Since David Frederick Strauss, in his “Life of Jesus,” attempted for the first time to trace the Gospel stories and accounts of miracles back to myths and pious fictions, doubts regarding the existence of an historical Jesus have never been lulled to rest. Bruno Bauer also in his “Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte und der Synoptiker” (1841–42, 2nd ed. 1846),1 disputed the historical existence of Jesus; later, in his “Christ und die CÄsaren, der Ursprung des Christentums aus dem rÖmischen Griechentum” (1877), he attempted to show that the life of Jesus was a pure invention of the first evangelist, Mark, and to account for the whole Christian religion from the Stoic and Alexandrine culture of the second century, ascribing to Seneca especially a material influence upon the development of the Christian point of view. But it was reserved for the present day, encouraged by the essentially negative results of the so-called critical theology, to take up the subject energetically, and thereby to attain to results even bolder and more startling.

In England John M. Robertson, in “Christianity and Mythology” (1900), in “A Short History of Christianity” (1902), as well as in his work “Pagan Christs: Studies in Comparative Hierology” (1903), has traced the picture of Christ in the Gospels to a mixture of mythological elements in heathenism and Judaism.

In France, as early as the end of the eighteenth century, Dupuis (“L’origine de tous les cultes,” 1795) and Voltaire (“Les Ruines,” 1791) traced back the essential points of the history of the Christian redemption to astral myths, while Émile Burnouf (“La science des religions,” 4th ed., 1885) and Hochart (“Études d’histoire religieuse,” 1890) collected important material for the clearing up of the origin of Christianity, and by their results cast considerable doubt upon the existence of an historical Christ.

In Italy Milesbo (Emilio Bossi) has attempted to prove the non-historicity of Jesus in his book “GesÙ Christo non È mai esistito” (1904).

In Holland the Leyden Professor of Philosophy, Bolland, handled the same matter in a series of works (“Het Lijden en Sterven van Jezus Christus,” 1907; “De Achtergrond der EvangeliËn. Eene Bijdrage tot de kennis van de Wording des Christendoms,” 1907; “De evangelische Jozua. Eene poging tot aanwijzing van den oorsprong des Christendoms,” 1907).

In Poland the mythical character of the story of Jesus has been shown by Andrzej Niemojewski in his book “BÓg Jezus” (1909), which rests on the astral-mythological theories of Dupuis and the school of Winckler.

In Germany the Bremen Pastor Kalthoff, in his work, “Das Christusproblem, Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie” (1903), thought that the appearance of the Christian religion could be accounted for without the help of an historical Jesus, simply from a social movement of the lower classes under the Empire, subsequently attempting to remove the one-sidedness of this view by his work “Die Entstehung des Christentums. Neue BeitrÄge zum Christusproblem” (1904). (Cf. also his work “Was wissen wir von Jesus? Eine Abrechnung mit Professor D. Bousset,” 1904.) A supplement to the works of Kalthoff in question is furnished by Fr. Steudel in “Das Christusproblem und die Zukunft des Protestantismus” (Deutsche Wiedergeburt, 1909).

Finally, the American, William Benjamin Smith, in his work, “The Pre-Christian Jesus” (1906), has thrown so clear a light upon a number of important points in the rise of Christianity, and elucidated so many topics which give us a deeper insight into the actual correlation of events, that we gradually commence to see clearly in this connection.

“The time is passed,” says JÜlicher, “when among the learned the question could be put whether an ‘historical’ Jesus existed at all.”2 The literature cited does not appear to justify this assertion. On the contrary, that time seems only commencing. Indeed, an unprejudiced judge might find that even JÜlicher’s own essay, in which he treated of the so-called founder of the Christian religion in the “Kultur der Gegenwart,” and in which he declared it “tasteless” to look upon the contents of the Gospels as a myth, speaks rather against than for the historical reality of Jesus. For the rest, official learning in Germany, and especially theology, has, up to the present, remained, we may almost say, wholly unmoved by all the above-mentioned publications. To my mind it has not yet taken up a serious position regarding Robertson. Its sparing citations of his “Pagan Christs” do not give the impression that there can be any talk of its having a real knowledge of his expositions.3

It has, moreover, passed Kalthoff over with the mien of a better informed superiority or preferably with silent scorn, and up to the present it has avoided with care any thoroughgoing examination of Smith.4 And yet such a distinguished theologian as Professor Paul Schmiedel, of ZÜrich, who furnished a foreword to Smith’s work, laid such an examination upon his colleagues as a “duty of all theologians making any claim to a scientific temper,” and strongly warned them against any under-estimation of Smith’s highly scientific work! “How can one then confidently stand by his former views,” Schmiedel cries to his theological colleagues, “unless he investigates whether they have not in whole or in part been undermined by these new opinions? Or is it a question of some secondary matter merely, and not rather of exactly what for the majority forms the fundamental part of their Christian conviction? But if these new opinions are so completely futile, then it must be an easy matter, indeed a mere nothing, to show this.”

In the meantime there are many voices which speak out against the existence of an historical Jesus. In wide circles the doubt grows as to the historical character of the picture of Christ given in the Gospels. Popular works written with a purpose, such as the investigations of the Frenchman Jacolliot, worked up by Plange into “Jesus ein Inder” (1898), have to serve to alleviate this thirst for knowledge and confuse views more than they clear them. In a short work, “Die Entstehung des Christentums” (1905), Promus has afforded a brief rÉsumÉ of the most important matter bearing on the point, without any working up of it on its own account, and attacked the existence of an historical Jesus. Lately Karl Voller, the prematurely deceased Jena Orientalist, in his valuable work, “Die Weltreligionen in ihrem geschichtlichen Zusammenhange” (1907), voiced the opinion “that weighty reasons favour this radical myth interpretation, and that no absolutely decisive arguments for the historicity of the person of Jesus can be brought forward” (op. cit. i. 163).

Another Orientalist, P. Jensen, in his work “Das Gilgamesch-Epos in der Weltliteratur” (1906), even thinks that he can show that both the main lines of the Old Testament story and the whole narrative of the life of Jesus given in the Gospels are simply variations of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (about 2000 B.C.), and consequently a pure myth.5

While criticism of the Gospel documents is advancing more boldly and always leaving in existence less of an historical Jesus, the number of works in popular religious literature intended to glorify Jesus the man grows enormously. These endeavour to make up for the deficiency in certain historical material by sentimental phrases and the deep tone of conviction; indeed, the rhetoric which is disseminated with this design6 seems to find more sympathy in proportion as it works with less historical restraint. And yet learning as such has long come to the point when the historical Jesus threatens to disappear from under its hands. The latest results in the province of Oriental mythology and religion, the advances in the comparative history of religion, that are associated in England with the names of Frazer and Robertson especially, and in Germany with those of Winckler, Jeremias, Gunkel, Jensen, &c., have so much increased our knowledge of the religious position of Nearer Asia in the last century before Christ, that we are no longer obliged to rely exclusively upon the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament for the rise of Christianity.7 The critical and historical theology of Protestantism has itself thrown so deep a light upon the origins of the Christian religion that the question as to the historical existence of Jesus loses all paradox which hitherto may have attached to it in the eyes of many. So, too, Protestant theology no longer has any grounds for becoming excited if the question is answered in a sense opposed to its own answer.

The author of the present work had hoped until lately that one of the historians of Christianity would himself arise and extract the present results of the criticisms of the Gospel, which to-day are clear. These hopes have not been fulfilled. On the contrary, in theological circles religious views continue to be quietly drawn from the “fact” of an historical Jesus, and he is considered as the impassable height in the religious development of the individual, as though nothing has occurred and the existence of such a Jesus was only the more clearly established by the investigations of critical theology in this connection. The author has accordingly thought that he should no longer keep back his own views, which he long since arrived at out of the works of specialists, and has taken upon himself the thankless task of bringing together the grounds which tell against the theory of an historical Jesus.

Whoever, though not a specialist, invades the province of any science, and ventures to express an opinion opposed to its official representatives, must be prepared to be rejected by them with anger, to be accused of a lack of scholarship, “dilettantism,” or “want of method,” and to be treated as a complete ignoramus. This has been the experience of all up to now who, while not theologians, have expressed themselves on the subject of an historical Jesus. The like experience was not spared the author of the present work after the appearance of its first edition. He has been accused of “lack of historical training,” “bias,” “incapacity for any real historical way of thinking,” &c., and it has been held up against him that in his investigations their result was settled beforehand—as if this was not precisely the case with theologians, who write on the subject of a historical Jesus, since it is just the task of theology to defend and establish the truth of the New Testament writings. Whoever has looked about him in the turmoil of science knows that generally each fellow-worker is accustomed to regard as “method” that only which he himself uses as such, and that the famous conception of “scientific method” is very often ruled by points of view purely casual and personal.8 Thus, for example, we see the theologian Clemen, in his investigation into the method of explaining the New Testament on religious-historical lines, seriously put the question to himself whether one “could not dispense himself from refuting such books as finally arrive at the unauthenticity of all the Pauline epistles and the non-historicity of the whole, or at least of almost the whole, tradition concerning Jesus; for example, not only that of Bauer, but also those of Jensen and Smith.” This same Clemen advances the famous methodological axiom: “An explanation on religious-historical lines is impossible if it of necessity leads to untenable consequences or sets out from such hypotheses,”9 obviously thinking here of the denial of an historical Christ. For the rest, the “method” of “critical theology” consists, as is well known, in applying an already settled picture of Jesus to the Gospels and undertaking the critical sifting of their contents according to this measure. This picture makes the founder of the Christian religion merely a pious preacher of morality in the sense of present-day liberalism, the “representative of the noblest individuality,” the incarnation of the modern ideal of personality, or of some other fashionable theological view. Theologians commence with the conviction that the historical Jesus was a kind of “anticipation of modern religious consciousness.” They think that they discern the real historical import of the Gospels in their “moral-religious kernel” so far as this is good for all time, and they arrive in this manner at its “strictly scientific conception” of Jesus by casting out all such features as do not fit this picture, thus recognising only the “everlasting human” and the “modern” as historical.10

If one keeps this before his eyes he will not be particularly moved by the talk about “method” and “lack of scientific system.” One could then at most wonder that it should be forbidden to philosophers particularly to have a say in theological matters. As though the peace at present reigning between philosophy and theology and their mutual efforts at a rapprochement did not clearly indicate that upon one of the two sides, or upon both, something cannot be in order, and that consequently it was high time, if no one else undertakes it, for a philosopher to notice theology in order to terminate the make-believe peace which is for both so fateful. For what does Lessing say? “With orthodoxy God be thanked one had arrived at a tolerable understanding. Between it and philosophy a partition had been raised behind which each could continue its way without hindering the other. But what is now being done? The partition is again being demolished, and under the pretext of making us reasonable Christians we are being made unreasonable philosophers.”

The author of this book has been reproached with following in it tendencies merely destructive. Indeed, one guardian of Zion, particularly inflamed with rage, has even expressed himself to this effect, that the author’s researches do not originate in a serious desire for knowledge, but only in a wish to deny. One who, as I have done, has in all his previous work emphasised the positive nature of the ethical and religious life against the denying and destroying spirit of the age, who has in his work “Die Religion als Selbst-Bewusstsein Gottes” (1906) sought to build up anew from within the shattered religious outlook upon the world, who in the last chapter of the present work has left no doubt remaining that he regards the present falling away of religious consciousness as one of the most important phenomena of our spiritual life and as a misfortune for our whole civilisation, should be protected against such reproaches. In reality, “The Christ Myth” has been written pre-eminently in the interests of religion, from the conviction that its previous forms no longer suffice for men of to-day, that above all the “Jesuanism” of historical theology is in its deepest nature irreligious, and that this itself forms the greatest hindrance to all real religious progress. I agree with E. v. Hartmann and W. v. Schnehen in the opinion that this so-called Christianity of the liberal pastors is in every direction full of internal contradiction, that it is false through and through (in so saying naturally no individual representative of this movement is accused of subjective untruthfulness). I agree that by its moving rhetoric and its bold appearance of being scientific it is systematically undermining the simple intellectual truthfulness of our people; and that on this account this romantic cult of Jesus must be combated at all costs, but that this cannot be done more effectually than by taking its basis in the theory of the historical Jesus11 from beneath its feet.

This work seeks to prove that more or less all the features of the picture of the historical Jesus, at any rate all those of any important religious significance, bear a purely mythical character, and no opening exists for seeking an historical figure behind the Christ myth. It is not the imagined historical Jesus but, if any one, Paul who is that “great personality” that called Christianity into life as a new religion, and by the speculative range of his intellect and the depth of his moral experience gave it the strength for its journey, the strength which bestowed upon it victory over the other competing religions. Without Jesus the rise of Christianity can be quite well understood, without Paul not so. If in spite of this any one thinks that besides the latter a Jesus also cannot be dispensed with, this can naturally not be opposed; but we know nothing of this Jesus. Even in the representations of historical theology he is scarcely more than the shadow of a shadow. Consequently it is self-deceit to make the figure of this “unique” and “mighty” personality, to which a man may believe he must on historical grounds hold fast, the central point of religious consciousness. Jesus Christ may be great and worthy of reverence as a religious idea, as the symbolical personification of the unity of nature in God and man, on the belief in which the possibility of the “redemption” depends. As a purely historical individual, as liberal theology views him, he sinks back to the level of other great historical personalities, and from the religious point of view is exactly as unessential as they, indeed, more capable of being dispensed with than they, for in spite of all rhetoric he is in the light of historical theology of to-day, even at best only “a figure swimming obscurely in the mists of tradition.”12

PROFESSOR DR. ARTHUR DREWS.

Karlsruhe, January, 1910.