The Christ Myth

On purely religious grounds the wrongly so-called “Catholicism” could very probably dispense with the fiction of an historical Jesus, and go back to Paul’s standpoint before the origin of the Gospels, if it could have faith to-day in its mythological conception, of the God sacrificing himself for mankind, without that fiction. In its present form, however, it stands or falls as a Church with the belief in the historical truth of the God-redeemer; because all the Church’s hierarchical claims and authority are based on this authority having been entrusted to her by an historical Jesus through the apostles. Catholicism relies for this, as it has been said, on “tradition.” But Catholicism itself called this tradition into life, just as the priests at Jerusalem worked up the tradition of an historical Moses in order to trace back to him their claim to authority. It is the “Irony of World-History” that that very tradition soon afterwards forced the Church, with regard to the historical Christ, to conceal its real nature from the crowd, and to forbid the laity to read the Gospels, on account of the contradiction between the power of the Church and the traditional Christ it had produced. But the position of Protestantism is even more contradictory and more desperate than that of the Catholic Church, in view of our insight into the fictitious character of the Gospels. For Protestantism has no means but history for the foundation of its religious metaphysics; and history, viewed impartially, leads away from those roots of Christianity to which Protestantism strives, instead of towards them.

If this is true of Protestant orthodoxy it is even more true of that form of Protestantism which thinks it can maintain Christianity apart from its metaphysical doctrine of redemption because this doctrine is “no longer suitable to the age.” Liberal Protestantism is and wishes to be nothing but a mere faith in the historical personality of a man who is supposed to have been born 1,900 years ago in Palestine, and through his exemplary life to have become the founder of a new religion; being crucified and dying in conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem, being raised up then as a God in the minds of his enthusiastic disciples. It is a faith in the “loving God the Father,” because Jesus is supposed to have believed in him; in the personal immortality of man, because this is supposed to have been the presupposition of Jesus’ appearance and doctrines; in the “incomparable” value of moral instructions, because they stand in a book which is supposed to have been produced under the immediate influence of the prophet of Nazareth. Liberal Protestantism supports morality on this, that Jesus was such a good man, and that for this reason it is necessary for each individual man to follow the call of Jesus. But it bases the faith in Jesus once and for all on the historical significance of the Gospels; though it cannot conceal from itself, after careful consideration, that the belief in their historical value rests on extremely weak grounds, and that we know nothing of that Jesus, not even that he ever lived. In any case we know nothing which could be of influential religious significance, and which could not be put together just as well or better from other less doubtful sources.510 It is pierced to the heart by the denial of the historical personality of Jesus, not, like Catholicism, merely as a Church, but in its very essence, as a Religion. And as to its real religious kernel it consists in a few fine-sounding phrases and some scattered references to a metaphysics which was once living, but which is now degraded into a mere ornament for modest minds. And after disposing of its would-be historical value there is left only a dimly smouldering spark of “homeless sentiments,” which would suit any style of religious faith. Liberal Protestantism proclaims itself as the really “modern” Christianity. Confronted by the philosophic spirit of our day, it lays stress upon having no philosophy. It sets aside all religious speculation as “Myth,” if possible with reference to Kant, as this is “modern,” without noticing that it is itself most deeply imbedded in mythology with its “historical” Jesus. It believes that, in its exclusive reverence for the man Jesus, it has brought Christianity to the “height of present culture.” As to this Stendel justly says: “Of the whole apologetic art with which the modern Jesus-theology undertakes to save Christianity for our time, it can be said that there is no historical religion which could not just as well be brought into accord with the modern mind as that of the New Testament.”511 We have no occasion to weep for the complete collapse of such a “religion.” This form of Christianity has already been proved by Hartmann to be worthless from the religious point of view;512 and it is only a proof of the fascinating power of phrases, of the laxity in our creeds, and the thoughtlessness of the mob in religious matters, that it is even yet alive. For such reasons it is even allowed, under the lead of the so-called critical theology, to proclaim itself as the pure Christianity, now known for the first time. Thus it finds sympathy. This unsystematic collection of thoughts, arbitrarily selected from the view of the world and of life given by the Gospels, which even so requires to be rhetorically puffed out and artistically modified before it is made acceptable to the present age, – this unspeculative doctrine of redemption, which at bottom is uncertain of itself, – this sentimental, æsthetic, Jesus-worship of a Harnack, Bousset, and the rest on whom W. v. Schnehen so pitilessly broke his lance;513 this whole so-called Christianity of cultured pastors and a laity in need of redemption, would have long since come to grief through its poverty of ideas, its sickening sweetness, if it were not considered necessary to maintain Christianity at all costs, were it even that of the complete deprivation of its spiritual content. The recognition of the fact that the “historical” Jesus has no religious interest at all, but at most concerns historians and philologists, is indeed at present commencing to make its way into wider circles.514 If one only knew a way out of the difficulty! If one were only not afraid of following a clear lead just because one might then possibly be forced beyond the existing religion in the course of his ideas – as the example of Kalthoff showed! If only one had not such a fearful respect for the past and such a tender “historic unconsciousness” and such immense respect for the “historical basis” of existing religion! The reference to history and the so-called “historical continuity of the religious development” is indeed on the face of it merely a way out of a difficulty, and another way of putting the fact that one is not desired to draw the consequences of his presuppositions. As if there can still be talk of a “historical basis” where there is no history, but pure myth! As if the “preservation of historical continuity” could consist in maintaining as history what are mythical fictions, just because they have hitherto passed for historic truth, though we have seen through their purely fictitious and unreal character! As if the difficulty of the redemption of present-day civilisation from the chaos of superstition, social deceit, cowardice, and intellectual servitude which are connected with the name of Christianity, lay in a purely spiritual sphere and not rather in the sentiment, in the slovenly piety, in the heavy weight of ancient tradition, above all in the economic, social, and practical relations which unite our churches with the past! Faith in the future of Christianity is still built not so much on the persuasive inner truth of its doctrine, but much more on the inborn religious feeling of the members of the community, on the religious education in school and home, and the consequent increasing store of metaphysical and ethical ideas, on protection by the State and – on the law of inertia in the spiritual life of the mob. For the rest, in pulpit, in parish papers, and in public life, a method of expression is used which is not essentially different from that of orthodoxy, but is so adapted as to allow every man to think what he deems best for himself. We are enthusiastically told that thus we are able to keep the rudderless ship of Protestantism still a while above water, and that we have “reconciled” faith with modern culture in “the further development of Christianity.”

Thus nineteen hundred years of religious development were completely in error. Is no other course open to us but a complete break with the Christian doctrine of redemption? This doctrine, however – such was the result of our previous examination – is independent of the belief in an historical Jesus. Its centre of gravity lies in the conception of the “incarnation” of God, who suffers in the world but is finally victorious over this suffering; and through union with whom Mankind also “prevails over the world” and gains a new life in a higher sphere of existence. That the form of this divine Redeemer of the world coalesced, in the minds of the Christian community, with that of a man Jesus; that, consequent on this, the act of redemption was fixed as to time and place, is only the consequence of the conditions under which the new religion appeared.

For this reason it can only claim, in and for itself, a transient practical significance, and not a special religious value; while on the other hand it has become the doom of Christianity that just this making into history of the principle of redemption makes it impossible for us still to acknowledge this religion. But then the preservation of historical continuity or the “further development” of Christianity in its proper sense probably does not consist in separating this chance historical side of the Christian doctrine of redemption from its connection with the whole Christian view of the world and setting it up by itself, but only in going back to the essential and fundamental idea of the Christian religion, and stating its metaphysical doctrine of redemption in a manner more nearly answering to the ideas of the day.

From the conception of a personal God-redeemer arose the possibility of sacrificing a man in God’s place, and of seeing the divine and ideal man, that is, the Idea of Man, in an actual man. From the growing Church’s desire for authority, from its opposition to Gnostic phantasy with its intellectual volatilising of the religious-moral kernel of the Pauline doctrine of redemption, and from the wish not to give up the historical connection with Judaism on opportunist grounds, arose the necessity of portraying the divine-human expiatory sacrifice as the sacrifice of an historical person who had arisen in Judaism. All these different reasons, which led to the formation of the belief in an “historical” Jesus, have no force with us, particularly after it has been shown that the personality of the principle of redemption, this fundamental presupposition of the evangelical “history,” is in the end to blame for all the contradictions and shortcomings of that religion. To lead back to its real essence the Christian doctrine of redemption can consequently mean nothing but placing the idea of the God-man, as it lies at the basis of that doctrine, in the central point of the religious view of the world, through the stripping off of the mythical personality of the Logos.

God must become man, so that Man can become God and be redeemed from the bounds of the finite. The idea of Man which is realised in the world must itself be a divine idea, an idea of the Deity, and so God must be the common root and essence of all individual men and things; only then may Man attain his existence in God and freedom from the world, through this consciousness of his supernatural divine essence. Man’s consciousness of himself and of his true essence must itself be a divine consciousness. Man, and indeed every man, must be a purely finite phenomenon, an individual limitation, the clothing of the Deity with a human form. In possibility he is a God-man, to be born again an actual God-man through his moral activity, and consequently to become really one with God. In this conception all the contradictions of Christian dogmatism are solved, and the kernel of its doctrine of redemption is preserved without being divested of its true significance by the introduction of mythical phantasy or of historical coincidences, as is the case in Christianity.

If we are still to use the language of the past, and to call the divine essence of mankind the immanent Godhead, “Christ,” then any advance of religion can only consist in the development and working out of this “inner Christ,” that is, of the spiritual-moral tendencies dwelling in mankind, in the carrying of it back to its absolute and divine basis, but not in the historical personification of this inner human nature. Any reality of the God-man consequently consists in “Christ’s” activity in Man, in the proving of his “true self,” of his personal, spiritual essence, in the raising of one’s self to personality on the ground of Man’s divine nature, but not in the magical efficacy of an external divine personality. This, indeed, is nothing but the religious ideal of mankind, which men have projected on to an historical figure, in order to assure themselves of the “reality” of the ideal. It is not true that it is “essential” to the religious consciousness to consider its ideal in human form, and that for this reason the historical Jesus is indispensable for the religious life. Were this true, religion would not be, in principle, in a position to raise itself above the mythical and primitive stage of God’s externality and appearance to the senses, and to conquer these Gods, working them more and more into the forms of an inner nature. This, however, is the essence of religious development. Religion would otherwise be confined to a lower province in the human life of the spirit; and it would be overthrown whenever the fiction of that projection and separation of God from one’s own self was seen through. It is only to orthodox Christianity that it is necessary to represent the God in Man as a God outside of Man, as the “unique” personality of a historical God-man; and that because it still remains with one foot in religious naturalism and mythology, and the historical circumstances of another age occasioned the choice of that representation and falsification of the idea of the God-man.

To think of the world’s activity as God’s activity; of mankind’s development, filled with struggles and sufferings, as the story of a divine struggle and Passion; of the world-process as the process of a God, who in each individual creature fights, suffers, conquers and dies, so that he may overcome the limitations of the finite in the religious consciousness of man and anticipate his future triumph over all the suffering of the world – that is the real Christian doctrine of redemption. To revive in this sense the fundamental conception from which Christianity sprang – and which is independent of any historical reference – is, indeed, to return to this religious starting-point. Protestantism, on the contrary, which repudiates Paul’s religion and sets up the Gospels as the foundation of its belief, nevertheless does not go behind Christianity’s development into the Church, back to the origin of Christianity, but remains always within this development, and deceives itself if it thinks that it can prevail over the Church from the point of view of the Gospel.515

In such an interpretation and development of the Christian conception of redemption “historical continuity” is preserved just as decidedly as it is in the one-sided making into history of that thought on the side of liberal Protestantism. What is in opposition to it is, on the one hand, completely unhistorical belief in an historical Jesus; on the other hand, the prejudice against the “immanent God,” or against Pantheism. But this prejudice is based entirely on that fiction of an historical “mediator” and the hypothesis contained therein of a dualistic separation of world and God. The representatives of the monistic conception – who began to organise themselves a short time ago – should be clearer as to the significance of that conception than they are for the most part even at the present day. They must perceive that the true doctrine of unity can only be the doctrine of the all in one. There must be an idealistic monism in opposition to the naturalistic monism of Haeckel, which is prevalent even to-day. This monism must not exclude but include God’s existence; and its present unfruitful negation of all religion must deepen into a positive and religiously valuable view of the world. Then, and not till then, will it be able to effect a genuine separation from the Church, and the monistic movement, still in its childhood, may lead to an inner improvement and renovation of our spiritual life in general. It requires much short-sightedness on the part of the exponents of a purely historical Christianity to suppose that the soulless and poor faith in the personal, or as it is considered better expressed to-day, in the “living” God, in freedom and immortality, supported by the authority of the “unique” personality of a man Jesus who died two thousand years ago, will be in a position permanently to satisfy religious needs, even when the metaphysic of redemption, still connected with it at all points, and the pious attitude based upon this are completely stripped off from it. The earlier the orthodox Christians, by giving up their superstition in an historical Jesus, and the Monists, by sacrificing their equally fatal superstition in the sole reality of matter and in the redeeming truths of physical science which alone can give happiness, come to a mutual reconciliation, the better it will be for both. The more surely we shall avoid the total obliteration of the religious consciousness; and the civilised nations of Europe will be saved from the loss of their spiritual ballast – towards which loss there seems at the present day to be a continuous movement on all sides. At present there are only two possibilities – either to look on quietly while the tidal wave of naturalism, getting ever more powerful from day to day, sweeps away the last vestige of religious thought, or to transfer the sinking fire of religion to the ground of Pantheism, in a religion independent of any ecclesiastical guardianship. The time of dualistic Theism has gone by. At present all the advancing spirits, in spheres most widely different, concur in striving towards Monism. This striving is so deeply grounded and so well warranted, that the Church will not be able to suppress it for ever.516 The chief obstacle to a monistic religion and attitude is the belief, irreconcilable with reason or history, in the historical reality of a “unique,” ideal, and unsurpassable Redeemer.

1

Cf. also his “Kritik der Evangelien,” 2 vols. (1850–51).

2

“Kultur d. Gegenwart: Gesch. d. christl. Religion,” 2nd ed., 1909, 47.

3

The same is true of Clemen, who, judging by his “Religionsgeschichtl. Erklärung d. N.T.” (1909), appears to be acquainted with Robertson’s masterpiece, “Christianity and Mythology,” only from a would-be witty notice of Réville, and furthermore only cites the author when he thinks he can demolish him with ease.

4

A. Hausrath, in his work “Jesus u. die neutestamentlichen Schriftsteller,” vol. i. (1908), offers a striking example of how light a matter our theologians make it to overthrow the attacks of the opponents of an historical Jesus. In scarcely three pages at the commencement of his compendious work he rejects the myth theory of Bruno Bauer with the favourite appeal to a few individual and historical features of the Gospel tradition which are intrinsically of no significance, finishing up this “refutation” with a reckless citation from Weinel which proves nothing for the historical character of Jesus.

5

Cf. also his work “Moses, Jesus, Paulus. Drei sagen varianten des babylonischen Gottmenschen Gilgamesch,” 2nd ed., 1909.

6

Cf., for example, “Jesus Vier Vorträge, geh. in Frankf.” 1910.

7

In other respects the “progress” in the province of religious history is not so great as I formerly believed I could assume. That is to say, in essentials modern learning in this connection has only brought facts to light and given a new focus to points of view which were already possessed (cf. Dupuis and Volney) by the eighteenth century. In the twenties and forties of the nineteenth century investigations, unprejudiced and independent of theology, had already reached in the case of some of their representatives, such as Gfrörer, Lützelberger, Ghillany, Nork, and others, the point which is to-day again represented by the most advanced learning. The revolution of 1848 and the reaction consequent on it in ecclesiastical matters then again shook, on account of their radical tendency, those views which had been already arrived at. The liberal Protestantism, too, that rose as a recoil against orthodoxy in its effort to work out the “historical” Jesus as the kernel of Christianity on its part had no interest in again bringing up the old results. Indeed, it actually makes it a reproach to a person of the present day if he quotes the works of those earlier investigators, and reminds him that religious learning did not begin only with the modern Coryphaei, with Holtzmann, Harnack, &c. Whoever looks upon things from this point of view can most probably agree in the melancholy reflection of a reviewer of the first edition of “The Christ Myth,” when he says with reference to the “latest investigations”: “Apparently the whole learning of the nineteenth century so far as relates to investigations into the moving forces of civilisation and national upheavals will be considered by future research as an arsenal of errors” (O. Hauser in the Neue Freie Presse, August 8, 1909).

8

It has also been reckoned as a want of “method” in this work that I have often made use of a cautious and restrained mode of expression, that I have spoken of mere “suppositions” and employed locutions such as “it appears,” &c., when it has been for the time being impossible for science or myself to give complete certainty to an assertion. This reproach sounds strange in the mouths of such as plume themselves upon “scientific method.” For I should think that it was indeed more scientific in the given cases to express oneself in the manner chosen by me, than by an unmeasured certainty in assertions to puff out pure suppositions into undoubted facts. I must leave such a mode of proceeding to the historical theologians. They work purely with hypotheses. All their endeavours to obtain an historical kernel from the Gospels rest upon conjectures simply. Above everything, their explanation of the origin of Christianity simply from an historical Jesus is, in spite of the certainty and self-confidence with which it comes out, a pure hypothesis, and that of very doubtful value. For that in reality the new religion should have been called into life by the “all-subduing influence of the personality of Jesus” and its accompaniments, the visions and hallucinations of the disciples worked up into ecstasies, is so improbable, and the whole view is psychologically so assailable, and, moreover, so futile, that even a liberal theologian like Gunkel declares it entirely insufficient (“Zum religionsgesichtl. Verständnis d. N.T.,” 89 sq.). With this explanation, however, stands or falls the whole modern Jesus-religion. For if they cannot show how the Pauline and Johannine Christology could develop from the mere existence of an historical Jesus, if this now forms “the problem of problems of New Testament research” (Gunkel, op. cit.), then their whole conception of the rise of Christianity disappears into air, and they have no right to hold up against others who seek a better explanation the partially hypothetical character of the views advanced by them.

9

Op. cit., 10 sq.

10

Cf. K. Dunkmann, “Der historische Jesus, der mythologische Christus, und Jesus der Christ” (1910). Cf. also Pfleiderer, “Das Christusbild des urchristlichen Glaubens in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung” (1903), 6 sq. Here, too, it is pointed out that modern scientific theology in its description of the figure of Christ proceeds in anything but an unprejudiced manner. Out of the belief in Christ as contained in the New Testament it “only draws forth what is acceptable to present modes of thinking – passing over everything else and reading in much that is its own – in order to construct an ideal Christ according to modern taste.” Pfleiderer declares it a “great illusion” to believe that the pictures of Christ in works such as Harnack’s “Wesen des Christentums,” each differently drawn according to the peculiarities of their composers, but all more or less in the modern style, are the result of scientific historical research, and are related to the old conceptions of Christ like truth to error. “One should,” he says, “be reasonable and honourable enough to confess that both the modern and the antique conceptions of Christ are alike creations of the common religious spirit of their times and sprung from the natural need of faith to fix its special principle in a typical figure and to illustrate it. The differences between the two correspond to the differences of the times, the former a simple mythical Epic, the latter a sentimental and conscious Romance.” In the same sense Alb. Schweitzer also characterises the famous “method” of historical theology as “a continual experimentation according to settled hypotheses in which the leading thought rests in the last resort upon an intuition” (“Von Reimarus bis Wrede,” 1906). Indeed, Weinel himself, who cannot hold up against the author with sufficient scorn his lack of method and his dilettantism has to confess that the same blemishes which in his opinion characterise dilettantism are to be found even in the most prominent representatives of historical theology, in a Wrede or a Wellhausen. He reproaches both of these with the fact that in their researches “serious faults of a general nature and in method” are present (21). He advises the greatest prudence in respect to Wellhausen’s Gospel Commentaries “on account of their serious general blemishes” (26). He objects to Wrede that to be consistent he must himself go over to radical dilettantism (22). He charges Schweitzer actually with dilettantism and blind bias which cause every literary consideration to be lacking (25 sq.). Indeed, he finds himself, in face of the “dilettante endeavours” to deny the historical Jesus, compelled even to admit that liberal theology for the future “must learn to express itself with more caution and to exhibit more surely the method of religious historical comparison” (14). He blames Gunkel for imprudence in declaring Christianity to be a syncretic religion, and demands that the historical works of liberal theology “should be clearer in their results and more convincing in their methods” (16). He says that the method which they employ is at present not sure and clear enough since “it has been spoken of generally in very loose if not misleading terms,” and he confesses: “We have apparently not made the measure, according to which we decide upon what is authentic and what not so in the tradition, so plain that it can always be recognised with security” (29). Now, if matters are in such a position, we non-theologians need not take too tragically the reproach of dilettantism and lack of scientific method, since it appears very much as though historical theology, with the exception at most of Herr Weinel, has no sure method.