolical personality and not a real one. He is a personality such as
were the heathen deities, who passed as general cosmic powers without
prejudice to their appearing in human form. Personality is for Paul
only another mode of expressing the supernatural spirituality and
directed activity of the principle of redemption, in distinction
from the blindly working powers and material realities of religious
naturalism. It serves merely to suggest spirituality to an age which
could only represent spirit as a material fluid. It corresponds
simply to the popular conception of the principle of redemption,
which treated this as bound up with the idea of a human being. But
it in no way referred to a real historical individual, showing,
in fact, just by the uncertainty and fluctuation of the idea, how
far the Christ of the Pauline doctrine of redemption was from being
connected with a definite historical reality.
Not because he so highly esteemed and revered Jesus as an historical
personality did Paul make Christ the bearer and mediator of redemption,
but because he knew nothing at all of an historical Jesus, of a human
individual of this name, to whom he would have been able to transfer
the work of redemption. "Faithful disciples," Wrede considers, "could
not so easily believe that the man who had sat with them at table in
Capernaum, or had journeyed over the Sea of Galilee with them, was
the creator of the world. For Paul this obstacle was absent." [357]
But Paul is nevertheless supposed to have met James, the "Brother of
the Lord," and to have had dealings with him which would certainly
have modified his view of Jesus, if here there were really question
of a corporeal brotherhood. What a wonderful idea our theologians
must have of a man like Paul if they think that it could ever have
occurred to him to connect such tremendous conceptions with a human
individual Jesus as he does with his Christ! It is true that there is
a type of religious ecstasy in which the difference between man and
God is completely lost sight of; and, especially at the beginning of
our era, in the period of Cæsar-worship and of the deepest religious
superstition, it was not in itself unusual to deify, after his death,
a man who was highly esteemed. A great lack of reason, a great mental
confusion, an immense flight of imagination, would be necessary to
transform a man not long dead, who was still clearly remembered by
his relatives and contemporaries, not merely into a divine hero or
demi-god, but into the world-forming spiritual principle, into the
metaphysical mediator of redemption and the "second God." And if, as
even Wrede acknowledges in the above-quoted words, personal knowledge
of Jesus was really an "obstacle" to his apotheosis, how is it to be
explained that the "First Apostles" at Jerusalem took no exception to
that representation of Paul's? They surely knew who Jesus had been;
they knew the Master through many years' continual wandering with
him. And however highly they may always have thought of the risen
Jesus, however intimately they may have joined in their minds the
memory of the man Jesus with the prevailing idea of the Messiah,
according to the prevalent theological opinion, even they are supposed
to have risen in no way to such a boundless deification of their
Lord and Master as Paul undertook a comparatively short while after
Jesus' death.
"Paul already believed in such a heavenly Being, in a divine Christ,
before he believed in Jesus." [358] The truth is that he never
believed at all in the Jesus of liberal theology. The "man" Jesus
already belonged to his faith in Christ, so far as Christ's act
of redemption was supposed to consist in his humbling himself and
becoming man--and no historical Jesus was necessary for that. For
Paul also, just as for the whole heathen world, the man actually
sacrificed in God's place was at best merely a chance symbol of the
God presenting himself as victim. Hence it cannot be said that the
man Jesus was but "the bearer of all the great attributes," which
as such had been long since determined; [359] or, as Gunkel puts it,
that the enthusiastic disciples had transferred to him all that the
former Judaism had been wont to ascribe to the Messiah; and that
consequently the Christology of the New Testament, in spite of its
unhistorical nature, was nevertheless "a mighty hymn which History
sings to Jesus"(!). [360] If we once agree as to the existence of a
pre-Christian Jesus--and even Gunkel, apart from Robertson and Smith,
has worked for the recognition of this fact--then this can in the first
place produce nothing but a strong suspicion against the historical
Jesus; and it seems a despairing subterfuge of the "critical" theology
to seek to find capital, from the existence of a pre-Christian Jesus,
for the "unique" significance of their "historical" Jesus.
Christ's life and death are for Paul neither the moral achievement of
a man nor in any way historical facts, but something super-historical,
events in the supersensible world. [361] Further, the "man" Jesus
comes in question for Paul, just as did the suffering servant of
God for Isaiah, exclusively as an Idea, and his death is, like his
resurrection, but the purely ideal condition whereby redemption
is brought about. "If Christ hath not been raised, your faith is
vain." [362] On this declaration has till now been founded the chief
proof that an historical Jesus was to Paul the pre-supposition of
his doctrine. But really that declaration in Paul's mouth points to
nothing but the faith of his contemporaries, who expected natural
and religious salvation from the resurrection of their God, whether
he were called Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, or anything else.
The fact is therefore settled, that Paul knew nothing of an historical
Jesus; and that even if he had known anything of him, this Jesus in
any case plays no part for him, and exercised no influence over the
development of his religious view of the world. Let us consider the
importance of this: the very man from whom we derive the first written
testimony as to Christianity, who was the first in any way to establish
it as a new religion differing from Judaism, on whose teachings alone
the whole further development of Christian thought has depended--this
Paul knew absolutely nothing of Jesus as an historical personality. In
fact, with perfect justice from his point of view he was even compelled
to excuse himself, when others wished to enlighten him as to such a
personality! At the present day it will be acknowledged by all sensible
people that, as Ed. von Hartmann declared more than thirty years ago,
without Paul the Christian movement would have disappeared in the
sand, just as the many other Jewish religions have done--at best to
afford interest to investigators as an historical curiosity--and
Paul had no knowledge of Jesus! The formation and development of
the Christian religion began long before the Jesus of the Gospels
appeared, and was completed independently of the historical Jesus of
theology. Theology has no justification for treating Christianity
merely as the "Christianity of Christ," as it now is sufficiently
evident; nor should it present a view of the life and doctrines of
an ideal man Jesus as the Christian religion. [363]
The question raised at the beginning, as to what we learn from Paul
about the historical Jesus, has found its answer--nothing. There is
little value, then, in the objection to the disbelievers in such a
Jesus which is raised on the theological side in triumphant tones:
that the historical existence of Jesus is "most certainly established"
by Paul. This objection comes, in fact, even from such people as
regard the New Testament, in other respects, with most evidently
sceptical views. The truth is that the Pauline epistles contain
nothing which would force us to the belief in an historical Jesus;
and probably no one would find such a person in them if that belief
was not previously established in him. It must be considered that,
if the Pauline epistles stood in the edition of the New Testament
where they really belong--that is, before the Gospels--hardly any
one would think that Jesus, as he there meets him, was a real man
and had wandered on the earth in flesh and blood; but he would in all
probability only find therein a detailed development of the "suffering
servant of God," and would conclude that it was an irruption of
heathen religious ideas into Jewish thought. Our theologians are,
however, so strongly convinced of it a priori--that the Pauline
representation of Christ actually arose from the figure of Jesus
wandering on earth--that even M. Brückner confesses, in the preface
to his work, that he had been "himself astonished" (!) at the result
of his inquiry--the independence of the Pauline representation of
Christ from the historical personality, Jesus. [364]
Christianity is a syncretic religion. It belongs to those multiform
religious movements which at the commencement of our era were
struggling with one another for the mastery. Setting out from the
Apocalyptic idea and the expectation of the Messiah among the Jewish
sects, it was borne on the tide of a mighty social agitation, which
found its centre and its point of departure in the religious sects and
Mystery communities. Its adherents conceived the Messiah not merely as
the Saviour of souls, but as deliverer from slavery, from the lot of
the poor and the oppressed, and as the bearer of a new justice. [365]
It borrowed the chief part of its doctrine, the specific point in
which it differed from ordinary Judaism, the central idea of the God
sacrificing himself for mankind, from the neighbouring peoples, who had
brought down this belief into Asia, in connection with fire-worship,
from its earlier home in the North. Only in so far as that faith
points in the end to an Aryan origin can it be said that Jesus was "an
Aryan"; any further statements on this point, such as, for example,
Chamberlain makes in his "Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts,"
are pure fancies, and rest on a complete misunderstanding of the true
state of affairs. Christianity, as the religion of Christ, of the
"Lord," who secularised the Jewish Law by his voluntary death of
expiation, did not "arise" in Jerusalem, but, if anywhere, in the
Syrian capital Antioch, one of the principal places of the worship
of Adonis. For it was at Antioch where, according to the Acts, [366]
the name "Christians" was first used for the adherents of the new
religion, who had till then been usually called Nazarenes. [367]
That certainly is in sharpest contradiction to tradition, according to
which Christianity is supposed to have arisen in Jerusalem and to have
been thence spread abroad among the heathen. But Luke's testimony
as to the arising of the community of the Messiah at Jerusalem
and the spreading of the Gospel from that place can lay no claim to
historical significance. Even the account of the disciples' experience
at Easter and of the first appearances after the Resurrection, from
their contradictory and confused character appear to be legendary
inventions. [368] Unhistorical, and in contradiction to the information
on this point given by Matthew and Mark, is the statement that the
disciples stayed in Jerusalem after Jesus' death, which is even
referred by Luke to an express command of the dead master. [369]
Unhistorical is the assemblage at Pentecost and the wonderful "miracle"
of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, which, as even Clemen agrees,
probably originated from the Jewish legends, according to which the
giving of the Law on Sinai was made in seventy different languages,
in order that it might be understood by all peoples. [370] But also
Stephen's execution and the consequent persecution of the community
at Jerusalem are legendary inventions. [371] The great trouble which
Luke takes to represent Jerusalem as the point whence the Christian
movement set out, clearly betrays the tendency of the author of
the Acts to misrepresent the activity of the Christian propaganda,
which really emanated from many centres, as a bursting out of the
Gospel from one focus. It is meant to produce the impression that
the new religion spread from Jerusalem over the whole world like an
explosion; and thus its almost simultaneous appearance in the whole of
Nearer Asia is explained. For this reason "devout Jews of all nations"
were assembled in Jerusalem at Pentecost, and could understand each
other in spite of their different languages. For this reason Stephen
was stoned, and the motive given for that persecution which in one
moment scattered the faithful in all directions. [372]
Now it is certainly probable that there was in Jerusalem, just as
in many other places, a community of the Messiah which believed in
Jesus as the God sacrificing himself for humanity. But the question
is whether this belief, in the community at Jerusalem, rested on a
real man Jesus; and whether it is correct to regard this community,
some of whose members were personally acquainted with Jesus, and
who were the faithful companions of his wanderings, as the "original
community" in the sense of the first germ and point of departure of the
Christian movement. We may believe, with Fraser, that a Jewish prophet
and itinerant preacher, who by chance was named Jesus, was seized
by his opponents, the orthodox Jews, on account of his revolutionary
agitation, and was beheaded as the Haman of the current year, thereby
giving occasion for the foundation of the community at Jerusalem. [373]
Against this it may be said that our informants as to the beginning
of the Christian propaganda certainly vary, now making one assertion,
now another, without caring whether these are contradictory; and
they all strive to make up for the lack of any certain knowledge
by unmistakable inventions. If the doctrine of Jesus was, as Smith
declares, pre-Christian, "a religion which was spread among the Jews
and especially the Greeks within the limits of the century [100 B.C. to
100 A.D.], more or less secretly, and wrapped up in 'Mysteries,'"
then we can understand both the sudden appearance of Christianity
over so wide a sphere as almost the whole of Nearer Asia, and also
the fact that even the earliest informants as to the beginning of
the Christian movement had nothing certain to tell. This, however,
seems quite irreconcilable with the view of a certain, definite,
local, and personal point of departure for the new doctrine. [374]
The objection will be raised: what about the Gospels? They, at least,
clearly tell the story of a human individual, and are inexplicable,
apart from the belief in an historical Jesus.
The question consequently arises as to the source from which the
Gospels derived a knowledge of this Jesus; for on this alone the
belief in an historical Jesus can rest.