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.1 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”2 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.3 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.4

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.5 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.6 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.7

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.”8 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.9 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.10 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.11

Certainly that James whose acquaintance Paul made in Jerusalem is designated by him as the “Brother of the Lord”;12 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,13 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.14 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).15 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.16 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.17 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.”18

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,19 or to the right of the apostles to be fed by the community.20 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 “??t?? ?fa: 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.21 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.22 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.23

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.24

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.”25 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.”26 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 Mand de hajjÊ and Hibil Ziw 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.”27 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.28 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.29 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.30

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.31 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.32 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,”33 reminds us too forcibly of the method of expression in the Mysteries for this agreement to be purely a coincidence.34

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 Acts35 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.36 Consequently the Gospel was in origin nothing but a Judaised and spiritualised Adonis cult.37 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.38

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;39 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.40 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,”41 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.42 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.43 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.44 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.45 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.46 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.”47 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.48 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.49 And Christ is as it were “put on”50 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.51 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.52 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.53 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.54

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.55 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.”56 So also the Pauline Christ contains all the fulness of the Godhead57 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.58

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.59 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.60 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.”61 For, as Paul says, “the Lord is the spirit; but where the spirit is, there is freedom.”62

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.”63 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.64 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.”65 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.”66 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;67 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”(!).68 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.69 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.”70 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.71

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.72

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.73

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,74 the name “Christians” was first used for the adherents of the new religion, who had till then been usually called Nazarenes.75

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.76 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.77 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.78 But also Stephen’s execution and the consequent persecution of the community at Jerusalem are legendary inventions.79 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.80

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.81 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.82 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.