Did Jesus exist?
Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus: Arthur Drews (1912)
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Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus: Arthur Drews (1912)

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The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus

Arthur Drews, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
Techn. Hochschule, Karlsruhe

Translated by Joseph McCabe

" Woe unto you, lawyers ! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge :
ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered." --- Luke XI, 52.

Contents

PREFACE -------- i x 

THE JEWISH WITNESSES 

1. PHILO AND JUSTUS OF TIBERIAS - 2 

2. JOSEPHUS - .... 3 

3. THE TALMUD - - 10 

THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

1. PLINY AND SUETONIUS - 18 

2. TACITUS - ... 20 

(a) Evidential Value of the Passage - 22 

(b) Question of the Genuineness of Annals, xv. 44 - 24 
I. Arguments for the Genuineness - 25 

II. Arguments against the Genuineness - 37 

(a) General Observations - 37 

(b) The Criticisms of Hochart - 41 

(c) Possibility of Various Interpretations of Annals, 

xv, 44 - 49 

3. "LUCUS A NON LUCENDO" - 56 

THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

1. PROOFS OF THE HISTORICITY OF JESUS IN PAUL - 65 

(a) Simple Proofs - - 69 

(b) The Appearances of the Risen Christ - - 77 

(c) The Account of the Last Supper - 80 

(d) The " Brothers " of the Lord - 84 

(e) The " Words of the Lord " - 91 

2. PAUL NO WITNESS TO THE HISTORICITY OF JESUS - 98 

3. THE QUESTION OF GENUINENESS - 102 

(a) Emotional Arguments for Genuineness - - 103  

(b) Arguments for Genuineness from the Times - - 106 

(c) The Spuriousness of the Pauline Epistles - 116 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

1. THE SOURCES OF THE GOSPELS - 123 

2. THE WITNESS OF TRADITION - 130 

3. THE METHODS OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM - 134 

(a) The Methodical Principles of Theological History - 134 

(b) The Methods of J. Weiss - 136 

4. THE "UNIQUENESS" AND " UNINVENTD3ILITY " OF 

THE GOSPEL PORTRAIT OF JESUS - - 142 

5. SCHMIEDEL'S "MAIN PILLARS" - - 144 

6. THE METHODS OF "THE CHRIST-MYTH" - 156 

(a) The Literary Character of the Gospels - - 156 

(b) The Mythical Character of the Gospels - - 161 

7. THE MYTHIC-SYMBOLIC INTERPRETATION OF THE 

GOSPELS - - 169 

(a) The Sufferings and Elevation of the Messiah - - 169 

(b) The Character and Miracles of the Messiah - - 174 

(c) John the Baptist and the Baptism of Jesus - - 183 

(d) The Name of the Messiah - 194 

(e) The Topography of the Gospels - - 200 

I. Nazareth - - 200 

II. Jerusalem - - 205 

III. Galilee - 209 

(/) The Chronology of the Gospels - - 212 

(g) The Pre-Christian Jesus - 216 

(h) The Transformation of the Mythical into an Historical 

Jesus - - 228 

(i) Jesus and the Pharisees and Scribes - - 235 
(k) Further Modifications of Prophetical and Historical 

Passages - - 245 

8. HISTORIANS AND THE GOSPELS - 247 



THE WORDS OF THE LORD - 249 

(a) The Tradition of the Words of the Lord - 249 

(b) The Controversies with the Pharisees - - 253 

(c) Sayings of Jesus on the Weak and Lowly - 258 

(d) Jesus' s Belief in God the Father - 262 

(e) Love of Neighbours and of Enemies - - 266 
(/) The Sermon on the Mount 271 
(g) Further Parallel Passages - 277 

10. THE PARABLES OF JESUS - 280 

11. GENERAL RESULT - 288 

12. THE " STRONG PERSONALITY " - 290 

13. THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE IDEAL CHRIST - 296 

14. IDEA AND PERSONALITY : SETTLEMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS CRISIS - - 301 

APPENDIX - 309 

INDEX -------- 317 



ERRATA 



Page 12, fifth line of first footnote, den should read dem. 

Page 25, fifth line from end, "in my opinion" should read "in his 
opinion." 

Page 27, last two lines of text, " Von der Burgh, Van Eysing," should 
read " Van den Bergh van Eysinga." 



PREFACE 



THE present work is an abbreviated and amended version, for 
English readers, of the volume which the author recently 
published as the second part of The Christ-Myth (English 
translation, 1910, Fisher Unwin). The author described this 
part as ' an answer to his opponents, with special reference 
to theological methods," and dealt in the early part of it with 
the theological critics who had assailed the results and the 
methods adopted by him. It will be seen that the fault of 
method is entirely on the side of the opponents, and that theo- 
logians can maintain the historical reality of Jesus on methodical 
arguments only when their methods are pre-arranged to lead 
to that result. It is not the author's intention wholly to omit 
the points of this controversy, as in this respect there is no 
difference between the theologians of Germany and those of 
other countries. The chief aim of the work, however, is 
to collect, examine, and refute the arguments which are 
advanced on the theological side for the historicity of Jesus. 
In spite of their arrogant behaviour, the German theologians 
have not been able to produce one single decisive reason for 
the historicity of Jesus. It remains to be seen whether the 
English authorities can adduce better proof of the validity of 
the Christian belief than their German colleagues have done. 
Besides doing this necessary critical work, it is hoped that the 
book may also provide a better explanation of the rise of the 
Christian religion than historical theology, as it is called, has 
yet afforded. In this respect the author is indebted to the very 
stimulating and informing works of Mr. J. M. Robertson 
(Christianity and Mythology, Pagan Christs, and A Short History 



x PEEFACE 

of Christianity), and to the American writer Professor W. B. 
Smith, whose works, Der vorchristliche Jesus and Ecce Deus, 
ought to be in the hands of every student of the Christian 
religion. 

The question of the historicity of Jesus is a purely historical 
question, and, as such, it must be settled with the resources of 
historical research. This procedure is, however, in view of the 
close connection of the subject with emotional and religious 
elements, not inconsistent with the fact that the final decision 
belongs to an entirely different province, that of philosophy, 
which also controls subjective feeling. In this sense, the 
question whether Jesus was an historical personage coincides 
with the question of the significance of personality in the 
general order of the world, and of the roots and motives of the 
inner religious life generally. 

The controversy in regard to the Christ-myth is at the 
same time a struggle for the freedom and independence of the 
modern mind, and of science and philosophy. Let there be 
no mistake about it : as long as the belief in an historical 
Jesus survives we shall not succeed in throwing off the yoke 
of an alleged historical fact which is supposed to have taken 
place two thousand years ago, yet has profoundly affected the 
science and philosophy of Europe. What a situation it is 
when the deepest thoughts of the modern mind must be 
measured by the teaching of Jesus, and referred to a world 
of ideas that has nothing to recommend it but the antiquity 
of its traditions and the artificially engendered appreciation of 
everything connected with it ! 

At the same time the Christ-myth controversy is a struggle 
over religion. Religion is a life that emanates from the 
depths of one's innermost self, an outgrowth of the mind and 
of freedom. All religious progress consists in making faith 
more intimate, in transferring the centre of gravity from the 
objective to the subjective world, by a confident surrender to 
the God within us. The belief in an historical instrument of 



PREFACE xi 

salvation is a purely external appreciation of objective facts. 
To seek to base the religious life on it is not to regard the 
essence of religion, but to make it for ever dependent on a 
stage of mental development that has long been passed in the 
inner life. Those who cling to an historical Jesus on religious 
grounds merely show that they have never understood the 
real nature of religion, or what " faith " really means in the 
religious sense of the word. They see only the interest of 
their Church, which assuredly profits by a confusion of true 
religious faith, of a trustful surrender to the God within us 
with the intellectual acceptance of certain facts of either a 
dogmatic or an historical character ; they only deceive them- 
selves and others when they imagine that they are promoting 
the interest of religion. 

Our science has not hitherto suffered the indignity of being 
placed after theology in the hierarchy of culture, and so 
being compelled to justify its deepest thoughts and achieve- 
ments from the theological point of view, or concern itself 
about theology at all. Our philosophy, however, allows faith 
to be set above knowledge, in spite of the fact that faith is born 
of the thirst for knowledge and consists in a view of the world ; 
in this way theology comes to exercise control over the whole 
province of philosophical knowledge. A philosophy that thus 
comes to terms with theology, a " perfectly safe philosophy " 
which seeks to live in peace with theology, is unworthy of the 
name. For it is not the work of philosophy merely to prepare 
academic theses, and deal with things that have no interest for 
any person outside the lecture-hall and the study : its greatest 
cultural task is to defend the rights of reason, to extend its 
sway over every province of knowledge, and to rationalise 
faith. In the words of Hegel, its task is "to disturb as much 
as possible the ant-like zeal of the theologians who use critical 
methods for the strengthening of their Gothic temple, to make 
their work as difficult as possible, to drive them out of every 
refuge, until none remains and they must show themselves 



xii PEEFACE 

openly in the light of day." It is from no accident, but in the 
very nature of things, that a philosopher thus came to 
denounce the truce which has so long and so artificially 
been maintained with theology, and sought to show the 
untenability of its central belief in an historical Jesus. 

Meantime we may reflect with comfort on the words 
of Dupuis : " There are large numbers of men so perversely 
minded that they will believe everything except what is 
recommended by sound intelligence and reason, and shrink 
from philosophy as the hydrophobic shrinks from water. 
These people will not read us, and do not concern us ; we 
have not written for them. Their mind is the prey of the 
priests, just as their body will be the prey of the worms. We 
have written only for the friends of humanity and reason. 
The rest belong to another world ; even their God tells them 
that his kingdom is not of this world that is to say, not of 
the world in which people use their judgment and that the 
simple are blessed because theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 
Let us, therefore, leave to them their opinions, and not envy 
the priests such a possession. Let us pursue our way, without 
lingering to count the number of the credulous. When we 
have unveiled the sanctuary in which the priest shuts himself, 
we can hardly expect that he will press his followers to read 
us. We will be content with a happy revolution, and we will 
see that, for the honour of reason, it is so complete as to 
prevent the clergy from doing any further harm to mankind." 

ARTHUR DREWS. 



THE WITNESSES TO THE 

HISTORICITY OF JESUS 



THE NON-CHRISTIAN WITNESSES 

IN view of the vagueness, defectiveness, and vulnerability 
of the evangelical accounts of Jesus, as far as his historical 
reality is concerned, the witnesses in non-Christian litera- 
ture have always occupied a prominent place in the 
question of his historicity. As early as the first few 
centuries of the present era pious Christians searched the 
Jewish and pagan writers for references to Jesus, con- 
vinced that such references ought to be found in them ; 
they regarded with great concern the undeniable defects 
of tradition, and, in the interest of their faith, endeavoured 
to supply the want by more or less astute " pious frauds," 
such as the Acts of Pilate, the letter of Jesus to King 
Abgar Ukkama of Edessa, 1 the letter of Pilate to Tiberius, 
and similar forgeries. Greater still was the reliance on 
the few passages in profane literature which seemed to 
afford some confirmation of the historical truth of the 
things described in the gospels. As these so-called non- 
Christian witnesses are again brought forward to rebut 
the denial of the historicity of Jesus, in the discussion 
which has followed the appearance of The Christ Myth, 
and are even pressed upon us as decisive testimony, we 
must make a comprehensive inquiry into the value of 
those references in profane writers which seem to support 
the belief in an historical Jesus. 

1 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, I, 13. 
1 



THE JEWISH WITNESSES 



1. PHILO AND JUSTUS OF TIBERIAS. 

LET us begin with the witnesses in Jewish literature. 
Here we at once encounter the singular circumstance 
that Philo (30 B.C. to 50 A.D.) makes no reference to 
Christ. Philo, the Alexandrian philosopher and contem- 
porary of Jesus, was by no means a secluded scholar who 
took no interest in the fortunes of his people. As envoy 
of the Alexandrian Jews to Caligula, he pleaded the 
interests of his co-religionists at Rome, and, in all 
probability, himself visited the land of his fathers. He 
even in one place makes an incidental reference to Pilate, 
who had caused an agitation among the Jews at Jerusalem 
by some offence against their religious ideas. 1 We are 
further indebted to him for some important information 
on the Palestinian sect of the Essenes, who in many 
respects closely resembled the Jessenes and Nazarenes, as 
the Christians were at first called. His own views, in 
fact, have so unmistakable an affinity with those of the 
contemporary Jewish-Gnostic sects, 2 and some of these, 
such as the Cainites, are so fully described by him 3 that 
it is in the highest degree improbable that Philo was 
unacquainted with the Nazarenes, on the supposition that 
they really were an important body in his time, and 
caused as serious an agitation among the Jews as is 
commonly believed. 

It may be suggested that Philo had no occasion to 
speak about them. 

How can we explain, then, that the Jewish historian 

1 Schiirer, Geschichte des Jild. Volkes, 4th. ed. Ill, p. 678, etc. 

2 Gfrorer, Philo und die Jild.-Alex. Theologie, 1835. 

8 M. Friedlander, Der vorchristliche Jild. Gnostizismus, 1898, p. 19, etc. 



THE JEWISH WITNESSES 3 

Justus of Tiberias, another contemporary and a closer 
fellow-countryman of the alleged historical Jesus he 
lived at Tiberias, not far from Capernaum, where Jesus 
is supposed to have been especially active is also silent 
about them ? Justus wrote a chronicle of the Jewish 
kings down to the time of Agrippa II. The original 
work has been lost. We know it only from a reference 
in Photius, a patriarch of Constantinople of the ninth 
century. Photius assures us, however, that he read 
through the Chronicle of Justus in search of references 
to Jesus, and found none ; he attributes it to " the 
disease " that is to say, the unbelief of the Jews that 
such a man as Justus does not mention the appearance of 
Christ, the fulfilment of the prophecies by him, and the 
miracles he wrought. As, however, we learn from 
Photius that the chronicle was merely a brief treatment 
of a subject that had no direct connection with the life of 
Jesus, we must not lay too much stress on the absence of 
any reference. Still the fact remains that Photius himself 
believed there ought to be some mention of Jesus, and was 
surprised to find none. 

2. JOSEPHUS. 

We have next to see how we stand in relation to the 
Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37-100 A.D.), the 
contemporary and political opponent of Justus of 
Tiberias. He is the first profane writer who can 
seriously be quoted for the historicity of Jesus. Josephus 
wrote three large works the history of the Jews, the 
history of the last Jewish war, and a defence of the 
Jewish religion. In these, according to the theological 
view, he cannot have had any occasion to deal with the 
appearance of Jesus, an episode of no significance in the 
history of the Jews, or with Christianity. At the time 
w T hen he wrote the body was almost extinct as a Jewish 
sect, and in any case of no consequence whatever. More- 
over, the theologians say, it would have been very difficult 



4 THE JEWISH WITNESSES 

for him to deal with it from the point of view of either 
side. 

But Josephus has mentioned much less important 
persons who, like Jesus, set up a messianic movement, 
and suffered death for it. 

Josephus has left us a luminous portrait of Pilate. He 
depicts him in all his brutality and unscrupulousness. 1 
Can we suppose that he refrained from telling how, in the 
case of Jesus, his compatriots forced the proud Roman to 
yield to them ? Or did he know nothing of any such 
occurrence ? Is it possible that he never heard of the 
exciting events which, as the gospels relate, occurred in 
the metropolis of Judaea the triumphant entrance of 
Jesus into Jerusalem, while the people acclaim him as 
the expected Messiah, the growing anger of the ruling 
parties, the taking of Jesus by night, the disturbance 
before the Governor's house, the abandonment of one of 
their own people by the Sanhedrim to the hated Roman 
authorities, the disappearance of the body from the grave, 
etc.? It would not be very easy to show that Jesus and 
his affairs would seem " insignificant " to Josephus in 
writing the history of the Jews, and that the sect brought 
into existence by him would seem unworthy of mention. 
At that time the Christian movement is supposed to have 
reached a prominent place in public life and attracted 
general attention. Can it be called an insignificant thing 
when a new religious sect enters into such rivalry with 
the old religion, from which it has sprung, as is ascribed 
to early Christianity in the Acts of the Apostles, 2 and this 
a very short time after the death of its founder ? We 
have only to recall the three thousand souls who are 
supposed to have been baptised in one day at Jerusalem, 
in the very heart of the Jewish cult ! It is, of course, 
an enormous Christian exaggeration ; but, in any case, 
Christianity must have made great progress before the 

1 Jeivish Antiquities, xviii, 3, i and 2 ; 4, i, etc. 2 ii, 41. 



THE JEWISH WITNESSES 5 

destruction of Jerusalem, if we are to put any faith 
whatever in the account of its early years given in the 
New Testament. 

It has been suggested that Josephus concealed the 
whole messianic movement among his people from the 
Romans, and wished to represent the Jews to them as 
extremely harmless, peaceful, and philosophical citizens ; 
and that this explains his remarkable conduct. In other 
parts of his works, however, Josephus does not make the 
least difficulty about the messianic agitations of the people 
of Palestine. In the Antiquities, 1 for instance, he gives 
the episode of the false Messiah who induced the Samaritans 
to go up with him to the holy mountain Gerizim, where he 
would show them the sacred vessels which Moses was 
supposed to have buried there, and thus he could inflame 
them to rise against their Roman masters. He tells of 
Judas the Gaulonite, who stirred up the people against 
the census of Quirinius. 2 He also relates how Theudas 
pretended to be a prophet and said that he could by his 
sole word cause the waters of the Jordan to divide, and 
so allow those who followed him to cross over in safety. 3 
Does anyone seriously believe, in fact, that Josephus 
could have concealed from the Romans, who had long 
ruled over Palestine and were most accurately informed 
as to the disposition of their subjects, the messianic 
expectations and agitations of his compatriots, and repre- 
sented them as harmless, in works w r hich were especially 
concerned with their strained relations to their oppressors ? 
It would be much the same as if a Pole, writing the 
history of his country, were, in order to avert unkindly 
feeling from his compatriots, to say nothing of their 
dream of a restoration of the ancient kingdom of Poland, 
and represent the Poles as " extremely harmless, peaceful, 
and philosophical citizens "! 

1 xviii, 4, i. 

2 Antiquities, xviii, 1, i ; 1, 6; xx, 5, 2 ; Jewish War, ii, 8, i. 
8 Antiquities, xx, 5, i. 



6 THE JEWISH WITNESSES 

As a matter of fact, it is hardly less ridiculous to make 
any such tender feeling for the sensitiveness of Rome the 
ground for the remarkable silence of Josephus, as Weinel 
and many other theologians do, than for von Soden, another 
theologian, to declare that Josephus would have been 
" embarrassed " to pass judgment on the Christians and 
the head of their sect from either side. 1 What sides 
does he mean ? From the Roman side ? But it might 
be a matter of complete indifference to them what 
judgment a Josephus would pass on what was so von 
Soden would have us believe in the eyes of the Jewish 
historian, the insignificant sect of the Christians ? Does 
he mean from the Jewish side? They would entirely 
agree with him if he condemned it. Is it suggested that 
he had a favourable opinion of the Christians ? This is, 
in point of fact, the view of J. Weiss, and it harmonises 
very well with the predilection of Josephus for the 
Essenes. It seems to him an indication of " a friendly, 
or at least impartial, disposition " that Josephus does not 
mention the Christians and their founder. He therefore 
rejects the view, put forward by Jiilicher, that Josephus 
said nothing about the Christians because their sect 
might discredit the Jewish faith. According to Jiilicher, 
it is "not difficult to guess " why Josephus omitted the 
Christian sect from his narrative : " not from shame and 
not from hatred, but because he could not very well at 
the same time represent the Jews, in whom he was 
primarily interested, as supporters of the Roman monarchy 
and of human civilisation, and describe the Christians (of 
the first century), who were regarded as enemies of the 
whole world, as an outcome of his pacific Jews. To be 
silent about them was a cleverer tactic than vigorously to 
shake them from his coat-tails" (!). It is remarkable 
what astounding things these theologians will say. 
Would not Josephus have done better, if he were minded 

1 Hat Jesus gelebt ?, 13. 



THE JEWISH WITNESSES 7 

as Jiilicher says, to have separated himself as widely as 
possible from the Christians? " In the same way as he 
condemns the zealots," says Weiss, "who were responsible 
for all the misfortunes of his country, he would have had 
a fitting occasion to brand the fools or fanatics who had 
drawn such false conclusions from the sayings of the 
prophets ; to him especially the Christians must have 
been the fittest lightning-conductor." According to 
Weiss, therefore, the silence of Josephus is " no sign of 
hatred of the Christians, but rather the reverse. An 
enemy of the Christians would certainly have drawn 
attention to them in order to relieve Judaism of the 
charge of having anything to do with the sect." " His 
silence is all the more puzzling" (p. 90). May not the 
simple explanation be that in the time of Josephus the 
Christians did not differ sufficiently from official Judaism 
to require special mention ? Must we not conclude from 
this silence of Josephus that he knew nothing about 
Jesus, though, if Jesus had really existed and things had 
occurred as tradition affirms, he ought certainly to have 
heard of and mentioned him, just as he mentions a John 
the Baptist and refers to other pretenders to the messiah- 
ship and disturbers of the people ? Weinel maintains 
that Josephus would only count as a witness against 
the historicity of Jesus if he spoke of Christianity and 
was silent only about Jesus (p. 107). But what if he had 
no occasion to speak of it because our whole modern view 
of the rise of Christendom, and the part it played during 
the first century, is radically false ? 

Josephus, however, is not silent about Jesus. In his 
Jewish Antiquities (xviii, 3, 3) we read: "About this 
time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed he should be 
called man. He wrought miracles and was a teacher of 
those who gladly accept the truth, and had a large 
following among the Jews and pagans. He was the 
Christ. Although Pilate, at the complaint of the leaders 
of our people, condemned him to die on the cross, his 



8 THE JEWISH WITNESSES 

earlier followers were faithful to him. For he appeared 
to them alive again on the third day, as god-sent prophets 
had foretold this and a thousand other wonderful things 
of him. The people [sect ?] of the Christians, which is 
called after him, survives until the present day." 

Here, it would appear, we have what we seek. Unfor- 
tunately, the genuineness of the passage is by no means 
admitted. There are two opinions on it. According to 
one view, the whole passage is an interpolation ; according 
to the other, it has merely been altered by a Christian hand. 

Let us examine the words of Josephus which remain 
after the expurgation of the supposed possible interpola- 
tions. They are as follows : " About this time lived 
Jesus, a wise man. He had a large following among 
the Jews and pagans. Although Pilate, at the complaint 
of the leaders of our people, condemned him to die on 
the cross, his earlier followers were faithful to him. The 
sect of the Christians, which is called after him, survives 
until the present day." Immediately before this Josephus 
tells of a rising of the Jews, due to a bitter feeling at the 
conduct of Pilate, and its bloody suppression by the ruling 
power. The words that immediately follow the passage 
are : " Also about this time another misfortune befel the 
Jews"; and we are told of the expulsion of the Jews from 
Borne by Tiberius on account of the conduct of some of 
their compatriots. 

What is the connection between the reference to Jesus 
and these two narratives ? That there must be some 
connection, if Josephus himself has written the passage 
about Jesus, goes without saying, in view of the character 
of the writer. Josephus is always careful to have a 
logical connection between his statements. The repres- 
sion of the Jews by Pilate must, naturally, have been 
regarded by Josephus as " a misfortune." We likewise 
understand the concern of the Jewish historian at the 
expulsion of his compatriots from Borne. These two 
episodes are directly connected by their very nature. 



THE JEWISH WITNESSES 9 

But what have the condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus 
to do with them? If Josephus really considered the 
fate of Jesus as a misfortune of his people, why was he 
content to devote to it a couple of meagre and lifeless 
sentences ? Why was he silent about the followers of 
Jesus ? We have already seen that the reasons usually 
advanced for this silence are worthless. From a rational 
point of view, Josephus had no occasion whatever to put 
the passage about Jesus in the connection in which we 
find it. That, on the other hand, the later Christians 
had every interest in inserting the passage, and inserting 
it precisely at this point, where there is question of events 
in the time of Pilate and of the misfortunes of the Jews, 
is clear enough ; it must have been to the Christians a 
matter of profound astonishment and concern that in 
such a connection there was not a word about Jesus, 
whose name w r as for them intimately connected with that 
of Pilate. And was not the condemnation of Jesus at 
the demand of the Jewish leaders really the greatest 
misfortune that the Jews had ever incurred ? 1 In the 
edition of Origen published by the Benedictines it is said 2 
that there was no mention of Jesus at all in Josephus 
before the time of Eusebius (about 300 A.D., Ecclesiast. 
Hist., I, 11). Moreover, in the sixteenth century Vossius 
had a manuscript of the text of Josephus in which there 
was not a word about Jesus. It seems, therefore, that 
the passage must have been an interpolation, whether it 
was subsequently modified or not. We are led to the 
same conclusion by the fact that neither Justin, nor 
Tertullian, nor Origen, nor Cyprian ever quotes Josephus 
as a witness in their controversies with Jews and pagans. 
Yet Justin, at least, could have had no better argument 
than the testimony of a compatriot in his dialogue with 
the Jew Trypho. Indeed, Origen says expressly that 
Josephus did not recognise Jesus as the Messiah. 3 

1 Cf. Origen, Contra Celsum, I, 47. 2 I, 362. s Contra Celsum, I, 47. 



10 THE JEWISH WITNESSES 

The same difficulties arise in regard to the other 
passage in Josephus, 1 where the Jewish historian tells 
how the younger Ananus (Hannas), at the time when the 
governor Festus died and his successor Albinus was as 
yet on the way, summoned a Council, brought before it 
James, the " brother of Jesus, who was called Christ," 
and had him and some others stoned for transgression of 
the law (62 A.D.). It is extremely doubtful whether 
James is understood by Josephus to be the corporal 
brother of Jesus, as brotherhood might very well mean 
only that he belonged to the Jesus-sect. In that sense 
Josephus would merely be saying that James was a 
" brother of Jesus," or leader of those who venerated the 
Messiah (Christ) under the name of Jesus. It is more 
probable, however, that this passage also is a later inter- 
polation, as Credner 2 and Schiirer are disposed to admit. 
Weiss also (88) regards this passage in the text as a 
Christian interpolation ; and Jiilicher too says, in his 
essay on " Religion and the Beginning of Christianity," 
in Hinneberg's Kultur der Gegenwart (2nd ed. 1909), 
that Josephus leaves Jesus " unmentioned " (loc. cit., 43). 

We understand, therefore, why Origen knows nothing 
of the passage. In his polemical work against Celsus he 
does not mention it when he comes to speak of James, 8 
though he refers to another in which Josephus represents 
the destruction of Jerusalem as a punishment of the Jews 
for having put James to death ; which certainly does not 
accord with the facts. 

3. THE TALMUD. 

When we have thus excluded Josephus from the 
number of witnesses to the historicity of Jesus, there 
remains only the question whether there may not be some 
evidence in the other Jewish literature of the time : in 
the body of Kabbinical writings collected under the name 

1 Antiquities, xx, 9, i. 2 Einl. ins N. T., 1836, p. 581. 3 I, 47. 



11 

of the Talmud, which cover a period from about 200 B.C. 
to 600 A.D. The answer is that no information about 
Jesus is to be found in the Talmud. One would suppose 
that, in works intended solely for a Jewish public, the 
Rabbis of the time would not fail to take the opportunity 
of attacking Jesus, if he spoke and acted as the gospels 
describe. Instead of this, they almost entirely ignore 
him, and, when they do mention him, their references 
have not the least historical importance. Von Soden 
declares that they had no opportunity of dealing seriously 
with him, as the oldest collection, entitled " Sayings of 
the Fathers," contains only moral sentences. Never- 
theless, all these moral aphorisms, definitions of religious 
law, and ritual prescriptions are closely connected with 
the meaning of the work. They partly relate to the same 
subjects as the sayings of Jesus. They bring together 
the opposing views of the various famous Rabbis. Why 
is the Talmud silent about Jesus in this connection? 
Why is there not the slightest definite reference to the 
man who expounded the law more subtly than any other 
Jewish teacher, and made the most serious attack upon 
the orthodox conception ? 

It is poor consolation for the supporters of the historicity 
of Jesus when an expert on the Talmud, Chwolson, says 
that there was no contemporary Rabbinical literature. 
In the extant Rabbinical literature of the second century 
there is, on his own showing, much material and many 
sayings that " belong to the Rabbis of the second and 
first centuries of the Christian era." 1 In fact, there are 
supposed to be among them three valuable references 
of the first and beginning of the second century the 
experience, namely, of the Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, 
the brother-in-law of Gamaliel II., with the Judaeo- 
Christian James of Kefar-Schechania, of whom it is said 
that he was a " pupil " (disciple) of Jesus, and had healed 

1 Ueber die Frage ob Jesus gelebt hat, p. 11. 



12 THE JEWISH WITNESSES 

the sick in the name of Jesus. Then there is the explana- 
tion by Jesus of a difficulty in the law, which the said 
James put to him, and which Jesus settled by a certain 
verse, after the fashion of the Rabbis. Lastly, there is 
the doubt of the Rabbi as to the orthodoxy of Jesus and 
the disdain he himself incurred by becoming a Christian. 
But who doubts for a moment that at the close of the 
first century and in the first half of the second sayings 
and explanations of the law were current in the name of 
Jesus, that the name of Jesus was used in exorcisms, and 
that sympathy with the Jesus-sect might in certain 
circumstances have very unpleasant consequences for a 
Eabbi ?' 

There is no room for doubt that after the destruction 
of Jerusalem, and especially during the first quarter of 
the second century, the hostility of the Jews and 
Christians increased, as not only Chwolson himself 
(Das letzte Passahmahl Christi) and Joel, 2 but also 
Lublinski, has recently shown. 8 Indeed, by the year 130 
the hatred of the Jews for the Christians became so fierce 
that a Rabbi, whose niece had been bitten by a serpent, 
preferred to let her die rather than see her healed " in 
the name of Jesus." But when Chwolson says that we 
see from these passages that the Rabbis of the second 
half of the first century, or the beginning of the second, 
were "well acquainted with the person of Christ " (13), 
he clearly deceives himself and his readers, if the impres- 
sion is given that they had any personal knowledge of 
him. 

On the other hand, the Rabbis are said to have 
possessed, as early as the year 71 A.D., a gospel which, 

1 Moreover, it is by no means established that the Jesus whom James 
of Kefar followed was the Jesus of the gospels. Neubauer, in his text of 
the Talmud, read, instead of Jesus ha-Nozri (the Nazarene), Jesus Pandira, 
who was supposed to be a contemporary of the Rabbi Akiba (p. 135). Cf. 
K. Lippe, Das Evangelium Matthaei vor den Forum der Bibel und des 
Talmud, 1889, p. 26. 

2 Blicke in die Religionsgeschiclite, II, 1883, especially p. 73, etc. 

8 Die Entstehung des Christenthums aus der antiken Kultur, 1910. 



THE JEWISH WITNESSES 13 

according to Chwolson, " was probably the original gospel 
of Matthew." About that time a judge appointed by the 
Eomans, " undoubtedly a Judaeo-Christian of Pauline 
tendencies," though he is not expressly described as such, 
quotes Mattheiv v, 17, in the Aramaic language, where it 
is said that Christ did not wish to abolish, but to supple- 
ment, the Mosaic law. In his work Jesus, die Hdretiker 
und die Christen nach den dltesten judischen Angaben 
(1910, p. 19, etc.), Strach has given us a literal translation 
of this passage. 1 It runs : 

Imma Salom was the wife of the Eabbi Eliezer, the 
sister of Rabban Gamaliel. Among his acquaintances 
was a " philosopher " who had the reputation of being 
incorruptible. They wished, to make him ridiculous. 
Therefore she [Imma] brought to him a golden candle- 
stick, and said : " I desire a part of the family property." 
He answered them : " Divide it." Then he [B. Gamaliel] 
said : " It is written for us 2 that, where there is a son, 
the daughter inherits nothing." He answered : " Since 
ye were driven from your land the law of Moses is 
abolished, and there is Avon-gillajon [Evangelium = the 
Gospel] , in which it is written, ' Son and daughter shall 
inherit together.' " On the following day he [E. Gamaliel] 
on his own part brought him a Libyan ass. Then he 
replied : "I have searched further in the Avon-gillajon, 
and it is written therein : ' I, Avon-gillajon, have not come 
to do away with the Thora, but to add to the Thora of 
Moses have I come.' And it is further written therein : 
' Where there is a son, the daughter shall not inherit.'" 
Then she said : " Thy light shineth like a candle." And 
R. Gamaliel said : " The ass has come, and has attached 
the candle " 

i.e., someone had spoiled the effect of a small bribe by 
giving a larger one. 

It is possible that we really have here a reference to 
the text of Matthew, and this is the more likely when we 
consider the play upon the candlestick, in reference to 
Matthew v, 14-16. That there is no question of our 
Matthew is certain, as there is no such passage in any of 

1 Babyl. Talmud Sabbath, p. 116, etc. 2 Numbers xxvii, 8. 



14 THE JEWISH WITNESSES 

our gospels that the son and daughter shall inherit 
together ; Jesus, on the contrary, often expressly dis- 
suades from mingling in these quarrels about inheritance. 1 
But what right has Chwolson to put the witness of this 
" Primitive Matthew," which seems to be referred to in 
the anecdote, about the year 71 A.D. ? Chwolson relies 
on the fact that R. Gamaliel (died about 124) was the 
son of the R. Simeon ben Gamaliel who is known to us 
from Acts v, 34, where he cleverly speaks for the 
Christians, and Acts xxii, 3, as a teacher of the Apostle 
Paul, and who was executed about 70 A.D. with other 
Rabbis who had taken part in the rising against the 
Romans. He gratuitously assumes that the passage in 
the Talmud refers to the quarrel about the property of 
the dead father, which would be divided about the year 71. 
This is plausible enough if there is question in the passage 
of a genuine quarrel about inheritance. But that is 
precisely what the text of the passage excludes. It is 
expressly stated that they wished to bring ridicule upon 
the " philosopher " who had an unmerited repute for 
incorruptibility. There is question, therefore, of a purely 
fictitious quarrel about inheritance, and there is no reason 
to suppose that this would necessarily be about the year 71. 
Indeed, the text itself shows that it was not, as the Jews 
were not yet expelled in 71 ; so that Chwolson finds himself 
compelled to change the expression " driven from your 
country " into " lost your country." Hence Chwolson's 
statement that there is evidence of a Gospel of Matthew 
in 71 A.D. breaks down. Moreover, even if the existence 
of such a gospel at that time were proved, it would have 
no bearing on the historicity of Jesus. The saying in 
Matthew v, 17 is not at all quoted in the Talmud passage 
as a saying of Jesus, as one would gather from Chwolson. 
" We see," says Chwolson emphatically and in large type, 
" from this important reference that not only was there 

1 Luke xii, 14. 



THE JEWISH WITNESSES 15 

a Gospel of Matthew in existence about the year 71 A.D., 
but it was already well known to the Christians of the 
time." As you please ; but one would like to know what 
this proves in regard to the historicity of Jesus. 1 

In addition to the few first-century references quoted 
by Chwolson, and regarded by him as "of great historical 
value," the Talmud contains a comparatively large number 
of references to Jesus, mostly of the third and fourth 
centuries. They have, of course, as Chwolson admits, 
"no historical value whatever " (p. 11). They are rather 
caricatures of Jesus, when they do plainly refer to him ; 
though this, on account of the cryptic phrasing of. the 
Babbis, does not seem to be the case quite as frequently 
as is generally supposed. Derenbourg has shown that 
the much-quoted Stada or ben Sat'da is not originally 
identical with Jesus, and Strach also admits that the 
scanty material in regard to Jesus which earlier students 
found in the Talmud shrinks still further on more careful 
inquiry. 2 Julicher, however, has pointed out that, as the 
caricatures of the Jesus-story are familiar to B. Akiba, 
we may conclude that the Christian tradition itself is 
much older. Now, Akiba met his end, in old age, on the 
occasion of the bloody rising of the Jews under Bar 
Kochba, in the year 135. It is not disputed that the 
evangelical tradition existed in the first third of the 
second century, when the hostility of the Jews and 
Christians was at its height. What " proof " is there, 
then, of the historicity of Jesus in the fact that Akiba, a 
fierce enemy of the Christians, spoke bitterly of Jesus at 
that time ? Certainly he regards him as an historical 
personage, just as the Talmud generally never doubts that 
Jesus had really existed. But Joel has, in this con- 
nection, shown that the Talmudists of the second century 
were careless about everything except the study of the 

1 Compare Steudel, ImKampfum die Christusmythe, 1910, p. 83, etc. 

2 There is a complete collection of the relevant passages in H. Laible, 
Jesus Christus im Talmud, 1891, 2nd ed. 1900. 



16 THE JEWISH WITNESSES 

scriptures and the law, and pointed out that it is " one of 
the most curious and astonishing consequences " of this 
indifference that they were so poorly informed in regard 
to events in the time of Jesus. 1 The Talmud derives all 
that it knows of the origin of Christianity from the little 
that has reached it of the gospel tradition and from the 
impression it has of the life of Jesus from the events of 
the second century ; and it changes its statements, as 
time goes on, in harmony with the changes in the 
Christian tradition. Thus Akiba, for instance, followed 
the narrative of the Synoptics in regard to the death of 
Jesus, and put the execution on the Feast-day. On the 
other hand, the somewhat later Mischna iv, 1, and the 
Gemara give the later version of the Gospel of John, that 
the death was on the Day of Preparation for the Passover. 
Hence the Talmud has no independent tradition about 
Jesus; all that it says of him is merely an echo of 
Christian and pagan legends, which it reproduces accord- 
ing to the impressions of the second and later centuries, 
not according to historical tradition. 2 That is, moreover, 
the view of Jiilicher in Kultur der Gegenwart, where he 
says that the Talmud has " borrowed " its knowledge of 
Jesus from the gospels. The Talmud is, in fact, so 
imperfectly acquainted with the time and the circum- 
stances of Jesus that it confuses him with the Rabbi 
Josua ben Perachja, or a pupil of his of the same name 
(about 100 B.C.), and even makes him a contemporary of 
Akiba in the first third of the second century. Can we, 
in such circumstances, pretend that there is any evidence 
for the historicity of Jesus in the fact that the Talmud 
does not question it ? 

It is not true, however, as has recently been stated, 
that no Jew ever questioned the historical reality of 
Jesus, so that we may see in this some evidence for his 
existence. The Jew Trypho, whom Justin introduces in 

1 Loc. cit., p. 54. 2 Joel, loc. cit., p. 54, etc. 



THE JEWISH WITNESSES 17 

his Dialogue with Trypho, expresses himself very scepti- 
cally about it. " Ye follow an empty rumour," he says, 
" and make a Christ for yourselves." "If he was born 
and lived somewhere, he is entirely unknown." 1 This 
work appeared in the second half of the second century ; 
it is therefore the first indication of a denial of the 
human existence of Jesus, and shows that such opinions 
were current at the time. 



1 viii, 3. Compare also K. Lippe, Das Evangelium des Matthaus. 



1. PLINY AND SUETONIUS. 

WE now come to the Roman witnesses [to the historicity 
of Jesus. 

Of the younger Pliny it is hardly necessary to speak 
further in this connection. He was dragged into the 
discussion of the " Christ-myth " at a late stage, merely 
to enlarge the list of witnesses to the historicity of Jesus. 
No one seriously believes that any such evidence is found 
in Pliny. 1 In his correspondence with the Emperor 
Trajan, which is believed to have taken place about the 
year 113, and which is occupied with the question how 
Pliny, as Proconsul of the province of Bithynia in Asia 
Minor, was to behave in regard to the Christians, he 
informs the Emperor that the adherents of the sect sing 
hymns to Christ at daybreak "as if he were a god (quasi 
deo)." What this proves as regards the historical reality 
of the man Christ we should be pleased to have rationally 
explained. 2 What has been said on the subject up to 

1 It is characteristic of the tactics of our opponents that certain Catholic 
writers have begun to appeal to Porphyry, the Neopla tonic philosopher, 
who lived 232-304 A.D. He wrote many works against Christianity, 
which we know only indirectly from the refutations of Methodius and 
Eusebius. No one can say precisely what they contained, as the Emperor 
Theodosius II. prudently ordered them to be burned in public in the year 
435. What does that matter to the theologian as long as he can bring 
one more name into the field ? 

2 Moreover, the genuineness of this correspondence of Pliny and Trajan 
is by no means certain. Justin does not mention it on an occasion when 
we should expect him to do so, and even Tertullian's supposed reference to 
it (Apol., cap. ii) is very doubtful. The tendency of the letters to put the 
Christians in as favourable a light as possible is too obvious not to excite 
some suspicion. For these and other reasons the correspondence was 
declared by experts to be spurious even at the time of its first publication, 
at the beginning of the sixteenth century ; and recent authorities, such as 
Semler, Aub (Histoire des Persecutions de I'^glise, 1875, p. 215, ,etc.), 
Havet (Le Christianisme et ses Origines, 1884, iv, 8), and Hochart (Etudes 

18 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 19 

the present is merely frivolous, adapted only to an utterly 
thoughtless circle of readers or hearers. Yet even a man 
like Jiilicher does not hesitate to quote Pliny among the 
profane witnesses. He also mentions Marcus Aurelius, 
who expresses his anger against the Christians in his 
Meditations (about the year 175 !), and assures us that 
what is meant there by Christianity is the community of 
those who believed in the Jesus of our and their gospels 
as their God and Saviour (p. 17). We are grateful for this 
" information," but we should have expected that a 
scholar like Jiilicher would have something more serious 
to tell us on the subject. 

There seems to be more significance in the words of 
the Roman historian Suetonius (77-140 A.D.), who tells 
us in his Life of Claudius (c. 25) that that emperor 
" expelled from Rome the Jews because, at the instiga- 
tion of Chrestus, they were perpetually making trouble " 
(Claudius Judseos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantes 
Roma expulit). If we only knew precisely who is meant 
by this Chrestus ! The name in the text is not 
" Christus," but " Chrestus " (and in some manuscripts 
Cherestus), which is by no means the usual designation 
of Jesus, while it is a common name, especially among 
Roman freedmen. Hence the whole passage in Suetonius 
may have nothing whatever to do with the question of 
Christianity. It may just as well refer to any disturb- 
ances whatever caused among the Jews by a man named 
Chrestus, and it does not say much for the " scientific " 
spirit of theologians when they interpret it in their own 
sense without further ado. 

An attempt has been made to connect the passage in 
Suetonius with the messianic expectation of the Jews, 
and to interpret it in the sense of referring either to 

au Sujet de la Persecution des Chretiens sous Neron, 1885, pp. 79-143 ; 
compare also Bruno Bauer, Christus und die Casaren, 1877, p. 268, etc., 
and the anonymously published work of Edwin Johnson, Antigua Mater, 
1887), which have disputed its authenticity, either as a whole or in 
material points. 



20 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

quarrels in the Jewish community at Home owing to the 
belief of those who held that Jesus was the Messiah they 
all expected, or to a general agitation of Roman Judaism 
on account of its messianic ideas and hostility to the 
pagan world. The first alternative, however, is not very 
helpful in view of the fact that, when Paul came to 
Borne about ten years afterwards to preach the gospel, 
the Jews there seem to have known nothing whatever 
about Jesus; and, according to the account in Acts, his 
arrival led to no disturbance among them. 1 The second 
alternative, on the other hand, contains no evidence for 
the historicity of Jesus, as, even if we substitute Christus 
for Chrestus, " Christus " is merely the Greek-Latin 
translation of " Messiah," and the phrase " at the instiga- 
tion of Chrestus " would refer to the Messiah generally, 
and not at all necessarily to the particular Messiah Jesus 
as an historical personality. 2 

In any case, however we interpret the passage of 
Suetonius, it has no bearing whatever on the question of 
the historicity of Jesus. Jiilicher and Weinel admit this 
when they omit Suetonius in their enumeration of profane 
witnesses. J. Weiss also admits : " The passage in 
Suetonius relating to Jewish disturbances at Eome in 
the time of Claudius ' impulsore Chresto ' betrays so 
inaccurate a knowledge of the facts that it cannot 
seriously be regarded as a witness " (p. 88). 

2. TACITUS. 

The passage in Suetonius leaves it uncertain who 
Chrestus is, and cannot, therefore, be advanced as a 

1 Acts xxviii, 17, etc. 

2 In his Geschichte der R&misclien Kaiserzeit, Bd. I, Abt. I (1883), 
p. 447, Hermann Schiller also connects the expulsion of the Jews under 
Claudius with their domestic disturbances, and says: "It is time to 
desist from the practice of identifying the impulsor Chrestus in Suetonius 
with Christ. Words ending in ' tor ' stand for a constant property, or an 
act that impresses a definite and permanent stamp on the subject in 
question ; in neither case can we refer this to Christ, who had never been 
in Rome, and was no longer living ; the activity of the impulsar can relate 
only to the assidue tumultuantes referred to." 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 21 

proof of the historicity of Jesus. It is very different 
with the evidence of Tacitus. In the Annals (xv, 44) 
Christ is expressly mentioned as an historical personage. 
The historian has related what measures were taken by 
Nero to lessen the suffering brought about by the great 
fire at Home in the year 64, and to remove the traces of 
it. He then continues : "But neither the aid of man, nor 
the liberality of the prince, nor the propitiations of the 
gods, succeeded in destroying the belief that the fire had 
been purposely lit. In order to put an end to this rumour, 
therefore, Nero laid the blame on and visited with severe 
punishment those men, hateful for their crimes, whom 
the people called Christians [Ergo abolendo rumori Nero 
subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poanis affecit quos per flagitia 
invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat] . He from whom 
the name was derived, Christus, was put to death by the 
procurator Pontius Pilatus in the reign of Tiberius [autor 
nominis ejus Christus, Tiberio imperitante, per procura- 
torem Pentium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat] . But the 
pernicious superstition, checked for a moment, broke out 
again, not only in Judaea, the native land of the mon- 
strosity, but also in Rome, to which all conceivable 
horrors and abominations flow from every side, and find 
supporters. First, therefore, those were arrested who 
openly confessed; then, on their information, a great 
number, who were not so much convicted of the fire as of 
hatred of the human race. Eidicule was poured on them 
as they died ; so that, clothed in the skins of beasts, they 
were torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or committed to 
the flames, and when the sun had gone down they were 
burned to light up the night [Igitur primum correpti, qui 
fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitude ingens, haud 
proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis 
convicti sunt. Et pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut ferarum 
tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent, aut crucibus affixi, 
aut flammandi, atque ubi defecisset dies, in usum nocturni 
luminis urerentur] . Nero had lent his garden for this 



22 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

spectacle, and gave games in the Circus, mixing with the 
people in the dress of a charioteer or standing in the 
chariot. Hence there was a strong sympathy for them, 
though they might have been guilty enough to deserve 
the severest punishment, on the ground that they were 
sacrificed, not to the general good, but to the cruelty of 
one man." 

(a) Evidential Value of the Passage. When Tacitus 
is assumed to have written, about the year 117, that the 
founder of the sect, Christus, was put to death by the 
procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius, Chris- 
tianity was already an organised religion with a settled 
tradition. Even the gospels, or at least three of them, 
are supposed to have then been in existence. Hence 
Tacitus might have derived his information about Jesus, 
if not directly from the gospels, at all events indirectly 
from them by means of oral tradition. That was the 
view of Dupuis, who writes : " Tacitus says what the 
legend said. Had he been speaking of the Brahmans, he 
would have said, in the same way, that they derived their 
name from a certain Brahma, who had lived in India, as 
there was a legend about him ; yet Brahma would not on 
that account have lived as a man, as Brahma is merely 
the name of one of the three manifestations of the 
personified god-head. When Tacitus spoke thus in his 
account of Nero and the sect of the Christians, he merely 
gave the supposed etymology of the name, without caring 
in the least whether Christ had really existed or it was 
merely the name of the hero of some sacred legend. 
Such an inquiry was quite foreign to his work." : Even 
J. Weiss observes : " Assuredly there were the general 
lines of even a purely fictitious Christian tradition already 
laid down about the year 100 ; Tacitus may therefore 
draw upon this tradition " (p. 88). It has been said, on the 
authority of Mommsen, that Tacitus may have derived his 

1 Ursprung der Gottesverehrung , p. 223 ; cf. also p. 227. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 23 

information from the Acts of the Senate and the archives 
of the State, and it has been suggested that his authority 
was Cluvius Eufus, who was consul under Caligula. Weiss 
says, however : " That he or any other had seen a report 
from Pontius Pilate in the records of the Senate is a 
hypothesis I should not care to adopt, as it would be 
complicating a simple matter with an improbability." 
" Archival studies," we read in the Handbuch der klassi- 
schen Altertumswissenschaft, "are not very familiar to 
ancient historiography ; and Tacitus has paid very little 
attention to the acta diurna and the records of the 
Senate." ' In fact, Hermann Schiller says, in his 
Geschichte des Romischen Kaiserreichs unter der 
Eegierung des Nero (1872) : " We are accustomed to 
hearing Tacitus praised as a model historian, and in 
many respects it may be true ; but it does not apply to 
his criticism of his authorities and his own research, for 
these were astonishingly poor in Tacitus. He never 
studied the archives." ' It is, moreover, extremely 
improbable that a special report would be sent to Home, 
and incorporated in the records of the Senate, in regard to 
the death of a Jewish provincial, Jesus. " The execution 
of a Nazareth carpenter was one of the most insignificant 
events conceivable among the movements of Roman 
history in those decades ; it completely disappeared 
beneath the innumerable executions inflicted by the 
Eoman provincial authorities. It would be one of the 
most remarkable instances of chance in the world if it 
were mentioned in any official report." ! It is the sort of 
thing we may expect from a Tertullian, who, in his 
Apology for Christianity (c. 21), tells one who doubts the 
truth of the gospel story that he will find a special report 
of Pilate to Tiberius in the Roman archives. In the 
mouth of a modern historian such a statement is frankly 
ridiculous. 

1 viii, 2 Abt., Heft 2, under "Tacitus." 

2 Work quoted, p. 7. 8 Weiss, work quoted, p. 92. 



24 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

There is nothing, then, in the records of the Senate, 
and of Cluvius Eufus we know next to nothing. As 
Bruno Bauer ironically observes : "That the founder 'of 
Christianity was put to death under Tiberius by the 
procurator Pontius Pilate must have been discovered by 
the historian who was not otherwise a very assiduous 
searcher of the archives in the same archive which, 
according to Tertullian, also gave the fact that the sun 
was darkened at midday when Jesus died." 1 In any case 
the reference in Tacitus is no proof of the historicity of 
Jesus, because it is far too late ; it is almost certain that 
the Roman historian simply derived it from the Christian 
legend. Tacitus could in 117 know of Christ only what 
reached him from Christian or intermediate circles. In 
such matters he merely reproduced rumours in whatever 
light his subject seemed to him to demand. 2 

Here we might close our investigation into the profane 
witnesses. We have reached the same result as J. Weiss: 
"There is no really cogent witness in profane literature " 
(p. 92). Weinel comes to the same conclusion when he 
says that not much importance can be attached by either 
side to non-Christian witnesses : "As there can be no 
doubt that at the time when the Annals of Tacitus, the 
letters of Pliny, and even the historical works of Josephus, 
appeared, Christianity was widely spread in the Roman 
Empire and traced its origin to Jesus, the man of 
Nazareth, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate" (p. 104). 
Jiilicher also, in the above-mentioned essay in Kultur der 
Gegenwart, denies altogether the evidential value of the 
Roman profane witnesses. 

(b) The Question of the Genuineness of "Annals" xv, 44. 
It is, however, not superfluous, perhaps, to consider more 
closely what is regarded as the most important profane 
witness for the historicity of Jesus that of Tacitus. 
Such witnesses still seem to make a great impression on 

1 Christus und die COsaren, p. 155. 2 Schiller, work quoted. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 25 

the general public. Even theologians who are themselves 
convinced of the worthlessness of such witnesses as 
regards the problem we are considering do not fail, as a 
rule, to repeat them to " the people " as if they gave 
some confirmation of their belief in an historical Jesus. 
That would be prevented once for all if it could be proved 
that the whole passage is not from the pen of Tacitus at 
all. However, this statement, which I advanced in the 
Christ Myth in accordance with the view of the French 
writer Hochart, has been so vehemently attacked, even 
by those who, like Weiss and Weinel, admit the worth- 
lessness of the passage as far as the historicity of Jesus 
is concerned, that it seems necessary to inquire somewhat 
closely into the genuineness of Annals, xv, 44. 

I. ARGUMENTS FOB THE GENUINENESS. 

There can, of course, be no question of any impossibility 
of interpolating the passage in the Annals on the ground 
of " the inimitable style of Tacitus," as defenders of the 
genuineness repeat after Gibbon. 1 There is no " inimit- 
able " style for the clever forger, and the more unusual, 
distinctive, and peculiar a style is, like that of Tacitus, 
the easier it is to imitate it. It would be strange if a 
monastic copyist of Tacitus, occupied with his work for 
months, if not for years, could not so far catch his style 
as to be able to write these twenty or twenty-five lines in 
the manner of Tacitus. Teuffel, in his Geschichte der 
Rom. Literature (5th ed. 1890, ii, 1137), commends 
Sulpicius Severus for his " skill " in imitating Tacitus, 
among others, in his composition. Such an imitation is 
not, in my opinion, beyond the range of possibility. 
Moreover, as far as the historicity of Jesus is concerned, 
we are, perhaps, interested only in one single sentence of 
the passage, and that has nothing distinctively Tacitan 
about it. 

1 Decline and Fall, ch. xvi. 



26 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

Equally invalid is the claim that the way in which 
Tacitus speaks of the Christians excludes all idea of a 
Christian interpolation. Von Soden thinks that Christians 
" would certainly have put early Christianity in a more 
favourable light, as they always did when they falsified 
the story of the rise of Christianity in the historical works 
they read." He overlooks the fact that the injurious 
epithets on the new religion and its adherents would 
probably, in the opinion of the forger, tend to strengthen 
its chances of passing as genuine. They are just what 
one might suppose to be in harmony with the disposition 
of Tacitus. The expressions, moreover, are at once 
enfeebled by the reference to the sympathy that the 
Eomans are supposed to have felt for the victims of 
Nero's cruelty. It is a common occurrence in the 
accounts of the Christian martyrs for the pagan opponents 
of Christianity to find their hostility changed into sym- 
pathy, and recognise the innocence of the persecuted 
Christians. We need quote only the description of Pilate 
in Matthew and Luke his " I find no blame in him " 
and " I am innocent of the blood of this just man " and 
the supposed words of Agrippa when Paul is charged 
before him : " This man doeth nothing worthy of death 
or of bonds." 1 So Pliny the younger condemns the 
Christians in his letter to Trajan, although he acknow- 
ledges their innocence. This, it is true, is not the case 
with Tacitus ; he seems rather to regard the Christians 
as guilty, whether or no they were the authors of the 
fire. But he allows the spectators to be touched with 
pity for the executed Christians, and thus awakens a 
sympathetic feeling for them in the readers of his 
narrative. 

It is said, however, that Tacitus, " on account of the 
difficulty of his style and his whole attitude, was not 
generally read by Christians," so that his text is, "in the 

1 Acts xxvi, 31. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 27 

general opinion of experts, the freest from corruption of 
all the ancient writings." So at least von Soden assures 
us (p. 11). In this, however, he is merely repeating the 
opinion of Gibbon. As a matter of fact, none of the 
works of Tacitus have come down to us without inter- 
polations. This supposed " purity of the text of Tacitus 
as shown by the oldest manuscripts " exists only in the 
imagination of Gibbon and those who follow him. It is, 
further, not true that the Christians did not read Tacitus. 
We have a number of instances in the first centuries of 
Christian writers who are acquainted with Tacitus, such 
as Tertullian, Jerome, Orosius, Sidonius Apollinaris, 
Sulpicius Severus, and Cassiodorus. It is only in the 
course of the Middle Ages that this acquaintance with 
the ROMAN historian is gradually lost ; and this not on 
account of, but in spite of, the passage in Tacitus on the 
Christians. This testimony of the ROMAN historian to 
the supposed first persecution of the Christians would be 
very valuable to them for many reasons. 

Are there, however, no witnesses to the genuineness of 
the passages of Tacitus in early Christian literature? 
There is the letter of Clement of Rome belonging to the 
end of the first century. According to Eusebius, 1 it was 
sent by Clement, the secretary of the Apostle Peter, and 
the third or fourth bishop of Home, to the community at 
Corinth, in the name of the Roman community ; as is 
also stated by Hegesippus (c. 150) and Dionysius of 
Corinth. 2 The point is so uncertain, nevertheless, that 
such distinguished authorities as Semler, Baur, Schwegler, 
Zeller, Volkmar, 3 Hausrath, 4 Lornan, 5 Van Manen, Von 
der Burgh, Van Eysing, 6 and Steck, 7 have disputed the 

1 Eccl. Hist, Ill, 16. 2 Op. cit. iv, 22, 1-3 ; iv, 23. 

3 See his essay on "Clement of Rome and the Subsequent Period," 
Tttbinger Tlieol. Jahrb-Ucher, 1856, 287-369. 

4 Neutestamentl. Zeitgesch.,111,99, Anm. 5. 

6 " Quaestiones Paulinse," in Tlieol. Tijdschrift, 1883, p. 14, etc. 

6 Onderzoek naar de aclitlieidvan Clemens' ersten brief aan de Corinthers, 
1908. 

7 Der Galaterbrief nach seiner Echtlieit unlersucht, 1888, p. 294, etc. 



28 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

genuineness of the letter; and it was reserved for the 
modern believers in Jesus to discover grounds for regard- 
ing it as genuine. Volkmar puts the letter in the year 
125 ; Loman, Van Manen, and Steck do not admit its 
composition earlier than the year 140. The letter cannot, 
therefore, be regarded as a reliable document on that 
account. 

But what do we learn about the Neronian persecution 
from the letter of Clement ? " Out of jealousy and envy," 
he writes to the Corinthians, " the greatest and straightest 
pillars were persecuted and fought even to death "; as 
in the case of Peter, " who, through the envy of the 
wicked, incurred, not one or two, but many dangers, and 
so passed to his place in glory after rendering his testi- 
mony," and Paul, " who showed the faithful the way to 
persevere to the end ; seven times was he imprisoned, he 
was banished, stoned, he went as a herald to the east 
and the west, and he reaped great glory by his faith. 
The whole world has attained to a knowledge of justice ; 
he went even to the farthest parts of the west, and gave 
his testimony before them that held power. Then was 
he taken out of the world and went to the holy place, the 
greatest model of patience." 1 

It is clear that we have here no reference to the per- 
secution of the Christians under Nero. It is not even 
stated that the apostles named met with a violent death 
on account of their faith, as the word " martyresas " 
(" after rendering his testimony ") need not by any means 
be understood to mean a testimony of blood, because the 
word " martyr " originally means only a witness to the 
truth of the Christian faith in the general sense, and is 
equivalent to " confessor," and was only later applied to 
those who sealed their faith by a violent death. 2 If the 
expression in the above text is usually taken to refer to 

1 Neutestatamentl. Apokryphen, edited by Hennecke, 1904, ch. v. 

2 See Hochart, Etudes au Sujet de la Persecution des Chretiens sous 
Neron, 1885. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 29 

the execution of the apostles under Nero, it is not because 
Clemens says anything about this execution, but merely 
because, according to Christian tradition, Peter and Paul 
are supposed to have been put to death at the time of the 
Neronian persecution. This tradition, however, is not 
only relatively late, but extremely doubtful in itself. 
That Peter was never in Eome, and so did not meet his 
end there under Nero, must be regarded as certain after 
the research of Lipsius. 1 As regards Paul, the tradition 
is, according to Frey, 2 certainly not earlier than the end 
of the fifth century ; before that time it was certainly 
said that he and Peter died under Nero, but not that Paul 
was a victim of the Neronian persecution. 3 How, then, 
could the Roman Clemens about the end of the first 
century connect the death of the two apostles with the 
Neronian persecution ? That he does so is supposed to 
be shown by the succeeding words, in which he says : 
" These men were accompanied on the heavenly pil- 
grimage by a great number of the elect, who have given 
us the noblest example of endurance in ill-treatment and 
torment, which they suffered from the envious. On 
account of envy women were persecuted, Danaids and 
Dirces, and had to endure frightful and shameful ill- 
treatment; yet they maintained their faith firmly, and 
won a glorious reward, though they were feeble of body." 
" These words," says Arnold, in his work Die Neronische 
Christenverfolgung (1888), which supports the genuine- 
ness of Annals, xv, 44, " are seen at a glance to be a 
Christian complement of the description of Tacitus; he 
also speaks of ' most exquisite tortures,' of the shame and 
derision with which the victims were treated when they 
were put to death, and of the satisfaction it gave to the 
crowds' lust for spectacles." 4 But would Tacitus, with 

1 See his Chronologic der Bom. Bisclujfe, p. 162, and Die Quellen der 
Bom. Petrussage, 1872. 

2 Die letzten Lebensjahre des Paulus : Bibl. Zeit- u. Streitfragen, 1910. 
8 Loc. cit. p. 8 ; see also Neutestamentl. Apokryplien, p. 365. 

4 Work quoted, p. 37. 



30 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

his well-known taste for spectacular stories of that kind, 
have refrained from giving us the ghastly picture of the 
Dirces torn on the horns of oxen? And what is the 
meaning of these Danaids, in whose form Christian 
women are said to have been shamed and put to death ? 
Can anyone seriously believe that the patient water- 
drawing daughters of Danaos would provide a fitting 
spectacle for the satisfaction of the crowd's lust for dis- 
play and blood ? Or does the writer of the letter merely 
intend by the words " Danaids and Dirces," which 
have no connection with what precedes and follows in 
the text, to set the Christian women-martyrs in contrast 
to the frivolous performers of the ancient myth ? Further, 
what does he mean when he says that these numerous 
men and women were ill-treated " out of jealousy and 
envy," and puts the lot of the Christians in this respect 
on the same footing as that of Cain and Abel, Jacob and 
Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Moses and the Egyptians, 
Aaron and Miriam, Dathan and Abiram, and David and 
Saul ? Eenan suggests the hatred of the Jews for the 
Christians ; but Joel has successfully defended his co- 
religionists against such a charge, and Tacitus does not 
give it the least support. Arnold suggests " denuncia- 
tions by Christians with party passions." 1 According to 
Lactantius, it was Nero's jealousy at the success of their 
propaganda that induced the emperor to persecute the 
Christians. But is it not possible that the writer of the 
letter had seen the Acts of Peter and other apocryphal 
writings, according to which Simon the magician, who 
had entered upon a struggle with Peter out of jealousy, 
may have been the cause of the persecution of the 
Christians ? And may not the whole ambiguous passage, 
with its rhetorical generalities, not really refer to the 
Neronian persecution, but rather throw back upon the 
time of Nero the martyrdoms that Christian men and 

1 Work quoted, p. 69. 



THE BOMAN WITNESSES 31 

women had suffered in later persecutions ? In any case, 
it does not follow from the letter of Clemens that the 
"number of the elect" who "had endured shame and 
torture on account of jealousy," and been " added to the 
company " of the apostles Peter and Paul, died at the 
same time as they. This assumption arises simply from 
an association of ideas between the death of the apostles 
and the supposed Neronian persecution an association 
that in all probability did not exist in the time of Clemens. 
How could the supposed Clemens, about the year 95, 
make Peter and Paul die under Nero, when the former 
had never been in Eome, and the latter did not die until 
after 64 ? And how can the very scholars who dispute 
the presence of Peter in Eome and do not admit the death 
of Paul in the Neronian persecution regard the letter of 
Clemens as genuine, and as establishing the Neronian 
persecution ? 

This, then, is the situation : either the letter of Clemens 
was really written about the year 95, and in that case the 
supposed reference to the Neronian persecution must, if it 
really is such, be regarded as a later interpolation ; or this 
reference is an original part of the letter, and in that case 
the letter cannot have been written until the tradition as 
to the death of the apostles in the Neronian persecution 
had taken shape that is to say, not before the middle of 
the second century. In either case, the so-called letter of 
Clemens is no evidence of the fact of a considerable 
persecution of the Christians under Nero. 1 

1 As the reference of the part quoted to the Neronian persecution is the 
only detail for fixing the date of the letter, if we refuse to admit the 
passage the date of the letter is altogether uncertain, and it may belong 
to the fourth century just as well as the first the "great century of 
literary forgeries" (Antiqua Mater, p. 304). The reference in I, 1, where 
there is question of perils and hardships that have suddenly come upon 
the Roman community, to the Domitian persecution in the year 93 is 
anything but certain. It is by no means proved that the so-called 
Domitian persecution was a persecution of the Christians. The text of 
Dio Cassius (67, 14) which is relied upon points at the most to a persecution 
of those who, like Flavius Clemens, the emperor's cousin, leaned to 
" atheism " or the Jewish faith. " If we rely on Roman sources, we find 
no persecution of the Christians under Domitian ; if we rely on Christian 



32 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

The belief that the Neronian persecution of the Chris- 
tians belongs to the realm of fable is further confirmed by 
the fact that the other witnesses that are quoted for it are 
just as vague and indecisive. What propagandist material 
would not the details of this first persecution of their faith 
have furnished to the early Christians ! Yet what trace 
of it do we find in them ? Let us take the evidence of 
Melito of Sardis. In his writing to the Emperor Marcus 
Aurelius, in which he endeavours to explain to the 
Emperor how beneficial Christianity had been to Roman 
power, we read : " The only emperors who, seduced by 
evil-minded men, sought to bring our religion into evil 
repute, were Nero and Domitian, and from their time the 
mendacious calumny of the Christians has continued, 
according to the habit of people to believe imputations 
without proof." In these words, which, moreover, are 
only known to us from Eusebius, 1 there is no question of 
a general persecution of the Christians under Nero ; it is 
merely stated that Nero tried to bring the Christians into 
bad repute. Dionysius of Corinth (about 170) also, and 
the presbyter Caius, who lived in the time of the Roman 
bishop Zephyrinus (about 200), affirm only, according to 
the same Eusebius, 2 that Peter and Paul died the death 
of martyrs " about the same time " at Rome, 3 which does 

sources, the persecution goes far beyond Rome, as, according to Hegesippus, 
the grandsons of Judas, being relatives of Christ, were brought from 
Palestine to Rome and condemned, and, according to Eusebius and, 
possibly, Irenseus, the apostle John was then banished to Patmos. In this 
case it cannot be said that Rome alone was affected by the persecution, 
and so there is no analogy with the description given in the letter " (Steck, 
work quoted, p. 297). It seems, then, that it was the imagination of the 
apologists and fathers of the Church, who wanted to make the sufferings 
of Christianity begin as early as possible, that deduced from the letter this 
persecution of the Christians as such. (Br. Bauer, work quoted, p. 238 ; 
also see Joel, work quoted, II, 45.) 

1 Ecclesiastical History, VI, 33. 2 Ibid. II, 28. 

8 In this connection it may be observed that all these references 
in Eusebius must be regarded with the greatest suspicion. This man, 
whom Jakob Burckhardt has called " the first thoroughly dishonest 
historian of antiquity," acts so deliberately in the interest of the power of 
the Church and the creation and strengthening of tradition that far too 
much notice is taken of his historical statements. "After the many 
falsifications, suppressions, and fictions which have been proved in his 



33 

not necessarily mean on the same day or the same 
occasion, or that the " trophies of their victory " are to 
be seen on the Vatican and the road to Ostia. Of the 
Neronian persecution they tell us nothing. In Tertullian's 
Apologeticum 1 we read that Nero, cruel to all, was the 
first to draw the imperial sword against the Christian sect 
which then flourished at Borne. He thinks it an honour 
to himself and his co-religionists to have been condemned 
by such a prince, since everyone who knows him will see 
that nothing was condemned by Nero that was not 
especially good. But there is nothing in his words to 
show that he was thinking of anything besides the death 
of the apostles Peter and Paul. Indeed, he says expressly 
that the apostles, scattered over the world at the master's 
command, after many sufferings at length shed their 
blood at Home through the cruelty of Nero, and he urges 
the pagans to read the proofs of this in their own 
"Commentaries"; which is much the same as when 
Tertullian refers to the Roman archives those who doubt 
the gospel narrative of the execution of Jesus. 2 We read 
much the same in the same writer's Scorp., ch. xv: 
" Nero was the first to stain the early faith with blood. 
Then was Peter (according to the word of Christ) girded 
by another, as he was fixed to the cross. Then did Paul 
obtain the Roman right of citizenship in a higher sense, 
as he was born again there by his noble martyrdom." ! 

There remains only the witness of Eusebius and of 
Revelation. Eusebius, however, merely reproduces 4 the 
statement of Tertullian that Nero was the first of the 
emperors to become an open enemy of the divine religion. 
He writes : " Thus Nero raged even against the apostles, 

work, he has no right to be put forward as a decisive authority ; and to 
these faults we must add a consciously perverse manner of expression, 
deliberate bombast, and many equivocations, so that the reader stumbles 
upon trapdoors and pitfalls in the most important passages." (J. Burck- 
hardt, Leben Konstantins, 2nd ed. 1860, pp. 307, 335, 347.) 
1 Ch. v. 2 Ch. xxi. 

3 See also De Proscriptions, cap. 36, and Adversus Marcion, iv, 5. 

4 Ecclesiastical History, ii, 28. 

D 



34 

and so declared himself the first of the arch-enemies of 
God. It is recorded that under him Paul was beheaded 
at Borne and Peter was crucified under him." In proof 
of this he points to the fact that the names of Peter and 
Paul have remained until his time on an inscription in 
the burying -place at Rome. As to Revelation, the 
commonly assumed connection between it and the 
Neronian persecution is so little proved that Arnold 
speaks of it as " a most unhappy suggestion " to associate 
the "great crowd" of Christians executed under Nero, 
according to Tacitus, with the vision of John, in which 
the seer beholds a vast multitude, whom no man can 
count, of all nations, peoples, and tongues, bearing palms 
and clothed in white garments before the throne of the 
Most High. 1 The Christian parts of the so-called Sybilline 
Oracles, which are supposed to have been written in part 
shortly after this event, have, as Arnold says, no relation 
to the Neronian persecution, even where there would be 
the greatest occasion. They speak often enough of the 
return of Nero and his cruelties, but he is never repre- 
sented, as he is afterwards in Eusebius, as the enemy of 
God and Christ and the persecutor of the early community. 
It seems very doubtful if the poets knew anything what- 
ever of such an occurrence. 2 Hence the idea that 
Revelation is the Christian " counter-manifesto to the 
Neronian persecution " is of no value. Ecclesiastical 
tradition assigns Revelation to the year 96 A.D. When 
recent theological scholarship assigns it to the year 65, it 
is assuming that the work refers to the burning of Home 
in 64. In that case it is clearly a vicious circle to infer 
the historicity of the Neronian persecution from the fact 
that Revelation was written shortly after 64. How little 
was definitely known of such a persecution in the first 
Christian centuries may be gathered from the fact that 
Eusebius puts it in the year 67. Justin, in spite of his 

1 Revelation vii, 9. 2 Work quoted, pp. 75-86. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 35 

praise of the courage and steadfastness of the Christians 
in their martyrdoms, does not say a word about it. Even 
the later Acts of Peter are silent about it, while other 
writings go so far as to make Nero a friend of the 
Christians, and say that he condemned Pontius Pilate 
to death for the execution of Christ. Origen (185-254) 
says in his work against Celsus 1 that, instead of the 
" multitude ingens " of Tacitus, the number of those who 
suffered death for the faith was inconsiderable ! 

But does not Suetonius speak in his Life of Nero 
(ch. xvi) of a chastisement of the Christians by the 
emperor as a class of men full of a new and criminal 
superstition (genus hominum superstitionis novae ac 
inaleficas) ? It is to be noted that he in no way connects 
this event with the burning of Rome, but with other 
misdeeds that were punished by Nero. Arnold has 
pointed out 2 that this biographer does not follow a 
chronological order in his work or observe the internal 
connection of events, but classes the deeds of the emperor 
as good or bad, and so puts the burning among the 
latter and the punishment of the Christians among the 
former. However that may be, no reason is given why 
Nero should punish the Christians on account of their 
religion. It is expressly allowed by historians 3 that the 
Roman emperors of that time were extremely tolerant of 
foreign religions. Suetonius himself says that Nero 
showed the utmost indifference, even contempt, in regard 
to religious sects. 4 Even afterwards the Christians were 
not persecuted for their faith, but for political reasons, 
for their contempt of the Roman State and emperor, and 
as disturbers of the unity and peace of the empire. 6 What 
reason, then, can Nero have had to proceed against the 
Christians, hardly distinguishable from the Jews, as a 
new and criminal sect ? 

1 iii, 8. 2 Work quoted, p. 38. 

3 See H. Schiller, Geschichte der Rum. Kaiserzeit, i, 441. 

4 Cap. 46. 5 Arnold, work quoted, p. 74. 



36 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

Schiller also thinks that the Roman authorities can 
have had no reason to inflict special punishment on the 
new faith. " How could the non-initiated know what 
were the concerns of a comparatively small religious 
sect, which was connected with Judaism and must have 
seemed to the impartial observer wholly identical with it ? 
Apart from Jerusalem, hardly any community at this time 
had so pronounced a Judaeo-Christian character as that 
of Rome." 1 If, moreover, it were supposed that by the 
" Christians " of Suetonius we must understand the Jews 
excited by messianic expectations " Messianists " who, 
with their belief in the approaching end of the world and 
its destruction by fire, made light of the burning of 
Rome and so incurred the hatred of the people the 
connection between them and the historical Jesus would 
be called into question, and the evidential value of the 
passage of Suetonius for the existence of Jesus would be 
destroyed. In fact, this supposition is negatived by the 
complete silence of Josephus as to any such misfortune 
of his co-religionists, though he does not otherwise spare 
the misdeeds of the emperor. Paulus Orosius also, the 
friend and admirer of Augustine, relies expressly on 
Suetonius for the expulsion of the Jews from Rome 
under Claudius, and even mentions the Neronian perse- 
cution, which, according to him, spread over every 
province of the empire, 2 but for this does not quote the 
witness of either Tacitus or Suetonius. When we further 
reflect that neither Trajan nor Pliny mentions the 
Neronian persecution of the Christians in his corre- 
spondence, although there was every occasion to do so, 
since they were discussing the judgment and treatment 
of the Bithynian Christians, we can hardly do otherwise 
than regard the passage in Suetonius's Life of Nero as 
a later interpolation. 



Work quoted, p. 585. 2 Adversus Paganos Histories, vii, 4. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 37 

II. ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE GENUINENESS. 

(a) General Observations. As regards the passage in 
Tacitus, the simple credulity with which it had hitherto 
been accepted led to a sceptical attitude, not only abroad, 
where the Frenchman Hochart, 1 the Dutchman Pierson, 2 
the English author of Antiqua Mater, Edwin Johnson, 
the American William Benjamin Smith in Ecce Deus 
(1911), and others assailed its genuineness, but also in 
German science. Besides Bruno Bauer, 3 H. Schiller 
has drawn attention to certain difficulties in the 
Tacitean tradition that had been overlooked; and even 
Arnold acknowledges, though he endeavours to show 
the unsoundness of the critical view of the passage, 
that "this reference, which had hitherto been regarded 
as quite simple and easy to understand, has been very little 
understood." 4 According to Hochart the passage contains 
as many insoluble difficulties as it does words. 6 This is 
especially true of the sentence : " Igitur primum correpti, 
qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitude ingens, 
haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani 
generis convicti sunt." Schiller calls this sentence "one 
of the most difficult in this sententious writer," and adds : 
" One could almost believe that he deliberately left a 
riddle to posterity which he had failed to solve himself." 6 
We have first the " multitude ingens " of the Christians. 
Even Arnold sees a " rhetorical exaggeration " in these 
words ; it is opposed to all that we know of the spread of 
the new faith in Rome at the time. 7 The question is, 
who exaggerated Tacitus, who would scarcely take any 
interest in the number of the Christians, or a later 
Christian interpolator, who would naturally have such an 

1 Etudes au sujet de la persecution des chretiens sous Nlron, 1885 ; De 
I' Authenticity des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite, 1890 ; Nouvelles Con- 
siderations au sujet des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite, 1897. 

2 Bergrede, p. 87. 3 Christus und die Casaren, p. 150. 
4 Work quoted, vi. 5 J&tudes au sujet, etc., p. 220. 

6 Work quoted, p. 435. 

T Work quoted, p. 40. See also Schiller, work quoted, p. 436, note. 



38 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

interest, in order to demonstrate the rapid spread and 
marvellous attractiveness of the religion of Jesus ? 

Then there is the word " fatebantur." Theological 
writers like Benan, Weizsacker, etc., refer the expression 
to the belief of those who were captured, and so make 
them out to have been persecuted on account of their 
Christianity. Von Soden also translates it : " All who 
openly confessed Christianity were at once arrested," etc. 
(p. 11). Schiller, however, rightly holds that it is not 
probable, in view of the close life of the Christians at the 
time, that some of them, apart from all the others, " had 
openly professed a doctrine that was not yet a peculiar 
creed, and would be intelligible to nobody." 1 Others, 
therefore, such as Arnold, think that the word " fate- 
bantur " refers rather to the crime of setting fire to 
Borne. In that case, there would, as many historians, 
such as Neumann, admit, be no question of a persecution 
of Christians as such, but merely of a police procedure. 9 

In the next place, however, the Christians are not 
so much " convicted " of the fire as of " hatred of the 
human race." Holtzmann (in Sybel's Historischer 
Zeitschrift) has translated this phrase as " completely 
devoid of any humane and political culture," " so that 
they might be relieved of considerations of humanity in 
dealing with them." Schiller sees in it a reference to 
the custom of the Christians to withdraw from all inter- 
course with the world, celebrate forbidden festivals in 
secret meetings, and never sacrifice to the genius of the 
emperor. 8 Arnold conceives the expression as "an oppo- 
sition on principle to the omnipotence of the Boman 
State. '" But, as Hochart rightly asks, could Tacitus, 
who never took seriously the faith of the Jews, and pre- 
sented the Jewish and, according to Tertullian, even the 
Christian God to his readers as a deity with an ass's head, 

1 Work quoted, p. 485. 

2 See also H. Schiller, Gescliichte derrttm. Kaiserzeit, I, 44G-50. 
:! Work quoted, p. 436. * Work quoted, p. 23. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 39 

regard the existence of a Jewish sect, which differed in 
no respect from the Jews in the eyes of the Romans, as 
so menacing to the welfare of the empire that he must 
call down on it the full anger of the gods of Olympus ? 
"It is inconceivable that the followers of Jesus formed a 
community in the city at that time of sufficient importance 
to attract public attention and the ill-feeling of the people. 
It is more probable that the Christians were extremely 
discreet in their behaviour, as the circumstances, especially 
of early propaganda, required. Clearly we have here a 
state of things that belongs to a later date than that of 
Tacitus, when the increase and propagandist zeal of the 
Christians irritated the other religions against them, and 
their resistance to the laws of the State caused the 
authorities to proceed against them." 1 The interpolator, 
Hochart thinks, transferred to the days of Nero that 
general hatred of the Christians of which Tertullian 
speaks. Indeed, the French scholar thinks it not impos- 
sible that the phrase " odium humani generis " was simply 
taken from Tertullian and put in the mouth of Tacitus. 
Tertullian tells us that in his time the Christians were 
accused of being " enemies of the human race " (paene 
omnes cives Christianos habendo sed hostes maluistis 
vocare generis humani potius quam erroris humani). 1 

1 Hochart, work quoted, p. 214. 

2 Apol. 37. How just this charge against the Christians was in the 
time of Tertullian may be gathered from Hausrath's excellent essay on 
" The Church Fathers of the Second Century " in his Kleine Schriften rcli- 
gionsgeschichtlichen Inhalts (1883), especially p. 71. It is enough to recall 
the words of a pious Father of the Church in his work On Spectacles (cap. 30) , 
where he addresses a pagan fellow-citizen, in a sweet foretaste of vengeance : 
" Spectacles are your chief delight ; wait, then, for the greatest of all 
spectacles, the final and eternal judgment of the world. How I shall 
admire, how I shall laugh and be delighted, when I hear so many proud 
Caesars, whom men had turned into gods, whining in the deepest abyss of 
darkness ; so many magistrates, who persecuted the name of the Lord, 
melting in a more furious fire than any they had lit for the Christians ; 
so many wise philosophers, who taught their pupils that God cared about 
nothing, burning in the glowing flames ; so many esteemed poets standing 
and shivering before the judgment-seat, not of Rhadamanthus or Minos, 
but of Christ ! Then will the tragedians roar louder than on the stage, 
and the player coo more seductively when he is softened by the flames, 
and the chariot-driver be seen careering red as fire on the flaming wheel. 



40 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

And even the " Thyestean meals " and " CEdipodic 
minglings," of which Arnold is reminded by the circum- 
stance that Tacitus ascribes those horrors and scandals 
to the Christians, hardly suit the age of Nero, and have 
all the appearance of a projection of later charges against 
the Christians into the sixties of the first century sup- 
posing, that is to say, that the writer was thinking of them 
at all in the expression quoted. It cannot be repeated too 
often that charges of this kind, if, as is usually gathered 
from similar expressions of Justin and Tertullian, they 
were really put forward by the Jews, 1 have no ground or 
reason whatever in the historical relations between the 
two during the first century, especially before the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem. The schism between Jews and Chris- 
tians had not yet taken place, and the hatred of the two 
for each other was as yet by no means such as to justify 
such appalling accusations. 2 If, on the other hand, they 
are supposed to be brought by the pagans against the 
Christians, there is a complete absence of motive. 3 

But I will not look at these ; rather will I turn my insatiable gaze upon 

those who made sport of the person of the Lord From seeing and 

rejoicing over these no praetor, no consul, no quaestor, and no priest can 
prevent us. These things, by our faith in the spirit and our imagina- 
tion, we already have ever present to us." "It must be admitted," 
Hausrath observes on this, " that this kind of ' Christian charity ' has an 
unmistakable resemblance to the ' odium humani generis ' with which the 
pagans reproached the new sect" (work quoted, p. 92). If Roman justice 
proceeded with severity against people of this temper, we can hardly blame 
it, any more than we should blame a modern State for its severe punish- 
ment of anarchists. In any case, the number of the martyrs has, as 
Hausrath shows, been fearfully exaggerated on the ecclesiastical side. It 
appears that during the first three Christian centuries there were no more 
than 1,500 people put to death on account of their faith (?), whereas Duke 
Alba slaughtered more than 100,000 Protestants in the Netherlands, and 
the St. Bartholomew massacre was responsible for 2,000 deaths in Paris 
and more than 20,000 in the whole of France, to say nothing of the 
savagery of the Inquisition and the crusades against heretics, such as the 
Albigenses. Moreover, many of these Christians often sought death out 
of religious fanaticism, irritated the authorities to proceed against them 
when they had no need to do so, and provoked, by their own behaviour, 
the cruelties of the persecutors which were afterwards so loudly deplored 
by Christian critics. See J. M. Eobertson's Short History of Christianity 
(1902), p. 130. 

1 See, to the contrary, Joel, work quoted, p. 15. 

2 See also Graetz, Gesch. der Jtiden, IV, 104. 

8 See Antiqua Mater, p. 23. Bruno Bauer also says: "The picture 



41 

(b) The Criticisms of Hochart. 1 No one has more 
decisively attacked the belief in the persecution of the 
Christians than Hochart, and it is therefore advisable to 
give a summary here of the critic's arguments. 

In the first place, he regards it as wholly improbable 
that the charge against Nero, of setting fire to the city 
himself, was made at all. The whole conduct of the 
emperor during and after the fire, as it is described by 
Tacitus, could not possibly have led to such a feeling 
among the people. Even Suetonius, who is so bent on 
throwing the blame of the fire on Nero, knows nothing 
of such a rumour, and, according to the account of 
Tacitus, the emperor suffered no loss of popularity with 
the people. Then the aristocrats, who were in con- 
spiracy against him, did not venture to take any step 
against him, and the people were very far from disposed 
to take the part of the conspirators when they were 
tried. Hence the persecution of the Christians has no 
adequate motive, and cannot in any case have been due 
to the cause alleged in Tacitus. In this Schiller agrees 
with Hochart. In agreement also with Adolph Stahr, 

given in Tacitus can only be understood in connection with the influences 
of the age in which he wrote his Annals the age of Trajan, the second 
decade of the second century. At that time there were Christian 
elements in Koine, and he might have heard of Christ and his fate under 
Pontius Pilate, and supposed that the unhealthy state of things that was 
suppressed by the death of Christ may have broken out again and reached 
Rome, the place to which everything unclean went. The same influences 
of the time and of Tacitus are seen in Suetonius' s biography of Nero 
(cap. 16 and 17), which mentions the punishment of the Christians, as 
people having a new and shameful superstition, among the police measures 
of the emperor" (p. 155). Lublinski has recently put very clearly the con- 
tradiction involved in the passage of Tacitus (Das werdende Dogma vom 
Leben Jesu, 1911, p. 59): "The Christians suffered a punishment that 
was clearly regarded as a penalty of their crimes ; the murderous incen- 
diaries were burned. Nevertheless, they are said to have been condemned, 
not on account of the fire, but for hating the human race. Strange to 
say, they could not be convicted of complicity in the fire, though they 
had made a ' confession.' In other words, people acknowledged them- 
selves guilty of arson, yet could not be convicted of it ; but they were 
nonetheless executed for arson in order to punish severely their hatred of 
the human race. Could anything be more confused and contradictory ?" 

1 Etudes au sujet de la persecution des Chretiens sous Neron, 1885 ; De 
V Authenticity des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite, 1890 ; Nouvelles Con- 
sid&rations au sujet des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite, 1897. 



42 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

he regards the rumour that Nero was the author of the 
fire as utterly incredible. If any rumour of the kind 
arose, it -would, he believes, have been confined to the 
members of the aristocratic party, with whom Tacitus 
was in sympathy, and would not be found among the 
people, who considered him innocent. 1 There was, there- 
fore, according to Schiller, with whom even Arnold agrees 
on this point, 2 no reason why Nero should accuse the 
Christians of causing the fire. 3 In any case there can be 
no question of a Neronian " persecution of the Christians," 
even if Tacitus has discovered a statement handed down 
that, on the occasion of the fire, a number of Jewish 
sectaries, possibly including some Christians, were put to 
death on the charge of causing it. 4 

The expression " Christians," which Tacitus applies to 
the followers of Jesus, was by no means common in the 
time of Nero. Not a single Greek or Roman writer of 
the first century mentions the name : neither Juvenal 
nor Persius, Lucian or Martial, the older Pliny or Seneca. 
Even Dio Cassius never uses it, and his abbreviator, the 
monk Xiphilinus, sees no reason to break his silence, but 
speaks of the Christians who were persecuted under 
Domitian as followers of the Jewish religion. 5 The 
Christians, who called themselves Jessreans, or Nazoraeans, 
the Elect, the Saints, the Faithful, etc., were universally 
regarded as Jews. They observed the Mosaic law, and 
the people could not distinguish them from the other 

1 Work quoted, p. 425. In the same way might be explained the 
testimony of the Praetorian leader, Flavius Subrius, who, in order to cut 
Nero as deeply as possible, called him, according to Tacitus (Annals, 
xv, 67), the murderer of his mother and wife, a charioteer, a comedian, 
and an incendiary. Bruno Bauer rightly observes on this: "Is it not 
possible that Tacitus, or, rather, his interpolator, merely put these words 
into the mouth of the brave officer ? Dio Cassius, who, like Tacitus and 
Suetonius, represents the prince as the deliberate author of the fire, has 
preserved the answer of Flavius Subrius in what is probably an older and 
more reliable form (Ixii, 24) : 'I will not serve a charioteer and zither- 
player ' " (work quoted, p. 153). 

2 Work quoted, p. 41. s Gescli. dcr rum. Kaiserzait, p. 359. 
4 Arnold, work quoted, p. 34 ; Schiller, work quoted, p. 449. 

6 See Joel, work quoted, p. 98. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 43 

Jews. That Tacitus applied the name, common in his 
time, to the Jewish sectaries under Nero, as Voltaire and 
Gibbon believe, is very improbable. The Greek word 
Christus (" the anointed ") for Messiah, and the derivative 
word Christian, first came into use under Trajan, in the 
time of Tacitus. Even then, however, the word Christus 
could not mean Jesus of Nazareth. All the Jews with- 
out exception looked forward to a Christus or Messiah, 
and believed that his coming was near at hand. It is, 
therefore, not clear how the fact of being a "Christian" 
could, in the time of Nero or of Tacitus, distinguish the 
followers of Jesus from other believers in a Christus or 
Messiah. 1 This could only be at a time when the 
memory was lost of the many other persons who had 
claimed the dignity of Messiah, and the belief in the 
Messiah had become a belief in Jesus, not as one, but the 
Messiah, and Christ and Jesus had become equivalent 
terms. 2 Not one of the evangelists applies the name 
Christians to the followers of Jesus. It is never used in 
the New Testament as a description of themselves by the 
believers in Jesus, and the relevant passage in Acts 

1 On the other hand, Arnold has attempted to ascribe to Tacitus a close 
acquaintance with the Christians from the fact that Sulpicius Severus 
used him as his authority in his description of the destruction of Jerusalem, 
and that his statement that Titus deliberately furthered the destruction of 
the temple in order to destroy at once the Christian and the Jewish religion 
was taken from the last conclusion of the fifth book of Tacitus' s Histories 
(work quoted, p. 46). No less an authority than Jakob Bernays (Uber die 
ChroniJ: des -Sif/jncis Severus, 1861, p. 57) has seen in this reference of 
Sulpicius a literal agreement with the statement of Tacitus in the Annals 
(xv, 44), that Judsea was the birthplace of the Christian religion, and 
concluded from this that Sulpicius had Tacitus before his eyes. Bruno 
Bauer has, however, observed that the ecclesiastical teachers of the fourth 
century were so firmly convinced of the hostility of all the emperors after 
Claudius to the Christians that the pupil of the Saint of Tours could easily 
penetrate the secret design of Titus without any inspiration from the 
Histories of Tacitus (Christus und die Ccesaren, p. 216). Hence the 
inference that Sulpicius possibly took the statement from Tacitus is any- 
thing but convincing, and thus the idea that Tacitus had any close 
acquaintance with the Christians falls to the ground. 

2 This general acceptation of the name Christian can, according to 
Harnack, only be traced to the end of the reign of Hadrian and that of 
Pius (Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christenthums in den ersten drei 
Jahrlmnderten, 1902, p. 296). 



44 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

(xi, 26), according to which the name was first used at 
Antioch, has the appearance of a later interpolation, 
belonging to a time when the term had become a name 
of honour in the eyes of some and a name of reproach in 
the eyes of others. 1 With this is also connected the 
peculiar way in which Tacitus speaks of the execution of 
Christ under the procurator Pontius Pilate. He does not 
know the name Jesus which, we may note incidentally, 
would be impossible if he had had before his eyes the 
acta of the trial or the protocols of the Senate takes 
Christ to be a personal name, and speaks of Pilate as a 
person known to the reader, not as an historian would 
who seeks to inform his readers, but as a Christian to 
Christians, to whom the circumstances of the death of 
Christ were familiar. 

The Jews at Rome had gone there voluntarily in order 
to make their fortune in the metropolis of the empire, 
and on the whole they prospered. They may have been 
held of little account, or even despised, but no more so 
than the other oriental foreigners who endeavoured to 
make money at Rome by fortune-telling, domestic service, 
or trade. In any case there is so little question of a 
general " hatred " of the people for them that the 
Jewish historians, especially Josephus, do not make much 
complaint of the treatment accorded to their countrymen 
at Rome. 2 It is incredible that the Jessaeans or Nazoraeans 
amongst them, who must in any case have been few in 
number at the time of the fire, were the object of an 
especial hatred, and so would be likely to bear the blame 
of the fire in the eyes of the people. 

Death by fire was not a form of punishment inflicted 
at Rome in the time of Nero. It is opposed to the 
moderate principles on which the accused were then 
dealt with by the State. The use of the Christians as 
" living torches," as Tacitus describes, and all the other 

1 See also 1 Peter iv, 16, and Acts xxvi, 28. 

2 See also Joel, work quoted, p. 106. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 45 

atrocities that were committed against them, have little 
title to credence, and suggest an imagination exalted by 
reading stories of the later Christian martyrs. The often 
quoted statements of Juvenal and Seneca have no bearing 
on this ; they are not connected with the Christians, and 
need not in the least be regarded as references to the 
members of the new sect sacrificed by Nero. 

The victims cannot possibly have been given to the 
flames in the gardens of Nero, as Tacitus says. Accord- 
ing to his own account, these gardens were the refuge of 
those whose homes had been burned, and were full of 
tents and wooden sheds. It is hardly probable that Nero 
would incur the risk of a second fire by his "living 
torches," and still less probable that he mingled with the 
crowd and feasted his eyes on the ghastly spectacle. 
Tacitus tells us in his life of Agricola that Nero had 
crimes committed, but kept his own eyes off them. The 
gardens of Nero (on the present Vatican) seem to have 
been chosen as the theatre of the deed merely to 
strengthen the legend that the holy of holies of Chris- 
tianity, the Church of St. Peter, was built on the spot on 
which the first Christian martyrs had shed their blood. 1 

Finally, there is the complete silence of profane writers 
and the vagueness of the Christian writers on the matter ; 
the latter only gradually come to make a definite state- 
ment of a general persecution of the Christians under 
Nero, whereas at first they make Nero put to death only 
Peter and Paul. The first unequivocal mention of the 
Neronian persecution in connection with the burning of 
Rome is found in the forged correspondence of Seneca 
and the apostle Paul, which belongs to the fourth 
century. A fuller account is then given in the Chronicle 
of Sulpicius Severus (died 403 A.D.), but it is mixed with 
the most transparent Christian legends, such as the story 
of the death of Simon Magus, the bishopric and sojourn 

1 Cf. Hochart, Nouvelles Considerations, 160 f. 



46 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

of Peter at Eome, etc. The expressions of Sulpicius 
agree, in part, almost word for word with those of 
Tacitus. It is, however, very doubtful, in view of the 
silence of the other Christian authors who used Tacitus, 
if the manuscript of Tacitus which Sulpicius used 
contained the passage in question. We are therefore 
strongly disposed to suspect that the passage (Annals, 
xv, 44) was transferred from Sulpicius to the text of 
Tacitus by the hand of a monastic copyist or forger, for 
the greater glory of God and in order to strengthen the 
truth of the Christian tradition by a pagan witness. 1 

But how could the legend arise that Nero was the first 
to persecute the Christians ? It arose, says Hochart, 
under a threefold influence. The first is the apocalyptic 
idea, which saw in Nero the Antichrist, the embodiment 
of all evil, the terrible adversary of the Messiah and his 
followers. As such he was bound, by a kind of natural 
enmity, to have been the first to persecute the Christians ; 
as Sulpicius puts it, " because vice is always the enemy 
of the good."' 2 The second is the political interest of the 
Christians in representing themselves as Nero's victims, 
in order to win the favour and protection of his successors 
on that account. The third is the special interest of the 
Roman Church in the death of the two chief apostles, 
Peter and Paul, at Rome. Then the author of the letters 
of Seneca to Paul enlarged the legend in its primitive 
fqi'm, brought it into agreement with the ideas of this 
time, and gave it a political turn. The vague charges of 
incendiarism assumed a more definite form, and were 
associated with the character of Antichrist, which the 

1 In his De V ' AutJtenticiU des Histoires etdcs Annales de Tacite Hochart 
points out that, whereas the Life of St. Martin and the Dialogues of 
Sulpicius were found in many libraries, there was only one manuscript of 
his Chronicle, probably of the eleventh century, which is now in the 
Vatican. Hence the work was almost unknown throughout the Middle 
Ages, and no one was aware of the reference in it to a Roman persecution 
of the Christians. It is noteworthy that Poggio Bracciolini seems by some 
lucky chance to have discovered and read this manuscript (work quoted, 
p. 225). Cf. Nouvelles Considerations, pp. 142-72. 

2 Compare Eusebius, Eccl. Hist., ii, 28. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 47 

Church was accustomed to ascribe to Nero on account 
of his supposed diabolical cruelty. He was accused of 
inflicting horrible martyrdoms on the Christians, and 
thus the legend in its latest form reached the Chronicle 
of Sulpicius. Finally a clever forger (Poggio ?) smuggled 
the dramatic account of this persecution into the Annals 
of Tacitus, and thus secured the acceptance as historical 
fact of a purely imaginary story. 

We need not recognise all Hochart's arguments as 
equally sound, yet we must admit that in their entirety 
and agreement they are worthy of consideration, and are 
well calculated to disturb the ingenuous belief in the 
authenticity of the passage of Tacitus. It seems as if 
official " science " is here again, as in so many other 
cases, under the dominion of a long-continued suggestion, 
in taking the narrative of Tacitus to be genuine without 
further examination. We must not forget what a close 
connection there is between this narrative and the whole 
of Christian history, and what interest religious education 
and the Church have in preventing any doubt from being 
cast on it. Otherwise how can we explain that no one 
took any notice during the whole of the Middle Ages of 
a passage of such great importance for the history and 
prestige of the Church ? No one, in fact, seems to have 
had the least suspicion of its existence until it was found 
in the sole copy at that time of Tacitus, the Codex 
Mediceus II, printed by Johann and his brother Wendelin 
von Speyer about 1470 at Venice, of which all the other 
manuscripts are copies. 1 Our historians as a rule are 
content to reproduce the narrative of Tacitus in some- 
what modified terms, without making any close scrutiny 
of Annals, xv, 44; thus does Domaszewski, for instance, 
in his History of the Roman Empire (1909), to say 
nothing of the numerous popular manuals of history. 
But our whole science of history is still, as regards the 
origin of Christianity, under the mischievous influence of 

1 Hochart, De I' Autlienticite , etc., p. 50. 



48 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

theology, and is content to reproduce its statements 
without inquiry. In regard to the question of the 
origin of the Christian religion and the historicity of 
Jesus it has almost entirely abdicated its function, and is 
actually pleased that it need not deal with this delicate 
theme, as Seeck candidly admits when he says in his 
Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (iii, 1900) : 
" We have no intention of depicting the human personality 
of Jesus and telling the story of his life, since these 
problems are, in the present state of tradition, perhaps 
insoluble, but at all events not yet solved. Every 
question relating to the origin of Christianity is so 
difficult that we are glad to avoid it altogether." 1 It is 
true that Seeck regards the hesitation in regard to the 
genuineness of the writings admitted in theology as " in 
most cases without foundation." He accepts tradition in 
regard to the Tacitus narrative, and believes in the 
Neronian persecution of the Christians. What is the 
use of this, however, when he has made no close inquiry 
into these things, and therefore gives his verdict solely in 
accordance with a general belief which is possibly a mere 
prejudice? Assuredly we do not envy the "historical 
sense " and the good taste of men who would persuade 
themselves and others that it would be just as easy to 
deny the historicity of Socrates, Alexander, Luther, 
Goethe, Bismarck, etc., as that of Jesus, although this 
is shown in a very different way than the historical 
existence of the " god-man " of the gospels. 2 

1 Work quoted, p. 173. 

2 Compare Steudel, Wir Gelehrten vom Fach, etc. (p. 6), and Lublinski, 
work quoted, p. 47. In the controversy about the Christ-myth an attempt 
has been made even lately to revive the much-ridiculed argument that 
there never was such a person as Napoleon, by which Perez fancied he 
could refute Dupuis, and the argument of Von der Hagen against Strauss, 
" that there was never any such person as Luther," in the year 1837, in 
order to show how one may deny the existence of any great man on 
"Drews' method." That such arguments rely upon the thoughtlessness 
of the majority of people to have any effect throws equal light upon the 
general intelligence, and on the frame of mind of men who can make use 
of such arguments. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 49 

(c) The Possibility of Various Interpretations of 
"Annals" xv, 44. So much as to the possible spurious- 
ness of Annals, xv, 44. We have now to examine the 
evidential value of the passage, supposing it to be 
genuine, and apart from all that we have said of its his- 
torical value. 

In opposition to Hermann Schiller, Neumann, and 
other historians, Harnack regards it as "certain" that 
the persecution mentioned by Tacitus was really a perse- 
cution of the Christians. He believes, nevertheless, that 
the passage is " not altogether intelligible " in the sense 
that it first ascribes the invention of the name " Chris- 
tiani " to the " people," and then goes on to say that " the 
author of the name " was Christ. " If that is so, the 
people acted quite reasonably in giving the name of 
Christians to the followers of Christ. Why, then, does 
Tacitus call the title ' Christians ' a ' name imposed by 
the people"?" The circumstance is really very curious. 
" In order to put an end to the trouble, Nero laid the 
blame on those whom, hateful for their crimes, the people 
called Christians." However, Andresen has made a fresh 
study of the Tacitus manuscript, and shown that the word 
was at first " Chrestianos," and was later altered to 
" Christianos "; whereas it is written " Christus," not 
"Chrestus." "Now it is quite clear," says Harnack, 
" Tacitus says that the people call the sect Chrestiani ; 
he, however relying on more accurate knowledge, as 
Plinius has already written ' Christiani ' quietly corrects 
the name, and rightly speaks of the author of the name 
as Christ." 1 

The expression " Chrestiani " is usually regarded as a 
popular version of " Christiani " (compare Vergil and 
Virgil), just as, on this account, Suetonius is supposed to 
have written Chrestus instead of Christus. But, as we 
observed before, Chrestus was not only a familiar personal 



Mission und Ausbreitung, p. 296. 

E 



50 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

name ; it was also a name of the Egyptian Serapis or 
Osiris, which had a large following at Eome, especially 
among the common people. Hence " Chrestiani " may 
be either the followers of a man named Chrestus, or of 
Serapis. The word " Chrestus " means " the good." 
Thus the Chrestiani were likely to attract the name of 
" the good," and it is presumed that the people gave this 
name to those whom they detested on account of their 
evil deeds. Possibly this name was given to them pre- 
cisely because they were hated for their crimes. The 
Latin sentence, " quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chris- 
tianos appellabat," admits this interpretation, and it is 
often found. How came the people to give the name of 
" the good " to men who were in their eyes notoriously 
bad? Clearly, the expression must, when we examine 
their way of thinking, be regarded as ironical ; the ROMAN 
people called the followers of Serapis-Chrestus " good " 
because they were precisely the contrary. We might 
therefore regard the name " Chrestiani " as equivalent to 
" the clean brethren," just as it is customary to call the 
scum of Paris the " Apaches." 1 

We know from history what an evil repute the Egyptian 
people, which consisted mainly of Alexandrian elements, 
had at Eome. While other foreign cults that had been 
introduced into Eome enjoyed the utmost toleration, the 
cult of Serapis and Isis was exposed repeatedly to perse- 
cution. This was due, as we learn from Cumont, not 
merely to political considerations, the hostility of Eome 
to Alexandria, but also to moral and police reasons. The 
lax morality associated with the worship of the Egyptian 
gods and the fanaticism of their worshippers repelled the 
Eomans, and excited the suspicion that their cultus might 
be directed against the State. " Their secret associations, 
which were chiefly recruited from the poorer people, 
might easily, under the cover of religion, become clubs 

1 Compare Louis Ganeval, Jtsus devant I'histoire n'a jamais vteu, 
1875. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 51 

of agitators and the resort of spies. These grounds for 
suspicion and hatred [!] contributed more, no doubt, to 
the rise of the persecution than purely theological con- 
siderations. We see how it subsides and flames out again 
according to the changes in the condition of general 
politics." 1 

In the year 48 B.C. the chapels devoted to Isis were 
destroyed by order of the Senate, and their images of the 
gods broken. In 28 A.D. the Alexandrian divinities were 
excluded from the limits of the Pomoarium a proscription 
which Agrippa extended seven years afterwards to a sphere 
a thousand paces from the city. In fact, in the year 49 
the feeling against the Egyptians ran so high, on account 
of a scandal in which Egyptian priests were involved, 
that the most drastic proceedings were taken against the 
followers of Serapis. On this occasion the maltreatment 
fell upon the Jews also, because some of their compatriots 
had behaved in a similar manner ; this was not due to 
any general hatred of the Jews, but to the fact that the 
Roman Jews, who mostly came from Egypt and Alex- 
andria, were confused with the Alexandrians, and even 
with that Alexandrian rabble the " Chrestiani." We 
read in Tacitus 2 that at that time the proscription of the 
Egyptian and Jewish religious practices was discussed, 
and the Senate decided to send four thousand men infected 
with their superstitions, of the class of freedmen, to the 
island of Sardinia, to fight the bandits, in the hope that 
the unhealthy climate of the island would make an end 
of them. Josephus also says this in his Antiquities. 3 A 
few years later, under Claudius, " the Senate decreed the 
expulsion of the mathematicians from Italy, though the 
decree was not put in force." 4 The mathematicians 
that is to say, astrologists are the Egyptians and Egyptian 
Jews, the followers of Chrestus, as we read in Fl. Vopiscus 

1 Die orientalisclien Religionen im rOmischen Heidentum, by Gehrich 
(1910), p. 98. 

2 Annals, ii, 85. 3 xviii, 3, 5. 4 Annals, xii, 52. 



52 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

in the letter of the Emperor Hadrian to his brother-in- 
law Servius : " Those who worship Serapis are the 
Chrestians, and those who call themselves priests of 
Chrestus are devoted to Serapis. There is not a high- 
priest of the Jews, a Samaritan, or a priest of Chrestus 
who is not a mathematician, soothsayer, or quack. Even 
the patriarch, when he goes to Egypt, is compelled by 
some to worship Serapis, by others to worship Chrestus. 
They are a turbulent, inflated, lawless body of men. 
They have only one God, who is worshipped by the 
Chrestians, the Jews, and all the peoples of Egypt." 

It is true that this letter is often regarded as spurious, 
a fourth-century forgery, on account of its absurd and 
confused expressions on Christianity and the Christians. 
In any case, it shows the close connection between the 
Alexandrian Jews and the Egyptians, since both are 
described as mathematicians and Chrestians. And is it 
not possible that the reference to Chrestus and the 
Chrestians has been too hastily applied to Christus and 
the Christians? And may not the absurdity be due 
simply to the fact that the writer of the letter could see 
no clear distinction between the two religions and their 
deities ? The passage in Tacitus may, in that case, be 
due to a similar misunderstanding. The " Chrestiani," 
who were detested by the people for their crimes, and to 
whom the historian ascribes all the abominations that 
have invaded the metropolis, are not Christians at all, 
but followers of Chrestus, the scum of Egypt, the 
" apaches " of Borne, a " multitudo ingens," a real " object 
of hatred to the human race," people on whom Nero could 
very easily cast the suspicion of having set fire to Home, 
and whose admission that they had done so is not in the 
least unintelligible. Hence the "people" rightly called 
them " Chrestians," which was, as we saw, an ambiguous 
name, and a not uncommon epithet in Home at the time. 
Tacitus, about the year 117, confuses them with the 
Christians of his time, just as the Emperor Hadrian does 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 53 

in his letter to Servius fourteen years afterwards. Having 
done so, he felt compelled to add the explanatory words, 
" autor nominis ejus Christus," etc., and describe them 
as coming from Judaea, confusing the Alexandrian Jews, 
who were identified with them, with the Jews of Pales- 
tine. In this way the expression " appellabat " (instead 
of "appellat"), which seems to Harnack "remarkable," 
becomes intelligible. Possibly there is question of some 
popular phrase used in Nero's time which Tacitus himself 
did not understand ; possibly, however, the sentence in 
which Christus is said to have been the author of the 
name of Christians and the whole reference to Judaea do 
not come from the pen of Tacitus at all, but are due to a 
later Christian, who identified the Chrestians of Tacitus 
with the Christians ; and thus the whole Neronian perse- 
cution and the supposed confirmation of the historicity of 
Christ by the ROMAN historian are based upon a monstrous 
misunderstanding. If that is so, a new light is thrown 
also on the " Chresto impulsore " of Sulpicius. Chrestus 
was not only the name of the god, but, as frequently 
happened in ancient religions, also of his chief priest. 
May it not be that the tumults of the "Jews" under 
Claudius really refer to rebellious and criminal elements 
of the Egyptian rabble in the metropolis, under the 
influence of their chief priest, ending in the expulsion of 
the Jews from Rome? This, of course, is not the only 
plausible explanation of the passage. We need only say 
that it is a possible interpretation of what happened. In 
that case, the passage of Tacitus might remain substan- 
tially unquestioned, without proving what it is generally 
supposed to prove namely, the fact of a Neronian perse- 
cution and the existence of an historical Jesus. In this 
way, at all events, we find the simplest solution of all the 
difficulties connected with the passage in Tacitus. 

Those who do not find this interpretation of Annals, 
xv, 44, plausible have still to solve the problem whether 
the Chrestians or Christians of the Roman historian were 



54 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

really Christians in our meaning of the word or were 
distinct from them. Edwin Johnson regards the Chres- 
tians as followers of the "good god" (Chrestus), as the 
Gnostics called their god in opposition to Jahveh, whom 
they looked upon as the perversely conceived creator of 
the Jews. He thus traces the name to a sect, the founder 
of which he considers to have been Simon the Magician, 
flourishing in Rome in the time of Claudius, whose 
members, as representatives of a spiritualised Judaism, 
were very obnoxious to the traditional Jew. 1 He supposes 
that Tacitus transferred to the time of Nero the hatred of 
the Christians which animated the Jews of his own time, 
and thus the Chrestians (Gnostics) were confused with 
the real Christians. Possibly, however, the name is only 
another expression for Messianists, and the Chrestians of 
Tacitus are Jews exalted by eschatological ideas, living in 
expectation of a speedy end of the world by fire, and so 
contracting the suspicion of having set fire to the city. 
They may have formed a " multitude ingens " and 
incurred " the hatred of the human race " by being led 
in their fanaticism to express their satisfaction at the 
burning of the metropolis ; possibly they even took part 
in it. However that may be, there is not the least proof 
in any case of a Neronian persecution of the Christians. 
Even in this case, Tacitus's reference to Christ as the 
founder of the sect rests on a misunderstanding namely, 
a confusion of the most confident of the Jewish Messianists 
with the followers of the Christus who, as Tacitus had 
heard, had been crucified under Pontius Pilatus. 2 

In regard to the significance of Pilate in Tacitus, a 
remarkable hypothesis has recently been put forward by 
Andrzej Niemojewski in his work, Gott Jesus im LicJite 
fremder und eigener Forschungen samt Darstellung der 
evangelischen A stralstoffe, A stralszenen, und A stralsysteme 

1 Antigua Mater, pp. 279-292. 

2 See Joel, work quoted, p. 144 ; also Whittaker, TJie Origins of Chris- 
tianity (2nd ed., 1909), p. 21. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 55 

(1910). According to this, the Pilate of the Christian 
legend was not originally an historical person ; the 
whole story of Christ is to be taken in an astral sense, 
and Pilate represents the constellation of Orion, the 
javelin-man (pilatus, in Latin), with the arrow or lance- 
constellation (Sagitta), which is supposed to be very long 
in the Greek myth, and appears in the Christian legend 
under the name of Longinus, and is in the Gospel of 
John the soldier who pierces the side of Jesus with a 
spear (longche, in Greek) . In the astral myth, the Christ 
hanging on the cross, or world-tree (i.e., the Milky Way), 
is killed by the lance of " Pilatus." Hence, according to 
Niemojewski, the Christian populace told the legend of a 
javelin-man, a certain Pilatus, who was supposed to have 
been responsible for the death of the Saviour. This 
wholly sufficed for Tacitus to recognise in him the 
procurator in the reign of Tiberius, who must have 
been known to the Roman historian from the books of 
Josephus " On the Jewish War," which were destined 
for the imperial house. 1 In point of fact, the procurator 
Pontius Pilate plays a part in the gospels so singularly 
opposed to the account of the historical Pilate, as Josephus 
describes him, that we can very well suspect a later 
introduction of an historical personage into the quasi- 
historical narrative. 

When we take account of these many possible inter- 
pretations of Annals, xv, 44, all of which are as probable 
as, if not more probable than, the customary Christian 
explanation, the narrative of Tacitus cannot be quoted as 
a witness to the historicity of Jesus. We may say, indeed, 
that history has hitherto treated the passage, in view of 
its importance, with an absolutely irresponsible super- 
ficialness and levity. " The non-Christian witnesses," 
says von Soden, " can only be quoted in favour of, not 
against, the historicity of Jesus" (p. 14). The truth is 

1 Work quoted, p. 129. 



56 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

that they prove nothing either for or against ; they prove 
nothing at all. 1 J. Weiss is perfectly correct when he 
says, as we saw previously : " There is no such thing as 
a really convincing witness in profane literature." It is 
true that he is able to console himself for this. " What," 
he asks, " could Josephus or Tacitus do for us ? They 
could at the most merely show that at the end of the first 
century not only the Christians, but their tradition and 
Christ-mythos, were known at Home. When it originated, 
however, and how far it was based on truth, could not be 
discovered from Tacitus or Josephus" (p. 91). The 
orthodox pastor Kurt Delbriick adds : " What does it 
matter whether or no Tacitus wrote it ? He could only 
have received the information, a hundred years after the 
time, from people who had told it to others. It matters 
nothing to us, therefore, whether the passage is genuine 
or not. The historical personality of Jesus Christ is 
proved only by the fact [?] that the earliest Christian 
community recognised its Saviour in him whom it had 
once seen alive. We have no further historical documents." 

3." LUCUS A NON LUCENDO." 

It seems superfluous now to enlarge on the objection 
that, if no pagan writer unequivocally proves the existence 

1 Characteristic of the conduct of our opponents is the way in which 
Otto Schmiedel treats the Roman witnesses. " Tacitus," says this repre- 
sentative of historical theology, " mentions in his Annals about the 
year 116 the execution of Jesus [?] under Pontius Pilate, and the spread 
of his [?] superstitious sect in Judaea and even Rome. A passage in 
Suetonius written about the year 120 (' Nero,' ch. xvi) is to the same 
effect [! ?] ; and the younger Pliny, Governor of Bithynia, in 112 or 113, 
describes in a letter (Ep. x, 96) to the Emperor Trajan the wide spread 
of the Christians in his province and the hymns they sing to their Christ 
as a god [!] . The violent opponent of Christianity, the philosopher 
Celsus, is already [sic] acquainted with the whole literature of the New 
Testament before the year 180, and this literature is unintelligible without 
the person of Christ, with which it is entirely concerned." (Die Haupt- 
probleme der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, 2 Aufl., 1906, p. 13). Notice the 
highly-coloured phrases (the execution of Jesus, the person of Christ !) and 
the word "already," by means of which he tries to convey the impression 
that the witnesses quoted were remarkably early, and therefore deserve 
unlimited confidence. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 57 

of an historical Jesus, at all events none of them ever 
contested it. The objection is futile, because its assump- 
tion is false. The Gnostics of the second century really 
questioned the historical existence of Jesus by their docetic 
conception ; in other words, they believed only in a meta- 
physical and ideal, not an historical and real, Christ. 1 The 
whole polemic of the Christians against the Gnostics was 
based essentially on the fact that the Gnostics denied the 
historicity of Jesus, or at least put it in a subordinate 
position. 

Moreover, how much has survived of the attacks on 
Christianity by its opponents ? Has not the Church 
been careful from the first to suppress or destroy every- 
thing that might endanger its interests ? Did it not burn 
the anti-Christian writings of Porphyry ? Was not the 
valuable library of Alexandria sacrificed to the zeal of 
fanatical monks in the year 391, and were not the 
greatest intellectual treasures of antiquity contained in 
it ? Who can say what evidences against Christianity 
did not perish in it ? Even the work of Celsus, the one 
attack on Christianity of which we have much knowledge, 
is known to us only from Origen's reply to it. This work, 
moreover, belongs to the second half of the second century, 
and is, therefore, incapable of proving anything. 2 Would 
it be remarkable at all that no pagan should take the trouble 
to contest the historicity of Jesus, assuming this to be the 
case ? At the time when the pagan reaction against 
Christianity began namely, in the second century the 
Jesus-story was already firmly rooted in tradition. Like 
the Jews, the pagan writers confined themselves in their 
polemic to the Christian tradition, as they were bound to 
do. To make research in the archives about a subject 

1 See Wolfgang Schultz, Dokumente der Gnosis, 1910. 

2 Yet Origen himself makes Celsus say : "You feed us with fables, and 
cannot give them a shade of plausibility, although some of you, like 
drunken men, who lay hands on themselves, have modified the texts of the 
gospels three or four or more times, in order to escape the criticisms we 
direct against you" (Contra Celsum, II, 26 and 27). 



58 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

was not the practice of ancient historical writers. " There 
was in ancient times," says the ecclesiastical historian 
Hausrath, " hardly any interest in historical truth as 
such, but only in ideal truth. There are very few cases 
in which an ancient historian put himself the question 
what had really happened and what was merely said to 
have happened." Even if anyone had desired to inquire 
into the truth of the gospel "story" and go deeply into 
the subject, he would have been quite unable to do so 
after the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of 
the Jews. 

Finally, was no doubt expressed by pagans as to the 
existence of Jesus because it was firmly established, or 
because at the time when we look for some doubter no 
one really affirmed it ? We await an answer to this 
question. Our opponents ask : If Jesus was not an 
historical personage, how is it that no one ever doubted 
his existence ? We reply with the further question : 
Granting that he was an historical personage, how is it 
that not only does the Talmud never mention him, but, 
apart from the gospels, not a single work belonging to 
the early Christian period gives us any intimate detail 
about the life of this personage? Examine Paul's 
Epistles ! As we shall show in the next chapter, they 
do not tell a single special fact about the life of Jesus. 
Bead the other Epistles of the New Testament Peter, 
John, James, Jude, and the Epistle to the Hebrews and 
the letter of Clement to the Corinthians, the letter of 
Barnabas, the Pastor of Herrnas, the Acts of the 
Apostles, etc. Nowhere in any single one of these early 
Christian documents do we find even the slenderest 
reference to the mere man Jesus, or to the historical 
personality of Jesus as such, from which we might infer 
that the author had a close acquaintance with it. His 
life, as it is described in the gospels, in all its human 

1 Kleine Schriften, p. 124. 



THE ROMAN WITNESSES 59 

detail, seems to have been entirely unknown to these 
authors. His speeches and sayings are hardly ever 
quoted, and where this is done, as in the Epistle of 
James or Acts, they are not quoted as sayings of Jesus. 
We have no feeling whatever that these documents know 
anything of an historical Jesus ; the little that could be 
quoted to the contrary, such as the passage in the 
supposed speech of Peter (Acts, x, 38), is so obviously 
due to a later tampering with the text and so absurd that 
we cannot pay it any serious attention. The earlier 
Christian literature is acquainted with a Jesus-god, a god- 
man, a heavenly high-priest and saviour Jesus, a meta- 
physical spirit, descending from heaven to earth, assuming 
human form, dying, and rising again ; but it knows 
nothing whatever about a merely human Jesus, the 
amiable author of fine moral sentiments, the " unique " 
personality of liberal Protestantism. There is therefore 
nothing in the objection that no one at that time 
questioned the existence of such a person. Those who 
attach importance to such doubts simply assume the 
correctness of the liberal-theological view of the origin 
of Christianity. If this view is false, if the transforma- 
tion of Jesus into an historical person only occurred at a 
relatively late stage (the first half of the second century), 
the absence of any doubt about the historical existence of 
Jesus before that time is quite intelligible. In any case 
it is logically absurd (" lucus a non lucendo ") to deduce 
from the circumstance that no one, apparently, expressed 
any doubt as to the existence of Jesus the fact that he 
actually existed. 

After this complete rejection of the evidence of profane 
literature in regard to an historical Jesus, we need hardly 
linger over the arguments that may be drawn from other 
supposed relics of his time and environment. There is 
still at Treves the holy coat for which the Roman soldiers 
cast lots at the foot of the cross. There is still in the 
Lateran at Rome the stairway which Jesus ascended on 



60 THE ROMAN WITNESSES 

entering the palace of Pilate. Then there are the 
innumerable fragments of the cross pointing to the 
drama of Golgotha, the innumerable holy nails, the 
vinegar-sponge, the veil of Veronica, the shroud in which 
the Saviour was wrapped, the swaddling-clothes of the 
infant Jesus, and, last but not least, the holy prepuce. 
There are indeed plenty of " historical documents " for 
those who wish to believe. They must be sought, 
however, not in literature, but in churches and chapels 
and other "holy places," where they prove their authen- 
ticity by the " blessing " which flows from them into the 
Church's coffers. But we will be content with our survey 
of profane witnesses. The improper use that has hitherto 
been made by theologians of these witnesses entails a 
careful examination. For our part we can only regard 
any attempt to prove the existence of an historical Jesus 
by these supposed profane witnesses as a sign of intel- 
lectual unscrupulousness or lamentable superficiality. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 



THE less evidence we find for the historicity of Jesus in 
profane writers, the greater becomes the interest of those 
who maintain it in a witness by whom the historical 
Jesus is unequivocally affirmed. Such an unequivocal 
witness we have, according to the prevailing view, in the 
so-called Epistles of the apostle Paul. Hence Paul is 
the piece de resistance for the theologian in regard to his 
belief in Jesus. He is the "surest foundation," the 
" unshakable cornerstone," the " irrefragable witness " 
for the fact that a Jesus did really live, and was crucified 
and buried, and rose again from the dead. So convinced 
indeed is historical theology of the absolute worth of this 
witness that it fancies it can silence all scepticism about 
the historicity of Jesus by merely pointing to Paul. It 
seems to think that no one can seriously dispose of the 
testimony of Paul without declaring that the Apostle's 
letters are spurious. We read, for instance, in von 
Soden's work on the Pauline Epistles : " They afford so 
strong a proof of the historicity of Jesus that no one but 
Drews has ever ventured to deny this historicity without 
contesting the genuineness of the Pauline Epistles " 
(p. 29) . The orthodox theologian Beth also observes : 
" In this case Drews must really be charged with 
negligence before the tribunal of his own theory, since 
he admitted the genuineness of some of the Epistles and 
found no reason to doubt the historical existence of Paul. 
In order to attain his end within the limits of his own 
theory and destroy all the evidences for Jesus, he ought 
also to have contested the existence of Paul." 1 

1 Beth, Hat Jesus gelebt?, p. 35. 
61 



62 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

Certainly, it would be simplest to say at once that the 
Epistles of Paul are spurious, and thus destroy the value 
of their testimony to the existence of an historical Jesus. 
This the theologians would assuredly like us to do, because, 
as things are in Germany, the genuineness of at least the 
four chief Epistles (Romans, Galatians, and the two to the 
Corinthians) is so firmly held by them that any doubt 
about it is at once rejected by them as " not to be taken 
seriously." It would thus be an excellent means of 
discrediting the whole tendency of the Christ-myth in the 
eyes of the general public, and of all who swear on the 
word of professors of theology. Who reads to-day Bruno 
Bauer's Kritik der Paulinischen Brief e (1852), in which 
the first attempt was made to show the spuriousness of 
all the Epistles ascribed to Paul ? That inconvenient 
scholar has so long been slighted by theologians, who 
have frightened readers from him by depreciatory remarks 
on his work, that it was thought quite safe to continue to 
ignore him. When, moreover, the Swiss scholar Steck 
concludes, in a thorough and learned investigation, that 
the Epistle to the Galatians is spurious (1888), that is 
merely " an extraordinary perversity of criticism," an 
" instance of pushing radical criticism too far," an attempt 
that one need not linger to refute. On the other hand, 
the criticism of English writers (Edwin Johnson, 
Robertson, and Whittaker) seemed to be quite devoid 
of danger, as few theologians have a command of the 
English language. It is true that in Holland a theo- 
logical school has endeavoured for thirty years to show 
the spuriousness of the Epistles of Paul ; but why should 
that trouble people in Germany? Dutch is a language 
that one has no occasion to learn at the universities. One 
may, therefore, take it for granted that the works of the 
Dutch will not be very seriously studied in Germany. 
Have not the Dutch, in fact, at a " Congress of free 
Christianity and religious progress," thanked German 
historical theologians for the distinguished services which 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 63 

they have rendered to the whole civilised world ? We 
frequently hear that kind of thing. The Dutch savants 
may, therefore, be regarded indulgently when they strike 
a path of their own in their own country and contest 
statements which are taken for granted in Germany. 

It is amusing to read German theologians writing on 
their Dutch colleagues. According to Beth, " the Amster- 
dam writer Loman has very finely shown how one may 
manufacture out of air a proof that Paul was merely 
invented in the second century as a preacher of univer- 
salistic Christianity " (p. 35). According to Jiilicher, it is 
a sign of "uncritical temper" to doubt whether Paul 
wrote the Epistles to which his name is attached a 
temper which, " as soon as it perceives a difficulty, which 
may occur in such documents just as well as in a 
Babylonian brick, cries ' Spurious ! ' and recognises no 
shades of difference"; and he advises it, with equal bad 
taste and foolishness, to consign itself to " work in subter- 
raneous Acheron" (p. 25). Yet these theologians are 
either totally ignorant of, or have only a very superficial 
acquaintance with, the work of the Dutch. This is clear 
when von Soden writes : " No one has yet attempted to 
give us an intelligible account of the origin of these 
Epistles in the second century " (p. 29) ; and J. Weiss 
says : " The Pauline Epistles are, as is known [! ?] , denied 
to the apostle Paul by the Dutch school and by Kalthoff ; 
but there is no plausible hypothesis as to their origin in 
any other way, no chronology of the various strata of the 
Epistles, and no answer to many other questions suggested 
by the denial " (p. 97) . Are Weiss and von Soden ignorant 
of the work of van Manen, whose Romerbrief has been 
excellently translated into German by Schlager (Leipsic, 
1906), while Whittaker has given a careful synopsis of 
his other books in his Origins of Christianity (2nd ed., 
1909) ? And if they are acquainted with him, how came 
they to pen such sentences, seeing that van Manen has 
done in a very thorough manner precisely what they say 



64 

ought to be done by those who deny Paul's authorship ? 
The truth is that historical theology in Germany needs a 
genuine Paul as an indispensable witness to its historical 
Jesus, and it must, therefore, ignore the Dutch and those 
must-be uncritical and confused thinkers who venture to 
dispute the credibility of their witness. 

Historical theology finds the historical Jesus in the 
Pauline Epistles, because it is determined to in fact, 
must find him there, or else the whole of its artificial 
historical construction of the origin of Christianity remains 
in the air without any support. It accepts without scrutiny 
not only the truth of the evangelical accounts of Jesus, but 
whatever Acts says about Paul ; and since it regards Paul 
as the author of the Epistles, it naturally finds it easy to 
see a confirmation of these things in the Pauline Epistles. 
It refers the mentions of Jesus in the Epistles to an 
historical Jesus because, anterior to any inquiry, from the 
gospels it is convinced of his reality ; and it therefore 
never dreams of referring the passages in the Epistles 
which deal with Jesus to any other than their own that 
is, the supposed historical Jesus of the gospels. It regards 
as " unmethodical " any man who would put a different 
interpretation on those passages, because the method 
employed by themselves, and regarded by them as the 
sole correct method, leads to the result that they desire. 
They are, therefore, in a vicious circle in their inquiry 
into the genuineness of the Pauline Epistles and their 
testimony to the historical Jesus. 

As a matter of fact, their assertion that the existence 
of an historical Jesus is the very foundation of the 
Epistles of Paul is not the result, but the assumption, of 
their method. As such it originated, quite independently 
of their method. In all investigation the method is 
directed according to the assumption that is made and 
the end to be attained. But if an inquirer is allowed to 
postulate the existence of an historical Jesus and confirm 
this assumption by his methods, it can hardly be considered 



65 

a sign of partisanship and prejudice to oppose the 
assumption on the ground of facts, and submit that such 
methods can hardly lead to a satisfactory result. Historical 
theology has hitherto endeavoured to interpret tradition 
in the sense of its historical Jesus, and has lost its way in 
a labyrinth of difficulties, contradictions, and insoluble 
problems. We raise the question whether the documents 
may not be better and more simply interpreted in the 
opposite sense, and whether there is any need at all to 
interpret the tradition historically. On which side the 
truth is found cannot be determined by the starting-point 
of the inquiry, but only by showing which interpretation 
best squares with the facts and which can be most 
easily established. In any case our method cannot be 
pronounced wrong because, starting from a different 
assumption, we reach conclusions other than those of 
the theologian ; nor may one charge us with " confusion " 
or appeal against us in the name of " sound " investigation 
and science when our inquiry into the New Testament 
documents leads us to deny the historicity of Jesus, as 
long as it is not proved that our assumption is absurd. 

1. THE PKOOFS OF THE HISTOEICITY OF 
JESUS IN PAUL. 

The starting - point and postulate of the Pauline 
doctrine of salvation is the attitude of man towards the 
law. The law was originally given to men by God for 
their good. It is to teach them what is sinful. It is to 
quicken their consciousness of evil and show them the 
way to become better. It should be to them, as Paul 
puts it, a teacher and breeder of righteousness. In reality 
it has proved a curse to them, and, instead of saving them, 
it has forced them deeper into the slavery of evil and sin. 
God therefore took pity on men, and sent to them Christ, 
his " son," to take from them the yoke of the law. 
Originally a supernatural being, buried in God and 

F 



66 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

co-operating in the creation of the world, Christ, at the 
will of his father, exchanged the glory of heaven for the 
poverty and straits of earth, in order to come upon the 
earth in the form of a slave, a man among men, for the 
redemption of mortals. He gave himself freely, for the 
salvation of men, to death on the cross. What no 
sacrifice had as yet been able to accomplish (a proof of 
the powerlessness of the law), complete delivery from 
sin and from death, which had come into the world with 
sin was attained by the sacrificial death of him in whom 
was concentrated the whole being of humanity. In his 
death he died the death of all. By his resurrection he 
triumphed over death. By the rejection and casting aside 
of his human nature in death the God-man resumed his 
essential divinity. In discarding the veil of flesh and 
returning to his father in transfigured form, as a pure 
spirit and being reunited to him, he set men an example 
how they were to attain their true nature by the sacrifice 
of their carnal personality. More than this, indeed, he 
thereby obtained for them redemption from the bonds of 
the flesh, lifted them above the limitations of earth, and 
secured for them eternal life in and with the father. 
Man has only to put himself in personal relation to him, 
to unite intimately with him, to accept and assimilate the 
belief in his redeeming death (to crucify himself with 
Christ), and show this by a love of his fellow-men, and 
he will have a share in Christ's exaltation, and so attain 
redemption. The law therefore ceases to prescribe his 
conduct. By his union with Christ he is dead to the law 
and released from its dominion. The demons, under 
whose curse he had hitherto lain, have now no power 
over him. The life of which he has but a limited share 
here on earth will be enjoyed under better conditions in 
heaven. Christ is therefore the " mediator " between 
God and man, destroying the barrier between them. He 
is the " saviour " who heals the maladies of earthly life, 
corporal or spiritual, the " deliverer " from the darkness 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 67 

of earthly existence and death, the " God-man," the true 
foundation and end of all religious action. 

Any man who reflects impartially on this theory will 
find it difficult to believe that there is question here of an 
external historical process, an historical individual. The 
idea comes closest, perhaps, to that of the Gnostics, and 
especially close to that of the Alexandrian religious 
philosopher Philo, an older contemporary of Paul, and 
his principle of the Logos, which we afterwards find 
blended with the Christian belief in the gospel of John. 
Christ seems to be in Paul another name for the idea of 
humanity, a comprehensive expression of the ideal unity 
of all men, set forth as a personal being. Just in the 
same way Philo conceives the fullness of the divine ideas 
personified in the shape of the Logos, the " mediator," 
" son of God," and " light of the world," and blends the 
Logos with the ideal man, the idea of man. And just as 
Christ is made flesh and assumes human form, so Philo's 
Logos descends from his heavenly sphere and enters the 
world of sense, to give strength to the good, and save men 
from sin, and lead them to their true home, the kingdom 
of heaven, and their heavenly father. 

This idea of the redemption of men by the " son " of 
the most-high God is very ancient, and was widespread 
in early times. In the Babylonian religion the redeemer 
Marduk is sent upon the earth by his father Ea to save 
men from their spiritual maladies and moral perversity. 
The Greeks worshipped similar " sons " of God and 
benefactors of men in Heracles, Dionysos, and Jason or 
Jasios (the Greek name for Jesus), who likewise had a 
heavenly commission to redeem men, and were taken 
back into the circle of the blessed after a premature and 
impressive death. The idea flourished chiefly, however, 
in the religions of nearer Asia and North Africa, among 
the Phrygians, the Syrians, and the Egyptians, who 
worshipped in their Attis, Adonis, and Osiris (respectively) 
a god who suffered, died, and rose again for humanity, 



68 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

and expressed their belief in mysterious cults which are 
known as " mysteries." Among the Mandaeic or Gnostic 
sects, which cultivated a peculiar form of piety, apart 
from the official religion, about the beginning of the 
present era, and to which, in a general sense, the Jewish 
sect of the Essenes seems to have belonged, the belief in 
a divine saviour and mediator was the very centre of their 
religious theory. Moreover, the Jewish apocalyptic of 
the time, which expected a speedy end of the world, 
leaned towards this view, and combined the form of the 
mediating God with its idea of the Messiah, the expected 
saviour of Israel from its political and social oppression. 
In the prophet Daniel the redeemer is described by the 
Gnostic name of "the son of man." Further, this idea 
of a suffering and dying saviour was unmistakably con- 
nected with the course of nature. It arose from the 
sight of the fate of the sun or the moon, as they rose and 
sank in their paths, as they waned, disappeared, and rose 
again, in conjunction with the experience of the death 
and resurrection of nature every year. It was expressed 
by a belief in a divine son and saviour, who sacrifices 
himself for his fellows, incurs death, descends into the 
underworld, struggles against the demons of hell, and 
after a time rises again from the tomb and brings a new 
life to the world. Even the Israelitic prophets are not 
uninfluenced by this idea. In the fifty-third chapter of 
Isaiah we encounter the form of the so-called " suffering 
servant of God," who is mocked, despised, and sacrificed 
in expiation of the sins of his people, but rises again in 
glory, and is borne to the splendours of heaven. It is 
true that in this the prophet immediately contemplated 
the fortune of his people, which he conceived as the 
general expiatory victim for the rest of mankind. But, 
as Gunkel rightly observes, the figure of a suffering and 
dying saviour is discerned in the background in this 
passage. Gressmann has even traced the fifty-third 
chapter of Isaiah to a " ritual song " derived from the 



69 

mysteries, which was sung by the initiated on the day of 
the death of God, and has clearly pointed out the mystery- 
character of the whole passage. 1 

(a) Simple Proofs. The "Christ-myth" regards the 
fifty-third chapter of Isaiah as the real germ-cell of 
Christianity. On it is based the Christian belief that the 
Messiah, whom the Jews expected, has already appeared 
in human form and servile lowliness, and sacrificed 
himself for the sins of his people, in order that thus the 
condition might be fulfilled without which the desired 
" kingdom of God " could not be established : the 
complete fidelity to the law and sinlessness of the 
Israelites. 2 In the fact of his previous earthly appearance 
they saw a guarantee of the speedy coming of the Messiah 
in all his heavenly majesty, and the combination of the 
figure of the " servant of God " with that of the " just 
man " in Wisdom* confirmed the belief that the judgment 
of the world was near, at which the just would be raised 
to heaven and the godless thrust into eternal damnation. 
Paul enlarged and deepened this idea by introducing it 
into a more general frame of ideas and deducing its 
metaphysical consequences. He gave greater clearness 
to the pagan idea of a suffering, dying, and risen saviour- 
god, which must have been familiar to the apostle from 
his Cilician home, and gave it life by infusing into it the 
spirit of the old mystery-religions. 4 It follows from this 
that the supposed historical fact of a crucified Jesus is 
not absolutely necessary to explain the origin of the 
Paulinian doctrine of redemption, and the question arises 
whether the letters which have come down to us under 
the name of Paul contain any reference whatever to 
an historical Jesus. The negative reply, which the 

1 Der Ursprung der israelitisch-jildischen Eschatologie, 1905, p. 322. 

2 Isaiah Iviii ; Ix, 21. 

3 ii, 12 ; iii, 10 ; iv, 7 ; and xiii, 5. 

4 This mystery-character of Paulinism has lately been put beyond 
question by Beitzenstein in his essay, Die hellenistiscJien Mysterien- 
Religionen, 1910. 



70 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

" Christ-myth " gives to this question, has caused great 
agitation among the theologians. 

What, they cry with one voice, Paul knew nothing of 
an historical Jesus ! His Jesus Christ was merely an 
"imaginary being," the mere "idea" of a God-man 
sacrificing himself ! There is no historical personage, no 
real event, behind the fact of the death on the cross and 
resurrection of Jesus Christ which is the central part of 
the Pauline system ! Is not Christ described by Paul as a 
real man? "Does not," von Soden asks, " his theory of 
redemption through Christ imply his full humanity? 
God sent his son in the form of sinful flesh on account of 
sin, and condemned sin in the flesh." 1 The apostle speaks 
of the "blood" of Christ, by which men are justified. 2 
" In vivid language he represents to the Corinthians the 
entrance of Jesus into human existence in order to 
stimulate them to contribute generously to the funds of 
the early Christians (2 Cor. viii, 9) : ' For ye know the 
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, 
yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his 
poverty might be rich '; and even more vividly he repre- 
sents him to the Philippians as the model of humility 
(ii, 5) : ' Let this mind be in you, which was also in 
Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought it 
not robbery to be equal with God ; but made himself of 
no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, 
and was made in the likeness of man.' How can Drews 
say in face of such passages (to which Weiss adds the 
allusions to the righteousness [Rom. v, 18, 19], the love 
[Gal. ii, 20] , and the obedience [Phil, ii, 8] of Jesus) : 
' The whole earthly life of Jesus is entirely immaterial 
to Paul'?" (p. 32). 

I must, unfortunately, adhere to my view in spite of 
the instruction given to me by theologians. What do 
the quoted passages prove ? " That Paul is thinking 

1 Romans viii, 3. 2 Romans iii, 25. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 71 

of the humanity of his Christ, not in the sense of an 
ideal humanity, but of a real human existence " (Soden, 
p. 31). Certainly. But where and when did I question 
this ? It is precisely the essential point of my theory that, 
in the early Christian and Pauline view, the real coming of 
the Messiah is preceded by his appearance in human shape. 
According to Isaiah, it is not due to the powerlessness of 
God, but to the sins of the people, that the fulfilment of 
the promise of a Messiah is delayed (Is. Iviii; Ixx, 1). In 
the fifty-third chapter the prophet had spoken of the 
" servant of God " who takes on himself the sins of men, 
and thus " justifies " them. If this figure of the servant 
of God and just man is associated with that of the 
Messiah, and the idea is inspired that the servant of God 
is to be understood, not in the sense of the people of 
Israel generally, but as a single individual who offers 
himself for men, in the same way as in heathenism 
originally one individual has to sacrifice himself annually 
for all, it would naturally follow that the individual who 
thus sacrificed himself would not merely have human 
features, but would have to be a real man, otherwise he 
could not expiate the sins of men. None but a man 
could, according to the general feeling of antiquity, take 
on himself the guilt of other men. Only as man was 
" the just " in Solomon's Wisdom conceived, and he calls 
himself "servant of God" (ii, 13) and represents God as 
his " father " (xvi, 18). Indeed, even the suffering servant 
of God in Isaiah was so unmistakably described as man 
that the most resolute elevation of his figure to the 
supernatural and metaphysical world, such as we find in 
Paul, could not obliterate his human features. The 
question is, whether these features are those of a real, 
that is to say historical, man : whether the heavenly 
being which must appear as a man according to Paul 
came upon the earth at a definite moment in history. 

Are the above-mentioned characters of the Christ-figure 
such that they necessarily imply an historical personality? 



72 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

A man must be absolutely wrapped in theological 
prejudice not to recognise that they are wholly borrowed 
from the figure of the servant of God in Isaiah : his love, 
his righteousness, his humility, 1 his obedience, his poverty, 
and even his position under the law (Gal. iv, 4), which 
follows at once, in the case of a Jew, from his obedience, 
and was for Paul the necessary condition for releasing 
from the law the rest of men who were subject to it (v) . 
This, as a matter of fact, was pointed out to the 
" historical " theologians by their colleague Wrede. 
" Only in one contingency," he says, " would the human 
personality of Jesus be a model : if the doctrine of Christ 
represented an idealising and apotheosis of Jesus in such 
wise that the historical reality were visible through it. 
This is certainly not the case [!] . Are the humility, 
obedience, and love which abound in the son of God, 
when he exchanges heaven for the miseries of earth, a 
reflection of the compassionate and humble man Jesus ? 
Has Paul transferred the various traits of the character 
of Jesus to the heavenly form ? This has been affirmed, 
but it is not true. Christ is said to be obedient because 
he did not oppose the divine will to send him to save the 
world, although it cost him his divine existence and 
brought him to the cross ; humble, because he stooped to 
the lowliness of earth : and love must have been his 
motive, since his incarnation and death were the greatest 
service to mankind. Such service is naturally inspired 
by the desire to serve by love. All these ethical quali- 
fications are, therefore, not derived from an expression of 
the moral character of Jesus, but originate in the apostle's 
own theory of redemption"' 1 



1 This is also shown by the first Epistle of Clement, in which the servant 
of God of Isaiah is represented as the "prototype " of Christ, and it is said : 
" If the Lord [!] was so humble, what ought we, who have been brought by 
him under the yoke of his grace, to be ? " (xvi, 17). It is very remarkable 
that Clement, instead of appealing to the behaviour of Jesus to show his 
humility, relies on the prophet Isaiah. 

2 Paulus, Religionsgesch. Volksbtteher (1904), p. 85. Cf. Martin Bruckner : 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 73 

But Paul represents Christ as "of the seed of David " 
and born " of a woman " (Rom. i, 3). Is not that a plain 
reference to an historical individual ? Unfortunately, 
descent from David is merely one of the traditional 
features of the Messiah, and consequently of his human 
appearance ; and, if the Pauline Christ was to be a man 
at all, from whom could he have been born if not from 
" a woman " ? If Paul seems to lay stress on this trivial 
and necessary circumstance, he may have been induced 
to do so by Gnostic tendencies, which aimed at dissociating 
the figure of the saviour from all earthly limitations, and 
turning it into a purely metaphysical conception ; and he 
therefore did not merely make use of a familiar Jewish 
expression " born of a woman " which occurs more 
than once in the Bible. 1 We may add that at least 
liberal theologians are, to a great extent, convinced that 
the " historical " Jesus did not descend from David, and 
that the genealogies in the gospels, which purport to 
prove such descent, are later fabrications made with a 
view to establishing the Messianic character of the 
Christian saviour. Thus Paul would have departed from 
the truth if he had sought to represent Christ to the 
communities as a descendant of David ! 

I need not linger to show that the many passages 
which mention the death and crucifixion of Jesus do not, 
as Weinel affirms, prove the historicity of Christ. When 
von Soden emphatically calls attention to the vividness 
with which Paul saw the details of the life of Jesus, 
pointing to the first Epistle to the Corinthians (xv, 4), in 
which he expressly [!] says that Jesus was buried after 
death (p. 32), we must say that the procedure of our 
opponents becomes rather humorous. Weinel charges 
me with saying that theologians based the historicity of 
Jesus on the account of the appearances of the risen 

Der Apostel Paulns als Zewge wider den Christusbild der Evangelien in 
Protest. Mvnatshefte, 1906, 355 /. 
1 Job xiv, 1 ; Matthew xi, 11. 



74 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

Christ (1 Cor. xv, 5), and concealing the fact that it was 
the preceding verses, which speak of the death and burial 
of Jesus, that were in question (p. 108). I must admit 
that I had had too high an opinion of the theological 
method of reasoning. The theologians really base the 
historicity of Jesus on his death and burial in spite of 
Isaiah liii, 9, where there is question of the grave of the 
servant of God. In fact, they even base it on the (equally 
historical !) fact of the resurrection, which, according to 
Beth, is one of those " features " [sic] of Jesus " which 
presuppose his humanity" (p. 36). What idea must 
theologians have of the mental level of their readers when 
they expect to make an impression on anyone with such 
quotations as these from Paul ! 

All that is shown by these arguments adduced by the 
theologians is, as I said before, that they assumed the 
existence of the historical Jesus and the truth of the 
gospel narrative before they "began their research ; on this 
account they at once, in the most uncritical way, refer 
every passage in which Paul touches upon the humanity 
of Christ to an historical individual, and interpret in the 
sense of the gospel narratives everything that is said 
about this man. Weiss says that the " impartial reader " 
must recognise " the historical fact of the incarnation and 
the crucifixion " as the foundation of Paul's creed. The 
word " historical " is, however, an addition for which as 
yet no justification has been found in the text ; to say 
nothing of the circumstance that hitherto no one, except 
a theologian, has regarded the incarnation of a god as an 
" historical fact." In fact, Paul himself, according to 
Weiss, was not in a position to conceive " purely a real 
and entire incarnation of the heavenly Christ," and he 
rightly points to Phil, ii, 7, where the apostle does not 
say : " He became man and was a man in his whole 
behaviour," but " he was made in the likeness of a man, 
and was found in fashion as a man " an expression that 
has really a distinctly docetic colour, and suggests the 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 75 

Gnostic conception of the Saviour. 1 Moreover, Paul's 
creed portrays not only the man Jesus, but also the man 
Adam. These two " men " complete each other, according 
to Paul : just as all men sinned in Adam, the first man, 
so they will be saved by the second man, Christ. Anyone 
who regards Paul as taking the man Christ to have been 
an historical fact must consistently also take Adam to 
have been an historical reality, as Dupuis rightly observed. 2 
When the orthodox hesitate to admit the historicity of 
Adam, because it is too much out of harmony with 
modern views, they deprive themselves of the second 
support on which they base their belief in the historical 
Christ and his work of redemption. For Paul one is just 
as much a reality as the other. This should be enough 
to open the minds of our theologians to the character of 
this "reality " and its relation to history. 

The " evidence " which we have so far examined from 
Paul for the existence of an historical Jesus may be best 
described as " simple." We may trust that it is not very 
seriously advanced by its supporters, and is rather intended 
for the edification of the general public. Probably they 
will also not attach much weight to the fact that Paul 
reminds the Galatians (iii, 1) how "before their eyes 
Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among 
them." That we have here nothing more than an 
expressive delineation of the dying Christ and the need for 
him to die for men, in order to move the hearers, just as 
we find commonly done in a modern sermon in order to 
turn souls to Christ, or at the most, according to Eobertson, 
a scenic or pictorial representation of the crucified God 
after the fashion of the ancient mysteries, and not an 
historical statement, it is surely unnecessary to prove. 
" If I set forth anything before the eyes of anyone," says 
Kurt Delbriick, " there can be no question of a super- 
natural and ideal being " (p. 15). In that case Delbriick 

1 J. Weiss, Christus, die Anfange des Dogmas, Relg. Vplksbilcher, 1909, 
p. 62. 2 L'originede tons Us cultes, 1794, ix, 13 ff. 



76 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

must regard the paintings of the Last Judgment and 
Hell by Michael Angelo and Eubens as reproductions of 
concrete realities, or take the ghost of Hamlet's father to 
be a real personality. But the most remarkable deduction 
from this phrase in Galatians is drawn by J. Weiss in 
his work against Wrede, Paulus und Jesus (1909), when 
he says in regard to the " cross of Christ " : "As he 
[Paul] utters these words, he has before his mind not 
merely the concrete image of the crucified but all the 
accompanying circumstances, which must have been 
known to him. Crucifixion is a Roman punishment ; 
he must therefore have known that the higher Roman 
authority, the procurator, was involved (!). And as, on 
the other hand, he doubtless (!) regarded the Jews as 
bearing the guilt of the death (there is no proof!), he 
must have had some idea of the course of the trial. 
Indeed, the figure of the crucified must (!) have been 
before his mind in more than mere outline ; it must have 
had colour, expression, vivid features otherwise he could 
not have ' set it forth evidently ' [in the Greek text, 
" before the eyes "] to the Galatians. The expression un- 
deniably (!) implies a living, expressive, pictorial descrip- 
tion of the event, not merely an impressive communica- 
tion of the fact" (p. 11). That is what I should call 
" exegesis." I will permit myself one question : whether 
the representation of the suffering just man in Isaiah 
(c. liii) would not suffice to enable one to " set before 
the eyes " the terrible death of the servant of God ? 

Perhaps someone will quote " the twelve " to whom 
Paul refers (1 Cor. xv, 5) as a proof that Paul knew some 
particular facts about the life of the historical Jesus. 
Since the work of Holsten, 1 however, it has been an open 
secret in the theological world that " the twelve " is a 
later interpolation in the original text. The theologian 
Brandt also regards "the twelve" as "a very unsafe 

1 Das Evangelium des Paulus, 1880, p. 224 ff. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 77 

part of the Pauline text," and believes it to be a " later 
addition " ;* and Seufert is convinced that it is possibly a 
"very early (?) gloss" which was inserted in the text in 
order to support with the authority of the apostle Paul 
the later idea of twelve apostles. 2 

(6) The Appearances of the Risen Christ. Generally 
speaking, Paul's whole account of the appearances of the 
risea^ Christ, as we find it in 1 Cor. xv, is not of a 
character to afford any evidence of the historicity of 
Jesus. Historical theology professes to attach much 
importance to this account. It sees in it some confirma- 
tion of the theory that in the resurrection we have 
merely " visions " on the part of the Saviour's disciples. 
In fact it regards it as the earliest account of the resur- 
rection that we have, and having great authority because, 
in their opinion, Paul relies directly on the testimony of 
the " primitive community " for the truth of his state- 
ment. That, they say, is what we must understand 
when the apostle writes : "I delivered unto you first of 
all that which I also received, how that Christ died for 
our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was 
buried, and that he rose again the third day according to 
the Scriptures," etc. But does not the phrase " according 
to the Scriptures " point rather to the fact that there 
is no question here of an historical reminiscence, but a 
belief based on writings namely, Isaiah liii, and possibly 
also Jonah ii, 1, and Ho sea vi, 2 ? s The story of Jonah 
itself seems to have been originally only an historical 
embodiment of the myth of the dead, buried, and risen 
Saviour ; in fact, Jesus refers to the prophet Jonah in 
this sense (Matt, xii, 40). 

1 Die evangel. Geschichte und der Ursprung des Christentums, 1903, 
pp. 14, 418, and 421. 

2 Der Ursprung und die Bedeutung des Apostolatus in der christl. 
KircJie der ersten drei Jahrhunderte, 1887, pp. 46 and 157. 

3 " After two days will he revive us : in the third day he will raise us 
up, and we shall live in his sight " a passage relating to the people of 
Israel, but which may have been taken by Paul to refer to the Messiah. 
Compare Hausrath, Jesus u. d. neutestamentl. Schriftsteller, i, p. 103, 1908. 



78 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

And even if the apostle was assured by the " primitive 
community " of the truth of these writings, what does it 
prove as regards the historicity of the person seen in such 
visions ? It has been said that his enumeration of the 
appearances of Jesus has a documentary and " catalogue - 
like " character. But where do we find in this " catalogue " 
the women to whom, according to Matthew (xxviii, 9) and 
Mar k (xvi, 9), the risen Jesus first appeared? And how 
can Paul say that Jesus appeared to the whole of the 
twelve apostles, as there were only eleven after the death 
of Judas, as Luke (xxiv, 33) assumes ? And how does 
James come into the matter, since, according to the 
gospels, Jesus is supposed to have had no relations with 
his brother, and they do not speak of any such appear- 
ance to him? If some of the more exalted religious 
folk saw visions and believed they perceived the bodily 
presence of the " servant of God," does that give any 
proof of historicity ? 

Naturally, Weiss says, and for proof he refers us to 
the vision of Paul, of which he says : " The appearance 
must have shown him features in the heavenly figure by 
which he recognised Jesus of Nazareth, or as I should 
say in accordance with 2 Cor. v, 16 recognised once 
more" (p. 108). Yet Acts says nothing about Paul 
perceiving a definite form ; it speaks only of a flash of 
light which fell upon the apostle from above, and a voice 
which he believed he heard. 1 That is enough to ruin the 
deduction which Weiss makes in his book against Wrede 
(p. ix) that Paul must have had a personal knowledge 
of Jesus. We should have just as much right to regard 
the pagan gods, Serapis or Asclepios, which were believed 
to appear to their devotees in a state of ecstasy, as 
historical personalities because the devotees regarded 
them as such. Weiss himself assumes, in fact, that the 
transfiguration of Jesus is based upon a statement of 

1 ix, 5 ; xxvi, 14. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 79 

Peter. Jesus is supposed to have appeared to his 
disciples in the company of Moses and Elias. But how 
did Peter know that the two were Moses and Elias ? 
He had no personal knowledge of them. 

Von Soden, however, believes that the visions mentioned 
in 1 Cor. xv show that the figure which appeared to the 
disciples must have had quite definite and recognisable 
features, by which it could be known as that of Jesus. 
But Paul does not say that Jesus appeared to them in 
bodily form. If the appearance of a light to him was 
enough to point to Jesus, may it not have been the same 
with the others, as they all hourly expected the coming 
of the Saviour ? Von Soden quotes the " more than 
500 brethren," who must all have seen him at some 
time, and of whom many still lived (1 Cor. xv, 6). It 
seems that he has never heard of apparitions of the 
Virgin Mary, which have been seen simultaneously by 
many of the faithful, though not one of them had 
the least personal acquaintance with her. He also 
thinks that the apparition to the five hundred may be 
brought into line with the Pentecostal occurrence in 
Acts. Unfortunately, this Pentecostal phenomenon was 
quite certainly not an historical event ; the account of 
the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is quite understood 
from Joel ii, 28, where we read : " And it shall come to 
pass that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh ; and 
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old 
men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see 
visions. And also upon the servants and upon the hand- 
maids in those days will I pour out my spirit. And I 
will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth," etc. 
But even if the Pentecostal phenomenon had ever really 
taken place, it would not help the opinion of Herr von 
Soden, because it would only follow that the five hundred 
saw an appearance of light, not a definite figure of Jesus. 
That is more probable, it is true, than that a definite 
form was seen simultaneously by five hundred men. For 



80 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

that reason we might regard the account in Acts as 
earlier than, if not the source of, the narrative of Paul. 
That would mean that the episode of the five hundred is 
not given in its original form in Paul, and we should then 
have all the more reason to regard the whole reference to 
the appearances of the risen Jesus in the fifteenth chapter 
of 1 Corinthians as an interpolation. The effort to put 
Paul's vision of Christ on a footing with those of the 
other apostles suggests that the whole thing is a fictitious 
account inserted in the interest of the apostle of the 
Gentiles, or, rather, of a common preaching of the apostle 
of the Jews and Paul. 1 

At any rate, the proof that Paul owes his account 
of the apparition of the risen Christ to the primitive 
community does not help at all, as there is no more 
guarantee of the historical reality of the figure seen in 
a vision by a number than by an individual. It merely 
shows the failure of theologians to find any support for 
their belief in an historical Jesus in 1 Cor. xv. 

(c) The Account of the Last Supper. Now we come 
to 1 Cor. xi, 23. Here we find the familiar words : " For 
I have received from the Lord that which also I delivered 
unto you, that the Lord Jesus the same night in which 
he was betrayed took bread," etc. This passage, J. Weiss 
assures us, is "fatal" to the whole theory of Drews, "because 
in it we not only have the words of the Lord quoted, but 
a perfectly definite event in the life of Jesus is described 
in all its details, which show a full knowledge of the story 
of the passion : the night, the betrayal, and the supper 
before the arrest" (p. 105). Certainly ; unless the words 
in question were not written by Paul, but are a later 
interpolation in the text. I was not the first to suggest 
this. The theologians Straatman 2 and Bruins 8 rejected 
Paul's account of the Last Supper, and concluded that it 

1 C/. W. B. Smith, Ecce Deus (1911), p. 155 ff. 

2 Kritiscte Studien, 1863, pp. 38-63. 
8 Theol. Tijdschr., xxvi, pp. 397-403. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 81 

does not fit the context. Steck 1 describes it as modified 
for liturgical use, and Volter 2 regards the whole eleventh 
chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians as an inter- 
polation. Van Manen also has questioned the passage 
relating to the Last Supper in Paul, on account of its 
lack of connection with the preceding passage, and has 
said that it gives one the impression of being a collection 
of sayings from various sources for the purpose of dis- 
placing the love-feasts of the community, on account of 
the unseemly things that happened, and replacing them 
by the festival of the Last Supper. 3 To these we may 
add Schlager, the translator of van Manen's JRomerbrief, 
who has raised objections to the passage; 4 and Smith also 
has recently declared the passage to be an interpolation. 
It is not therefore foolish to speak about an interpolation 
in 1 Cor. xi, 23. 

Historical theology generally regards the passage in 
Corinthians as the earliest version we have of the words 
used at the institution of the Supper. But a particu- 
larly striking reason that prevents us from seeing in 
Paul the oldest tradition of the words at the Last 
Supper is their obviously liturgical form and the mean- 
ing which the apostle puts on the words. It is very 
remarkable that Paul and Luke alone represent the 
Lord's Supper as instituted by Jesus in "memory" of 
him ; Mark and Matthew know nothing of this. They 
have a much simpler test than the other two. Hence, 
Julicher, against Weizsacker and Harnack, rightly doubts 
whether the Supper was " founded " by Jesus. 8 " He did 
not institute or found anything ; that remained for the time 
when he came again into his father's kingdom. He made 
no provision for his memory ; having spoken as he did in 
Matthew (xxvi, 29), he had no idea of so long a period 

1 Galaterbrief, p. 172. 

2 Theol. Tijdschr., xxiii, p. 322. 

3 Whittaker, work quoted, p. 168. 

i Theol. Tijdschr., 1889, Heft. I, p. 41. 
5 Theol. Abhandlungen fttr C. Weizsacker, 1892, p. 232. 

G 



82 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

of future time" (p. 244). Paul, therefore, according to 
Jiilicher, indicates a later stage of the tradition in regard 
to the first Eucharist than Mark and Matthew, and the 
earliest tradition does not make Jesus show the least sign 
that he wishes these material actions to be performed 
in future by his followers (p. 238). If this is so, the 
words of the institution of the Supper were interpolated 
subsequently in the text of Paul, as the liturgical use of 
them in the Pauline sense became established in the 
Church, in order to support them with the authority of 
the apostle, and the words, " For I have received from 
the Lord," serve to give further proof of their authentic 
character ; or else the first Epistle to the Corinthians 
was not written by the apostle Paul, as, in spite of 
Jiilicher, it is difficult to believe that Paul could at 
so early a stage give a version of the Lord's Supper 
that differed so much from that of the " primitive com- 
munity." 

Or may we believe that Paul had a more reliable 
account of the words of Jesus than the evangelists, 
and has used it in 1 Cor. xi, 23 ? If so, how came 
Matthew and Mark to change the original words of 
institution, and how could this alteration be preserved 
in their text and received by the Church? Even in 
their text the words of institution do not give an 
impression of history. Their mystic sense is in 
flagrant contradiction to what theologians so appre- 
ciatively call the " simplicity " and " straightforward- 
ness " of the words of Jesus. " How were the disciples 
to understand that they eat the body of Christ who was 
about to be put to death, and drank his blood, though 
not the blood present in his body, but that about to be 
shed soon ? " asks the theologian A. Eichhorn in his 
work Das Abendmahl (1898), and he declares that the 
whole story of the institution of the supper, as we have 
it in the Synoptics and Paul, is an historical impossibility. 
" All the difficulties disappear if we adopt the later point 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 83 

of view of the community." 1 The mysticism of the 
festive supper cannot have been instituted by Jesus, but 
is based on the cult of the Christian community, and was 
subsequently put in the mouth of its supposed founder. 2 

In that case 1 Cor. xi, 23, etc., is of no value as a 
proof of the historicity of Jesus. 

Let us examine the passage more closely. " The same 
night in which he was betrayed" was he betrayed? 
The thing is historically so improbable, the whole story 
of the betrayal is so absurd historically and psycholo- 
gically, that only a few thoughtless Bible-readers can 
accept it with complacency. Imagine the ideal man 
Jesus knowing that one of his disciples is about to betray 
him and thus forfeit his eternal salvation, yet doing 
nothing to restrain the miserable man, but rather con- 
firming him in it ! Imagine a Judas demanding money 
from the high-priest for the betrayal of a man who walks 
the streets of Jerusalem daily, and whose sojourn at 
night could assuredly be discovered without any treachery ! 
" For Judas to have betrayed Jesus," Kautsky says, " is 
much the same as if the Berlin police were to pay a spy 
to point out to them the man named Bebel." 3 More- 
over, the Greek word paradidonai does not mean 
" betray " at all, but " give up," and is simply taken 
from Isaiah liii, 12, where it is said that the servant of 
God "gave himself unto death." The whole story of 
the betrayal is a late invention founded on that passage 
in the prophet, and Judas is not an historical personality, 
but, as Robertson believes, a representative of the Jewish 
people, hated by the Christians, who were believed to 
have caused the death of the Saviour. Further, the 
" night," in which the betrayal is supposed to have taken 
place, has no historical background. It merely serves to 

1 Work quoted, p. 19. See also A. Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu 
Wrede (1906), p. 152. 

' 3 See Feigel, Der Einfluss des Weissagungsbeweises und anderer Motive 
auf die Leidensgeschichte (1910), p. 50. 

3 Der Ursprung des Christentums (1910), p. 388. 



84 

set in contrast the luminous figure of Jesus and the dark 
work of his betrayer. 1 Hence Paul cannot have known 
anything of a nocturnal betrayal on the part of Judas, 
and one more " proof " of the historicity of Jesus breaks 
down. 

Theologians humorously comment on the fact that all 
passages are rejected as interpolations which do not 
square with the theory of those who deny the historicity 
of Christ, and say that this is a wilful procedure. It is, 
however, quite certain that they themselves would at 
once abandon the passages, and find as many arguments 
against their genuineness as they now do in favour of it, 
if this suited their general system. 

This much is certain: If 1 Cor. xi, 23, etc., is not an 
interpolation in the text, there are no interpolations at all 
in the New Testament. We can understand how difficult 
it is for theologians to give up the passage on account of 
the very thin thread which unequivocally connects the 
teaching of Paul with the gospels, but we cannot think 
much of their perspicacity when they find no fault with 
the passage. In earlier verses (17-22) of the chapter Paul 
is not dealing with the so-called last supper, but with the 
love-feast, or agape, which the Christians celebrated in 
common. From the twenty-third verse on the apostle 
speaks suddenly of the supper, and then in verses 23 and 
24 returns to the love-feast. 

(d) The "Brothers" of the Lord. We have now to 
deal with " the brothers of the Lord " (1 Cor. ix, 5 and 
Gal. i, 19). Here the theologians believe that they play 
their trump. If Jesus had had corporal brothers, he 
must certainly have been an historical individual, and it 
is untrue that Paul knew nothing of any individual human 
feature of Jesus. " Have we not," says 1 Cor. ix, 5, 
" power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other 
apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas ? " 

1 See Feigel, work quoted, pp. 47 and 114. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 85 

If it could only be proved that Paul had in his mind 
corporal brothers of Jesus and not merely " brothers " in 
the sect ! Weinel contests this on the ground that it is 
unlikely that a sect would call itself " brothers " of the 
God of the cult. Has he never heard of brothers of 
St. Vincent, brothers of Joseph, sisters of Mary, etc. ; 
that is to say, religious brotherhoods whose members call 
themselves after the saint whose service they have 
entered, and who correspond to the heroes of the cult 
in the ancient mysteries ? " But in the case of Paul," 
he replies, " we can prove that he does not give that 
name to Christians ; he calls them ' brethren ' or ' brethren 
in Christ'" (p. 109). 

Now, in Romans (viii, 44) those who are impelled by 
the spirit of God are called " sons of God." Christ, 
as " son of God " in a special sense, is called " the first- 
born among many brethren " (29), and his followers are 
called "heirs of God" and "co-heirs with Christ" (17), 
from which it follows that they must at the same 
time be " brothers of Christ." That is, says Weinel, a 
figure, not a Christian name. But why should not the 
followers of Jesus receive a figurative name from Paul, 
when the " brotherhood " of the sect is only figurative, its 
heads are figuratively called " fathers," and the members 
only figuratively their sons? In Matthew (xxviii, 10) 
Jesus himself calls his followers his " brothers," and in 
Mark (Hi, 35) he says : " Whoever shall do the will of 
God, the same is my brother and my sister and mother." 
In John (xx, 17) he so names the disciples because they 
have as " father " the same God as he. In fact, in the 
second century Justin, in his dialogue with the Jew 
Trypho, speaks of the apostles as " brothers of Jesus " in 
the highest sense (p. 106). Why, then, should not Paul 
have spoken of the followers of Jesus as his " brothers " ? 
Because he usually calls them "brothers in Christ"? 
But just as, on the one hand, the apostle expresses the 
intimate connection with Christ by the continence of the 



86 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

faithful (Gal. iii, 26-29), and also by absorption in the 
life-atmosphere of the Supreme, so he also speaks, on the 
other hand, of Christ living in the faithful and bringing 
them into closer relationship, or making brothers of them. 
If in one place he does not confine himself to one mode 
of expression, why should he do so in another ? Those 
who think otherwise must have been convinced before- 
hand that Jesus is an historical individual in Paul, 
and that his brothers can only be brothers in the flesh. 
As a matter of fact, the partisans of the historicity of 
Jesus merely reject the figurative interpretation of the 
expression " brothers" because they assume that historicity 
in advance. 

According to Weinel, it follows that a special group of 
men must be named here, because in 1 Cor. ix there is 
question of the prerogatives of the apostles, and the 
brothers of the Lord are associated with them as apostolic 
men (p. 109). But was it really a " prerogative" of the 
apostles to be married ? Were the other members of the 
sect besides the apostles and the corporal brothers of 
Jesus forbidden to take a wife ? Might not Paul just as 
well have wished to say that in all things he felt himself 
in the same position as the other members of the com- 
munity, and therefore his apostolic dignity could not be 
contested once he had won a right to that name by his 
missionary work ? No, says J.Weiss; the "brothers of 
the Lord " cannot be ordinary Christians. " Why were 
they named between the apostles and Cephas, and why 
especially were the apostles not so called? " (p. 106). On 
the other hand, why is Cephas mentioned after the 
" brothers of the Lord," seeing that he was one of the 
apostles ? And were the Corinthians so familiar with the 
brothers of Jesus that Paul could appeal to them and 
their conjugal relations ? Are we not rather to under- 
stand by the " brothers of the Lord," if they do really 
mean a special group of men distinct from the twelve 
apostles, the seventy disciples whom Jesus is said (Luke x) 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 87 

to have sent on missionary journeys ? We might point 
to the fact that James, the " brother of the Lord," is 
distinct from the twelve apostles according to the apostolic 
constitutions, and is counted by Eusebius 1 among the 
seventy a view which Hegesippus also seems to hold in 
Eusebius. 2 There is no answer to these questions. At 
the best the passage remains obscure. 

Other students, who do not need the " brothers of 
Jesus " in support of their belief in an historical Jesus, 
have dropped 1 Cor. ix, 5 altogether, and declared that it 
is meaningless or is an interpolation. Schlager, for 
instance, considers it spurious because, in his research, 
all passages in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, with 
one single exception (iv, 4), which speak of Christ as " the 
Lord " have proved to be interpolations. " Missionary 
journeys of the brothers of Jesus," he says, " are not 
known to us from any other source, and are in themselves 
improbable." That is undoubtedly correct. Imagine 
Simon, Jude, or Joseph (Joses) going out with the 
announcement that their brother Jesus was the long- 
expected Messiah, and would soon come again in the 
clouds of heaven ! Steck also is surprised to hear of mis- 
sionary journeys on the part of the brothers of the Lord, 
" who, as patriotic Jews, are not easy to imagine away 
from Palestine," and he is reminded of Gal. ii, 12, where 
it is merely said that Peter went to Antioch, without any 
further historical explanations. 8 And Bruno Bauer 
exclaims : " What an idea that Peter and the twelve 
apostles should be known to the Corinthians as travelling 
about ! It was not until the second century that they 
were known as such to everybody. And how incongruous 
the question is whether they have not the same right to 
marry as the apostles, and that Barnabas should be 
brought into closest intimacy with the person of Paul 
and represented to the Corinthians as co-ordinate with 

1 Comment. Is. xvii, 5 ; Eccl. Hist., I, 12 ; II, 1 ; VH, 19. 

2 Eccl. Hist., II, 25. 8 Galaterbrief, p. 272. 



88 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

Paul ! As if he had gone to Corinth with the apostle of 
the Gentiles!" (p. 52). 

The partisans of an historical Jesus naturally connect 
his " brothers " with Mark vi, 3, where James, Joses, 
Juda, and Simon are mentioned as sons of Mary and 
brothers of Jesus. But Steudel has rightly called our 
attention to Mark xv, 40, where the same Mary, who is 
supposed to be the mother of James and Joses, is not 
represented as the mother of Jesus, and, consequently, 
James and Joses cannot be regarded as his brothers. We 
have evidently to deal with two independent accounts, and 
there can be no hesitation in saying which was the 
earlier ; and, therefore, the belief that Jesus had brothers 
in the flesh is seen to be a secondary and legendary 
growth. 1 

Here we also have the answer to the question about the 
brotherhood of James (Gal. i, 19). I have endeavoured 
to show that this also is merely brotherhood in the sect, 
and that the position of honour which James is supposed 
to have had in the community, according to Acts xv, 13 
and Gal. i, 19 and ii, 9 and 12, was due to his personal 
qualities. " It was reserved for Drews," says von Soden, 
" to explain the phrase ' brothers of the Lord ' in the 
sense that James was the best Christian, the most like to 
the Lord" (p. 31). The learned writer evidently forgets 
that Origen had said long ago that James was called the 
brother of the Lord, not so much on account of blood- 
relationship with Jesus, or because -he had grown up with 
him, as because he was faithful and virtuous. 2 It is well 
known what an important part James played in the 
second century in the Jewish-Christian communities, as 
we see especially in Hegesippus (in Eusebius's Ecclesias- 
tical History, II, 25), precisely on account of his piety. 
He was at the same time the patron of the Ebionitic 



1 Steudel, Im Kampf um die Christusmythe, pp. 95 and 114. 

2 Contra Celsum, I, 47. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 89 

party, which formed a garland of legends about his 
head. Is it so improbable that the pious brother in the 
sect was early elevated to the position of " brother of 
the Lord " in a special sense, and that the name 
originally only a title of honour was used by Paul in 
that sense ? 

On the other hand, it is not impossible that " the 
brother of the Lord " is a later interpolation in Gal. i, 19, 
whether because a particular group of Christians wished 
to bring the venerated saint as close as possible to 
Jesus by making him a brother in the flesh, or, as 
Schlager (p. 46) thinks, in order to distinguish more 
clearly the various individuals who were named James. 
As Hegesippus says : " The community distinguished 
the apostle James, the brother of the Lord, by the name 
of ' the just,' from the time of Christ to our own days, 
as there were several with the name James." 1 It 
was quite natural, when they began to regard Jesus 
generally as a human being, to give him human 
features, and convert the inner spiritual relationship 
to him of various distinguished brethren into a bodily 
relationship ; at times this might be done in order to 
vindicate the complete reality of the incarnation of Christ 
against the growing Gnostic spiritualism. Lastly, can 
it be a mere coincidence that the three " pillars " at 
Jerusalem agree in name with the three privileged 
disciples of the Lord who are present with him at the 
raising of the daughter of Jairus (Mark v, 57; Luke vii, 
51), follow him to the mountain of transfiguration (Mark 
ix, 2 ; Luke ix, 28) , and are permitted to be the witnesses 
of his agony in face of approaching death in Geth- 
semane? Was not the " pillar " apostle James originally 
identical with James the son of Zebedee and brother of 
John, and only afterwards converted into the " brother 
of Jesus " ? 

1 Eusebius, Eccl. Hist., as above. 



90 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

Let it not be said that it is mere " subjective arbitrari- 
ness " to find here another interpolation in Paul. No 
theologian doubts that the Pauline Epistles have been 
greatly interpolated. Which passages have been inserted 
later can be decided only by the general theory which one 
gathers from the text. And that the theory of the theo- 
logians is the only correct one, that the Jesus of the Pauline 
Epistles was an historical individual, has not yet been 
proved by anything we have found in the Epistles. 
What is there to prevent us, then, from interpreting in 
our own sense, or excluding, so singular and isolated an 
expression as " the brother of the Lord " in Galatians ? 

As is well known, much scandal was early occasioned 
in Essenian-Ebionitic circles by the statement that Mary 
was married to Joseph and had several children, and it 
was said that James was not a real brother of Jesus. 
Some regarded him as a step-brother a son of Joseph 
by an earlier wife; others thought the "brothers of the 
Lord " were foster-brothers or cousins of Jesus, or 
attempted to explain them away as equal to the apostles. 
This led to an identification of James the Just, the 
" brother of the Lord," with James the son of Alphaeus, 
as he is briefly called in the Synoptics and in Acts, 1 as we 
find in Jerome, for instance ; others identified him with 
James the son of Zebedee, the brother of John ; and these 
views have found representatives among recent theolo- 
gians. In the Synoptics the " brothers " have apparently 
a purely symbolical significance. They serve the purpose 
of emphasising the distinction between spiritual and 
bodily relationship, and illustrating the truth that 
belonging to Jesus does not depend on external cir- 
cumstances and the accident of birth, but simply on 
faith. 2 Even in John (vii, 5) the brothers, who do not 
believe in him, are opposed to the twelve and their 



1 Matt, x, 3 ; Mark iii, 18 ; Luke vi, 15 ; Acts i, 13. 

2 Matt, xii, 46; Mark iii, 31 : Luke viii, 19. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 91 

unhesitating recognition of his Messiahship (vi, 69), 
which also recalls the antithesis of the Jews, who, in 
spite of their racial connection, would hear nothing of 
Jesus and his intimate followers. It is only in the later 
Acts of the Apostles (i, 14) that the brothers of Jesus 
appear as followers of him, although not a word is said 
in explanation of their sudden conversion. This does not 
dispose us to place very much confidence in the references 
of the New Testament to the brothers of Jesus, and when 
Weinel says in regard to James, " It is all so simple, 
intelligible, and straightforward that it needs a good deal 
of art to evade the testimony of the connection of Gal. i 
and 1 Cor. ix and the terminology" (p. 116), I can only 
reply that, in spite of all my efforts to understand James 
from the writings of theologians, I have never been able to 
get at the real nature of the man. And as I find that 
others have had the same experience, it does not seem to 
be due to any defect on my part that the James-problem 
seems to me hopeless; every attempt to throw light on the 
obscure problem fails. 1 To base on an isolated passage 
such as the reference to " the brothers of the Lord " in 
Paul a belief in the historical character of Jesus seems 
to me too "simple"; I am not modest enough to do 
it. I can only see in the " brothers of Jesus," as 
far as they are supposed to have been brothers in the 
flesh, and in his parents, the carpenter Joseph and Mary, 
mythical figures ; in the case of Mary especially, because 
the name is customary among the saviour-gods of ancient 
times, and the other supposed actions of the Biblical Mary 
agree with those of the mothers (or sisters) of those 
deities. 2 

(e) The " Words of the Lord." We now come to 
what are called the " Words of the Lord," the introduc- 
tion of which into the Pauline Epistles is supposed to 



1 See also Steudel, Wir Gelehrten vom Fach, p. 69. 

2 See The Christ-Myth and Robertson's Christianity and Mythology. 



92 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

prove that the apostle had some knowledge of Jesus. 
First there is 1 Cor. vii, 10 : " And unto the married I 
command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife 
depart from her husband : but and if she depart, let her 
remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband ; and 
let not the husband put away his wife." The latter part 
of this precept agrees in substance (not verbally) with 
Matthew v, 32, and xix, 9, and other parallel passages. 
But does that mean that it is a quotation of a saying 
of the historical Jesus ? The prohibition to part with a 
wife is sound Kabbinism. In the Talmud we read : " A 
wife must not be dismissed except for adultery " 
(Gittin, 90) ; " The altar itself sheds tears over the man 
who sends away his wife " (Pessach, 113) ; " The man 
who separates from his wife is hateful to God " (Gittin, 
90 6). We even read in the prophet Malachi : "Let 
none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth. 
For the Lord, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth 
putting away" (ii, 15). How, if the apostle had this 
passage in mind in his prohibition of divorce, and by the 
" Lord " in whose name he speaks, are we to understand 
" the God of Israel " ? Does not Paul regard the Old 
Testament as the word of revelation of the "Lord," 
whose pointing to Christ had hitherto been hidden, but 
is now revealed in the eyes of the faithful? 1 And when 
the apostle appeals in 1 Cor. ix, 14, to a command of the 
" Lord " for the right of the apostles to live by the 
gospel, we may be disposed to recall Matthew x, 10 : 
" The workman is worthy of his meat "; but we should 
have just as much right to think of Deut. xviii, 1, where 
it is written : " The priests the Levites, and all the tribe 
of Levi, shall have no part nor inheritance with Israel : 
they shall eat the offerings of the Lord made by fire, and 
his inheritance," and xxv, 4 : " Thou shalt not muzzle 
the ox when he treadeth out the corn." Paul himself 

1 2 Cor. iii, 14. 



93 

sometimes (1 Cor. ix, 9) appeals to this word of the law. 
In order, therefore, to explain Paul's " Words of the 
Lord " we have no need to suppose, as I did previously, 
that they are rulSs of the community, which are clothed 
with an authoritative significance by ascribing them to 
the patron of the religious body ; it is enough to appeal 
to the Old Testament. 

If, however, we are to understand by the " Lord " in 
Paul, not the " God of Israel," but Jesus, there is still no 
security whatever that the words in question are not 
interpolations. " References to the words and deeds of 
the life of the historical Jesus are," says Schlager, " so 
infrequent in the Pauline writings that, whenever they 
occur, we have to ask ourselves whether it is not the 
reflectiveness of a later period, which was accustomed to 
rely on the evangelical literature, that introduced the 
authority of Jesus into the text" (p. 36). What is to 
prevent us from supposing that the reverse often took 
place also, and that words and phrases from the Pauline 
Epistles were afterwards put in the mouth of the Jesus 
of the gospels ? 

Von Soden, also, finds it remarkable that the " Words of 
the Lord " in Paul are not found, or not found in the same 
form, in the gospels. That is especially true of 1 Thessa- 
lonians iv, 15 an Epistle which is usually regarded as 
genuine by historical theologians : " For this we say unto 
you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive 
and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent 
them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall 
descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the 
archangel, and with the trump of God ; and the dead in 
Christ shall rise first : then we which are alive and 
remain shall be caught up together with them in the 
clouds, to meet the Lord in the air ; and so shall we ever 
be with the Lord." The passage recalls Mark xiii, 26, 
especially in view of the subsequent warning to watch, 
but differs from it in important points. Here we have 



94 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

an excellent illustration of the way in which " Words of 
the Lord" came into existence. For some of the most 
distinguished critical representatives of historical theology 
(Holtzmann, for instance) are convinced that the thir- 
teenth chapter of Mark is in the main an apocalyptic 
leaflet of the time of the Jewish War, shortly before the 
year 70 ; more probably, as Graetz believes and Lublinski 
has recently shown, a leaflet by a Palestinian Christian 
of the time of Bar-Kochba. 1 These " Words of the 
Lord " are merely the sayings of individuals who felt 
the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and believed that their 
utterances during the ecstatic condition came directly 
from "the Lord"; and sometimes, as in the case we are 
discussing, they were introduced afterwards into the New 
Testament. 2 

Such being the state of things, it is utterly futile to 
claim that, because certain words and phrases of the 
Pauline Epistles harmonise with others in the gospels, 
Paul is repeating the words of the historical Jesus. The 
late H. Holtzmann, in his attempt to refute my state- 
ment in the Christ Myth that Paul seemed not to be 
acquainted with any sayings of Jesus, hastily put together 
a number of such words from the apostle's Epistles, and 
no doubt others will be found now that attention has 
been drawn to them. There is, however, as I said, no 
disproof whatever in this, for the simple reason that most 
of these words are of such a nature that we cannot say 
whether the gospels took them from the Pauline Epistles, 
or the Epistles owe them to the gospels. On the one 
hand, even according to theologians, the gospels are 
repeatedly found to contain Pauline ideas ; on the other, 
one can very easily see how it would be to the interest of 
the Church to discover the ideas and words of Jesus in 



1 Wernle, Die Quellen des Lebens Jesu, 1905, p. 58 ; Das werdende 
Dogma vom Leben Jesu, 1910, pp. 76 and 101. 

2 Steudel, Wir Gelehrten vom Fach, p. 37 ; Iin Kampf um die Christus- 
mythe, p. 56. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 95 

Paul, in order to bridge over the remarkable gulf between 
the two. Moreover, a great part of these particular words 
of Jesus, especially of the more important, have nothing 
distinctive about them to show that they were uttered by 
Jesus only. 

This is true, in the first place, of Romans ii, 1 : 
" Wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest 
thyself" (cf. also xiv, 4). The saying is supposed to 
suggest Matthew vii, 1 : " Judge not that ye be not 
judged." But the resemblance is so slight and the 
saying so commonplace that Paul himself may have 
been the author of it. It is written in the Talmud 
(Pirke Aboth, i, 6): "Judge only good of thy neigh- 
bours," and (Sanhedrim, 100) : "As a man measures, 
with the same standard shall he be measured." It is the 
same with Romans ii, 19. When the apostle exclaims to 
the law-proud Jew, " Thou art confident that thou 
thyself art a guide of the blind," there is no necessary 
connection with Matthew xv, 14, and xxiii, 16 and 24, 
where Jesus pronounces his woes over the Pharisees, as 
the figure is too pertinent and familiar to prove anything. 
In Romans ix, 33, Paul describes his gospel of justification 
by faith as "a stumbling-block and rock of offence." 
This at once sends theologians to Matthew xxi, 42, where 
it is written : " The stone which the builders rejected, 
the same is become the head of the corner." Whereas 
in this case Jesus himself appeals to the Scriptures, and 
there is no reason whatever why Paul also, when he 
reproduced the words, should not have in mind Is. viii, 14, 
and xxviii, 16. In Romans xii, 14, we find : " Bless them 
which persecute you; bless, and curse not." That, of 
course, must be based on the words of Jesus in Matthew 
v, 44 : " Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, 
do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which 
despitefully use you and persecute you." It is, however, 
written in Psalm cix, 28 : " Let them curse, but bless 
thou " ; and the Talmud says : " It is better to be wronged 



96 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

by others than to wrong " (Sanhedrim, 48) ; " Be rather 
with the persecuted than the persecutors" (Babamezia^S) ; 
and the oldest manuscripts of the gospels (Sinaiticus and 
Vaticanus) do not contain the words of Jesus at all. In 
the same way we dispose of Romans xii, 21 : " Be not 
overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good " (c/. also 
Wisdom, vii, 30). 

In Romans xiii, 7, we read : " Bender therefore to all 
their dues : tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to 
whom custom"; and this is paralleled by Matthew xxii, 21 : 
" Bender therefore unto Caesar the things which are 
Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's "; but 
we also read in the Talmud (Shekalim iii, 2 ; Pirke 
Aboth iii, 7) : " Everyone is bound to discharge his obliga- 
tions to God with the same conscientiousness as his 
obligations to men. Give unto God what belongs to 
him." In Romans xiii, 8-10, we have the precept of 
mutual charity : " He that loveth another hath fulfilled 
the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, 

Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal and if there 

be any other commandment, it is all comprehended in 
this saying namely : Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 
thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour : therefore 
love is the fulfilment of the law " (cf. also Galatians v, 14). 
Here the source seems to be Matthew xxii, 40, where 
Jesus tells the Scribe, who asks him which is the greatest 
commandment in the law, that it is the love of God and 
one's neighbour, and adds : " On these two command- 
ments hang all the law and the prophets." But Hillel 
also is said to have told a Gentile who asked him to teach 
the whole law while he stood on one leg : " What dis- 
pleases thee, do thou not to any fellow-man ; that is the 
whole of our teaching " (Shabbat, 31). In Romans xiv, 13, 
Paul warns his reader to give no scandal to his weak 
brother (also 1 Cor. viii, 7-13). Here we are referred to 
Matthew xviii, 6-9, where Jesus pronounces his woes on 
those who give scandal : " Whoso shall offend one of these 



THE WITNESS Otf PAUL 97 

little ones which believe in me, it were better for him 
that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he 
were drowned in the depth of the sea." But, apart from 
the fact that this prohibition of scandal is too natural and 
obvious for Paul to need to derive it from the words of 
Jesus, it is written in the Talmud : " Better were it for 
the evil-minded to have been born blind so that they 
might bring no evil into the world " (Tanchuma, 71), 
and " Whoso leads his fellow-men into sin acts far worse 
than if he took away his own life" (Tanchuma, 74). 

In 1 Cor. xiii, 2, Paul speaks of the faith that " moves 
mountains." But that he was referring to Matthew 

xxi, 22: "If ye have faith, and doubt not ye shall 

say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou 
cast into the sea; and it shall be done," seems very 
doubtful in view of the fact that the phrase about re- 
moving mountains was quite common among the rabbis 
as an expression of the power of the discourse of a teacher, 
and might easily be transferred to express the power of 
faith (Berachoth, 64 ; Erubim, 29). The other phrases 
that are quoted under this head are of no importance. 
If it is objected that a comparison of the parallel passages 
shows that the composition of the sayings of Jesus is 
more distinguished for "originality" than that of the 
words of Paul, such originality proves neither that they 
are earlier nor that they were uttered by Jesus. It is just 
as conceivable that the words of the apostle received their 
greater freshness and force by being afterwards fitted into 
the peculiar frame of the gospels as that Paul himself took 
them from the gospels, as Steck, for instance, is disposed 
to think. 1 Hence, the concordances with the gospels in 
Paul prove nothing whatever as regards the historicity of 
Jesus, and would not if they were more numerous than 
those we have quoted. 



1 Pp. 163-72. Cf. E. Hortlein, "Jesusworte bei Paulus?" in the Prot. 
Monatshefte, 1909, p. 265, and Bruckner, work quoted. 

H 



98 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

2. PAUL NO WITNESS TO THE HISTOKICITY 
OF JESUS. 

We must, therefore, acquiesce in the view of Wrede and 
M. Bruckner, which is also presented in the Christ-Myth, 
that Paul was not concerned with the earthly life of 
Jesus, and his idea of Christ was formed independently 
of an historical Jesus. " Of the ' life ' of Jesus," says 
Wrede, "one single event was of importance to him : the end 
of life, the death. For him, however, even this is not the 
moral action of a man ; indeed, it is not an historical fact 
at all for him, but a superhistorical fact, an event of the 
supersensual world." 1 Wrede therefore doubts whether 
the "disciple of Jesus" properly applies to Paul, if it is 
meant to express his historical relation to Jesus. " We 
need not repeat it : the life-work and living figure of 
Jesus are not reflected in the Pauline theology. There 
can be no doubt about this fact. He of whom Paul 
professed himself the disciple and servant was not the 
historical human being Jesus, but another." 

This admission on the part of so distinguished an 
expert as Wrede is naturally very unwelcome to liberal 
theologians. It has brought into play a large number 
of theological pens, eager to weaken Wrede's remarks, 
represent them as exaggerations, and make them harmless. 
" Attempts at reconciliation," J. Weiss rightly calls these 
efforts in his work Paulus und Jesus, in which he 
emphatically opposes Wrede, and endeavours to find 
better arguments to prove the close connection between 
Paul and Jesus. Jiilicher also has published a volume 
in the " Religionsgeschichtlichen Volksbiicher," entitled 
Paulus und Jesus (1907), to correct the heresy of Wrede. 
In this he has endeavoured, with more rhetoric than force, 
to explain the agreement and the difference between Jesus 
and his apostles, and to prove that Paul was not indifferent 
to the personality of Jesus. " The ' Lord,' the supreme 

1 Paulus, pp. 85 and 95. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 99 

master, was not shown to him by the apostles, but by 
God alone; but what the Lord had once taught, com- 
manded, and instituted on earth could [sic] be learned by 
Paul only from men. The friendly co-operation of Paul 
with other Evangelists, such as Barnabas and Mark, who 
assuredly did not possess such remarkable exclusiveness, 
makes it impossible that the gospel-story should have 
remained substantially unknown to Paul." Who can fail 
to recognise here the method which the liberal theologian 
regards as the only " scientific " method namely, to 
assume precisely what has to be proved the connection 
of Paul and the " primitive community " with an historical 
Jesus'? It is, of course, more than improbable that, if 
Peter and Barnabas and all the others knew any details 
about Jesus, Paul should not have heard them. But the 
only fact in the matter is that the apostle's letters show 
no trace whatever of such knowledge. What is the value 
of an argument which tries to prove the historicity of the 
gospels by means of the Pauline Epistles, and the historical 
character of the Pauline references to Jesus by similar 
references in the gospels ? We ask : Is there anything in 
the Pauline Epistles which compels us to infer from them 
the existence of an historical Jesus ? Did the writer of 
these Epistles know anything in detail of the events which 
the gospels describe as historical ? We cannot be put off 
with the assurance : Yes, he must have known of them ; 
that is to say, if things fell out precisely as the New 
Testament writings say that they did which is the thing 
to be proved. 1 

1 In his pamphlet Hat Jesus gelebt ? Jiilicher seems to deny that there 
is any difficulty here at all, and appeals from those who deny Jesus to the 
" judicious historian," who must, of course, be a theologian. It is true 
that he generally agrees with Wrede : " The nucleus of the gospel is for 
Paul the superhistorical element in the appearance and fate of Jesus and 
the superhuman in it." "But," he asks, " ought one to expect in him a 
lively interest in the details of the historical greatness and the human 
personality of Jesus ? " Then we have the pronouncement of the " judicious 
historian." " One can only explain the appeal of those who deny Jesus to 
Paul and his successors as witnesses against the historicity of Jesus by 
their complete inability to get from their own minds into that of a man 



100 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

We do not, of course, mean that Paul ought to have 
taken all his ideas from the words of Jesus. But we 
ought to find the influence of the historical Jesus some- 
where in the thoughts and words of Paul, especially as he 
often treats of things which are prominent in the teaching 
of Jesus. But that he never appeals to any distinctive 
acts of " the Lord," that he never quotes the sayings of 
Jesus in the gospels as such, and never applies them, even 
where the words and conduct of Jesus would be most 
useful for strengthening his own views and deductions 
for we must ignore what has been said in refutation of 
this statement all this is for us a certain proof that Paul 
knew nothing of Jesus. We should like to have it 
explained how a man who has the authority of " the 
Lord " on his side in a heated conflict with his opponents 
(on the question of the law, for instance), and for whom 
the mere mention of it would suffice to silence his 
opponents, instead of doing so, uses the most complicated 
arguments from the Scriptures and the most determined 
dialectic, when he might have acted so much more 
simply. Why, for instance (Gal. iii, 31), does he not 
recall that Jesus also had discussed the Jewish laws about 
food, in order to convince Peter that he is wrong in 
avoiding the tables of the Gentiles ? Why does he not 
mention that the Jews crucified Jesus on the Passover, 
the chief solemnity, and had thus themselves shown that 
the law was not absolutely valid ? He has not himself 

who lived 1,900 years ago that is to say, the inability to think, judge, 
and reason historically." We reply : It is only the complete inability 
to put themselves in the frame of mind of a man who is convinced that 
God's son, the second God, wandered on earth in human form and died on 
the cross only the complete obsession of theologians in the ancient way 
of thinking, which will not permit them to see the wood for the trees, and 
suffers them to say that such a man had no interest in the earthly life of 
the God. Steudel has said all that need be said on the matter on the 
occasion of the Berlin debate, and it is unnecessary to return to it. 
"When Paul says," Jiilicher continues, "that Jesus, after a poor human 
life, is taken from the circle of disciples to heaven by the death of a 
criminal, having given [?] them instructions in regard to the new Church, 
has he given up the personality of Jesus in favour of a mystic figure ? " 
Who will gauge the depths of that sentence ? 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 101 

seen the personal conduct of Jesus, like the disciples at 
Jerusalem. He knew his deeds and words only at second 
hand, and may therefore not have had them sufficiently 
vivid in his mind to quote them frequently. But certain 
leading features and fundamental principles of the life of 
Jesus such as the above, which affected his own propaganda, 
he ought to have known and used. If he knew of an 
historical Jesus, it remains the most insoluble of problems 
why he made no use of the knowledge. 

Let us not be told that Paul's letters are " occasional 
papers," and the apostle had no opportunity to speak 
more fully about Jesus. This phrase of Deissmann, 
"occasional papers," is one of those with which theo- 
logians conceal from themselves and others the difficulty 
of the problem. These letters, swarming with dogmatic 
discussions of the most subtle character, are merely 
occasional papers, so that the apostle could not be 
expected to betray any acquaintance with the historical 
Jesus ! It is the same sort of science as that which, in 
order to get out of a difficulty, would persuade us that 
Paul had spoken a good deal of Jesus in his oral discourses, 
and so did not return to the subject in his letters. This 
sort of " psychology " does not impose on us, and we find 
it nothing less than pitiful when Weinel sorrowfully 
confesses : "I myself once regarded the question in this 
false light " (namely, that there is little or nothing about 
Jesus in Paul) ; and then adds : " What Paul says about 
Jesus and his words is little when measured by the 
standard of a gospel, and little also if it is thought that 
a Paul ought to base all his thoughts on the words of 
Jesus. It is, however, not enough to find the existence 
of Jesus convincingly in the Pauline Epistles ; the very 
words of Jesus are found in Paul at every important 
stage [!] ; and there are not only quite a number of 
details which Paul knows and transmits [!] , but all the 
prominent features of the preaching and nature of Jesus 
are preserved for us in Paul. There is, therefore, a great 



102 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

deal, if the Epistles are not approached with the old preju- 
dice, and if we remember that they are all occasional papers 
and never have reason to speak expressly about Jesus " 
(p. 16). 1 This pronouncement is on the same high level 
as that of Feine, who says that Paul has " taken great 
pains to obtain a clear and comprehensive picture of the 
activity and personality of Jesus." 1 

We must, therefore, regard the effort of theologians to 
disprove any statement that Jesus Christ is not an his- 
torical personality in Paul as a complete failure. Any 
attempt to find proof of the historical existence of Jesus 
in the Pauline Epistles is futile from the mere fact that 
the gospels are used to check the contents of the Epistles, 
although they are supposed to have been written after the 
Epistles. A proof could be found in the Epistles only if 
they unequivocally pointed to the Jesus of the gospels. 
As this is not the case, and the relevant passages have 
first to be interpreted by means of the gospels and 
explained in the same sense as they, it is absurd to quote 
the Pauline utterances on Christ as evidence for the 
gospel Jesus, and pretend that the historicity of Jesus is 
proved by the apostle. Such proof runs in a vicious 
circle, and is no proof at all. The frantic efforts of 
theologians to discover the historical Jesus in the Pauline 
Epistles merely show, if they show anything, the impossi- 
bility of quoting Paul as a witness to the historicity of 
Jesus. 

3. THE QUESTION OF GENUINENESS. 
The Pauline Christ is a metaphysical principle, and his 
incarnation only one in idea, an imaginary element of his 
religious system. The man Jesus is in Paul the idealised 
suffering servant of God of Isaiah and the just man of 
Wisdom an intermediate stage of metaphysical evolu- 
tion, not an historical personality. When we admit this, 

1 See, on this, Krieck, Die neueste Orthodoxie und das Christusprobkm, 
1910, p. 47. a Jesus Christum und Paulus, 1902, p. 229. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 103 

we remove the chief obstacle that has hitherto prevented 
theologians from studying seriously the question of the 
spuriousness of the Pauline Epistles. What they have said 
on the subject up to the present shows anything but an 
unprejudiced inquiry into the matter. Historical theology 
has need of genuine Pauline Epistles, in order to base on 
them its belief in an historical Jesus, and therefore they 
must not be spurious. But how are they going to prove 
that they are genuine ? There are no non-Christian 
witnesses. The silence of Philo and Josephus about an 
apostle who is supposed to have thrown the Jews into 
excitement over the whole earth (Acts xxiv, 5), to have 
been persecuted by them with the direst hatred, and to 
have been dragged into court more than once, involving 
the highest Jewish and ROMAN authorities, has not yet 
been explained by our opponents. What about Christian 
witnesses ? There are " enough of them," says J. Weiss. 
Unfortunately, what the theologians bring forward such 
as the letter of Clement to the Corinthians, on which 
Weiss relies have long been shown to be unreliable by 
the Dutch, especially by Loman, 1 Van Manen, and Steck. 2 
There is no proof of the existence of Pauline Epistles 
before Justin, and it remains an open question whether 
Justin had any knowledge of such Epistles. Papias also is 
silent about Paul's'Epistles, even at a point where he would 
have been bound to mention them if he had known them. 8 
It is also a matter for reflection that as early as the second 
century there were heretical sects, such as the Severians, 
who declared that all the Epistles of Paul were spurious. 
(a) Emotional Arguments for the Genuineness. We 
can, therefore, only seek to prove the genuineness of the 
Pauline Epistles by internal arguments, by philological 
considerations or analysis of their style. But how we can 
in this way establish that the Epistles really were written 



1 Quccstioiies Paulines. 2 Oalaterbrief, p. 287. 

3 Eusebius, EccL Hist., Ill, 40. 



104 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

by the apostle Paul, and belong to the middle of the first 
century, seeing that we have no independent specimens of 
Paul's writing, it is difficult to say. When a philologist 
like Wilamowitz infers the genuineness of the Epistles 
from their vivid and personal style, and says, categorically, 
" This style is Paul, and no one else," 1 we merely have 
one more proof of the dependence of our whole science on 
theology. How does the philologist know the character 
and personality of Paul if not from the Epistles issued 
under his name ? He therefore finds the test of genuine- 
ness in the Epistles themselves ; and when he discovers 
that the Epistles naturally meet this test, he thinks that 
he has established their genuineness. "A standard is 
used," says Van Manen, " which has been taken from the 
Epistle or Epistles whose genuineness is in question, and 
students proceed as if the picture of the apostle of the 
Gentiles which they owe to tradition, to descriptions by 
third persons, or to their own research, was obtained 
apart from the Epistle or Epistles to which it is applied. 
They exclaim : Paul to the life ! They recognise one 
feature after another. But what have they really proved ? 
They have merely hoaxed themselves." 2 

But what about the " powerful personality," the " unin- 
ventible originality," the " soul " that lives in the Epistles ? 
When our opponents can find no other argument, they 
have naturally to rely on the originality, the uniqueness, 
the impossibility of inventing the style of the Epistles. 
On this point we find von Soden, Jiilicher, Weiss, and all 
the rest in full agreement. " Then the general impression 
made by the Epistles," exclaims J. Weiss, ecstatically 
we almost see him with his eyes raised to heaven and his 
hand laid on the text of Paul " this richness of tones and 
shades, this extraordinary originality any man who cannot 
feel it convicts himself of great uncultivation of literary 
taste and judgment " (p. 100). 

1 Kultur der Gegenw., I, p. 159. 2 Romerbrief, p. 185. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 105 

But who in the world contests a word of this ? What 
we contest is the deducing of the apostle Paul from these 
features of the Epistles. No matter how " personal " the 
style of the Epistles may be, it does not give us the least 
assurance that the Epistles were written by the man 
whose name appears at the head of each. Nor does it 
follow from the " distinctiveness of the style " that they 
could not have been produced by a school or a group. Is 
not the style of the Johannine literature even more 
distinctive '? Or must the Homeric poems have been 
composed by a single Homer because they all have the 
same style ? As a matter of fact, moreover, the Epistles 
do not accord with each other, nor is there complete 
harmony within the limits of a single Epistle. 1 As to the 
originality, van Manen observed : " To be original in any 
form, in any language or age, is just as possible, provided 
that the man has the necessary ability, for one who covers 
himself with the mask of some distinguished person as for 
one w r ho w r rites in his own name and person, for the 
pseudonymous writer just as well as for the candid writer " 
(p. 188). On the principles of our opponents, Nietzsche's 
work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, must have been written 
by the ancient Persian religious founder, because it is so 
personal, so original, so rich in tones and shades. On the 
same principles, the fourth gospel was evidently written 
by the apostle John ; and, as a matter of fact, up to the 
middle of the last century theologians affected to perceive 
in it the very heart-beat of the disciple whom Jesus loved. 
"Which," as van Manen says, "ought to make us more 
cautious, and raise the question whether we are not at 
times too ready to identify an old and long-standing 
opinion with the fresh and unadulterated impression 
which the work, the Epistle, would make on an impartial 
reader. It is at least certain that as yet no one has 
succeeded in denning the ' personal ' element in such a 

1 Compare Steck, p. 363. 



106 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

way that any moderate group would agree in the descrip- 
tion. A satisfactory portrait of Paul is one of the things 
that are yet no more than pious wishes " (p. 189). 

Jiilicher says, in reference to the " sharp variation of 
tone, the moods, the allusions to things known only to the 
people to whom the Epistle is addressed, and the outbreaks 
of almost sinister anger in the Pauline Epistles" (p. 25), 
that no man could put himself in the frame of mind of 
another in this way. In that he merely shows that a 
modern professor of theology sitting at his desk is 
incapable of doing it, not that an impassioned Gnostic 
of the second century, in the thick of the fight against 
legal Judaism and ardently seeking to vindicate his 
conception of the gospel, could not have " invented " 
these things. We need not, therefore, regard him as a 
" forger " who " works with incredible fineness and creates 
the most extraordinary monuments of a great enthusiasm " 
(p. 26). He need only put into words his own feelings 
and thoughts, and, as was not uncommon at the time, 
place on the work the name of the apostle Paul, with 
whom he feels a spiritual aflmity, or whom he has chosen 
for some other reason; and what seems to Jiilicher 
impossible is done. 

(6) Arguments for Genuineness from the Times. The 
defenders of the genuineness of the Pauline Epistles 
would be in an evil plight if they had no other arguments 
than the aesthetic considerations we have just examined. 
They have others, however. According to von Soden, no 
one has ever given an intelligible theory of the origin of 
these Epistles in the second century. " They deal with 
far too many things, and with the most lively interest, 
which no one in Christendom regarded seriously in the 
second century, as we learn from other and reliable 
documents" (p. 29). Jiilicher also says: " They fit no 
other period but the years between 50 and 64." Others, 
however, especially the Dutch experts, are of the contrary 
opinion. They have, amongst other things, pointed to 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 107 

the rich inner life of the communities to which the 
apostle directs his Epistles, and to the complex organisa- 
tion and ecclesiastical institutions, which are hardly 
consistent with the view that these were newly founded 
and quite young communities ; they rather indicate that 
they had been in existence for a long time. Van Manen 
in particular has described the condition of the Roman 
community as one that we cannot conceive in the year 59, 
in which the Epistle to the Romans is supposed to have 
been addressed to it (p. 155) ; and Steck has shown the 
same in regard to the Corinthian community (p. 265) .* 
Such institutions as the vicarious baptism for the dead 
(1 Cor. xv, 29) and the ascetic law of marriage (1 Cor. vii) 
rather point to the second century, with its Gnostic 
influence, than to the middle of the first ; unless we 
admit that the Jesus-cult is much older than our 
theologians are disposed to think, and Gnosticism is the 
root of the whole of Christianity. The divisions and 
parties of the Corinthian community, also, which the 
apostle is eager to conciliate, and the nature of which no 
one has yet succeeded in explaining, give the impression 
that they " are merely described schematically under 
names which were familiar from apostolic times, and the 
general aim of the warning against ecclesiastical splits 
was such as the later period everywhere made necessary." 3 
It has been said that the gift of tongues which is 
mentioned in 1 Cor. xii-xiv had " quite disappeared " in 
the second century, and this is advanced as a proof that 
the Pauline Epistles must have been written in the first 
century. 3 But the " ecstatic or Methodistic " phenomenon 

1 Besides van Manen (p. 14), William B. Smith has, in an article in the 
Journal of Biblical Literature (1910), which even Harnack appreciates, 
shown that Romans i, 7 originally read, " To all that are beloved of God," 
instead of "To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints," 
so that the Epistle of Paul was not addressed to the Romans, but was a 
theological message to all Christians in general : a view that Zahn has 
adopted in the third edition of his Einleitung in den Romerbrief. (See 
Harnack in Preuschen's Zeitschr., 1902, p. 83.) 

2 Steck, work quoted, p. 72. 

8 Otto Schmiedel, Die Hauptprobleme der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, p. 14. 



108 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

of tongues is so general, and recurs so constantly in 
periods of religious excitement, being even found among 
certain religious sects and institutions of our own time, 
that the silence in regard to it of the rest of the literature 
of the second century gives us no right to conclude that 
the Pauline Epistles are genuine. We know the gift of 
tongues from the Epistles, which are assumed to belong 
to the first century. But how can anyone say that these 
Epistles must belong to the first century because there is 
question in them of the gift of tongues? The question 
of circumcision, also, was by no means unimportant in 
the second century, as Clemen says ; l so much is clear 
from the Dialogue of Justin with the Jew Trypho 
(cap. 47). The question is there raised whether the 
Judaeo-Christians who cling to the law can be saved, 
and the reply is that there is no reason why they should 
not be, provided they do not press the law on the Gentile 
Christians under the pretext that they otherwise could 
not be saved, and do not refuse to live with the Gentile 
Christians. That indicates that about the middle of the 
second century the two parties in Christendom still faced 
each other much as we find them doing in the Epistle to 
the Galatians. 2 

As is well known, the attitude of the Christian towards 
the law and his relation to Judaism is a central pre- 
occupation of the Pauline system. Now, during the 
whole of the first century, at least until the destruction 
of Jerusalem, there was no opposition between Jews and 
Christians in regard to the law. They lived in friendliness 
with each other, visited each other, intermarried, and 
claimed each other's help in sickness, for instance. So, 
amongst many others, Chwolson tells us and he has 
carefully investigated the matter in his work on The 
Last Passover. In the year 62, according to the account 



1 Paulus, sein Leben und sein Wirken, I, p. 11, 1904. 

2 Steck, p. 380. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 109 

of Josephus, the high priest Hannas had James executed, 
and this displeased the Pharisees. According to Acts 
(xv, 5), some of the Pharisees joined the sect. Indeed, 
about the year 58, the scribes among the Pharisees stood 
up for Paul, and acknowledged that they found no wrong 
in him (Acts xxiii, 9). Acts, in fact, knows nothing of a 
fundamental difference between Paul and the rest of the 
apostles in regard to their attitude towards Judaism, and 
even the account of his travels the part of Acts which 
has the strongest claim to be regarded as genuine is 
silent as to any difference of mind between Paul and the 
first disciples of Jesus, and does not betray by a single 
syllable that Paul has promulgated a gospel far in 
advance of that of the original apostles and surpassing 
theirs both in the richness of its contents and the depth 
of its thoughts. Compare with this the vigour with 
which the Pauline Epistles assail the Mosaic law, the 
profound opposition between the ideas of Paul in the 
Epistles and those of the Jews, especially of the Pharisees, 
his rejection and fresh interpretation of the older Jewish 
idea of the Messiah, his glorification of the crucified and 
risen Jesus at the cost of all that was dear to the religious 
feeling of the Jews ; and then reflect whether such a 
system was more likely to develop in the first century, a 
few years after the death of Jesus, or in the second 
century whether it does not fit any period rather than 
the years between 50 and 64 ! 

As a matter of fact, it was, as the Jews affirm, and as 
Lublinski and others have shown, the destruction of 
Jerusalem that brought about the breach between Jews 
and Christians. It was only when, after the fall of the 
holy city, the Jewish priestly organisation and religious 
life were put out of joint, and the Jews, in order to main- 
tain the purity and strength of their vanquished faith, 
stood aloof, and sought in an increased service of the law 
some compensation for the loss of the temple, that the 
Christians, with their more liberal idea of worship, their 



110 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

inner morality fostered by the prophets, and their stronger 
sense of penitence on account of their expectation of a 
speedy end of the world, began to separate from the other 
Jews, from whom they had as yet not been essentially 
distinct, and realise that they were a special religious 
community in opposition to Judaism. This separation 
increased to deadly enmity and irreconcilable hatred 
when, about the end of the first century, the section of 
the Christians opposed to the law got the upper hand, 
when the Christians went on to deny the validity of the 
law and its indispensability for religious salvation ; when, 
in the last decisive struggles of the Jews against the 
Romans, the Christians took the side of the latter, and, 
abandoning their national hopes of the restoration of 
Jerusalem and the political recovery of Israel, endeavoured 
to prevent the rebuilding of the temple, and thus openly 
separated from their compatriots. The Jews now refused 
to have any intercourse with the Christians ; they cursed 
and burned their Scriptures, and expelled them from the 
communities. The Christians avenged this conduct by 
branding the Jews as obdurate. They reproached them 
with cutting themselves off from the promise, and con- 
trasted themselves as the chosen of heaven with their 
former compatriots as outcasts of God and damned. This 
is the very idea that pervades the Pauline Epistles. 
Such ideas as those set forth in Eomans ix to xi, repre- 
senting that the Jews, in spite of the promises made to 
their fathers, will have no part in the blessings of Chris- 
tianity, had no foundation whatever in the time about the 
year 59. The question why the Jews were excluded from 
salvation could not arise and be answered until they were 
actually outside Christianity. Yet at the time when the 
Epistle to the Romans is usually supposed to have been 
written the mission to the Gentiles had only just fully 
developed, and at least those of the Jews who lived in the 
dispersion had as yet had no opportunity of learning the 
gospel. How, then, could Israel be at that time described 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 111 

as " broken off from the trunk " (Romans xi, 17-21) ? 
How could anyone talk of a "fall" of the Jews, which 
is to be visited by " the sternness of God " ? This, 
as van Manen observes, presupposes the fall of Jeru- 
salem, " the first important fact after the death of Jesus 
in which the Christians might see a punishment " 
(p. 159). 

The Christian tendency that most strenuously opposed 
Judaism was Gnosticism. Its roots go back, as Fried- 
lander 1 and others have shown, into the period of the 
origin of Christianity. But it is not until the second 
century that we encounter it as a fully -developed 
religious - philosophical theory or a theosophy. Now 
Paulinism has the closest affinity to Gnosticism, as 
Holsten, Pfleiderer, Weizsacker, and others have shown. 
In both the idea of faith changes into the idea of know- 
ledge ; this knowledge is based on divine revelation : the 
salvation of the soul depends on the recognition of certain 
facts of revelation. In both we find a thoroughly dual- 
istic system, in which God and the world, law and 
grace, death and life, spirit and flesh, etc., are set in the 
sharpest contrast, and the tendency to mysticism and 
asceticism goes hand in hand with the striving after a 
speculative interpretation of the facts of religious experi- 
ence. Besides their idea of God, and their Christology and 
doctrine of redemption, they have in common a large 
number of ideas, such as gnosis, grace, pleroma, ectroma, 
life, light, etc. They agree, also, not only in their easy 
disdain of history, but also in their hostility to Judaism 
and their depreciation indeed, rejection of the law. In 
one case the connection between Gnosticism and Paul is 
so evident that it may be cited as a proof that Paul 
knew nothing of an historical Jesus ; it is the passage in 
1 Cor. ii, 6, where the apostle speaks of the " princes of 
this world," who knew not what they did when they 

1 Der vorchristliche Gnosticismus, 1898. 



112 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

"crucified the Lord of glory." It was long ago recog- 
nised by van Manen and others that by these " princes " 
we must understand, not the Jewish or Roman authorities, 
nor any terrestrial powers whatever, but the " enemies of 
this world," the demons higher powers, which do indeed 
rule the earth for a time, but will " pass away " before the 
coming triumph of the saviour-God. 1 That is precisely the 
Gnostic idea of the death of the Redeemer, and it is here 
put forward by Paul ; from that we may infer that he did 
not conceive the life of Jesus as an historical event, but a 
general metaphysical drama, in which heaven and earth 
struggle for the mastery. 

It is well known that prominent Gnostics like Basilides, 
Valentine, and especially Marcion, appeal confidently to 
Paul. Marcion's liking for Paul won him the name of 
" apostle of the heretics." All this may be explained in 
the sense that the Gnosticism of the second century had 
a source in Paul, and appropriated his ideas in the expo- 
sition of their own doctrines. But it is just as possible 
that both Paulinism and Gnosticism belong to the same 
age, and are only different branches from the same root. 
This seems to me the more probable when we reflect how 
well the ground must have been prepared for the apostle's 
letters if they were to be understood in the communities. 
Such difficult dogmatic disquisitions as those in the Epistle 
to the Romans imply a long period of evolution, during 
which the apostle's ideas must have been much discussed 
in the communities. They suggest a familiarity with 
Paulinism which is hardly credible, especially in distant 
Rome, at the time when the Epistle is usually supposed 
to have been written. " Paulinism," says van Manen, 
" seems to be a generally familiar and much-discussed 
phenomenon. It has its supporters and its opponents, its 
catchwords and stereotyped phrases, its own language, 
which needs no explanation because the readers are 

1 RGmerbrief, p. 124. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 113 

assumed to understand it" (p. 141). Without any 
explanation the apostle uses a number of expressions 
which would have been understood at once in Gnostic 
circles of the second century, but could not possibly have 
been understood in the middle of the first century, a few 
decades after the death of Jesus, in letters to newly- 
founded communities. 

But it is particularly remarkable that Paul himself 
should have attained so detailed and systematic a know- 
ledge of Gnostic ideas so soon after the tragedy of 
Golgotha. One has only to recall the fundamental 
points of the Pauline system to see that van Manen is 
right in saying that " a long time must have elapsed 
since the appearance of the first disciples before a new 
tendency of this character could arise. We have here 
more than a simple triumph over the repugnance to the 
cross, by which pious Jews were enabled to accept the 
ideal of a suffering Messiah, to hail Jesus of Nazareth as 
the Messiah promised to their fathers, and to join the 
new brotherhood. We have here a complete breach with 
Judaism, a new and substantially complete system, need- 
ing only to be elaborated in detail and accommodated to 
the needs of a later generation, a thorough reform of the 
prevailing system, assuredly the fruit of a deep experience 
of life and a long period of earnest thought." This 
reform is supposed, according to the prevailing view, to 
have taken place a few years after the death of Jesus, to 
have been brought about by a man who, himself a Jew 
and pupil of the Jewish scholars, is supposed to have 
lived wholly in Judaism until that time, and to have 
arisen in circumstances which would hinder rather than 
further it ! That seems to be quite unintelligible from 
the psychological point of view. " It is simply incon- 
ceivable," says van Manen, "that Paul the Jew, who 
persecuted the community on conviction, brought about 
so extraordinary a revolution in the faith of this com- 
munity almost immediately after he accepted it. It is 

I 



114 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

not conceivable that this conscientious zealot for Israel's 
God, Israel's laws, morals, and customs, should perceive 
so suddenly, when he has overcome his repugnance to 
the cross, that this God was not the most-high, but must 
make way for the father, whom neither Jews nor Gentiles 
had known before the coming of Christ [?] ; that this 
Christ was not the one promised to their fathers, the 
Messiah, but a supernatural being, God's own son, who 
merely assumed for a time the appearance of a man like 
ourselves ; and that the law, with all its prescriptions 
and promises, could and should be thrust aside as without 
value or significance. We must not forget that all this 
is new in the Pauline gospel, and has no relation to the 
' faith ' of the first disciples, who were still full-blooded 
Jews in their Messianic expectations. Let us try to 
realise what it means for a serious-minded and pious 
Jew, like the convert Paul, to abandon the God of his 
fathers and bow down to one who had hitherto been 
unknown. Consider the dependence of the pious Jew on 
the law and the morals and customs it prescribes. 
Imagine what is required to make a man accept as a 
supernatural being, as God's own son, one whom he had 
shortly before regarded as an impostor, and who had 
died on the cross as a criminal a few years before, even 
if he now acknowledges his innocence and his high 
character as an anointed of God. A belief in the resur- 
rection and transfigured life of Jesus could not accomplish 
this, any more than it led the first disciples to deify the 
master, because it was believed that Enoch, Moses, and 
Elias also had been taken up into heaven ; they had not 
on that account ceased to have a human character in the 
minds of believers. In this we can clearly discern the 
influence of ideas of a non-Jewish origin, the ideas of 
oriental gnosis, which in turn had come into contact with 
Greek philosophy and pagan notions of divinity. We 
have here no case of ordinary ' deification,' for which a 
pious imagination might supply the material. Had not 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 115 

Christianity come into contact with gnosis through 
' Paul,' had it remained permanently under the lead of 
the Jewish mind, the monotheism of Israel would have 
warned it against deifying its ' founder,' just as in the 
days of their fathers Moses, the founder of the religion 
of Israel, was saved from deification." 1 

What efforts the historical critics have made to render 
more or less intelligible the sudden revulsion of Paul 
after the Damascus vision ! But neither the resources 
of the Hegelian dialectic, as used by Baur and, in a 
certain sense, Pfleiderer, nor those of modern psychology, 
employed by Jiilicher, Weiss, and others, have enabled 
the prevailing theory to give even plausibility to their 
idea of the origin of the Pauline Christology, and to fill 
with psychological and historical considerations the gap, 
the reality of which J. Weiss does not deny, 2 between the 
doctrine of Paul and that of the so-called disciples of 
Jesus. That the light which Paul saw, and the words 
he heard, led him to condemn the whole of his previous 
thought, life, faith, and hope, and converted him into a 
" new creature," is hardly credible. Such an event 
would be so " unique " in the history of the world that 
any man who admits it has no need to deny other 
" miracles " in the New Testament, or regard any of its 
statements as incredible. It has recently been suggested 
that the historical Jesus himself may have been concerned 
in the conversion ; we hear of the " strong impression " 
that Jesus must have made on Paul, and Kolbing 3 and 
J. Weiss speak of " a spiritual action of the person of 
Jesus" some even suggest a meeting somewhere of the 
two. Such a theory finds no support whatever in Acts 
or the Pauline Epistles ; indeed, as I said before, it would 

1 Work quoted, p. 136. As to the impossibility of the historical Jesus 
being deified by Paul and the great difference between this sort of deifica- 
tion and the deification of other outstanding personalities, such as the 
Emperor, etc., see Lublinski, Das werdende Dogma, p. 49. 

3 Paulus und Jesus, pp. 3 and 72. 

8 Die geistige Einwirkung der Person Jesu auf Paulus, 1906. 



116 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

make the apostle untruthful, as be says repeatedly and 
emphatically that he received his gospel only by an 
inner revelation (Gal. i). Theologians also see in the 
" Damascus miracle " another proof of the " all-surpassing 
greatness and significance " of their Jesus, and try to 
realise the " ineffaceable impression " which Paul must 
have had of Jesus, in order in this way to find some 
justification of their cult of Jesus. The event, however, 
is not made more plausible in this way, because the 
difficulty precisely is how it was possible for a mono- 
theistic mind, a zealous Jew, to apotheosise a man who 
had died not long before, not a personage of remote 
antiquity such as Moses, Elias, or Enoch. And the 
difficulty is not removed by supposing that the apostle 
had somewhere or other met the crucified Jesus. Paul 
had never known Jesus personally. The Christianity 
that was linked with Paul in its later development 
cannot be traced to a personal action of Jesus on the 
apostle. That is unequivocally shown by the documents, 
the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles. Any man 
who denies this is reading into the documents something 
that they do not contain; in fact, they say just the 
contrary. Whoever reads this into them is simply 
introducing into the documents a conception of Jesus 
which he has obtained elsewhere, interpreting them in a 
sense that they do not justify, and cannot complain if his 
opponents regard his claim to be " methodical " and 
" unprejudiced " as a ridiculous hallucination and pre- 
sumption. 

(c) The Spuriousness of the Pauline Epistles. If Paul 
refers in his Epistles to an historical Jesus, these Epistles, 
bearing his name, cannot possibly have been written by 
the apostle who was changed from Saul to Paul by the 
Damascus vision. For it is inconceivable that an his- 
torical individual should, so soon after his death, be 
elevated by the apostle to the dignity of a second God, a 
co-worker in the creation and redemption of the world. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 117 

If the Epistles really were written by Paul, the Jesus 
Christ who is a central figure in them cannot be an 
historical personality. The way in which the supposed 
Jew Paul speaks of him is contrary to all psychological 
and historical experience. Either the Pauline Epistles 
are genuine, and in that case Jesus is not an historical 
personality; or he is an historical personality, and in 
that case the Pauline Epistles are not genuine, but 
written at a much later period. This later period would 
have no difficulty in raising to the sphere of deity a man of 
former times who was known to it only by a vague tradi- 
tion. And if the Epistles do not come from Paul, they 
belong to a totally different circle from that of the con- 
verted Jew, and are rather, as Steck says, the work of a 
whole school of anti-legal Gnostics of the first quarter of 
the second century, who aimed at detaching Christianity 
from its maternal Jewish stock, and making it an inde- 
pendent religion ; in that case their references to Jesus 
have no historical value, and cannot be quoted as evidence 
of the historical Jesus. 

Let it not be objected that the Pauline Epistles bear 
unmistakably the stamp of Jewish authorship, and in their 
Rabbinical cast of thought and argument point to the 
Paul of Acts. For, apart from the fact that this would 
afford no proof that Paul was the author, since the Gnostic 
author of the second century might be a Pharisaic Rabbi 
converted into an apostle by some " tremendous experi- 
ence," the Jewish character of the author of the Epistles 
and his relation to Rabbinism are by no means so certain 
as believers in Paul suggest ; indeed, here again it seems 
as if most of them know nothing of the Rabbinical cast 
of mind and method of argument except from the Epistles 
themselves. Jewish scholars, who can appreciate the 
point, by no means recognise the contents of the Epistles 
as of their own spirit ; they emphatically deny that their 
author could have been a pupil of the Rabbis. There is 
serious ground for reflection in the fact that, as Kautzsch 



118 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

pointed out in 1869 and Steck has confirmed (p. 212), 
the writer of the Epistles does not quote the Hebrew text 
of the Scriptures, but the Greek Septuagint translation, 
with all its faults, and that on this account he makes 
statements which a glance at the Hebrew text would 
have shown him at once to be incorrect. 1 That would 
be unintelligible on the part of a rigorous Jew and pupil 
of the Eabbis, because the translation of the Old Testa- 
ment into a foreign language was regarded by the strict 
Jews of Palestine as a sin against the law, a profanation 
of the holy word. 

Did Paul know Hebrew at all ? The question seems 
to be absurd if the author of the Epistles really was the 
pupil of Gamaliel and had been a zealot for the Mosaic 
law. Yet the Epistles give no trace of an acquaintance 
with Hebrew. In spite of the assurance of the writer 
that he was born a Jew, he seems to be Greek in every- 
thing. He thinks as a Greek, speaks as a Greek, uses 
Greek books ; and whatever there is in him that can only 
be explained we are told by Judaism is much closer, 
as van Manen says, to the Alexandrian or Hellenistic 
Judaism of Philo and Wisdom, which he often uses, than 
to the ideas of the Old Testament, and need by no means 
have been taken from the Hebrew Bible. 

Further, this supposed pupil of the Eabbis interprets 
the law in a way that, as we are told by Jewish experts, 
is anything but Eabbinical. While the Eabbis leave 
the literal meaning of the scripture untouched even in 
their allegorical interpretations, the apostle is extremely 
arbitrary in this respect ; he turns the meaning of the 
words inside out, and changes a plain meaning into the 
very opposite, as Eschelbacher shows (among others) in 
the case of Gal. iv, 21 (p. 546). The author of the 



1 For further details see Eschelbacher, " Zur Geschichte und Charak- 
teristik der Paulinischen Briefe," in the Monatsschrift fiir Geschichte u. 
Wissenschaft d. Judentums, 51 Jahrg., Neue Folge, 15 Jahrg., 1907, 
pp. 411 and 542. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 119 

Pauline Epistles has neither an accurate knowledge of 
the text of the scriptures nor an interest in, or under- 
standing of, its contents. He twists the plain course of 
the text to his purposes at the moment, and grossly offends 
against both the letter and the spirit of the passages in a 
way that no man who had passed through the schools 
would ever venture to do. " The interpretations of scrip- 
ture in the Pauline Epistles," says Eschelbacher, " cannot, 
either in substance or form, be brought into any relation 
whatever either with those of the Palestinian experts, or 
with those of the Judseo-Hellenistic religious philosophers, 
or with those of their time or of the following period. 
There is nothing analogous to them in the whole of 
Jewish literature. This is found only in the Christian 
writings of the second century, such as the Epistle to 
the Hebrews, the Epistle of Barnabas, the writings of 
Justin, etc." (p. 550). " There is no question whatever of 
a thorough knowledge of scripture, or scholarly acquaint- 
ance with what was taught in the Jewish schools in 
Palestine or elsewhere, in the Pauline Epistles " (p. 668). 

When we survey all that has been urged, especially 
by the Dutch, against the genuineness of the Pauline 
Epistles, particularly the contradiction between Acts and 
the Epistles, 1 we cannot resist the impression that the 
obstinacy with which historical theology clings to the 
Pauline authorship, and declares every attack on it to 
be " beneath discussion," is really due rather to a very 
intelligible prejudice than to the merits of the case. In 
the eyes of these theologians Paul is the weightiest 
witness to the historicity of Jesus on whom their 
" science " can rely, hence nothing can be " scientific " 
which tends to discredit the testimony of their witness. 
We who are convinced that, even if the Pauline Epistles 
were genuine, they would not prove the existence of an 



1 See ScHager, Der Paulus der Apg. und der Paulus der Briefe, in the 
periodical Die Tat, 2 Jahrg., 1910, Heft 8. 



120 THE WITNESS OF PAUL 

historical Jesus, and that they probably refer to another 
Jesus altogether, are only moderately interested in the 
question who was the author of the Epistles. It is 
immaterial to us whether there was one author, or 
whether, as the Dutch have tried to show, several 
co-operated in producing them ; whether they are 
original, or are merely elaborations of older letters ; 
whether in substance they go back to an apostle Paul 
who preached the gospel to the Gentiles about the middle 
of the first century, founded communities, and was to 
some extent opposed to the " original apostles " at 
Jerusalem, or whether they are altogether products of 
the first quarter of the second century, and the figure of 
the apostle is a piece of fiction. 

It is possible that, as Steck and van Manen believe, 
there really was a Paul, a man who, though he may have 
taken up a somewhat exceptional position in regard to 
the other apostles, can scarcely have been so decisively 
opposed to them as the Epistles represent, and whose 
features we have described, somewhat didactically, in 
Acts. This Paul, however, was in that case " a Jew by 
birth, who had to a slight extent turned his back on 
Judaism. He preaches circumcision that is to say, 
fidelity to the rites and customs of Judaism, fidelity to 
the law in spite of his acceptance of the faith and 
expectations of the disciples of Jesus." 1 There was thus 
no direct connection between him and the author of the 
letters which bear his name ; they show a quite different 
spirit. But there was an indirect connection in the sense 
that Paulinism, as an attempt to detach Christianity from 
Judaism, making it a world-religion, and at the same time 
spiritualising and deepening its contents, may have had a 
grateful recollection of the man who first gave wide 
publicity to the ideas of the new religion. But it is 
equally possible that the name of Paul is only a general 

1 Van Manen, R&merbrief, p. 206. 



THE WITNESS OF PAUL 121 

title for a number of letter-writers, who invented the 
character in order to give an air of authority to a 
religious system that went beyond the original Chris- 
tianity. It would not be possible to ascribe so peculiar 
and novel a system as Paulinism to an immediate disciple 
of " the Lord," to whose supposed historical personality 
the other followers of the new religion appealed. But 
some sort of connection with the " historical " Jesus was 
needed in order to displace the older Christianity with its 
Judaic leanings, and to base the hostility to Judaism on a 
" revelation " that came from Jesus himself. Thus arose 
the character of the once pious Jew Paul, who rages 
against the Christians, and is then converted by a vision, 
and, as a zealot against the law, founds a purely spiritual 
Christianity, making it easier by his own example for 
the Jews to abandon the law. 

However this may be, the Pauline Epistles, we need 
not repeat, give no support whatever to the belief in an 
historical Jesus. This also, as we said, puts an end to 
religious interest in the historicity of Paul, and profane 
historians and philologists may be left in peace to recon- 
struct, out of Acts and the so-called Epistles of Paul, a 
picture of the real sequence of events which accompanied 
the rise of Christianity. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 



THE evidential value of profane writers and the Pauline 
Epistles in regard to the existence of an historical Jesus 
has proved illusory. The genuineness of the Pauline 
Epistles is not at all established. ' Even if, however, 
they were really written by the apostle in the fifties and 
sixties of the first century, they would give no testimony 
to the historical human being Jesus. That the apostle 
has such a person in mind, and not a heavenly being, a 
saviour-god Jesus, who has become man, cannot be 
deduced from the Epistles, but is read into them, so 
that the existence of an historical Jesus is merely 
assumed. Now, this assumption is based on the gospels, 
and, therefore, the Pauline Epistles cannot in their turn 
serve to prove the existence of the Jesus of the gospels. 

There is no other source of the belief in an historical 
Jesus but the gospels. The credibility of the historical 
documents of Christianity finds no support outside them- 
selves. For an historian that is a lamentable situation. 
Even Weiss feels that he must make some excuse in 
quoting the gospels as witnesses, as sceptics may object 
that a witness can hardly testify in his own favour. He 
consoles himself by pointing to the grandeur and beauty 
of the gospels as some assurance of their truth, for- 
getting that truth only vindicates itself, and not its 
authors. However much we may esteem the contents 
of the gospels, this appreciation does not throw the 
least light on the historicity of the statements made in 
them. However much the figure of Jesus, as it is set 
forth in the acts and words of the gospel narrative, may 

122 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 123 

move and enchain the sentiments of the reader, it cannot 
be deduced from these sentiments that an historical 
personality was the model of the character. Otherwise 
we should have to describe Homer's heroes, Shakespeare's 
Hamlet, and Goethe's Faust as historical personalities 
because they are so vividly portrayed, and make such a 
" strong impression " on sensitive souls. The attempt to 
prove the historicity of Jesus is hopeless if there are no 
other historical sources for it than the gospels, even if the 
gospel tradition is so close to the historical facts that we 
may be dealing with historical reminiscences. We see, 
therefore, how important it is for those who maintain the 
historicity of Jesus to have other witnesses besides the 
gospels, and we understand the frantic efforts of theo- 
logical " historians " to retain the evidence of profane 
historians and of Paul, however slender and disputable 
it be. The importance of the inquiry into the evangelical 
documents is thus set in its true light. It is not merely a 
question of establishing the historical credibility of the 
gospel narratives in detail, but of securing in general a 
firm historical ground in which tradition may anchor. 
To obtain some assurance of the historical character of 
the gospels is a matter of life and death to the historical 
faith of the Christian. Hence it is that every straw is 
eagerly welcomed, and in this matter the theological 
" historians " betray a contentedness and liberality that 
would not be tolerated in any branch of profane history. 

1. THE SOUECES OF THE GOSPELS. 

Such a straw, in regard to the belief in the historicity 
of the gospels, is the often-quoted testimony of Papias. It 
is, as is known, one of the " safest " (though by no means 
unquestioned) results of the modern discussion of the life 
of Jesus that the gospel of Mark is the oldest of the 
surviving four. As compared with the other gospels, it 
shows the " greatest freshness " and " vividness," the 



124 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

most impressive " picturesqueness," and such an abun- 
dance of trivial details that it gives one the impression of 
" directly suggesting the narrative of an eye-witness." 
It is, therefore, a happy coincidence, theologians assure 
us, 1 that Papias, bishop of Hierapolis about the year 150, 
makes a statement about Mark, the author of the gospel, 
which admirably agrees with that impression. He says : 
" Mark was Peter's interpreter, and he carefully wrote 
down all that he remembered. He did not, however, 
adhere to the order followed by Christ in his discourses 
and actions. He had himself never heard the Lord or 
been among his followers. But he afterwards met Peter, 
as I said, and Peter instructed his hearers as opportunity 
offered, though he did not give the words of the Lord in 
their proper order. Hence Mark did no wrong in writing 
things as they were in his memory. He was concerned 
only to omit nothing that he had heard, or to admit no 
untruth in his work." 

In this way the origin of the oldest gospel seems to go 
back very near to the time of Jesus, and its historical 
character seems to be accredited. The only question is 
how far we can rely on the statement of the Bishop of 
Hierapolis. Now Papias appeals to the priest John 
[Presbyter Johannes] as his authority. Who is the 
priest John, and whence did he obtain his knowledge? 
According to Jerome and Irenaeus, he was identical with 
John the Evangelist. Papias himself, however, denies 
this when he assures us that he himself never saw or 
heard the holy apostles, but owed his knowledge to their 
friends, the elders. Hence Papias received his informa- 
tion as to the origin of the gospel from John, John from 
Mark, and Mark received his information about Jesus 
from Peter, who in turn only said what he knew about 
Jesus. Seeing that, in addition, the writings of Papias 
have been lost, and we know of him only from Eusebius 

1 Wernle, Die synoptische Frage, 1899, p. 204. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 125 

(of the fourth century), that is clearly too complicated a 
piece of evidence to merit an unreserved acceptance. We 
do not, moreover, learn from Papias whether Peter 
gathered from his own intercourse with Jesus what he 
told to Mark, or, if he did not, whence this original 
witness derived his knowledge of the Saviour. It does 
not follow from the words of Papias that Peter was a 
personal disciple of Jesus, however emphatically Eusebius 
may regard him as such, and however Papias may have 
thought so. The good bishop was not at all the kind of 
man to have a clear idea of such a thing. According to 
Eusebius and Irenaeus, he was very " narrow-minded," 
and the other things which he gathered from the elders 
in the way of parables and teachings of Jesus and deeds 
of the apostles, in order to have as much information as 
possible about Jesus and his followers, are so disputable 
and miraculous that even Eusebius is obliged to relegate 
them to the province of fable. 1 

There is another matter that we learn in regard to the 
bishop from Eusebius (ii, 15), and this also is supposed 
to help to prove the connection of the gospel of Mark 
with the historical Jesus. Papias is reported as saying 
that, when Peter came to Rome and overcame the 
wizard Simon in their conflict, his hearers turned to 
Mark, who accompanied Peter, in their zeal for the 
gospel, and begged him to let them have a written 
memorial of the teaching that had been orally delivered 
to them, and he did so. The apostle, he says, learned 
this by a revelation of the Holy Spirit (!), rejoiced at 
their zeal, and directed that the writing should be used 
in the churches. " Why," asks Lublinsky, " had Peter 
to learn from the Holy Spirit that his constant companion 
had written a gospel, instead of from Mark himself, who 
ought first to have asked his master to look over so 
sacred and important a work '? It would be impossible, 

1 EccL Hist., iii, 40. 



126 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

moreover, for the apostle to confirm and commend a 
work which was not written in the proper order of the 
Saviour's life. Such carelessness is even more difficult 
to believe when we reflect that the Jews are said to 
have already taken up an attitude of hostility to the 
Christians, and would certainly fasten at once upon 
any untruth or inaccuracy on the Christian side. 
There were still too many witnesses of events alive 
for any one to dare even to correct the matter a little " 
(p. 62). 

There is, in fact, much to be said for Lublinski's 
conjecture that there is question of a gospel belonging to 
the first half of the second century, to which it was 
sought to give some canonical prestige by tracing it to 
Peter and the Holy Ghost, and that the story of Peter's 
pedagogical activity was invented to cover the discon- 
nectedness of its material. To trace it directly to the 
apostle, as the first gospel was ascribed to Matthew and 
the fourth to John, was impossible for some reason. It 
was, therefore, inscribed with the name of Mark, of 
whom it was said in the so-called first Epistle of Peter : 
" The Church that is at Babylon saluteth you, and so doth 
Marcus my son," just as the third was ascribed to the 
physician Luke, and thus brought into relation with the 
apostle Paul. 1 

In any case, it is impossible to prove the connection of 
the gospels with the historical Jesus from these two refer- 
ences of Papias, as they are preserved by Eusebius. Even if 
the notice in Papias were better accredited than it is, his state- 
ment need not have arisen independently of the literary 
character of the gospel of Mark. It is said to agree per- 
fectly with that character. But we do not know whether 
the gospel was not precisely ascribed to Mark, and thus 
connected with Peter, because at the time of its appear- 
ance this accidentally concordant character of the gospel 

1 See Gfrorer, Die heilige Sage, I, 3-23, 1838 ; also Liitzelberger, Die 
kirkliche Tradition ilber den Apostel Johannes, 1842, pp. 76-93. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 127 

impressed its readers, if it had not been expressly written 
in the Petrine sense. 

Besides the reference to the origin of the gospel of 
Mark, we have in Eusebius also one to the origin of the 
gospel of Matthew; a reference to which the greatest 
importance is attached by historical theology, and of 
which the author is again Papias. " Matthew," he said, 
" wrote the words of the Lord in Hebrew, and others 
translated them as well as they could" (iii, 40). Theo- 
logians at once assume that these " words of the Lord " 
are sayings of the historical Jesus ; and it is possible that 
Papias meant this, though he does not mention the name 
Jesus, and we have in early Christian literature (such as 
the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles and the Epistle of 
James) words of the Lord which are not quoted as words 
of Jesus, but are clearly sayings of earlier prophetic 
teachers, the so-called apostles. The expression " words 
of the Lord " often means the sayings of prominent 
religious personalities which were attributed to the direct 
influence of the Holy Ghost ; even quotations from the 
Old Testament are called " words of the Lord " that is 
to say, of the God of Israel. 1 Moreover, the identity of 
the Matthew who is said by Papias to have written the 
words of the Lord with the evangelist Matthew is not 
certain, as the latter drew from Greek sources, and the 
tax-gatherer whom Jesus calls (Mark ii, 14), and in 
whom we are supposed to have the author of the gospel, 
was not named Matthew, but Levi, son of Alphaeus, and 
seems not to have been identified with the apostle 
Matthew until a later period. 2 That is what theologians 
call " a sound tradition " ! We cannot avoid the sus- 
picion that these supposed sayings of Jesus, the " words 
of the Lord " of Papias, which Matthew is said to have 
collected, were not the words of a single definite individual 

1 Matt, x, 20; Mark xiii, 11. Also compare Revelation xii, 10: "The 
witness of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." 

2 Wernle, work quoted, p. 229. 



128 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

or an historical Jesus, but were merely placed in his 
mouth afterwards. 1 In that case this second passage of 
Papias referring to Matthew is just as incapable of 
showing an historical connection of the gospels with the 
life of an historical Jesus. We learn nothing from it 
except that there were " words of the Lord " in 
the second century in several different versions, and 
that these differences were understood to be due to 
different translations of a common source, the author 
of which was believed to have been a certain Matthew, 
whose name appeared among the so-called disciples of 
Jesus. 

It is on this " sound tradition " that modern critical 
theologians base their hypothesis of two sources. It 
supposes that the gospel of Mark, or an earlier version 
of it, the so-called "Primitive Mark," is one source of 
our three Synoptic gospels ; it describes the actions of 
Jesus. The other source is the discourses or sayings- 
source, the document which Papias ascribes to Matthew, 
the so-called " Primitive Matthew." Our actual Matthew 
and Luke have independently taken their account of the 
actions of Jesus from the primitive gospel of Mark, and 
have taken the words of Jesus from the other source, and 
combined the two. Each of them, however, has his 
" private property," something that is not found in the 
words-source or the primitive Mark, but is probably due 
to oral tradition. In working out this hypothesis theo- 
logians differ considerably from each other. Some say 
that there were stories of the life of Jesus also in the 
primitive Matthew and discourses of Jesus in the 
primitive Mark. Others think that besides the primitive 
Matthew and Mark there was a primitive form of Luke ; 
according to Arnold Meyer, this may have been older than 
the actual Mark, and contained, besides the stories of the 
birth and childhood of Jesus, the parables and stories 

1 Steudel, Wir Gelehrten vom Fach ! p. 37 ; Im Kampf um die 
Christitsmythe, p. 56. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 129 

which tended to glorify poverty and depreciate wealth. 
We thus get an "Ebionite Gospel," or gospel of "the 
Poor," which is believed to have been especially used by 
Luke. Recently, if we may so interpret a passage in 
Weiss (p. 155), the gospel of John, which has been 
almost entirely excluded from the discussion of the sources 
of the life of Jesus for more than half a century, seems 
to be returning to the group of sources. That would be 
another instance that " everything happens over again," 
as Nietzsche said. The game of combining the various 
possibilities seems to be an essential part of the theolo- 
gical discussion of the sources. At all events, the con- 
tinued work of theologians has so complicated the 
problem of the sources of the life of Jesus that it is 
hardly possible to speak any longer of a " two-sources 
hypothesis," and speak freely of it. 

Whatever may be said from the philological point of 
view as to the value of the two-sources hypothesis, of 
which German critical theologians are so proud, it has, as 
the above considerations have shown, no value as far as the 
historicity of Jesus is concerned. It would not have 
even if the exact contents of the sources were known to 
us, as Weinel seems to think, and if the reconstruction 
of the sources in Harnack's German translation, which 
is by no means generally admitted, were something more 
than a mere hypothetical attempt, and Wernle's corre- 
sponding analyses were not sheer and uncertain con- 
jectures. No matter how much the method of the 
historical theologians is improved in the future, it can do 
no more. That in the gospels we really have to do with 
the " tradition of a personality" namely, the historical 
Jesus cannot be shown even by the acutest philological 
criticism and the most perfect command of technical 
apparatus. The attempt of historical theologians to 
reach the historical nucleus of the gospels by purely 
philological means is hopeless, and must remain hopeless, 
because the gospel tradition floats in the air ; the belief 



130 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

in its historical value is not confirmed by a single external 
witness who has the least claim to confidence. 



2. THE WITNESS OF TEADITION. 

On what general ground do theologians affirm that the 
gospels contain history ? On no other ground than that 
such is the general view. "We are asked," Weinel 
exclaims, " to prove that Jesus was an historical 
personage ; in other words, we are to sacrifice an 
historical tradition of centuries, against which as a 

whole not a single objection was brought until 

Bruno Bauer in 1841, and Albert Kalthoff in 1902 " 
(p. 10). He says that it is a " depreciation of tradition " 
to call in question the historicity of the gospel narratives 
(p. 10). Weinel seems never to have heard of the 
Gnostics, whose resistance to the growing tradition of an 
historical Jesus gave so much trouble to the Church in 
the second century. He does not seem to know that it 
was not Bruno Bauer and Kalthoff who first questioned 
or denied the historicity of Jesus, but philosophers who 
lived a hundred years before Bauer, Bolingbroke and 
the English Deists. We have heard of the saying of 
Pope Leo X. at the beginning of the sixteenth century 
about the " fairy-tale of Christ." Even so enlightened 
a ruler as Frederick the Great does not seem to have 
been entirely convinced of the historicity of Jesus. He 
speaks of " the comedy " of the life and death and 
ascension of Christ, and says : "If the Church can err in 
regard to facts, I see reason to doubt if there is a 
Scripture and a Jesus Christ." 1 Has Weinel never 
heard of Dupuis and Volney, who advanced an astral- 
myth explanation of the gospel "history" in the last 
decade of the eighteenth century ? 

As a matter of fact, the existence of Jesus has been 
assailed from the moment when historical inquiry began 

1 Friedrichs des Gr. Gedanken ilber Religion, 1893, pp. 87 and 92. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 131 

to oppose itself to the prevailing ecclesiastical ways of 
thinking that is to say, from the eighteenth century. 
That is quite natural, as no one had hitherto believed in 
a purely historical Jesus, and the dogmatic Christ of 
tradition gave little occasion to contest his historical 
reality ; he might be accepted or rejected, but not on 
historical grounds. " Precisely because liberal theology 
has," says Ernst Krieck, " constructed its Jesus in 
opposition to the whole of Christian tradition, we have 
a right to ask it for proof ; precisely because, as Weinel 
admits (p. 22), documents are wanting in regard to their 
Jesus such as are generally used to prove the reality of 
historical personages, the demand for proof is not so absurd 
as Weinel represents it to be." 1 

It is a complete perversion of the facts when Weinel 
and his colleagues claim that tradition is on their side. 
The tradition of the first eighteen centuries of Christianity 
knows only a god-man, not the man Christ. Lublinski 
rightly calls attention to the fact that " in the early 
centuries the blood of Christian martyrs was chiefly shed 
because the unyielding and angry primitive Christians 
regarded the cult of the emperors as the horror of 
horrors, since it meant adoring a man. They, however, 
worshipped their Christ and died for him because they 
considered him, not a man, but a god-man. Who is 
nearer to tradition, the one who makes an earthly man 
of Jesus, or the one who is content to say that he was 
from the start a mythical being, a symbol in a word, the 
God-man?" It is precisely one of the objections raised 
by orthodox against liberal Christians that they are in 
opposition to the whole of Christian tradition ! What 
early Christian writings are there, apart from the gospels, 
that show the existence of an historical Jesus ? There 
is not one single early Christian document that speaks, 
not of the god-man Jesus Christ, but unequivocally of 

1 Die neueste Orthodoxie u. d. Christusproblem, p. 47. 

2 Dos werdetide Dogma, p. 82. 



132 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

the mere man Jesus which modern liberal theology 
conceives him to have been. Weinel appeals to the 
apocryphal gospels, the writings of the " apostolic 
fathers," the apologists of the second century (Justin, for 
instance) ; they all show just the contrary of what he 
states (p. 103). It is precisely one of the strongest 
arguments of those who deny the historicity of Jesus 
that neither Acts nor Revelation nor the Epistles, nor 
the apologists, etc., relate the slenderest fact that can 
confidently be referred to a purely historical Jesus. As 
regards the apologists, in particular, they know, says Pro- 
fessor W. B. Smith in his Ecce Deus, " nothing whatever 
about the miraculous pure human life in Galilee and Judasa. 
Not a single event is mentioned, not a single proof, not 
a single explanation, or exhortation, or counsel not a 
single motive have they drawn from the incomparable 
life which is supposed to have fascinated the disciples 
and even the bloodthirsty Saul. The modern preacher, 
even the modern critic, at a distance of 1900 years, fills 
all the vessels of his discourse at this pure and inex- 
haustible source of the personality and life of Jesus. But 
the early apologists, who lived under the Antonines and 
before the settlement of the canon of the New Testament, 
know nothing of this source in their debates with kings 
and emperors, with philosophers and representatives of 
their own group. They do not draw a single drop of the 
water ; they rarely mention it, even remotely. It would 
almost seem that, if it existed at all, it was confined to 
an esoteric, not exoteric, source. We do, it is true, find 
a few scanty references to certain teachings which are 
' known,' but they are all of a more or less metempirical 
character, such as the mystery in 1 Tim. iii, 16. We 
find no knowledge of such a human life as that which 
modern and orthodox theologians make the basis of their 
New Testament theory." 

To base the historicity of Jesus on tradition is merely 
to make tradition the decisive factor in the question 



133 

because it is tradition. "History," says Weinel (p. 22), 
" depends on tradition." But when tradition is so isolated 
as it is in the case of the gospels, we have every right to 
ask whether there are any historical facts whatever at the 
base of it. Even Weinel admits that the historicity of a 
tradition cannot be shown by " some simple logic." Such 
proof can only be given " by means of documents." There 
are, however, none for the life of Jesus. It has been said 
that Socrates and Plato might be struck out of history 
just as easily as Jesus, since there are spurious works 
among those that bear the name of Plato, and it is 
impossible to prove that the others are genuine. But we 
are assured of the existence of Socrates, not only by 
Plato and Xenophon, but by the comedian Aristophanes, 
and there is not the slightest ground to doubt his his- 
torical existence. And the historical existence of Plato 
is accredited, not merely by the works ascribed to him, but 
in other ways, as well as that of any personality in history. 
We should not even have ground to doubt his historicity 
if all the works of the philosopher were spurious. As to 
the existence of Luther, Frederick the Great, Goethe, or 
Bismarck, we have not only documents from their own 
hand, the genuineness of which is not open to question, 
but masses of evidence on the part of contemporaries. 1 
All this is wanting in the case of Jesus. He has not left 
behind a single line. He has, as Jiilicher says, " written 
in the sand," and there is not a single reliable document to 
enable us to trust the gospels, from which alone we learn 
something about his life. It is, therefore, just as permis- 
sible to doubt as to admit the existence of such a person ; 
and it is an unhappy indication of the superficiality and 
loose thinking of our time that even leaders of science have 
not hesitated to bring into the field to prove the historicity 
of Jesus this foolish reference to historical personalities. 2 

1 See Jiilicher, p. 14. 

2 Steudel, Wir Gelehrten vom Fach, p. 6 ; Lublinski, Das werdende 
Dogma, p. 47. 



134 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

3. THE METHODS OF HISTOEICAL CRITICISM. 

(a) The Methodical Principles of Theological History. 
From what we have seen we perceive that critics are con- 
vinced of the historicity of the gospels a priori, before 
investigating the subject. All they have to do, therefore, 
is to seek the "historical nucleus " in tradition. How is 
that done ? " The Christian element," says Weinel, 
" must be stripped from the figure of Jesus before he can 
be discovered. But this means only the Christian element 
in a certain sense. Jesus was not a Jew, but something 
new; the Christian element must be removed from him 
in the sense of thoughts, ideas, and tendencies w T hich could 
only be entertained by a later community" (p. 28). Or, as 
we read in another passage: " The only standard by which 
the historical critic can discriminate between the genuine 
and the spurious is to set aside as spurious those features 
of tradition which could not be due to the interest of Jesus, 
but only to the interest of the community " (p. 30). 

Notice how much is assumed in all this : that Jesus 
was an historical personage, that he was not a Jew, that 
he was " something new," and, especially " the interest 
of Jesus." How is it that Weinel knows the interest of 
Jesus so well before beginning his inquiry that he thinks 
he can determine by this test what is spurious in tradition 
and what is not ? Let us be candid. Is it not a question 
of the " interest " of historical theology and the Church 
rather than of Jesus? The gospels, it seems, are to be 
understood from " the soul of Jesus," not from the soul 
of their authors ! I should have thought that in a strict 
historical inquiry the " interest " and the " soul " of Jesus 
could only be gathered in the course of the inquiry. The 
theological " historian," however, assumes from the start 
precisely what he is supposed to prove and deduce the 
existence and the knowledge of the innermost nature of 
the man Jesus. Not only does Weinel do this, but 
Clemen also formulates, for use in the religious-historical 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 135 

interpretation of the New Testament, the famous "methodo- 
logical principle " that a religious-historical interpretation 
is impossible when it leads to untenable consequences 
(namely, the denial of the historicity of Jesus or of the 
genuineness of the Pauline Epistles) or starts from such 
premises. 1 J. Weiss says this even more plainly when he 
acknowledges that in all his inquiries he starts with the 
assumption " that the gospel story in general has an 
historical root, that it has grown out of the soil of the 
life of Jesus, goes back to eye-witnesses of his life, and 
comes so near to him that we may count upon historical 
reminiscences" (p. 125). It is little wonder that they 
find themselves " scientifically " compelled to cling to the 
historicity of Jesus, and regard the so-called historical 
method which they use as the only correct method, 
because it seems to establish this historicity. The truth 
is that it is not a result, but a presupposition of their 
method ; the method is arranged in advance so as to 
confirm the presupposition, and it is not in virtue of the 
method that the inquiry ends in a conviction of the 
existence of a definite Jesus, but because this was the 
goal kept in mind from the start. 

This, however, is not all that we have to say in regard 
to the theological method of inquiring into the historicity 
of Jesus. There is a further principle, that all that 
seems possible to the theological critic in the gospel 
narratives may at once be set down as actual. Thus 
Weinel would regard a tradition as valid as long as "it is 
not clearly seen to be impossible." But are there not 
plenty of things in traditions which are possible, yet may 
not in the least be actual ? The story of Tell is possible, 
the story of the seven kings of Home, or of Semiramis or 
Sardanapalus ; and as long as independent documents did 
not exist, they were held to be real histories. Indeed, on 
this criterion of " possibility " we might prove that 

1 Die religionsgeschichtl. Erklarung des N. T., 1909, p. 10. 



136 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

Hercules was an historical personage, and endeavour to 
extract an " historical nucleus " out of the shell of legend. 
Why may there not have been a man of that name who 
strangled a lion, dragged a wild boar, caught a hind alive, 
slew a dangerous serpent, cleaned out a stable, and 
performed other heroic deeds, finally sacrificing himself 
on the pyre ? That the hydra had more than one head, 
and that when one was cut off two new ones grew in its 
place, is, of course, due to later imagination ; possibly it 
originated in a " vision " on the part of Hercules. Do we 
not know that he was a heavy drinker ? Well, in a state 
of intoxication things are often seen doubled, or even 
trebled. Thus it would be possible to give an " historical " 
interpretation of the myth of Hercules on the above 
principle. The principle, however, overlooks the fact 
that, though everything that is actual is at the same time 
possible, the laws of logic forbid us to draw an inference 
in the opposite direction, from possibility to actuality. 
Yet it is simply on such a deduction, apart from con- 
siderations of " the interest of Jesus," that all theological 
constructions of the life of Jesus are based. The stories 
in the gospels are first examined to see if they are 
possible, and they are then treated as historical realities, 
the historicity of which is supposed to have been proved 
by showing that they are possible. 

(b) The Method of J. Weiss. J. Weiss is a master in 
the application of this wonderful method. His way of 
interpreting the miracles of Jesus must not be passed in 
silence. 

Weiss starts from the general character of the age in 
which the miracles are supposed to have been performed, 
its credulity and thirst for miracles, an age " for which 
saviour and physician are almost the same thing." It is 
true that he grants that the sudden and remarkable cures 
wrought by Jesus cannot be controlled in their further 
course. " We do not hear of a single patient who tells 
anything of his subsequent history " (p. 119), which is 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 137 

at least very curious, and does not say much for their 
gratitude. He thinks, however, that " many [!] a one 
will acknowledge " that Jesus was much occupied with 
healing the sick. We have, it is true, " not a very good 
idea " of the way it was done. We can only imagine the 
manner in which Jesus acted. It is, however, " a quite 
unreasonable scepticism to say that these scenes, because 
of the difficulty of imagining them, and thelhealing work 
of Jesus in general, should be relegated to the province of 
legend. That Jesus was regarded and sought as a healer 
of the sick we are bound to assume, as the popular side of 
the great impression which he made on men," which in 
turn is simply assumed in this paragraph. " The one [!] 
possible explanation is that he was full of the belief that 
he was allied to divine force ; his confidence in God's 
miraculous aid, his ' enthusiasm ' in this regard, must [!] 
have been strong and sincere, and it must [!] have been 
based on real experience " (p. 117). 

Take, for instance, the possessed in the synagogue at 
Capernaum. Weiss thinks he can explain his delivery by 
the enthusiastic messianic character of the preaching of 
Jesus, " by which the patient, identifying himself with 
the demon within him, feels that he is personally 
threatened, yet at the same time attracted; and thus a 
paroxysm is provoked, and it is followed by tranquillity. 
In this," he exclaims, " how have we passed the bounds 
of historical interpretation ? What is there improbable 
in the episode ? " Jesus imposed silence on the demon 
" by virtue of the divine spirit which he felt in himself." 
If any one ventures to differ from him, Weiss bitterly 
retorts : " Any man who says that these religious ideas 
and emotions are inconceivable had better keep his hand 
off matters of religious history ; he has no equipment to 
deal with them" (p. 121). Then there is the healing of 
Peter's mother-in-law. "I have," says Weiss, "no 
experience in such matters [What a pity ! What a lot 
he might have taught us had he been able to experiment 



138 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

on his own mother-in-law !] ; but I do not see that what 
is described here is impossible " (p. 122) / It is true that 
one may regard the curing of such a patient by suggestive 
influence as " quite possible, and even probable." But 
what sort of " science " it is to reduce the whole contents 
of the gospels to mere possibilities of this sort we must be 
permitted to hold our own opinion. 

Perhaps the " method " by which critical theologians 
prove the existence of their Jesus cannot be better studied 
than in the case of Weiss's Das dlteste Evangelium. Weiss 
tries to prove that the author of our gospel of Mark is 
merely incorporating an already existing tradition. " Not 
without certain assumptions," he admits, " do we set about 
the inquiry. We have been prepared by the tradition of 
the early Church, especially by the evidence of Papias [!] , 
to find that in the gospel which has come down to us 
under the name of Mark we shall find an echo of the 
statements of Peter. Hence [!] we approach our subject 
with the particular question how far the reminiscences of 
Peter form the groundwork" (p. 120). "My aim is, I 
candidly admit, to trace the text of Mark in its general 
lines [!] to an earlier tradition. As far as it is possible [!] , 
I endeavour to trace it to Peter's way of looking at things, 
and understand it as historically as possible. I am, there- 
fore, a partisan of my author that I grant to a certain 
extent " (p. 122). Now let us listen. 

" Now, after that John was put in prison, Jesus came 
into Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God " 
(Mark i, 14). " Thus Peter may have begun his account " 
(p. 136). Then there is the account of the calling of the 
early disciples. Here we detect a certain amount of 
literary manipulation ; the story reminds us too strikingly 
of the calling of Elisha by Elijah (1 Kings xix, 19). It is 
not certain that the phrase " fishers of men " was uttered 

1 In his work, Das dlteste Evangelium (1903), Weiss tells us that it was 
"probably a case of malarial fever," and refers us to Eulenburg's Real- 
Encyclopddie der ges. Heilkunde, p. 146. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 139 

on this occasion. But it may have been spoken on another 
occasion, and the whole account may spring from a 
reminiscence of that " unforgettable moment " in which 
the word of Jesus induced Peter to follow him. The 
technical phrase " casting of nets " is, Weiss assures us, 
significant ; he seems to think it improbable that any but 
a fisherman should use this very unfamiliar phrase, or 
know anything about so unusual an occupation. In this 
case we may have the first part of those narratives of 
Peter which Mark is said by Papias to have used. Now 
for the Sabbath in Capernaum, the healing of the possessed 
in the synagogue and of Peter's mother-in-law, the healings 
in the evening, the flight in the morning. How excellent 
a local and chronological connection there is between the 
stories! How vividly the details are told ! Howthe agitation 
of all concerned is felt in the account ! From all this the 
" sole scientific method, the one prudent and critical view," 
deduces that (we tremble with curiosity) here we have an 
" excellent tradition " in fact, the recollections of Peter 
because (we must complete the argument) no other 
man could have invented these things, or at least not 
have told them in that way. 

In the second chapter we have the strange story of 
the palsied man who could not reach Jesus on account of 
the crowd, so that they had to remove the roof of the 
house and let him down to the healer within. As the 
scene is Capernaum, and there is " mention of a house," 
it is natural, according to Weiss, to suppose that it was 
Peter's house ! Another of Peter's reminiscences, there- 
fore. Does the parable of the sower belong to the same 
category ? " We should like to believe it, on account of 
the graphic introduction [!] . The reminiscence recalls a 
very clearly-described locality [the fact is that Jesus is 
supposed to have spoken the parable from a boat at the 
shore], and the time of it also is determined by iv, 35 
["And the same day, when the even was come"]. It 
was a perfectly definite [?] day on which these things 



140 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

took place" (p. 178). The boat (iv, 1) was, of course, 
Peter's boat, though this is not said in the text. 

Into the story of the daughter of Jairus the healing of 
the woman with an issue of blood is rather artistically 
woven. This artistic combination cannot be a literary 
device, but depends on a real historical reminiscence. 
"It was unforgettable that so curious an event should 
take place on the way to the house of Jairus " (p. 180). 
Then there is the calming of the tempest. The story is 
so improbable, and so strongly suggests Jonah i, 3 and 5, 
that most critics since Strauss have regarded it as a mere 
legend, and one is disposed to ask, with Weiss : "If Peter 
could tell things of that kind, what use is he to us ? " 
Nevertheless, why should we not once more see a real 
episode at the base of it, and suppose that the evangelist 
afterwards gave it the first touches of miraculous quality ? 
In the same way, the story of the Gadarene possessed is 
supposed to be based on " a sound tradition " (tradition 
is always "sound" when it fits the theological scheme). 
Observe how the writer's acquaintance with the locality 
is assumed. What a graphic description ! Mountains 
running down to the shore and falling precipitously into 
the sea I 1 " This description could only originate among 
those who were familiar with these features of the 
country." Mark could not have so described it unless 
tradition had enabled him ; hence the story must be true, 
and Peter must be the teller of it. And then the descrip- 
tion of the possessed man ! The symptoms are totally 
different from those of the possessed in the synagogue ; 
it is " epileptoid hysteria " (this also the " historian " seems 
to have found in Eulenburg's Beal-Encyclopddie) . The 
account, moreover, must have been given by the patient 
himself after his restoration or by the other people ; hence 
once more we have a " sound tradition." The only defect 
of the evangelist's description is that he is too much 

1 Mark v, 11 and 13. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 141 

interested in the swine, too little in the man. "The 
story is interesting in any case, and if any man takes 
offence at it he may be told that it was narrated precisely 
on that account " (p. 189). 

So much for the "historian" Weiss. After these 
specimens of his critical exegesis we may refrain from 
following him further along this path, although there is 
much in his work that ought not to be suffered to pass 
into oblivion ; his interpretation, for instance, of the 
confession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi the locality is 
" drawn to the life," the detail is " thoroughly concrete "; 
it has, as Herr von Soden would say, " the very smell of 
the soil of Palestine," so that we are compelled to admit 
its historical reality and his conception of the trans- 
figuration of Moses, which must, of course, have been a 
" visionary experience on the part of Peter." 

We may add, to the credit of science, that the effort 
of Weiss to reconstruct the fundamental form of Mark's 
narrative by means of exegetic analysis, and prove that 
Peter and his friends were responsible for it, has met 
with the most violent resistance even among his own 
colleagues. Wellhausen finds the tradition of Mark as 
regards Galilee and the Galilean narratives to be of such 
a nature that it cannot be referred to the primitive 
disciples. " Is it possible," he asks, " that Peter was the 
authority for the sudden vocation of the four fishers of 
men? that he told of the walking on the sea, the 
driving of the evil spirit into the swine, the healing of 
the woman with an issue of blood by the virtue of his 
garments, and of the deaf and blind by means of spittle ? 
And why does he not tell us more, and in greater detail, 
about the intercourse of the master with his disciples ? 
It does not seem likely that the narrative tradition in 
Mark originated among the companions of Jesus ? " Otto 
Schmiedel also finds himself compelled to put more than 

1 Einl. in die drei ersten Evangelien, 1905, p. 52. 



142 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

one note of interrogation after the statements of Weiss, 
and observes : " We do not know with so much confidence 
(in spite of Papias) that Peter was Mark's authority." 1 
In fact, the whole method is in the air, and it is quite 
hopeless to attempt to deduce the historicity of the gospel 
narratives from their character. 

4. THE " UNIQUENESS " AND " UNINVENTIBILITY " 
OF THE GOSPEL POETEAIT OF JESUS. 

In the absence of any objective criterion it is necessary 
for the theologian to rely upon subjective feeling and seek 
in this the irrefragable proof of the historicity of the 
gospel Jesus. Here we have especially to meet the 
emphatic claim that the portrait of Jesus is " unique " 
and " could not have been invented." 

As to the uniqueness, the phrase is so obviously used 
for the purpose of raising the personality of Jesus above 
all other men, in spite of its purely human and historical 
character, and to provide some compensation for the loss 
of belief in his divinity, that we need not linger over it. 
Even a theologian like Paul W. Schmiedel acknowledges : 
" For my part I never claim that Jesus was unique ; it 
either means nothing at all, since every man is unique, 
or it may seem to affirm too much." 2 And the historian 
Seeck observes that every man has his like, and therefore 
there are no unique personalities in the sense in which 
theologians use the word here. 8 Faust, Hamlet, Lear, 
and Caliban, and their like, are unique ; are they therefore 
historical personalities ? 

The great point, however, is that the figure of Jesus, 
as it is described in the gospels, " could not have been 
invented." This is repeated incessantly, not only in 
popular discussions, but even by experts such as von 

1 Die Hauptprobleme der Lebcn-Jesu-Forschung, 2 Aufl., 1906, p. 62. 
3 Die Person Christi im Streite der Meinungen der Gegenwart, 1906, 
p. 29. 
8 Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt, iii, p. 183. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 143 

Soden, Jiilicher, Weiss, and even Harnack. How much 
truth there is in it has been shown by Steudel in his 
work against von Soden. It would not be easy to find 
a more ridiculous phrase or a feebler argument. In no 
other historical inquiry whatever would such an argument 
be admitted as proof of the historicity of a certain person 
or event. None but a theological historian would venture 
to use such an argument, and it is lamentable that he 
should find any support on the side of profane historians. 
As if one could settle a priori the limits of the human 
faculty of invention ! As if the figure of Jesus in the 
gospels stood really apart from comparison with any 
others ! If religious-historical inquiry has told us any- 
thing, it has shown that this is the reverse of the truth. 
The Saviour of the gospels is paralleled by other redeem- 
ing divinities, whom he resembles so closely at times as 
to be identical with them. His fate is entirely related to 
that of Attis, Adonis, Dionysos, Osiris, Marduch, etc. 
Indeed, in many and important points we recognise a 
human personality in the saviours of the non-Judaic 
religions, and the more research advances in that field 
the clearer it becomes that the separate features of the 
figure of Jesus have their counterpart, partly in ancient 
mythology, partly and especially in the Old Testament, 
and thus it is absurd to say that they could not be 
invented. So fine a story as that of the disciples at 
Emmaus (Luke xxiv, 13), which treats of the risen, not 
the living, Christ, and therefore must certainly be un- 
historical according to the critical theologians, could be 
"invented." 1 The story of the adulterous woman also, 
which is found only in John (viii, 1), is allowed to be a 
later invention. 2 Even the pleasant story of the two 
sisters, Mary and Martha (Luke x, 38), is, as Smith has 
shown in his Ecce Deus, a mere allegory of the relations 
of paganism and Judaism to the cult of Jesus, the former 

1 Cf. Niemojewski, Warum eilten die Jilnqer nach Emmaus ? (1911). 

2 Compare Robertson's Christianity and Mythology, p. 457. 



144 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

receiving him with joy, the latter occupying herself much 
with customs and ceremonies and claiming the same 
service from her "sister." 1 If these three stories three 
of the pearls of the gospels were invented, what is there 
that could not be invented ? 

However, one has the feeling that the theological 
historians are not really very much in earnest with this 
argument. They use it only at times as a rhetorical 
auxiliary, and on account of the impression which it is 
apt to make on the thoughtless mass of people. Even 
Weiss seems to be not quite at home with it (p. 15), and 
Schmiedel expressly acknowledges that the statement 
that the figure of Jesus in the gospels could not be 
invented " is not a valid argument in its general form." 
" We must," he says, " restrict it to certain passages in 
which it is indisputably valid. I count nine such 
passages, and, in order to emphasise their importance, 
give them a special name : I call them the main pillars 
of a really scientific life of Jesus." 2 

5. SCHMIEDEL'S " MAIN PILLAES." 

We have now reached a point where the man who 
denies the historicity of Jesus is to be definitively put to 
shame: the "granite," the "historical bedrock," which, 
according to the theological critics, will resist every 
attempt to rob the gospel narratives of their funda- 
mentally historical character. Nine main pillars of a 
really scientific life of Jesus ! The same number as in a 
game of skittles. Here we have the last solid ground 
on which the structure of the liberal conception of Jesus 
rests. Beneath the roof that rests on these nine pillars 



1 Moreover, the circumstance that Martha (" mistress ") worried also 
finds expression in the name of the place, Bethany, where, according to 
John, the episode is supposed to have taken place. In Aramaic it means 
" The house of her who worries." 

2 Die Person Jesu im Streite der Meinungen der Gegenwart. See also 
Schmiedel's work, Das vierte Evangelium gegenttbdr den drei ersten, p. 16. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 145 

the critic may confidently relax from the strain of his 
usual historical efforts. As long as the pillars stand 
there is no danger of the collapse of the Christian 
historical belief. But what if these also are fragile if 
the " granite " is mere plaster or stucco, if the nine main 
pillars are merely wings to hide the emptiness and 
nakedness of the theological way of writing history? 
What if they are "jerry-built houses," intended only for 
show ? As a matter of fact, the pillars will stand only 
as long as one refrains from putting them to a serious 
test, and is content to admire their " really scientific " 
appearance ; it would hardly take a Samson to bring 
Schmiedel's whole nine pillars with a crash to the ground. 
For they are based entirely on the assumption that it is 
the aim of the gospels to represent the historical human 
Jesus as a divine being ; they fall of themselves the 
moment one assumes that, as the " Christ-myth " main- 
tains, they seek, on the contrary, to describe as a real 
man one who was originally a god. 

Schmiedel's nine pillars have of late years, on account 
of the great part they have played in the discussion of the 
Jesus-problem, been subjected to a close scrutiny by more 
than one writer. Hertlein endeavoured to upset them in 
1906, and more recently Robertson (Christianity and 
Mythology] , Lublinski (Das werdende Dogma, p. 93) , Steudel 
(Im Kampf urn die C.M., p. 88), and W. B. Smith (most 
fully of all, in his Ecce Deus) have dealt with them, and 
shown that they are entirely untenable. I might there- 
fore refrain from returning to the subject were it not that 
so much stress is still laid by theological "historians " on 
Schmiedel's nine pillars ; and a fresh discussion, at least 
of the more important of them, is needed. 

First, then, what is the nucleus of Schmiedel's argu- 
ment ? When, he says, one learns about " an historical 
person merely from a book that is pervaded with reverence 
for its hero, as the gospels are in regard to Jesus, he 
regards most confidently those passages in the book as 

L 



146 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

authoritative which are not in harmony with this rever- 
ence ; he says to himself that, in view of the author's 
mood, they could not have been invented by him indeed, 
could not have been chosen by him from the material at 
his disposal if they had not been forced on him as abso- 
lutely true." 

There is, for instance, the statement in Mark (iii, 21) 
that the relatives of Jesus, his mother and brothers, went 
forth to seize him, saying that he was mad. That, says 
Schmiedel, cannot have been invented by one who rever- 
enced Jesus, because he would lower his hero in the eyes 
of his readers ; it is the less conceivable when we reflect 
that the other evangelists say nothing of such language 
being used by the relatives of Jesus, clearly because they 
felt it to be out of harmony with their conception of 
Jesus. Hence in this passage of Mark we have the echo 
of a real historical reminiscence. But in the gospel of 
John, which is generally admitted to carry the glorifica- 
tion of Jesus to its highest point, we find the depreciatory 
circumstance that even his brothers did not believe in 
him (vii, 5) ; and in x, 20, the evangelist makes the Jews 
say: "He hath a devil, and is mad." In the book of 
Wisdom (v, 4) we read how the godless spoke of the just 
man : " His life we held for a folly." In Zechariah 
(xiii, 3) it is written : " And it shall come to pass [in the 
days of the saving of Jerusalem from the attack of its 
enemies] that, when any shall yet prophesy, then his 
father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him : 
Thou shalt not live, for thou speakest lies in the name of 
the Lord ; and his father and his mother that begat him 
shall thrust him through when he prophesieth." And to 
those who ask him about the wounds on his hands he will 
reply : " Those with which I was wounded in the house 
of my friends." In Psalms (Ixix, 8) it is likewise said : 
" I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien 
unto my mother's children." Now, no one doubts that 
the figure of Jesus in the gospels is in many respects 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 147 

determined by passages in the Old Testament. How can 
one doubt that what Schmiedel thinks " could not be 
invented" originated in that source? 

Moreover, Schleiermacher has pointed out, and Strauss 
confirmed the fact, that the word of the Pharisees, " He 
hath Beelzebub " (Mark iii, 22), which has quite a 
different context in Matthew (ix, 34, and xii, 24) and 
Luke (xi, 15), gave the evangelist an opportunity to put 
it, in its meaning, also in the mouths of the relatives of 
Jesus, in order to explain his slighting reply when their 
coming was announced to him. 1 It has, however, clearly 
only the symbolical meaning that real relationship with 
Jesus is purely spiritual, not bodily, and it is neither 
" beyond the range of invention " nor contradictory to 
the divine reverence for Jesus. In fine, the conduct of 
the Saviour's relatives in the gospels need not be taken at 
all as a depreciation of Jesus, so that there is no need to 
regard it as historical on that account. " As if," Steudel 
says, " a romancer depreciates his hero by representing 
him as misunderstood by those about him." 2 As if it 
might not just as well have been his aim to bring out the 
surpassing importance of Jesus by representing him as 
too great to be understood by his relatives, and even being 
regarded by them as mad. When people refuse to recog- 
nise an " historical sense " in those of us who deny the 
historicity of Jesus because we find such an argument as 
this trivial, we must on our part refuse the " aesthetic 
sense " to Schmiedel and his followers because they so 
little understand the poetical fineness of that passage in 
Mark as to find it out of harmony with the general 
portrait of Jesus in the gospels. 

We turn to the second pillar. In Mark x, 18, Jesus 
declines to be called a " good " master " Why callest 
thou me good? There is none good but one, that is 



1 Strauss, Leben Jesu, I, 692. 

3 Im Kampfe um die Christusmythe, p. 89. 



148 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

God." How little such an expression could be invented 
by the followers of Jesus who wrote the gospels, says 
Schmiedel, we learn from Matthew. In his gospel 
(xix, 16) the rich man says : " Good master, what good 
thing shall I do that I may have eternal life ? And he 
said unto him, Why asketh thou me about the good ? 
One is good." 1 Logically, Jesus ought to have said: 
" One thing is the good." But as Matthew had the words 
of Mark before him, and sought to avoid their offensive- 
ness, he changed the words. 2 Unfortunately, it is not at 
all certain that in this case Mark has the original text. 
The oldest manuscripts read like Matthew, and leave 
out the " good " at the beginning of the usual text, so 
that the text of Mark may be a later form of the altered 
text of Matthew. This oldest text, however, is not at 
all as illogical as Schmiedel represents. In the Hebrew 
version of the reply of Jesus the masculine and neuter 
are both the same : it may be either " one person " or 
" one thing." " Let us assume (with Eesch) that the 
reply ran : One thing is good keep the commandments. 
First this was translated into the masculine gender in 
Greek : One is good. Afterwards the explanatory note 
was added, and later admitted to the text namely, God. 
' One is good, God,' seemed to be in opposition to the 
person of Jesus. Hence the question, Why askest thou 
me about the good ? had to be changed into, Why callest 
thou me good ? The connection was now broken, and it 
had to be restored by adding, ' But if thou wilt enter 
into life,' and so the original question was resumed." 
This is the literary-critical hypothesis put forward by 
Pott as regards the historical evolution of the text. 8 
However that may be, in such a condition of things no 

1 [The English translation of the Bible has the same answer in Matthew 
and Mark. I find that there are different versions of the Greek text of 
Matthew xix, 16. J. M.] 

2 Das vierte Evangelium, p. 19. 

8 Der Text des Neuen Testaments nach seiner geschichtlichen Entwick- 
lung, 1906, p. 63, Also see Robertson's Christianity and Mythology. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 149 

one has a right to say that the correct answer of Jesus is 
in Mark, and that Matthew gives a tendentious modifica- 
tion of the original text, and to make a "main pillar" 
out of such material as this. Psychologically, it is just 
as improbable that the innocent and customary address 
"good master" provoked Jesus to disclaim the epithet as 
that the question as to doing good should have prompted 
him to say that God is good. Moreover, the answer 
" God alone is good " suggests Plato just as forcibly as 
the form " The good is one " suggests Euclid of Megara- 
Hence it is impossible to say that these words of Jesus 
" could not be invented." For the rest, until Schmiedel 
no one had noticed anything particularly offensive in the 
passage of Mark. Justin, for instance, finds in the reply of 
Jesus a proof of the Saviour's lowliness and modesty in 
disclaiming the appellation " good "; while other apostolic 
fathers, in the opposite sense to Schmiedel, saw in the 
words of Jesus a proof of his divinity, making Jesus 
apply to himself the words, " God alone is good," as if 
he wished to say : " That man rightly calls me good, 
for I am God." 

Equally ambiguous is the value of the third main 
pillar. It consists in this, that Jesus could perform no 
miracle in Nazareth, on account of the unbelief of his 
countrymen (Mark vi, 5). But it is maintained that the 
symbolical character of this passage is obvious. Is not 
the glorification of the power of faith a leading tendency 
of the gospel of Mark ? " For verily I say unto you, 
That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou 
removed, and be thou cast into the sea ; and shall not 
doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things 
which he saith shall come to pass ; he shall have what- 
soever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things 
soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive 
them, and ye shall have them " (xi, 23 and 24). The 
man who believes shall receive help (x, 52). Shortly 
before, in the fifth chapter, the evangelist has described 



150 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

how the woman with an issue of blood was healed owing 
to her faith in Jesus ; and Jesus said to Jairus, whose 
daughter had died : " Be not afraid, only believe." As a 
complement to this we have the description of the unbelief 
of the people of Nazareth and the failure of the wished-for 
miracles. Can anyone seriously doubt that the story has 
been " invented " to illustrate the fundamental idea of the 
gospel, that faith is necessary for miracles? Moreover, 
the sojourn of Jesus in Nazareth clearly reminds the 
evangelist of the familiar saying of the time, that a 
prophet is nowhere of less account than in his own 
country and among his own people. He therefore puts 
the proverb in the mouth of Jesus, and then illustrates it 
by making him refrain from performing miracles in his 
country. It is, in any case, impossible to find anything 
here inconsistent with the evangelist's reverence for 
Jesus. The thing that the impartial reader would be 
inclined to regard as beyond the range of invention is 
that anyone should be scandalised at the passage, and 
from this scandal endeavour to deduce the historicity 
of Jesus. 

A fourth pillar, according to Schmiedel, is Jesus's cry 
of despair on the cross : " My God, my God, why hast 
thou forsaken me?" The words, however, are found at 
the beginning of the twenty-second psalm, which gives 
various details of the crucifixion the just man hanging 
on the stake, the perforated hands and feet, the mocking 
crowd, the soldiers gambling for the clothes everything 
takes place as described in the psalm. Is it possible to 
believe that the words were really spoken by Jesus? 
Yes, says Schmiedel ; and Harnack agrees. If the story 
of Jesus is recounted in such a way that the sacred words 
of the Old Testament seem to be fulfilled in it, this was 
only done when it served "the interest of Jesus"; but 
this interest would have been injured if the words of the 
psalm had been put in the mouth of the dying Jesus. As 
if the gospels had been composed in much the same way 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 151 

as a modern writer would sit down at his desk to write a 
large book, and contained one consistent idea, with the 
various parts carefully controlled and all contradictions 
avoided. As if the gospels did not swarm with contra- 
dictions and " discordances " in their description of the 
character and experiences of Jesus, which afford another 
proof that there is no question in them of a single definite 
person and of historical recollections, but a mere collection 
of details taken from very different sources, the choice of 
which was determined, not with a view to avoiding con- 
tradictions, but with a view to making the figure of the 
Saviour as vivid and attractive as possible in the sense of 
the Messianic expectations. 

Lublinski has admirably shown that in an attempt to 
give sensuous embodiment to a symbol, such as the 
supposed historical Jesus is in our opinion, the result is 
inevitably an irrational organism which is sure to present 
many " contradictions " to our intellect. 1 " The one aim 
of the author of the primitive gospel," says Steudel, "was 
to give an expressive elaboration of the idea ; and, as he 
wished to describe Jesus as the ' suffering servant ' of 
Psalm xxii, he could not hesitate for a moment to put 
in his mouth as a prayer the quotation in question. 
Whether the figure which he built up was consistent or 
not gave very little concern to the author." ' 

Even the theologian Spitta says that it is a " modern 
notion that a later dogmatic could not possibly have put 
into the mouth of Jesus the despairing cry of Matt. 
xxvii, 46, and Mark xv, 34. Dogmatics has had nothing 
to do with it ; it was the primitive Christian tradition 
which saw in the twenty-second psalm a prediction of the 
death and resurrection of Jesus. It is a curious illusion 
to suppose that gospels of the Christological views which 
Matthew and Mark represent would not suffer Jesus to 
end his life with a cry of despair of God and his mission. 

1 Das werd. Dogma, p. 93. 

2 Ln Kampf uni die Christtismythe, p. 117. 



152 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

That may apply to certain constructions of the life of 
Jesus, but it is not inconsistent with the feeling of the 
gospel writers. That, in view of the undoubted influence 
of the Old Testament doctrine of the sufferings of the just 
one on the suffering figure of Jesus and of the central 
significance of the death of Jesus in the Pauline dogmatic, 
the later manipulations of the evangelical tradition would 
not be disposed to weaken the sufferings and death of 
Jesus, should not need emphasising." ; 

Only if it were proved that there is question of a real 
history in the gospels could one admit that the evangelist 
would have avoided weaving into the life-story of his 
Jesus such details from the Old Testament as did not 
accord with his main idea of the personality of Jesus. 
If the historicity of Jesus were established by other 
arguments we should be justified in deducing from the 
presence of these details the fact of an historical tradition 
which the author was bound to reproduce. But to seek 
a proof of the historicity of the gospel narrative from 
mere contradictions, real or apparent, is not science nor 
the method " which every historian follows in non- 
theological matters "; it is simply the method of arguing 
in a vicious circle which is peculiar to theological 
" history," the thing that has to be proved being taken 
for granted. To go back to our earlier illustration from 
Heracles, we could prove the historicity of the Greek 
hero on that method. In the account of him there are 
many details that do not accord with the otherwise 
splendid figure of this strongest of all Greek heroes. He 
is supposed to have become insane at times, and to have 
murdered his own children when in that condition ; he 
is said to have taken refuge with a Thracian woman in 
his struggle with the Meropes, and concealed himself in 
female clothing ; in fact, he is supposed to have been 
altogether unmanly and weak in face of Omphale, winding 

1 Zur Oeschichte und Literatur des Urchristentums, iii, 2, 1907, p. 204. 
Cf. Feigel, Der Einfluss des Weissagungsbeweises, u.s.w., 63-69. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 153 

her wool and running round her in her garments. We 
might call these " main pillars of a really scientific life 
of Heracles "! 

Hence it is sheer self-deception for Schmiedel to 
imagine that he has " established " the existence of an 
historical Jesus beyond a shadow of doubt. His main 
pillars are " ingenious discoveries of a theologian, master- 
pieces of apologetic hairsplitting " (Steudel) ; they are 
" small matters which one must examine with a 
microscope in order to give them the character of 
granite which they are supposed to have as central 
columns of the liberal Jesus " (Krieck). 

Yet the four we have discussed are the only ones 
among them which even seem to have any importance. 
This cannot be said of the other five. When Jesus 
confesses, in regard to the day and hour of the end of 
the world, that " no man know T eth, no, not the angels 
which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father " 
(Mark xiii, 32), we can only say that omniscience is not 
expected of him, as the evangelist describes him as a 
mere man, with human qualities and human limitations. 
Moreover, the uncertainty in point of time of the end of 
the world is one of the normal features of every 
apocalyptic. Hence the ignorance of Jesus on that point 
is so natural that the evangelist himself prudently refrains 
from any chronological statement. Lastly, Smith points 
out how one may infer the divine character of the Son 
from his being placed after the angels in the words of 
Jesus. 

And when Matthew (xi, 5) makes the Saviour say : 
" The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the 
lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, 
and the poor have the gospel preached to them," to what 
extent can we see in this a contradiction of the idea 
which the evangelist had of Jesus? Schmiedel takes 
the words spiritually : the spiritually blind shall see, the 
spiritually lame walk, etc., because Jesus, he thinks, 



154 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

" could not have more seriously destroyed the effect of his 
words than by making a series of miracles, which rises as 
high as the awakening of the dead, close with something 
so simple and common as preaching to the poor." Yet 
we read in Isaiah (xxxv, 5), in relation to the promised 
coming of the Lord : " Then the eyes of the blind shall 
be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. 
Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue 
of the dumb sing." And in Isaiah Ixi, 1, it is said : 
" The spirit of the Lord God is upon me : because the 
Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the 
meek ; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, 
to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the 
prison to them that are bound [sight to the blind] ; to 
proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of 
vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn." 1 
Clearly, the " pillar " is merely made up of these two 
passages, and therefore the saying of Jesus has no claim 
to historicity. 

Of the rest of the "main pillars" it is better to 
say nothing. Those who are interested may consult 
Schmiedel and the works we have quoted. For my part, 
I have tried in vain to see in them any sort of argument 
for an historical Jesus. A man has to be a theologian to 
appreciate arguments of this kind. We may assume 
that real historians shrug their shoulders at Schmiedel's 
" nine main pillars," if they have gone so far as to look 
into the matter. Schmiedel's " nine main pillars " are 
excellent companions to the three "pillar-apostles" of 
the Epistle to the Galatians. At a distance they look 
very fine ; when you come closer to them they dissolve 
into atoms. Schmiedel thinks that in virtue of his 
"pillars" he "knows" that the person of Jesus cannot 
be relegated to the world of fable. He also "knows" 
that " Jesus was a man in the full sense of the word, and 

1 See also Isaiah xlii, 7. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 155 

that in him the divine, which is, of course, not on that 
account denied, must be sought only as it can be found 
in a man." 1 We leave him with this " knowledge "; for 
our part, we decline to settle in a house that rests on these 
"nine main pillars of a really scientific life of Jesus." 2 
Schmiedel has the support of his colleague Weiss in his 
search for " indubitable historical features " in the 
evangelical figure of Jesus. " The power of Jesus," Weiss 
says, " rests on the spirit that was given to him in 
baptism ; we see how this spirit wrestles with the 
spirits" (Mark i, 25; iii, 11; v, 6, 8; xxv, etc.). Then 
follows the list of Schmiedel's chief pillars, and the 
" historian " continues : " We see [!] how the dogmatic 
conception of the evangelist was unable to absorb the 
human-historical figure" (p. 133). Surely we have here 
a tenth main pillar ! 3 

This, then, is, as regards the historicity of Jesus, the 
" solid " fruit of that penetrating " analytical work on the 
gospels which is called historical exegesis," which has 
been going on for more than a century. We quite under- 
stand that " there are many who are indifferent to this 
inquiry into the inner structure of a document, and 

1 Die Person Jesu, p. 9. 

2 Observe the play of colour in the phrase " a man in the full sense of 
the word," in whom, nevertheless, "the divine is not denied," though it 
" must be sought only as it can be found in a man." (See also his Das 
vierte Evangelium, p. 17, where it is said that, while we acknowledge that 
there was something divine in Jesus, he thought and lived in a way which 
we must regard as really human. To what triviality is this "God- 
manhood " reduced in our liberal theologians !) Is Jesus a God -man in 
the Christian sense or is he not ? We might ask these theologians in 
the words of Elijah : " How long halt ye between two opinions ? " 
(1 Kings xviii, 21). 

8 Some may see a sort of main pillar in the words of Jesus (Mark 
xiii, 30): " This generation shall not pass till all these things be done." 
Because, they may say, if a prophecy of this kind, which was not confirmed 
by the course of events, could remain in the gospels, it must have been 
uttered by Jesus. But is it not possible that the saying of Jesus is part of 
the Jewish apocalyptic which is embodied in the chapter of Mark quoted ? 
In that case it is no more historical than Matt, x, 23, Mark ix, 1, and 
Luke ix, 27, which are merely due to modifications of Mark xiii, 30. The 
saying cannot be a " main pillar " because it contradicts the first "pillar " 
(Mark xiii, 32), according to which Jesus declined to tell the time of the 
end of the world. 



156 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

declare in warning tones that the work of theologians 
is hopeless, though they themselves will do nothing " 
(Weiss, p. 134). 

6. THE METHOD OF " THE CHRIST-MYTH." 

(a) The Literary Character of the Gospels. Differently 
from the method of the theological historian, The Christ- 
Myth starts with the conviction that the gospels are, on 
the confession of the theologians themselves, works of 
edification, not of history, or tendentious works of a 
dogmatic-metaphysical character ; that is to say, it is not 
so much their aim to describe the real life of Jesus as to 
put before the minds of their readers a Jesus that will be 
likely to " influence their religious feelings, inflame their 
hope, and awaken their faith." Even Weiss admits " how 
impossible it is to take the gospel of Mark forthwith, 
without close inquiry, as a primitive source. We cannot 
trace the inner movement, or even the course of external 
events, from the successive pieces in Mark. The form 
and tone which Mark gives to the various parts of his 
narrative are often more dogmatic than historical ; he 
himself is not a chronicler, but a witness to the gospel of 
Christ, the son of God " (p. 153). In the conception of 
Mark the death of Jesus is, as Weiss observes, " the real 
aim and content of his life (!) ; it is seen in advance, and 
everything works up to it, so that the entire gospel is 
really a story of the Passion stretching backwards " 
(p. 132). Moreover, the chronological frame in which 
Mark encloses the details of the life of Jesus is " neither 
historical nor chronological, but didactic. Galilee is the 
life, and Jerusalem is the death ; the passage from 
Nazareth to Golgotha is the unavailing work among 
Israel and the prospect of the believing heathens of the 
future ; that the actions of Jesus in Israel did not bring 
salvation to that people, but that salvation is found in the 
mystery of his death for those who acknowledge and 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 157 

believe those are the great ideas which he spreads like 
a net over his variegated material " (p. 136). 

Even when the evangelist offers us ostensible history, 
we do not feel confident about what he describes. 
" Chronology is his weak point." " He has no idea of 
the duration of the activity of Jesus" [in the year 64 !]. 
For him to make Jesus, the pious Jew, come to Jeru- 
salem for the first time at the Passover is, according to 
Weiss, " a really childish idea." He gives nothing in 
chronological order. We never find a date that might 
serve to fix any event in point of time. And it is not 
much better with his indications of places. It is true 
that he knows the names of a few places, and often 
represents a situation as known to his readers ; but his 
indications are generally so superficial and vague (a 
house, a mountain, a solitary place, and so on) that 
the historian can make no more of them than he could 
of the stage-directions of a play. " His geographical 
notions are," says Weiss, " confined to a few large 
divisions Galilee, Peraea, Judaea, the ' sea ' of Galilee, 
etc. But it is clear, from, for instance, the section that 
deals with the two miraculous meals, that he has no idea 
of the localities. To represent Jesus moving about the 
sea, suddenly appearing in the region of Tyre and Sidon, 
and then to the east of the sea again, shows that the 
writer has no idea of the topography of the country " 
(p. 137). " The topographical ideas of the evangelist are 
confused," we read in his Das dlteste Evangelium. " He 
does not take the least interest in such things ; he is indif- 
ferent to time and place" (p. 235). Weiss naturally 
complains of this vagueness as to time and place which 
is so conspicuous in this evangelist (p. 151). Wellhausen 
speaks in the same way, and even more disdainfully, 
of the author of the oldest gospel. 1 

But the other two synoptics are no better in this 

1 Einleitung, p. 51. Compare also the Commentar zu den vie 
Evatigelien of P. van Dyk (S. E. Verus), Leipzig, 1902, Kap. 8 and 9. 



158 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

respect. At least we might have expected more of Luke, 
who expressly describes himself as an " historian " in the 
foreword to his gospel. Unfortunately, it is not so. The 
phrases " In those days," " At that time," " On a Sabbath 
day," "After eight days," "At the same hour," etc., are 
just as common with him ; and when he does seem to 
give definite indications of time for instance, " In the 
days of King Herod," " At the time of the enumeration 
under the governor Cyrenius," " When Lysanias the 
tetrarch was at Abilene, and every man had to be 
numbered" we find him historically inaccurate in 
every case. Herod had died four years before the 
beginning of the present era. Cyrenius was not governor 
until the years 7-11 A.D. Lysanias had been dead 
thirty-four years at the time when Jesus was born. 
Annas and Caiaphas could not be high-priests together, 
as there was only one high-priest at a time. The 
description of the Pharisees is wrong in Luke and all 
the other evangelists. The trial which ended in the 
condemnation of Jesus does not correspond at all to 
Jewish usage at the time. 1 Nothing is known by any 
historian of a friendship between Herod and Pilate, such 
as Luke (xxiii, 12) describes. It is true that we know 
that Pilate was procurator in Judaea in the fifteenth year 
of the Emperor Tiberius (28). But the character of 
Pilate, as described in Luke and the other evangelists, 
is entirely opposed to all that we know of the man ; and 
it is not certain that we have not here an astral myth, in 
which the Homo pilatus (the javelin-man Orion) played a 
part, converted into history on the strength of a similarity 
of name with the Roman procurator Pilate, and that the 
whole story was not on this account placed in the time of 
the first two Roman emperors. It can be detached from 
that period without suffering any essential change. In 
essence it is independent of time, as myths are. This is 

1 Brandt, Die evangel. Geschichte ; Steudel, Im Kampf um die Christus- 
mythe, pp. 42 and 53. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 159 

strikingly confirmed by the statement of St. Augustine 1 
that Jesus died on March 25 under the consulate of the 
two Gemini (29). The death of Christ falls, according to 
the calculations of Niemojewski, on March 25 (during 
the vernal equinox), when the new moon dies in the 
constellation of the Heavenly Twins in Latin, Gemini. 2 
There are many other details in the gospels which point 
to the fact that astral relations are at the root of the 
supposed historical events which they describe. 

In any case, the narrative of the gospels is not of a 
nature to exclude the possibility that dogmatic and 
metaphysical material, which originated in a totally 
different province, was afterwards worked into an his- 
torical scheme, and that this was done at a time when 
the real features of Palestine in the days of Jesus were 
very superficially known to the author, and by one who 
had not an accurate knowledge of the geographical and 
chronological conditions. From this we know what to 
think when von Soden and others speak of the " graphic 
miniature painting " and " smell of the soil of Palestine " 
in the gospel narratives, and when Jiilicher assures us 
that Jesus is " a human personality that could not possibly 
have been in any other time and place than those in 
which he is put in the gospels," and emphasises his being 
" rooted in Jewish soil." It is much the same as if a man 
were to say that Borneo and Juliet were real characters 
which could not have existed elsewhere but in Verona, 
in medieval Italy, where Shakespeare places them. 
Augustine is nearer the truth when he confesses : " Were 
it not for the authority of the Church, I should put no 
faith in the gospels." 

We may dispense ourselves from considering more 
closely the much-praised "pictorial character" of the 
gospels and examining the proof of the historicity of 
Jesus that is based on it. The description in the gospels 

1 De civitate Dei, xviii, 54. 

2 Niemojewski, Gott Jesus, pp. 131, 371, 382, 384. 



160 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

may be pictorial, but it is not more so than any description 
which aims at giving a sensible form to a certain idea by 
artificial means. If we admitted this as an argument for 
the Biblical Jesus, we should have to accept the characters 
and situations of many novels, dramas, and other works of 
fiction as historical realities. Moreover, the vividness of 
the gospels is only found in situations and sensations, not 
in depicting characters ; the character of Jesus by no 
means merits that description, on account of the contra- 
dictions it includes, and there is no consistent and 
progressive treatment in the gospels. In this respect 
Lublinski has very well described the style of the gospels 
as an "impressionist lyrical al fresco style": "Great 
stress is laid on certain scenes, while all the rest lies in 
a darkly-coloured background. That kind of description 
would be curious and incongruous, in fact unprecedented, 
if there were question of a biography. But as the aim is 
to represent a god in his superhuman splendour, no happier 
style could have been chosen. The god must not come 
too close to ourselves, otherwise he loses his altitude, yet 
not be too far from us, otherwise he would not have 
assumed human form for the redemption of sinners. 
The best course is to bring him out in some of his 
actions and situations with sudden and magical power, 
and then allow him to sink back again. Thus we get the 
transfiguration scene, the scene on Golgotha, the entry 
into Jerusalem, the arrest, the crucifixion, and the 
resurrection. We hear strong, angry words and others 
full of tenderness and pity, which similarly break upon 
us suddenly and unexpectedly in seemingly indifferent 
passages. At other times lofty moral sentiments are 
pronounced, and these in turn have to retire behind the 
glamour of mystic words spoken at the last supper or 
after the resurrection and apocalyptic visions. These 
details are not given in logical order and in the quiet 
course of a sustained narrative, but with a certain sudden- 
ness ; just as, when one is travelling in a mountainous 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 161 

district, every turn of the road presents new aspects 
and wonders of the landscape. But the character 
that produces these effects, now humanly approaching us 
and now fading into the mystical distance, would not be 
found a definite personality if his psychology and conduct 
were considered from the biographical point of view. As 
a symbol and god-man, however, he could not have been 
better described." ' 

(b) The Mythical Character of the Gospels. We have 
further to consider the resemblance of the figure of Jesus 
to the saviour-gods of pagan peoples, which theologians 
do not contest, and the resemblance of the Christian 
doctrine of redemption and details of the cult to those of 
the mystical cults in ancient times. 2 We can quite 
understand when the theologians, under the lead of 
Harnack, regard the relevant research in comparative 
religion with great distrust and concern, and that in this 
respect they warn us to proceed with extreme " prudence." 3 
But all that they have said as yet against the possible 

1 Das werdende Dogma, p. 39. 

2 See Arnold Meyer, Inwiefern sind die neutestamentl. Vorstellungen 
von ausserbiblisclien Religionen beeinflusst, 1910. 

3 How theologians go to work may be seen in a pamphlet by Harnack 
on Christmas, in which it is said that the Christmas-story is " not a 
mythology, but a lofty legend, comprising historical and religious facts 
and experiences in very fine images." One is tempted to ask the dis- 
tinguished writer what there is in the story that is not mythical. Is it 
the child-bearing of "Mary " at "Bethlehem " at the time of the great 
" census " ? Or the shepherds on the fields, to whom an angel announces 
the birth of the Saviour, and their veneration of the "son of David"? Or 
the story of the announcement of the birth of the Baptist ? Or the 
massacre of the children ? Or the presentation of the child in the temple ? 
Or but Harnack at last tells us : the story of the star and the wise men 
from the east ! " Here we have an ancient myth reproduced and applied 
to Jesus Christ, but " he at once soothes his readers "how rich the story 
is ! At that time many ancient religions were pressing from the east into 
the Roman Empire ; they were, to some extent, deeper and richer than 
the Graeco-Roman, and therefore had many followers. Our story shows 
us the wise men from the east that is to say, those oriental religions [!] 
bowing down before the wonderful star that had arisen over Bethlehem, 
and bringing gifts to the new-born child. And so it actually came to 
pass ! History has fulfilled and confirmed the myth in a wonderful way 
[sic] . The oriental religions brought gifts to the Christian, and then 
paled before its light." Thus speaks "Dr. Adolf Harnack, ordinary Pro- 
fessor at the University of Berlin." We now know how to give a " really 
scientific " interpretation of myths. 

M 



162 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

derivation of the Christ-story from the pagan myths is so 
lame and biassed that it is difficult to keep patience in 
discussing such things with them. Take, for instance, 
the notion of a suffering and dying God. The Christ- 
Myth has shown how familiar this idea was to Judaism 
from its own tradition how the notion of a suffering 
king and just one, offering himself for the sins of his 
fellows, was based on a very ancient rite in the whole 
early world, which has left traces even in the Old Testa- 
ment. A man must be utterly devoid of psychology and 
be a worshipper of the letter to doubt that the idea must 
have had adherents among the Jews even in the days of 
Jesus merely because we have no direct evidence of it in 
writing. And what a decisive part the idea plays in the 
Gnostic systems ! Nor can it any longer be disputed 
that Gnosticism was not, as was hitherto generally 
believed, a product of Christianity, but is much older than 
Christianity. 1 In the second century the Talmud expressly 
sets forth the idea of a Messiah suffering in atonement 
for his people. It would be surprising if, in the circum- 
stances, the belief in a suffering and dying saviour-god 
had not been found among the Jews at an earlier date. 
As we shall see more fully, the idea had been impressed 
on them by Isaiah (ch. liii). The ancient Babylonian 
idea of a divinity coming down from heaven and soiling 
himself with earthly material for the purpose of saving 
mankind was bound to imply suffering and death, 
especially among a people of strong religious feelings, 
surrounded by the suffering and dying gods of neigh- 
bouring peoples, in the close atmosphere and mysticism 
of sectarian life. 

Opinions may differ as to the way and the extent in 
which Christian ideas, especially the gospel narratives, 
were influenced by the analogous myths and ceremonies 
of non-Christian religions whether the influence was 

1 See M. Bruckner, Der sterbende und aufersteliende Gottheiland in den 
Orient-Religionen und ihr Verh<niss zum Christentum, 1908, p. 30. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 163 

direct or indirect, and whether the analogies were merely 
accidental or were, as some credulous writers affirm, 
divinely appointed. The Christ-Myth refrained from 
taking up any definite position on this point. It was 
generally content to tell the facts and let them speak for 
themselves, in order to justify its theory that Jesus also 
may have been one form of the myth, and the " history " 
of him may have been derived from the same mythic 
material as that of the pagan saviour-gods. It stimulated 
questions, and drew attention to points which might 
contribute to the elucidation of obscure passages in the 
gospels. If it has been misunderstood and represented as 
saying that on all points the Christian ideas were depen- 
dent on the non-Christian world, or as speaking of a 
"composition" of the story of Jesus from the analogous 
myths of pagan religions, the author is not to blame, and 
does not need to be told that analogies do not of them- 
selves prove historical connection. 

This much, at least, is certain : the origin of Chris- 
tianity cannot be properly understood without regard to 
the mythological connections of its ideas with those of 
other religions. In this respect research is only just in 
its infancy, as up to the present there has been almost 
nothing but purely historical and philological work done 
in this field, and biblical " mythology," which has had 
an able and far-seeing exponent in Nork, has been thrust 
into the background. While Mr. J. M. Robertson has 
led the way and made considerable advance in England 
in his Christianity and Mythology, Pagan Christs, and 
Short History of Christianity, the science of religion in 
Germany remains wholly under the influence of theology, 
and is mainly concerned to avoid a conflict with theology. 
Hence on the theological side we find men contesting the 
obvious affinity of the Easter-story of the gospels with 
the myths and ceremonies of the Attis-Adonis-Osiris 
religion, saying that " there is no such thing "as a burial 
and resurrection in the myths of Attis and Adonis, and 



164 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

that the difference between the death of Jesus and that 
of his Asiatic kindred can only be explained by the 
" hard fact " the famous theological bed-rock of the 
death on the cross. Weiss is unable to recognise in 
Mary Magdalen and the other Marys at the cross and 
the grave of the Saviour the Indian, Asiatic, and 
Egyptian mother of the gods, the Maia, Mariamma, or 
Maritala, as the mother of Krishna is called, the 
Mariana of Mariandynium (Bithynia), Mandane, the 
mother of the "Messiah" Cyrus (Isaiah xlv, 1), the 
" great mother " of Pessinunt, 1 the sorrowing Semiramis, 
Miriam, Merris, Myrrha, Maira (Maera), and Maia, 2 the 
" beloved " of her son. Weiss, however, does not question 
that " the belief in a dead and risen Christ has, in general 
outline, considered from the point of view of the science 
of religion, a similar structure to these cult-myths, though 
the details are altogether different " (p. 39). As if there 
were any question about the details as such ! Whether, 
for instance, the traditional number, "after three days," 
in the account of the resurrection has been chosen on 
astral grounds, and is related to the three winter months 
from the shortest day, when the sun dies, to the vernal 
equinox, when it triumphs definitively over the winter, 
and so the months are condensed into three days in the 
myth, 3 or whether the moon has furnished the data for 

1 See The Christ-Myth, pp. 53 and 78. 

a The mother of the " world-saviour " Augustus, who is generally known 
as Attia, is also called Maia in Horace and on an inscription at Lyons 
(" Maia' s winged child"), and she is supposed to have brought her son 
into the world in a remarkable way and under astonishing circumstances. 
The name was a standing name for the mothers of the saviour-gods of 
antiquity, and it is naive to regard it as the real name of the historical 
Jesus. 

9 Weiss denies that the three days could be taken from the course of 
the sun, as the sun is never buried for three days and three nights. But 
Heracles is said, according to the scholiast of Lycophron (Cassandra, 33), 
to have remained three days in the belly of the sea-monster, and to have 
escaped with the loss of his hair, which clearly points to the rays of the 
sun. The somewhat similar Jason also, the Greek counterpart of the 
biblical Joshua, whose solar nature is beyond question, is said to have 
been swallowed by the dragon and spat out again. The biblical Jonah, 
whose name means "dove," and points to the reverence of the Ninevites 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 165 

the three days and three nights, as it is invisible for that 
period, and, as so often happens in myths, the moon and 
the sun have been blended, we need not consider here. 
Possibly the number may be explained by the popular 
belief in Persia and Judaea that the soul remains three 
days and nights in the neighbourhood of the body, only 
departing to its place on the fourth morning. Possibly, 
again, the number was determined by Hosea vi, 2, where 
we read : " After two days will he revive us ; in the third 
day he will raise us up." In any case, when there are 
so many possible explanations, we have no convincing 
reason to regard the account in the gospels as historical, 
and to say with Weiss that the third day was chosen 
" because something of importance [sic~\ had happened 
on it" (p. 36). 

There is very little force in the other objections of 
theologians to the astral explanation of the day of the 
death of Jesus. It is true that the day of the vernal 
equinox is at least fourteen days before the Passover, 
which is celebrated at the full moon after the beginning 
of spring. I may recall, however, the very common 
combination of sun and moon- worship in myths. Niemo- 
jewski has proved that a moon-myth is at the base of 
Luke's astral system. Moreover, we may very well 
suspect that, on account of the symbolism of the Paschal 
lamb, the Christians have tampered with the calendar. 
That the mythic-astral method " breaks down altogether " 

for doves, seems also to have been originally a sun-god and related to 
Heracles, or, rather, to the sun-god Perseus and Joshua. In Jaffa, from 
which Jonah is supposed to have set out for Tarsis, there were still shown 
in the days of Pomponius Mela certain large bones of the fish that had 
tried to swallow Andromeda whom Perseus delivered (consider the similar 
liberation of Hesione by Heracles) ; and the dove was, according to Assyrian 
ideas, the wife of Ninus (that is to say, the fish), who appears in the Old 
Testament, under the name of Nun, as the father of Joshua. In fact, the 
connection of the Christ-form with these pagan sun-gods is clearly seen in 
the ceremony performed on December 26 in the Church of Sta. Maria di 
Carmine at Naples, in which the hair is cut off the figure of the crucified 
with great solemnity. Compare also the three (winter) months and five 
days during which Joseph is said, according to the " Testament of the 
Twelve Patriarchs," to have dwelt in the under- world (Christ-Myth, I, 46). 



166 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

in face of the time of the death of Jesus, as Weiss says, 
is not true at all, and before we consent to regard Sunday 
the 15-16 of Nisan as the day of the resurrection, 
" because on that day something of importance [sic] 
happened to the first disciples" (p. 38), we have to settle 
the chronological confusion that we find in regard to the 
date of the death of Jesus, which no one yet has succeeded 
in doing. 

In fine, we may ask, as some reader of The Christ- 
Myth did, if the death and resurrection of Jesus really 
took place at the Jewish Easter, why was the day not 
fixed once for all instead of changing with the date 
of Easter? If Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on a 
certain day and " rose again on a certain day, and if 
the Pentecostal gathering took place in Jerusalem forty 
days after the resurrection, these days ought to have been 
fixed. It is useless to say that the festivals of the Church 
were only fixed at a later date. That may be true of 
Christmas, etc., but not of the day of the death and 
resurrection, which, together with Pentecost, were days 
of incomparable importance for Christians from the very 
first. These definite days ought to have been celebrated 
everywhere by Christians with great solemnity, either 
joyous or mournful. There could not possibly be a doubt 
as to which dates were to be celebrated. The fact that 
the Jewish calendar had movable feasts does not affect 
the matter ; Paul ought at least to have given his Greeks 
and Romans a definite date to celebrate. The Church 
professes to know quite accurately the day on which 
Peter and Paul were crucified at Borne." How has it 
failed to fix vastly more important dates? As long as 
theologians can give us no satisfactory answer to this 
question we prefer to think that we are dealing, not with 
history, but with a myth to which an historical form was 
afterwards given. 

Critical theologians have hitherto affirmed the his- 
toricity of the gospel narratives, but they have landed in 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 167 

insuperable difficulties and insoluble contradictions ; so 
poor, not to say purely negative, a result amounts to a 
bankruptcy of their whole method. It seems, therefore, 
to be our duty to try the mythic-symbolic method, and to 
consider the gospels from the point of view that their 
Jesus was not an historical, but a purely mythical, per- 
sonage. The literary quality of the gospels, their tenden- 
tious dogmatic-metaphysical character, their chronological 
and topographical vagueness, their constant absence of 
definite indications of space and time in regard to events, 
the slender traces of an apparently historical and geo- 
graphical framework, the resemblance of their most 
important details to the myths of non-Christian religions 
a resemblance that often extends to the smallest points 
all this demands that we shall study the gospels from 
a very different point of view from that hitherto adopted. 

The fundamental idea of The Christ-Myth is that 
their historical character is only a symbolic clothing of 
their real content. 

Why this method is less sound than the historical 
method followed by theologians, less " scientific " in 
fact, no real method at all is, in the circumstances, not 
very obvious. It is quite certain, and will be questioned 
by no one, that the gospels contain a large amount of 
legendary matter, and that a good deal in them is to be 
understood mystically or symbolically. It is not at all 
equally well established that they have an historical basis. 
The idea is grounded solely on the feeble tradition of 
Papias. What is there to prevent us, therefore, or what 
methodological principle restrains us, from extending the 
mythic-symbolical interpretation to the whole contents of 
the gospels, and refusing them any kind of historical 
reality ? In Homer's Iliad there is much that seems at 
first sight to be historical and real, yet no one has 
attempted to see in the Iliad an historical document, 
and to extract its " historical nucleus " by means of 
criticism and exegesis from the mythical and poetical 



168 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

shell. It is possible that The Christ-Myth is wrong in 
its analysis of the gospel story into myths ; but in that 
case its failure will only bring out more brilliantly the 
historical character of the gospels, so that, instead of 
scolding us, the believers in an historical Jesus ought to 
be grateful that we have relieved them of their thankless 
and uncongenial task. Our opponents complain that our 
procedure is actuated by the secret hope that there never 
was an historical Jesus. The truth is that it is their 
own exertions which are inspired by the opposite hope. 
Would theologians ask us to believe that they approach 
the problem impartially ? Must we be dubbed unscien- 
tific because we take no interest in their historical Jesus ? 
Let us avoid pretence, and have respect for truth. To 
science as such it is wholly immaterial whether there 
ever was a Jesus or no. It has no advantage in approach- 
ing the question of his historicity either from the positive 
or the negative standpoint. It is theology alone that 
has an interest in regarding the positive standpoint as 
necessary, and in coming to an affirmative solution of the 
problem. This, however, is not a scientific, but a religious 
or ecclesiastical, interest ; and therefore all their talk 
about their " scientific procedure " and all their disdain 
of their opponents' methods are interested manoeuvres. 
It is ridiculous for theologians to tell the laity that 
" science " has " proved " the historicity of Jesus, and 
"historical research" has established the "fact" of his 
existence. We cannot repeat too often : The science of 
history has up to the present taken no notice of the 
problem. Theology is not science, and, strictly speaking, 
does not merit the name of science at all, because, in 
spite of its formal scientific procedure, it rests, in the 
long run, on faith. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 169 

7. THE MYTHIC-SYMBOLIC INTEEPEETATION OF 
THE GOSPELS. 

(a) The Suffering and Exaltation of the Messiah. The 
mythic-symbolic interpretation of the gospels sees in 
Isaiah liii the germ-cell of the story of Jesus, the 
starting-point of all that is related of him, the solid 
nucleus round which all the rest has crystallised. 

The prophet deals with the "servant of Jahveh," who 
voluntarily submits to suffering in order to expiate the 
sin and guilt of the people :- 

He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, 
and acquainted with grief ; and we hid as it were our 
faces from him ; he was despised, and we esteemed him 
not. 

Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows ; 
yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and 
afflicted. 

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was 
bruised for our iniquities ; the chastisement of our peace 
was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. 

All we like sheep have gone astray ; we have turned 
every one to his own way ; and the Lord hath laid on him 
the iniquity of us all. 

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened 
not his mouth ; he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, 
and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth 
not his mouth. 

He was taken from prison and from judgment; and 
who shall declare his generation ? for he was cut off out 
of the land of the living, for the transgression of my 
people was he stricken. 

And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich 
[evildoers] in his death ; because he had done no violence, 
neither was any deceit in his mouth. 

Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him ; he hath put 
him to grief ; when thou shalt make his soul an offering 
for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, 
and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. 

He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be 
satisfied ; by his knowledge shall my righteous servant 
justify many ; for he shall bear their iniquities. 

Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, 



170 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

and he shall divide the spoil with the strong ; because he 
hath poured out his soul unto death ; and he was numbered 
with the transgressors ; and he bare the sin of many, and 
made intercession for the transgressors. 

The general belief is that there is here question of the 
sufferings of Israel in the interest of the whole of mankind. 
According to Gunkel and Gressmann, however, the idea 
of the suffering just man is joined to an allusion to the 
god who expiates the sins of men by his voluntary death. 
Certainly we detect in it all the essential features of the 
suffering Christ, sacrificing himself for mankind and 
expiating their sins. That the early Christians felt this 
we see in Mark ix, 12, and xv, 28 ; Matt, viii, 17 and 
xxvi, 23 ; 1 Peter ii, 21 ; and Acts viii, 28-35, where the 
words of the prophet are expressly applied to Jesus. 

Isaiah liii speaks of the "griefs " of the just one. But 
Plato, who also has described, in his Republic, the perse- 
cutions and sufferings that befall the just man, makes him 
be scourged, tortured, cast in prison, and finally pilloried 
("crucified"); 1 and in Wisdom the godless deliberate 
about condemning the just to a " shameful death." 
According to Deuteronomy (xxi, 23), there was no more 
shameful death than "to hang on a tree" (in Greek 
xylon and stauros, in Latin crux) ; so that this naturally 
occurred as the true manner of the just one's death. 
Then the particular motive of the death was furnished 
by the passage in Wisdom and the idea of Plato. He 
died as a victim of the unjust, the godless, who say : 

Let us overpower the poor just man Let us set snares 

for the just, because he is a burden to us, and opposes our 
deeds, and represents to us the commands of the laiv. He 
boasts that he has a true knowledge of God, and calls 
himself the servant of God. He has become unto us a 

1 Apollonius refers to the passage of Plato's Republic (II, 361) in his 
Apology : " For one of the Greek philosophers also says : The just man will 
be martyred, spat upon, and at last crucified." The passage seems even to 
have been in the mind of James when he says : "Ye have condemned and 
killed the just, and he doth not resist you " ; and we read in Justin : " Ye 
have beaten the just " (Dial. xvi). 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 171 

living reproach, on account of our desires. He is a burden 
unto us, when we do but look on him, because his ways 
and his conduct are different from those of all others. Us 
he regards as insincere, and he holds himself from inter- 
course with us, as from impurities. But he praises the 
eternity of the just, and boasts that God is his father. Let 
us see if his words be true, and wait for the manner of his 
going forth. For if the just is a son of God, God will take 
care of him, and save him from the hands of his enemies. 
Let us put him to the proof with insults and evil treatment, 
so that we may know his meekness and prove his stead- 
fastness. Let us condemn him to a shameful death ; for, 
according to his words, he will have protection. Such 
things said they in their madness, for their wickedness 
dazed them, and they recognised not the mysteries 
of God. 

These words suggest the cry of the martyred and 
reviled in the twenty -second psalm, whose torments 
also recall the death " on the tree ": 

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? my 

God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not I am 

a reproach of men and despised of the people. All 

they that see me laugh me to scorn ; they shoot out the lip, 
they shake the head, saying : He trusted in the Lord that 
he would deliver him ; let him deliver him, seeing he 

delighted in him I am poured out like water, and all 

my bones are out of joint My strength [palate] is dried 

up like a potsherd ; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws 

For dogs have compassed me, the assembly of the wicked 
have enclosed me ; they pierced my hands and my feet [like 
the lion are my hands and my feet] . I may tell all my 
bones ; they look and stare upon me. They part my 
garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture. 

It is further said in the book of Wisdom : 

The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no 
torment can touch them. Only according to the folly of 
the unwise do they seem to be dead, and their going in is 
counted a misfortune, and their going forth from us for a 
destruction ; but they are at peace. For if they have 
been punished in the eyes of men, their hope was full of 
the faith in immortality. And after they have borne a 
brief torture, they will receive great rewards ; for God has 
but tried them, and has found them worthy of him. Like 
gold in the crucible has he tried them, and like the gift of 



172 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

a whole offering has he accepted them. And at the time of 
their home-coming they will shine bright, and will pass 
like sparks in the reed. They shall judge the heathen and 
rule over the peoples, and the Lord shall be their king for 
ever. They who trust in him shall know the truth, and 
the faithful will remain with him in love. For grace and 
mercy shall be the part of his elect. But the godless 
shall be punished according to their deeds, who despised 
the just and rebelled against the Lord. 

In these words we clearly perceive the fundamental 
idea of the Christian mysteries. The love of the " Lord " 
and trust in him are for the good and just the conditions 
of their glorious exaltation and an eternal life with God 
after death : " For God has created man for immortality, 
and made him in the likeness of his own being. But 
death came into the world through the envy of the 
devil" (ii, 23). Hence the wicked irreclaimably fall to 
him, no matter how long they enjoy life on the earth. 
The just, on the other hand, dies young : 

He is withdrawn from the midst of sinners In a 

little while he hath fulfilled much time. For his soul was 
pleasing to the Lord ; therefore did he hasten to take him 

from the wicked world The just will himself judge the 

living godless after death, and the early closed youth the 

long old-age of the unjust For they shall see the end 

of the wise, and shall not know what he hath designed 
concerning him, and why the Lord hath brought him to 
safety. They will see and understand not, but of them- 
selves will the Lord make sport At the reckoning of 

their sins they shall stand shivering, and their trans- 
gressions of the law shall appear before them as accusers. 
Then will the just with much confidence stand against 
them that have oppressed him and have slighted his needs. 
At sight of him they will be smitten with a terrible fear, 
and will be astonished at his unexpected safety. They 
will see ruefully to themselves, and in the anxiety of their 
soul will they moan : This was he who once made sport 
for us and for an object of contempt to us fools. His life 
we counted a folly, and his end ivithout honour. How, 
then, was he numbered among the sons of God and hath a 
possession among the holy ? We have, therefore, wandered 
from the way of wisdom, and the light of justice has not 
illumined us, and the sun has not shone upon us 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 173 

But the just live in eternity, and their reward is with the 
Lord, and the care of them is with the most high. There- 
fore will they receive the kingdom of glory and the crown 
of beauty from the hand of the Lord. 

Since the just is here described in his heavenly 
exaltation as accuser and judge of the godless, speaking 
judgment on them after their death, it would be curious 
if in the minds of the pious the figure of the exalted just 
did not instinctively blend with that of the expected 
Messiah. It was an essential element of that expectation 
that the Messiah would appear in heavenly glory, and 
judge Israel according to its deeds, condemning the 
godless and taking the good to eternal life in heaven. If 
this happened, it would follow that the Messiah also 
would suffer and die, and by his voluntary death remove 
the guilt of men, and obtain heavenly happiness for those 
who love and trust him and walk in his footsteps. It is 
true that Wisdom refers the love of the faithful to God. 
But we know how in the Jewish mind the figure of the 
Messiah tended to be identified with that of Jahveh, and 
the " son of God," as the just is called in Wisdom, is one 
with his father, and is in a certain sense only another 
name for him. 

Bead in the prophet Isaiah the important references 
to the coming lordship of the Messiah and mysterious 
indications of his nature : " Say ye to the righteous, that 
it shall be well with him ; for they shall eat the fruit of 
their doings. Woe unto the wicked ; it shall be ill with 
him ; for the reward of his hands shall be given him " 
(iii, 10). That was already contained in the passage we 
quoted from Wisdom : 

Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be 
exalted and extolled, and be very high. 

As many were astonied at thee ; his visage was so 
marred more than any man, and his form more than the 
sons of men ; 

So shall he sprinkle many nations ; the kings shall 
shut their mouths at him. For that which had not been 



174 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

told them shall they see, and that which they had not 
heard shall they consider. 1 

Would not that recall to readers the astonishment and 
fear of the godless at sight of the exalted just as described 
in Wisdom ? " And he shall judge among the nations, 
and shall rebuke many people" (ii, 4). The prophet 
applied this to Jahveh, but in Wisdom it is said of the 
just, who is raised by God to heavenly glory after his 
humiliating death. Is it possible to doubt that the just, 
the " servant of God " in the fifty-third chapter of the 
prophet, was Jahveh himself, or rather that " son of 
God," in the special sense, which the Messiah was 
conceived to be ? 

Then there are the words of the prophet that the 
servant of God grew up before Jahveh "as a tender 
plant, and as a root out of dry ground" (lii, 2). Here 
the connection is quite obvious, for the eleventh chapter 
of Isaiah, in which the prophet describes the glory of 
the Messianic kingdom in especially impressive tones, 
began with almost the same words : " And there shall 
come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch 
shall grow out of its roots." Here the servant of God is 
also described as of the root of David, as the prophet 
Zechariah, too, had said : " Behold I will bring forth my 
servant the branch" (iii, 8; also see vi, 12), leaving 
no room for doubt that the Messiah is intended here. 
Will it now be said to be impossible that the Jews had 
blended the servant of God in Isaiah liii with the 
Messiah, and had seen in the passage a mysterious 
reference to some preceding suffering and humiliating 
death of the expected Saviour, and thus Israel's Saviour 
fell into line with the suffering, dying, and rising gods of 
the religions of nearer Asia ? 

(b) The Character and Miracles of the Messiah. Of 
all these gods special myths were related by their 

1 Isaiah lii, 13-15. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 175 

followers. Their life-story was related, and curious 
things were said of their origin, character, deeds, etc., 
from birth to death. Did the prophet who spoke of the 
sufferings, death, resurrection, and exaltation of the 
servant of God give any indications of this character ? 
Bead the forty-second chapter : 

Behold my servant, whom I uphold ; mine elect in 
whom my soul delighteth ; I have put my spirit upon 
him ; he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. 

He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be 
heard in the street. 

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax 
shall he not quench ; he shall bring forth judgment unto 
truth. 

He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till be have set 
judgment in tbe earth ; and tbe isles shall wait for his 
law. 

Thus the servant of God is to be wise, gentle, tender, 
full of endless pity for the oppressed and suffering. He 
is indefatigable in the exercise of the office committed to 
him by God, and his mission is to proclaim truth and 
establish righteousness on earth the kingdom of that 
perfect righteousness of all, which is to the prophet the 
condition of the fulfilment of all that God has promised 
to his people (ch. Iviii). In agreement with this we read 
in ch. 1, 4 : 

The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, 
that I should know how to speak a word in season to him 
that is weary 

The Lord God hath opened mine ear, and I icas not 
rebellious, neither turned away back. 

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them 
that plucked off the hair ; I hid not my face from shame 
and spitting. 

For the Lord God will help me, therefore shall I not be 
confounded ; therefore have I set my face like a flint, and 
I know that I shall not be ashamed. 

Obedience to God, his father, trust in his heavenly 
power, patient submission to his lot, not disturbed even 
by the foulest maltreatment and shame, are the essential 



176 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

features of the servant of God. He submits willingly 
to the command of God, just as the saviour-gods and 
redeemers of the pagan religions descended to earth at 
the command of their divine " fathers "; as the Baby- 
lonian Marduch was obedient to his father Ea ; as Heracles, 
the most resolute and powerful hero, nevertheless bowed 
to the command of his heavenly father and undertook 
the heaviest labours. 

Now we can also understand the words of the sixty- 
first chapter : 

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me ; because the 
Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the 
meek ; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to 
proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the 
prison to them that are bound ; 

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the 
day of vengeance of our God ; to comfort all that mourn. 

They seem to be the words of the servant of God 
himself, who reveals in them the meaning of his Messianic 
task. He is not sent to the rich and fortunate, but to 
the poor and miserable ; he does not come as a powerful 
leader of armies, to lead his followers to victory over 
their enemies ; but, like the saviour-gods of other peoples, 
he chiefly heals suffering of body and soul, and alleviates 
the lot of the people, as we read in ch. xxxv, 4 : " Behold, 

your God will come and save you. Then the eyes of 

the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall 
be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, 
and the tongue of the dumb sing." And again (xxix, 18) : 
" And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the 
book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity 
and out of darkness. The meek also shall increase their 
joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall rejoice 
in the Holy One of Israel." 

To announce the gospel, the glad message of the 
realisation of salvation, of the fulfilment of the hopes of 
a happy life, is the essential activity of the servant of 
God during his life on earth. For so speaks God, 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 177 

Jahveh, who spread out the heavens : "I, Jahveh, have 
called thee in righteousness, and I will take thee by the 
hand, and will protect thee, and make thee to represent 
the covenant with the people of Israel, and a light to 
the nations, as I open the eyes of the blind, deliver the 
prisoners from their prison, and from their captivity 

those that sit in darkness And I will give my glory 

to none other, nor my fame to the idols." 

What a mysterious indication of the real nature of 
the servant of God ! The covenant that Jahveh made 
with Moses is renewed by him ; he is therefore a second 
Moses. Nay, did not the prophet seem to intimate that 
Jahveh w r ould confer on him his own glory, and does not 
this seem to imply his equality in nature with Jahveh ? 
Assuredly he was no ordinary man, this servant of God 
of the prophet ; and the hopes of the people for the 
kingdom of God would be fulfilled very differently from 
what they expected, if salvation was to be extended to 
the Gentiles as well as the Jews. But that the prophet's 
servant of God is really he for whom the Jewish people 
longed is shown by his marvellous deeds. 

Thus we can explain the miracles of Jesus on which 
the critics have expended so much fruitless labour ; they 
followed at once from the above passages, the moment an 
attempt was made to give a detailed picture of the life of 
the servant of God, and to embody the intimations of the 
prophets in impressive stories. These miracles must have 
been performed by Jesus simply because they were part 
of the character of the servant of God. They serve as 
evidence of his supernatural power and his mysterious 
relation to Jahveh, and they differ in no respect from 
the miracles which the pagans also ascribed to their 
saviour-gods, such as Asclepios, Hermes, Anubis, etc., 
just as the Old Testament had attributed them to Moses, 
Elijah, and Elisha, and as, in the common feeling of 
ancient times, they were expected of any outstanding 
man. Take Apollonius of Tyana, for instance. 

N 



178 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

The prophet speaks of the curing of the blind, deaf, 
lame, and dumb. Those are precisely the miracles of the 
gospels. It is true that he does not speak of raising the 
dead to life or driving out demons feats which were 
related of Asclepios and Apollonius. He does, however, 
make the servant of God deliver captives. But if we 
interpret the text with deeper insight, does it not seem to 
mean the opening of the doors of sense and bodily life, 
which form the kingdom of the devil, and which Plato 
had described as the prison of the soul, or the unsealing 
of the tombs that hold the dead as prisoners? Intro- 
duced into the mental world of the doctrine of mysteries, 
the words of the prophet would naturally lose their 
original and real meaning, and become symbols of a 
mysterious truth hidden in them, the meaning of which 
would be clear only to the initiated. If Isaiah's servant 
of God was a saviour, a lord over natural forces chosen 
by God, like the pagan saviour-gods, he must, like them, 
have above all a dominion over the dread world of spirits 
and demons, by which the men of the time saw them- 
selves surrounded and threatened everywhere, in whom 
they recognised the causes of disease, and for protection 
against whom they took refuge in the magical realm of 
the mysteries. 1 It would, therefore, be childish to take 
the miracles of Jesus at their face value, and seek to 
extract from the gospel narratives which describe them 
an "historical nucleus." Compare a story like that of 
the Gadarene swine (Mark v, 1) in the symbolical 
explanation which Lublinski (p. 131) gives of it with 
the historical conception of it in Weiss. Only complete 
unintelligence could attempt to deduce from the descrip- 
tion of the locality, the presence of the swine, etc., 
the historical place and truth of the story ; whereas there 
is obviously question of the nether world, of a symbolical 
representation of the power of the Saviour over the demons, 

1 Compare Zechariah xiii, 2: "In that day I will cause the 

unclean spirit to pass out of the land." 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 179 

and the swine are introduced only as " typhonic " beasts, 
to suggest the scenery of the nether world. 1 A good 
deal of amusement has been expressed over the childish 
miracles which the gospels attribute to the son of God. 
We have, however, only to recognise that they are built 
on the prophet's intimations and inspired by them, and 
are merely symbols of the spread of faith in Jesus, as 
Smith has shown at length in his Ecce Deus ; and we 
shall see that even in regard to the miracles the evan- 
gelical way of putting things can be justified. In this 
way the much-discussed question of the miracles of the 
gospels may be settled. 

SUPPLEMENT. 

As we have seen, Isaiah and Wisdom are the germ- 
cell of the figure of Jesus in the gospels and the Christian 
theory of redemption. But a third element has been at 
work the figure of Job. 

The canonical book of Job depicts for us a just man 
who, just like the prophet's servant of God, is tried by a 
conflict with Satan, by intolerable suffering and humilia- 
tion, and is afterwards raised again to his former con- 
dition. There is much in the book that directly reminds 
us of Isaiah liii and Psalm xxii ; for instance, the circum- 
stance that Job and the servant of God are both afflicted 
with leprosy (Isaiah lii, 14; liii, 4). Or read the follow- 
ing lament of Job : 

They have gaped upon me with their mouth ; they have 
smitten me upon the cheek reproachfully ; they have 
gathered themselves together against me. 

1 That the whole story is only meant to be symbolical is recognised by 
some theologians, such as von Baur and Volkmar. But to what absurdities 
their historical point of view will lead theologians we have a charming 
illustration in Otto Schmiedel (p. 114). In his opinion, the possessed man 
is no other than Paul, and the whole thing is a piece of malicious Judaeo- 
Christian ridicule of the apostle. Yet these are the men who reproach us 
with "fantastic" explanations, and ask us to respect the "method" of 
theologians. 



180 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me 
over into the hands of the wicked 

His archers compass me round about ; he cleaveth my 
reins asunder, and doth not spare ; he poureth out my 
gall upon the ground 

My face is foul with weeping, and on my eyelids is the 
shadow of death. 

Not for any injustice in mine hands : also my prayer is 
pure 

Let my cry have no place. 

Also now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and my 
record is on high. 

My friends scorn me, but mine eye poureth out tears 
unto God 

My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the graves 
are ready for me. 

Are there not mockers with me? and doth not mine 
eye continue in their provocation? [My eye must rest 
on their brawls. Compare the soldiers casting dice for 
the garments of Jesus.] 

He hath made me also a byword of the people, and 
aforetime I was as a tabret. [I must let my face be spat 
upon.] 

Mine eye also is dim by reason of sorrow, and all my 
members are as a shadow. 

Upright men shall be astonished at this, and the 
innocent shall stir up himself against the hypocrite. 

The righteous also shall hold on his way, and he that 
hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger. 1 
Job cries again (ch. xxix) : 

Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when 
God preserved me ; 

When his candle shined upon my head, and when by 
his light I walked through darkness. 

As I was in the days of my youth 

When the Almighty was yet with me, when my 
children were about me 

When I went out to the gate through the city, when I 
prepared my seat in the street. 

and the aged arose, and stood up. 

The princes refrained talking, and laid their hand on 
their mouth. [Compare Isaiah lii, 15.] 

The nobles held their peace, and their tongue cleaved 
to the roof of their mouth. 

1 Job xvi, 10-xvii, 9. Also see xxxix, 1, 9-11, and 20. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 181 

When the ear heard me, then it blessed me ; and when 
the eye saw me, it gave witness to me. 

Because I delivered the poor that cried, and the father- 
less, and him that had none to help him. 

The blessing of him that was ready to perish came 
upon me ; and I caused the widow's heart to sing for 
joy 

I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. 

I was a father to the poor, and the cause which I 
knew not I searched out. 

And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the 
spoil out of his teeth 

Unto me men gave ear, and waited, and kept silence at 
my counsel. 

After my words they spake not again ; and my speech 
dropped upon them. 

I laughed on them when they despaired ; they believed 
it not, and the light of my countenance they cast not down. 

I chose out their way, and sat chief, and dwelt as a 
king in the army, as one that comforteth the mourners. 

These words remind us of the prophet's servant of God. 
But at the same time we see Jesus before us, as, sur- 
rounded by his disciples, he speaks to the people in the 
market-place and the streets, disputes with the Pharisees 
and Scribes, and silences them, strides through life helping, 
working miracles, consoling, healing, and encouraging, and 
is blessed by the crowd and by the lost and the saved. 

Still greater, however, than with the canonical book of 
Job is the concordance of the gospel figure of Jesus with 
the popular Jewish additions to it. One of these we have 
in the so-called Job's Testament, which was first published 
in 1883, and again in 1897 by Montague Rhodes James 
and K. Kohler, and very closely studied by Spitta in its 
relation to the New Testament. 1 James held at first that 
Job's Testament was purely Jewish and pre-Christian, but 
afterwards attributed it to a Jewish convert to Chris- 
tianity, as he could find no other explanation of its 
astonishing agreements with the New Testament, not 
only as regards its general contents, but at times even in 

1 Zur Geschichte und Literatur des Urchristentums, 1907, iii, 2. 



182 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

words. 1 Kohler regards it as pre-Christian, an Essenian 
Midrasch on the book of Job ; this is, however, denied by 
Spitta. Bousset, a careful man, finds a " slight Christian 
modification " of a Jewish work, while Spitta believes that 
the remarkable work has a purely Jewish character : " One 
of the Jewish pre-conditions of Christianity, a full know- 
ledge of which is of great importance for an appreciation 
of Christianity itself, and especially of the figure of Jesus." 
" In this case, it seems to me," he says, " the view would 
be more plausible that the figure of Jesus is of pre- 
Christian origin than in connection with the Gilgamesch- 
epic or W. B. Smith's pre-Christian Jesus." He empha- 
sises the following points : " Job and Jesus are both of 
royal race ; both are healers of the poor and distressed ; 
both struggle against the power of Satan, and are fruit- 
lessly tempted by him to fall away from God ; both incur 
suffering and contempt, even death, by the machinations 
of the devil ; both are saved from necrotes [the state of 
death], attain honour on earth, and are raised to the 
throne at the right hand of God" (p. 198). Spitta does 
not fail to point out the differences between Job and 
Jesus ; but he considers the resemblance to be so great 
that, in his opinion, it is enough " to explain how it could 
happen that the figure of Jesus was involuntarily endowed 
by Jewish writers with features which originally belong 
to the Job-legend " (p. 200). That this figure could have 
arisen only in connection with the figure of Job is a 
possibility which, of course, lies beyond the horizon of the 
theologian. Yet so many details of the gospel portrait of 
Jesus have been shown to be due to foreign influence that 
we can hardly say what is really supposed to be historical 
in it. For the rest, the Christians themselves were well 
aware of the resemblance of their Jesus to Job. It is 
proved by James v, 10, where we read : " Take, my 
brethren, the prophets who have spoken in the name of 

1 Compare, especially, the remarkable resemblance to the story of the 
Magi in Matthew ii. See Spitta, p. 192, and James, pp. 169, 199, and 204. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 183 

the Lord, for an example of suffering affliction, and of 
patience. Behold, we count them happy which endure. 
Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the 
end of the Lord ; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of 
tender mercy." Here Jesus is put on a level with Job, 
assuming that by " the Lord " we are to understand 
Jesus, and not Jahveh, which seems more likely, in view 
of the reference to the prophets who have spoken " in the 
name of the Lord." l 

(c) John the Baptist and the Baptism of Jesus. Weiss 
rightly speaks of the gospel of Mark as " a story of the 
Passion prolonged backwards." This rich fullness of the 
earthly life of Jesus is assuredly something more than a 
development of Pauline principle ; he humbled himself, 
and was obedient even to the death on the cross. From 
the Pauline gospel alone the evangelist could not possibly 
have evolved his narrative (p. 132). But no one has said 
that he could. What I do say is that the prophet Isaiah 
has supplied the chief features for the story of Jesus, and 
the general framework. There, and there only, do we 
find the real " main pillars of a truly scientific life of 
Jesus." Not only the sufferings, death, resurrection, and 
exaltation, but the description of his character and activity 
and miraculous power, come from the prophet's words. 
Even the first appearance of Jesus, in connection with the 
penitential preaching of John, links with the text of 
Isaiah. The words with which the earliest gospel opens 
are also the beginning of the second part of the book of 
the prophet, the author of which is known as the Deutero- 
Isaiah, and distinguished from the older prophet ; he is 
believed to have written his work at Babylon in the last 
days of the captivity. 

1 Is James a Christian Epistle in the ordinary meaning of the word ? 
The Epistle, it is true, contains sayings of Jesus, but they are not described 
as such, and there is no clear indication that the Epistle reflects anything 
but purely Jewish ideas. Perhaps it belongs to "pre-Christian Chris- 
tianity," when the Jewish Jahveh, "the Lord," was worshipped under the 
name of Jesus. See later. 



184 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness : Prepare 
ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a 
highway for our God. 

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and 
hill shall be laid low ; and the crooked shall be made 
straight, and the rough places plain ; 

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all 
flesh shall see it together : for the mouth of the Lord hath 
spoken it (xl, 3-5). 

The gospel refers the words to the Baptist, the "voice 
of one crying in the wilderness," to whom " the word of 
the Lord came" (Luke iii, 2). But we know that, as 
Mark himself says, he has been influenced by the prophet 
Malachi, who says in his third chapter : " Behold, I will 
send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before 
me"; that the words "in the wilderness" have been 
inserted by a copyist in the wrong place ; in reality, they 
do not denote the place whence the cry came, but mean 
that the way is to be prepared in the wilderness. We are 
thus led to suspect that the figure of the " precursor " also 
may have grown out of the above passage in the prophet, 
and that the idea of a double mission of Jahveh to his 
people may have arisen from the passage in which Isaiah, 
consoling his fellows, says that Jerusalem has received 
" double from the hand of Jahveh " for all its sins (xl, 2). 
The ideas of the Baptist's message also agree with the 
admonishing words which the prophet earnestly addresses 
to Jerusalem. " There cometh one mightier than I after 
me," we read in Mark (i, 7), "the latchet of whose shoes 
I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose." In Isaiah 
it is said : " The Lord God will come with strong hand." 
The prophet then describes the power and greatness of 
Jahveh, before whom all the peoples and powers of the 
earth are nought, whose spirit is immeasurable, his power 
incomparable, and who says : "I have raised up one from 
the north, and he shall come ; from the rising of the sun 
shall he call upon my name ; and he shall come upon 
princes as upon mortar, and as the potter treadeth clay " 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 185 

(xli, 25). " Whose fan is in his hand " so Matthew and 
Luke complete the words of the earliest gospel " and he 
will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into 
the garner ; but he will burn up the chaff with unquench- 
able fire" (Matthew iii, 12; Luke iii, 17). In Isaiah 
Jahveh says to Israel : " Behold, I will make thee a new 
sharp threshing instrument, having teeth ; thou shalt 
thresh the mountains and beat them small, and shalt 
make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the 
wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall 
scatter them " (xli, 15). And in xlvii, 14, it is said of the 
Gentiles : " Behold, they shall be as stubble ; the fire shall 
burn them ; they shall not deliver themselves from the 
power of the flame." : 

It is a language of repentance and warning that the 
evangelist puts in the mouth of the Baptist : " Eepent ye, 
for the kingdom of God is at hand." The last judgment 
approaches. The expected Messiah is near. So in the 
prophet also Jahveh appears as a kind of judge who 
summons the nations before his chair, to prove to them 
the nothingness of their deities in comparison with the 
hero whom he has raised for the redemption of his 
people. " Bring forth the people that is blind, though it 
hath eyes, and they that are deaf, although they have 
ears. All ye peoples, gather yourselves together, and let 
the nations congregate." " Behold, ye are of nothing," he 
says, reviling the gods of the nations, " and your work 
of nought ; an abomination is he that chooseth you " 
(xli, 24). Who is not reminded of the reproaches which 
John addresses to the Pharisees, scourging their stubborn- 
ness and darkness : " Generation of vipers, who hath 
warned you to flee from the wrath to come "? 

The publicans come to John and ask : " What shall we 



1 See also Isaiah v and Psalm i, 22, where the just, who rejoices in the 
law of Jahveh, is compared with the tree by the stream, "that bringeth 
forth its fruit in due season," while the godless are described as "chaff," 
which " the wind sweeps away." 



186 

do ?" And he replies : " Exact no more than that which 
is appointed you." The soldiers put the same question 
and receive the answer : " Do violence to no man, neither 
accuse any falsely ; and be content with your wages " 
(Luke iii, 12-14). We read in Isaiah (xxxiii, 15) : "He 
that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly, he that 
despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands 
from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from 
hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil ; 
he shall dwell on high ; his place of defence shall be the 
munitions of rocks." 

" Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance," the Baptist 
cries to the Pharisees, " and begin not to say within 
yourselves : We have Abraham to our father ; for I say 
unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up 
children unto Abraham. And now also the axe is laid 
unto the root of the trees ; every tree therefore which 
bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into 
the fire" (Luke iii, 8 and 9). Can it be a mere coinci- 
dence that there is also question of " the seed of 
Abraham " in the forty-first chapter of Isaiah, and 
Israel is consoled precisely as the Pharisees are in the 
gospels, when they boast of their " righteousness " in 
having Abraham for father ? And what do we read at 
the beginning of the fifty-first chapter of the prophet? 
" Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye 
that seek the Lord : Look unto the rock whence ye are 

hewn Look unto Abraham, your father." Isaiah 

also makes " the day of the Lord " humble all that are 
proud and lofty (ii, 12), and Ezekiel makes the proud 
oaks of Lebanon fall at Jahveh's command because of 
their haughtiness and godless nature (xxxi, 12). 

Bobert Eisler has, in an essay on the baptism of John, 1 
drawn attention to Micah vii, 14, where the prophet 
makes Zion say to Jahveh : 

1 In the Silddeutsche Monatshefte, 1909, Heft 12. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 187 

Feed thy people with thy rod, the flock of thine 
heritage, which dwell solitarily in the wood in the midst of 
Carmel the orchard 

According to the days of thy coming out of the land of 
Egypt will I shew unto him marvellous things. 

The nations shall see and be confounded at all their 
might their ears shall be deaf. 

They shall lick the dust like a serpent, they shall move 
out of their holes like worms of the earth ; they shall be 
afraid of the Lord our God, and fear because of thee. 

Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, 
and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his 
heritage? 

He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us ; 
he will subdue our iniquities ; and t hou wilt cast all their 
sins into the depth of the sea. 

Thou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy 
to Abraham, which thou hast sworn unto our fathers 
from the days of old. 

Here the situation is just the same, not only as in the 
fortieth and forty-first chapters of Isaiah, but as in the 
gospel account of the appearance of John. Nearly every 
detail of the words put in the mouth of the Baptist is 
found in the words of the prophet : Jahveh conceived as 
a pastoral inhabitant of the wilderness in Israel, about 
whom the people in the wilderness gather in spite of the 
orchards about them, the reference to the coming anger 
of Jahveh, the stubbornness of the " nations," the threat 
that they will be humbled before Jahveh in spite of all 
their power, the comparison of the stubborn with serpents 
("generation of vipers"), the remark that the stubborn 
themselves do not share in the forgiveness of sins and 
inherit grace because they are descended from Abraham, 
to whom Jahveh promised these things ; while, on the 
other hand, the penitent shall see such wonders as were 
done at the flight from Egypt, and especially the baptism, 
by which sins are cast into the sea and washed away by 
its waves. It was not unusual to put an expiatory mean- 
ing on the passage of the Israelites through the Eed Sea, 
and to regard it as a kind of baptism and forgiveness of 



188 TEE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

sins of the whole people, as Paul says : "All our fathers 

passed through the sea, and were all baptised unto 

Moses in the cloud and in the sea " (1 Cor. x, 1). 

In Isaiah also the " Holy One of Israel," Jahveh, 
promises his people that they shall rejoice over him. 
" When the poor and needy seek water, and there is 
none, and the tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will 

hear them I will open rivers in high places, and 

fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the 
wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of 

water " (xli, 17). " Fear not, Jacob, my servant for 

I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods 
upon the dry ground : I will pour my spirit upon thy 
seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring ; and they 
shall spring up as among the grass, as willows by the 
water courses" (xliv, 2). The figure of the springs in 
the desert waste recalls the " shoots on dry land," and 
we have the connection between the baptism of John 
and the baptism of the servant of God : " Behold, I will 
do a new thing ; now it shall spring forth ; shall ye not 
know it ? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and 

rivers in the desert to give drink to my people, my 

chosen " (xliii, 19 and 20). 

" I baptise you with water," Matthew and Luke make 
John say, " but one mightier than I cometh who shall 
baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with fire." In 
Isaiah it is written : " When thou passest through the 
waters, I will be with thee ; and through the rivers, they 
shall not overflow thee ; when thou walkest through the 
fire, thou shalt not be burned ; neither shall the flame 
kindle upon thee " (xliii, 2) ; and the following verses 
show clearly that he also has in mind the baptism in the 
Red Sea, the baptism by water as distinct from the 
baptism by fire, since he says : "I gave Egypt for thy 

ransom therefore will I give men for thee and people 

for thy life." 

And now we read in the famous eleventh chapter of 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 189 

the prophet, on " the rod of the stem of Jesse ": " The 
spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of 
wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and 
might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the 
Lord" (xi, 2). These are the words which have given 
rise to the story of the baptism of Jesus and the descent 
of the Holy Ghost upon him, and we now understand 
why the preacher of repentance, John, threatens with a 
coming judgment. The "rod" of the passage is repre- 
sented mainly in the character of an upright judge, of 
whom it is said that he will "judge the poor with 
righteousness, and reprove with equity for the meek of 
the earth ; and he shall smite the earth with the rod of 
his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay 
the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his 
loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins " (xi, 
4 and 5). 

Thus the whole story of the appearance of John and 
the baptism of Jesus is built on the prophet Isaiah. This 
removes the difficulties which a purely historical concep- 
tion of the story encounters, especially in the contradictory 
statement that a Jesus could submit to the baptism of 
John ; all the countless attempts to explain this are 
merely play on words. What has not been written on 
the character of John and his relation to Jesus ! It 
would be just as reasonable to take as the subject of a 
" scientific " investigation the question why Achilles 
remained inactive ten years before Troy, instead of going 
home and devoting himself to other matters. One must 
regard with some pain a science that, on account of its 
connection with ecclesiastical life, has to propose such 
questions and deal with them in academically approved 
and learned works, when it is clear from the above 
passages in Isaiah that the whole story of the baptism 
belongs to the province of fiction. 

As yet we have not touched upon the astral features 
that seem to occur in the story of the baptism. 



190 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

Dupuis long ago identified the John of the gospels with 
the Babylonian Oannes, Joannes, or Hanni, the curiously 
shaped creature, half fish and half man, who, according 
to Berosus, was the first lawgiver and inventor of letters 
and founder of civilisation, and who rose every morning 
from the waves of the Red Sea in order to instruct men 
as to his real spiritual nature. He believed that he could 
recognise him in the southern constellation of the Fishes, 
as this seemed to the inhabitants of Babylon to rise out of 
the Bed Sea, and its rising and setting indicated the two 
yearly solstices. 1 Possibly, however, he was originally 
Aquarius, as this constellation is depicted as a fish-man 
in the old oriental sphere, and the constellation of the 
Fishes was afterwards detached from it. 8 In any case, it 
was connected with the division of the year by solstices, 
and was in this sense a " teacher of astronomy." We 
have a reminiscence of this primitive astral significance 
of John in the fact that we still celebrate his festival on 
the day of the solstice, when the constellation of the 
southern Fishes rises as the sun sets, and disappears 
as the sun rises. Also the newly baptised Christians 
used to be called fishes (pisciculi in Tertullian), and the 
baptismal font is still called the piscina, or fish-pond. Thus 
the fish-man has been turned in Christianity into a sort 
of fisher of men. To this there is an allusion in the 
Ambrosian choral (liamum pro/undo miserat piscatus est 
verbumDei), representing John as drawing the converted 
out of the water with an arm of the cross ; which recalls 
Oannes, who saved the first man from the flood, and is 
supposed to have endowed him with his real life as a man 
and spirit. 

That the evangelist himself perceived this relation of 
John to the fishes is proved by the parable attributed to 
the Saviour, comparing the actual generation to children 
who sit in the market-place and call to each other : 

1 Dupuis, L'origine de tous les cultes, 1795, III, pp. 619 and 683. 
* Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alien Volker, 1820, H, p. 78. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 191 

"We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced" 
(Matthew xi, 16 ; Luke vii, 32). For these words remind 
one very much of Herodotus, according to whom, when 
Cyrus heard the willingness of the lonians, who had 
hitherto refused to obey, to submit after his victory over 
Cro3sus, he said in a parable : "A fisherman saw fishes in 
the sea, and played his flute in order to bring them out 
upon the land. And when he saw that he had failed, he 
took a net, and caught a great number of fishes in it, and 
drew them out. And when he saw them floundering, he 
said to the fishes : ' You need not dance now, since you 
would not dance when I piped.' ' 

As the one who indicates the solstices and divides the 
year, Cannes becomes identical with the sun itself, as a 
rising and setting star. In this way he entered the myth- 
group of Joshua, Jason, and Jesus, and, indeed, corre- 
sponds to the Old Testament Caleb, as representative 
of the summer solstice, when the dog-star (Sirius) sets in 
the month of the Lion, or of the autumnal equinox, which 
is the division of the year equivalent to the former, when 
the sun descends below the celestial equator into the land 
of winter. Joshua (Jesus), on the other hand, repre- 
sented the winter solstice, at which the days begin to 
grow longer, or the vernal equinox, when the sun again 
advances beyond the equator, and enters victoriously the 
"Promised Land" beyond the Jordan (or the Milky 
Way) of the heavenly Eridanus, the watery region of the 
heavens, in which the zodiacal signs of Aquarius and 
Pisces predominate. The evangelist expresses this by 
making John be born six months before Jesus (Luke i, 36), 
and disappear from the scene and be put to death at the 
time when Jesus enters it (Mark i, 14). Hence the 
words of John : " He must increase, but I must decrease " 
(iii, 30). Again, as the setting sun the Baptist resembles 
the Greek Hermes Psychopompos, who, at the time of 
the autumnal equinox, leads the constellations or souls 
into the nether world, the dark and sterile half of the 



192 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

year symbolically represented by the " wilderness," in 
which the people come to John, who is there. On the 
other hand, Jesus, as the rising sun, resembles Hermes 
Necropompos, who leads back the souls at the time of 
the vernal equinox to the heavenly home of light, the 
" kingdom of heaven," their true home. Hence it is said 
of the Baptist in the gospel : " John came neither eating 
nor drinking "; but of Jesus : " The son of man came 
eating and drinking" (Matthew xi, 17). This is quite 
intelligible when we see the relation of the one to the 
winter, and of the other to the summer. 

The oriental imagination, however, is not satisfied with 
this general idea. It affects to find the Baptist in the 
constellation of Orion, near which, at the time when the 
point of spring falls in the constellation of Taurus, the 
sun is found at the time of the vernal equinox. It stands 
in the celestial Eridanus, in the Milky Way, at Bethabara 
(John i, 28), the " place of setting " that is to say, near the 
spot where the sun crosses the Milky Way in the zodiac. 
With one foot it emerges from Eridanus, which connects 
with the Milky Way, and seems to draw water from it with 
the right hand, at the same time raising the left as if bless- 
ing really a very vivid astral figure of the Baptist ; we 
have also the three stars of Orion's belt in the (leathern) 
girdle which the gospels give to the Baptist, and the people 
are seen in the constellations about Orion, and, according 
to Babylonian ideas, a meeting of the gods takes place at 
the vernal equinox when the sun has run its course 
through the zodiac. 1 

It is useless to oppose to this conception of John the 
familiar passage of Josephus (xviii, 5, 2) as proving the 
historicity of the Baptist. The genuineness of the passage 
is just as doubtful as that of the two references in Josephus 



1 I borrow this indication of the connection of the Baptist with the con- 
stellation Orion from Fuhrmann's work, Der AstralmytJws von Christus. 
Also see, as to the astral features of the Baptist, Niemojewski (work cited, 
under "Joannes " in the index). 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 193 

to Jesus. Not only does the way in which it interrupts 
the narrative plainly show it to be an interpolation, but 
the chronology of the Jewish historian in regard to John 
is in irreconcilable contradiction to that of the gospels. 
According to the gospels, the appearance or the death of 
John must have taken place in the year 28 or 29 ; whereas 
the war of Herod with the Nabataean Aretas, the unfor- 
tunate result of which was, according to Josephus, to be 
regarded as a punishment for the execution of John, falls 
in the years 35 and 36 of the present era. Moreover, 
the complaints against Herod Antipas on account of his 
ncestuous marriage with his brother's wife, which are 
supposed to have occasioned the death of John, cannot 
have been made before then. 1 In fine, John might 
be an historical personality without there being any 
historical truth in what the gospels say of him. His 
connection with the story of Jesus is certainly due 
to astral considerations and the passages we quoted from 
Isaiah. We have, therefore, no reason to regard it as 
historical. 

Space will not permit us to go more closely at this 
point into the astral features of the gospel narrative. 
Here there is a field open to future research which has as 
yet been touched only by a few isolated students, and 
from which historical theology may expect some un- 
pleasant surprises. The examination of the gospel story 
from the astral-mythological point of view was begun by 
Dupuis, Volney, and Nork a century ago ; and Niemojewski 
has more recently done very promising work in that field. 
Others will follow him, and furnish us with an entirely 
new key to the problems of the New Testament. 2 It will, 
however, always be difficult to say how far the story of 
Jesus is affected by astral relations and how far by the 



1 Compare Graetz, Gesch. der Juden, 1888, III, p. 278. 

2 See also Wilhelm Erbt, Das Markusevangelium. Eine Untersuchung 
ilber die Form der Petruserinnerungen und die Geschichte der Urgemeinde, 
1911. 



194 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

Old Testament, which of the two influences was the 
earlier, and whether the relevant passages of the Old 
Testament may not possibly themselves be influenced by 
astral considerations. 

In general it may be said that astral mythology has 
furnished the framework or skeleton of the gospel story, 
and made it clear that many episodes which seem to be 
disconnected in the gospels owe their position to their 
place in the astral system. It suffices here to mention 
the importance of astral mythology in the interpretation of 
the gospels, and to show in the case of the Baptist how the 
two methods of interpretation work together. When the 
actual prejudice against astral mythology disappears, when 
a closer knowledge of the starry heavens than we now have 
places the student in a position to test these relations in 
detail, when it is generally recognised that astronomy and 
a knowledge of astrological language are at least as 
necessary for a correct understanding of the ancient east 
as philology is for critical theology, the time will have 
come for the last supports of the present purely historical 
conception of the gospels to break down, for the symbolical- 
mythical method to triumph completely over the present 
historical method, and for the " twilight of the gods " of 
critical theology. For the present theologians know what 
they are doing when they meet all such research with a dis- 
dainful smile, and declare it " unscientific." Their position 
in regard to it is much the same as the position of the 
early Church in regard to the astrological speculations of 
the Gnostics, which were met with the bitterest hostility, 
because they betrayed too much of the real origins of 
Christianity, and were the most dangerous obstacle to its 
representation as historical. 

(d) The Name of the Messiah. Meantime what we 
have seen will suffice to convince any impartial reader 
that, as we said, the figure of the saviour or redeemer in 
the gospels is really due to the prophet Isaiah, and that 
the character of the suffering servant of God, as described 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 195 

by the prophet, was in the mind of the evangelists. 1 His 
very name, Christus, the "anointed," can be traced to 
Isaiah (Ixi, 1), where the prophet says that the spirit of 
the Lord rests on him, because Jahveh has " anointed " 
him (see also xlii, 1). It is, however, very significant 
that the saviour and servant of God everywhere submits 
to him, as if he were speaking the other's words, and 
Jahveh, the prophet, and the servant of God combine in 
one personality; just as in the gospel of Luke Jesus at 
once applies the word of the prophet to himself, and by 
its means unfolds the programme of his future work in 
his first public appearance in the synagogue. In the 
Jewish mind the " anointed " is the Messiah, which is 
merely the Hebrew for Christ. It is a fresh proof that 
the idea of a suffering Messiah was bound to begin early 
to build on the above passages in Isaiah, as soon as the 
announcement of the glad tidings was conceived as an 
announcement of the servant of God or of the Jahveh 
who was identified with him. 

Now, in Isaiah vii, 14, the " son of the virgin " is 
named Emmanuel, and this is translated " God with us." 
That is also the meaning of the name Jesus, since in 
Matthew i, 21, the son of Mary receives this name, "that 
it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the 
prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and 
shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name 
Emmanuel." In the Septuagint, as we know, Jesus is 
the Greek form of the Hebrew Jeschua, which in turn 
is the same as Jehoschua or Joshua. Joshua, however, 
means something like " Jahveh is salvation," " Jah-Help," 
and corresponds to the German name " Gotthilf." We 
read in Matthew : " And she shall bring forth a son, and 
thou shalt call his name Jesus ; for he shall save his 
people from their sins." The name was fairly common 
among the Jews, and in this connection it is equivalent 

1 Also compare Matthew xii, 17. 



198 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

together the dispersed Jews and lead them into the 
coveted land of their " fathers " that is to say, of souls; 
to their heavenly home, whence the souls had originally 
come, and whither they return after death. He was 
therefore regarded as a second Joshua, and it was natural 
to give him the same name. 

In the Epistle of Barnabas (about the year 115) Joshua 
is described as the " forerunner of Jesus in the flesh" 
(xii, 20). Justin also stresses the relationship of Jesus 
with the Joshua of the Old Testament, and observes that 
the latter, who was originally called Hosea (Auses), 
received the name of Joshua from Moses, not by chance, 
but with a view to Christ, whose predecessor in leadership 
he was (Contra Tryph., cxiii). Eusebius traces not only 
the name Jesus, but also the name Christ, to Moses, 
saying : " The first to recognise the name Christ as one 
of especial veneration and repute was Moses. He 
appointed a man high-priest of god in the highest possible 
sense, and called him Christ. In this way he settled upon 
the dignity of the high-priesthood, which in his opinion 
far transcends all other human prerogatives, the name 
Christ, to add to its honour and splendour. 1 The same 
Moses, enlightened by God, also clearly knew the name 
Jesus, and honoured it with a great distinction. He gave 
the name Jesus, which had never been used before the 
time of Moses, to him who, he knew, would after his 
death as a type and figure of Jesus have dominion 
over all. Thus he gave to his successor, who had not 
previously been called Jesus he was called Nave (Nun), 
as his parents had named him the name Jesus, and 
meant by this to confer on him a distinction greater than 
the diadem of a king. He did this because this Jesus, 
the son of Nave, was a figure of our redeemer, who alone 
would, after Moses and the fulfilment of the symbolical 
service of God introduced by him, enter upon the 

1 This refers to Lev. iv, 16, where it is said in the Greek translation : 
Ho hiereus, ho Christos (the high-priest, the anointed). 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 199 

dominion of the true and pure worship of God. Thus 
did Moses give to the two men who then stood out from 
the whole people in virtue and repute namely, the high- 
priest and his successor as leader of the people as their 
highest distinction, the name of our saviour Jesus Christ " 
(Eccl. Hist., I, 3). 

There is, however, in the Old Testament a high-priest 
Joshua, who plays a similar part to that of Jesus and of 
the successor of Moses ; he also is supposed to gather the 
dispersed and imprisoned Jews, and lead them to their old 
home, Palestine, as was expected of the Messiah. We 
find him in Ezra iii, 2. According to Zechariah iii, the 
prophet sees the high-priest Joshua before the angel of 
Jahveh, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse 
him. But the angel orders the dirty clothes to be 
removed from him and be replaced by festive garments, 
and promises him the continuance of the priesthood if he 
will walk in the ways of God. He calls him " a brand 
plucked from the burning," just as the saviour Asclepios 
is supposed to have been delivered from the burning 
womb of his mother by his father Apollo. In fact, 
Joshua himself is represented in the light of a saviour, 
when the angel speaks of him and his companions as " fore- 
signs of a wonderful future," and refers to his " servant 
the branch," who is to come, observing that Jahveh will 
wipe away in one day the guilt of the land. It is true 
that we at once learn that the " branch" is Zerubbabel, 
the leader of the Jews of David's race, in whom the 
prophet saw that " branch " which Isaiah (xi, 1) had 
referred to the coming Messiah. Nevertheless, in Zech. 
vi, 11, the prophet puts a crown on the head of Joshua, as 
well as Zerubbabel, and they are placed on a common 
throne. But the Greek text of the prophet was altered, 
as the great hopes entertained of Zerubbabel were not 
fulfilled; the name of Zerubbabel was struck out, the 
plural (vi, 12) changed into the singular, and Joshua 
alone was represented as crowned, and was raised to the 



200 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

rank of the expected Messiah. 1 Thus the two Joshuas, 
the successor of Moses and the high-priest, blend into one 
person ; the name " Jesus " received a Messianic signifi- 
cance, and came to be used for the " branch " of the 
prophet Isaiah. 

There was, therefore, not merely a pre-Christian Christ, 
as Gunkel admits, " a belief in the death and resurrection 
of Christ in Judaeo-syncretist circles," 2 but there was also 
a pre-Christian Jesus, as Jesus and Christ were only two 
different names for the suffering and rising servant of God, 
the root of David in Isaiah; and the two might be 
combined when one wished to express the high-priesthood 
or the Messianic character of Jesus. Jesus was merely 
the general name of the saviour and redeemer ; and if on 
two critical occasions in the history of Israel a Jesus had 
saved the people and led it from abroad into its true home, 
it was natural to suppose that on the third occasion also 
the work would be done by a Jesus. 8 Now, if his very 
name thus becomes ambiguous, what is there left of the 
historical Jesus ? 4 

(e) The Topography of the Gospels. 

I. NAZAEETH. 

The historical Jesus is said to have been born in 
Nazareth. This, however, is, in turn, anything but 

1 Stade, Gesch. des Volkes Israel, 1888, II, p. 126, note; Hiihn, Die 
messianisclien Weissagungen des israel. Volkes, 1889, p. 62. 

a Zumreligionsgeschichtl. Verstandnis des Neiien Testaments, 1903, p. 82. 

3 The possible connection of Jesus with the two Joshuas of the Old 
Testament has been discussed by Robertson and by M. Bruckner in his 
Der sterbende und auferstehende Gottheiland, although the latter refrains 
from drawing any " particular conclusions as to the pre-Christian signifi- 
cance of a Joshua- Jesus " (p. 39). These relations, therefore, cannot be so 
foolish as they have been represented when we find them discussed by a 
theologian in a popular religious work intended for general circulation. 
The excellent Hebraist Prof. T. K. Cheyne writes in the Hibbert Journal 
(April, 1911), p. 658 : " The direct evidence for the divine name Jeshua or 
Joshua in pre-Christian times is both scant and disputable. Yet I incline 
(on grounds of my own) to agree with Prof. Drews in his view of the main 
point in dispute." Cf . p. 662 : " In my opinion Prof. Drews and his authori- 
ties are right in the main." 

4 Consider, also, the admission of Zimmern that the name "Jesus" 
might "very well be unhistorical," in his Zum Streit um die Christus- 
mythe, p. 4. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 201 

certain. It may be a matter of chance that neither the 
Old Testament nor Josephus nor the Talmud mentions 
the place ; and, except in the gospels, the name is 
unknown until the fourth century (Eusebius, Jerome, 
and Epiphanius). But the statement of Weiss, that it 
" cannot be denied that it was firmly believed by the 
Christians of the first century that Jesus came from 
Nazareth " (p. 21), is wholly unjustified, and is based only 
on the unproved assumption that the gospels already 
existed then in their present form. On the other hand, 
it is entirely inadmissible that the sect of the Nazaraeans, 
as the followers of Jesus are first called in Acts (xxiv, 3), 
took their name from the supposed birthplace of their 
founder, as Nazareth played scarcely any part in the life 
of Jesus which was known to them. It is true that 
Matthew (ii, 23) says that Jesus received his epithet 
" the Nazaraios " from Nazareth, and he appeals to a 
passage in the prophets. But no such passage is to be 
found, quite apart from the fact that in that case he 
ought to be called a " Nazarethene," or else Nazareth, his 
supposed birthplace, ought to be called Nazara; this is, 
indeed, found in some of the old manuscripts, and has 
been affirmed, but merely in order to harmonise it with 
the name Nazoraios, Nazaraios, or Nazarene, which is 
given to Jesus in the gospels. 

The fact is that the name only occurs in the latest 
stratum of the gospels (Matthew ii, 23; Luke iv, 16), 
whereas the older stratum (Mark vi, 1 ; Matthew xiii, 54) 
merely speaks of his " native town." Mark i, 9, is clearly 
only an amplification of the older reading of Matthew iii, 13, 
where it is simply said that Jesus came "from Galilee"; 
and Matthew iv, 13, and xxi, 11, are plainly interpolations, 
since Nazareth has not previously been mentioned. The 
same must be said of Matthew xxvi, 71, where it is 
written " Jesus of Nazareth," in accordance with the 
earlier expression of the evangelist. On the other hand, 
no theologian will deny that the story of the childhood in 



200 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

rank of the expected Messiah. 1 Thus the two Joshuas, 
the successor of Moses and the high-priest, blend into one 
person ; the name " Jesus " received a Messianic signifi- 
cance, and came to be used for the " branch " of the 
prophet Isaiah. 

There was, therefore, not merely a pre-Christian Christ, 
as Gunkel admits, " a belief in the death and resurrection 
of Christ in Judaeo-syncretist circles," 2 but there was also 
a pre-Christian Jesus, as Jesus and Christ were only two 
different names for the suffering and rising servant of God, 
the root of David in Isaiah; and the two might be 
combined when one wished to express the high-priesthood 
or the Messianic character of Jesus. Jesus was merely 
the general name of the saviour and redeemer ; and if on 
two critical occasions in the history of Israel a Jesus had 
saved the people and led it from abroad into its true home, 
it was natural to suppose that on the third occasion also 
the work would be done by a Jesus. 8 Now, if his very 
name thus becomes ambiguous, what is there left of the 
historical Jesus ? 4 

(e) The Topography of the Gospels. 

I. NAZAEETH. 

The historical Jesus is said to have been born in 
Nazareth. This, however, is, in turn, anything but 

1 Stade, Qesch. des Volkes Israel, 1888, II, p. 126, note; Hiihn, Die 
messianisclien Weissagungen des israel. Volkes, 1889, p. 62. 

2 Zumreligionsgeschichtl. Verstandnis des Neuen Testaments, 1903, p. 82. 
8 The possible connection of Jesus with the two Joshuas of the Old 

Testament has been discussed by Robertson and by M. Bruckner in his 
Der sterbende und auferstehende Gottheiland, although the latter refrains 
from drawing any " particular conclusions as to the pre-Christian signifi- 
cance of a Joshua- Jesus " (p. 39). These relations, therefore, cannot be so 
foolish as they have been represented when we find them discussed by a 
theologian in a popular religious work intended for general circulation. 
The excellent Hebraist Prof. T. K. Cheyne writes in the Hibbert Journal 
(April, 1911), p. 658 : " The direct evidence for the divine name Jeshua or 
Joshua in pre-Christian times is both scant and disputable. Yet I incline 
(on grounds of my own) to agree with Prof. Drews in his view of the main 
point in dispute." Of. p. 662 : " In my opinion Prof. Drews and his authori- 
ties are right in the main." 

4 Consider, also, the admission of Zimmern that the name "Jesus" 
might "very well be unhistorical," in his Zum Streit urn die Christus- 
mythe, p. 4. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 201 

certain. It may be a matter of chance that neither the 
Old Testament nor Josephus nor the Talmud mentions 
the place ; and, except in the gospels, the name is 
unknown until the fourth century (Eusebius, Jerome, 
and Epiphanius). But the statement of Weiss, that it 
" cannot be denied that it was firmly believed by the 
Christians of the first century that Jesus came from 
Nazareth " (p. 21), is wholly unjustified, and is based only 
on the unproved assumption that the gospels already 
existed then in their present form. On the other hand, 
it is entirely inadmissible that the sect of the Nazaraeans, 
as the followers of Jesus are first called in Acts (xxiv, 3), 
took their name from the supposed birthplace of their 
founder, as Nazareth played scarcely any part in the life 
of Jesus which was known to them. It is true that 
Matthew (ii, 23) says that Jesus received his epithet 
" the Nazaraios " from Nazareth, and he appeals to a 
passage in the prophets. But no such passage is to be 
found, quite apart from the fact that in that case he 
ought to be called a " Nazarethene," or else Nazareth, his 
supposed birthplace, ought to be called Nazara; this is, 
indeed, found in some of the old manuscripts, and has 
been affirmed, but merely in order to harmonise it with 
the name Nazoraios, Nazaraios, or Nazarene, which is 
given to Jesus in the gospels. 

The fact is that the name only occurs in the latest 
stratum of the gospels (Matthew ii, 23; Luke iv, 16), 
whereas the older stratum (Mark vi, 1 ; Matthew xiii, 54) 
merely speaks of his " native town." Mark i, 9, is clearly 
only an amplification of the older reading of Matthew iii, 13, 
where it is simply said that Jesus came "from Galilee"; 
and Matthew iv, 13, and xxi, 11, are plainly interpolations, 
since Nazareth has not previously been mentioned. The 
same must be said of Matthew xxvi, 71, where it is 
written " Jesus of Nazareth," in accordance with the 
earlier expression of the evangelist. On the other hand, 
no theologian will deny that the story of the childhood in 



202 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

Luke is of late date. In Mark Jesus is called " the 
Nazarene " in i, 24 ; x, 47 ; xiv, 67 ; and xvi, 6, without 
any statement that this indicates the place of his origin. 
It may, therefore, just as well have a different meaning, 
and may be a sect-name. 

This is the view of William B. Smith. In his opinion 
the name can be traced to the ancient root N-Z-B, which 
means something like watcher, protector, guardian, saviour. 
Hence Jesus the Nazoraean or Nazarene was Jesus the 
Protector, just as Jahveh, 1 or the archangel Michael, the 
" angel-prince," who often takes the place of the Messiah, 
is known as the " protector of Israel," its spokesman with 
God, and its deliverer from all its cares (Daniel xix, 
13, and xii, 1 ; Gen. xlviii, 16) ; the rabbinical Metatron 
also plays this part of protector and supporter of the 
Jewish people, and is regarded as the " angel of redemp- 
tion," especially of the damned suffering in hell. The 
followers of Jesus will, therefore, have called themselves 
Nazoraeans because they primarily conceived the expected 
Messiah in the sense of a Michael or Metatron, a 
protector ; that is, at all events, more probable than that 
they took their name from the place Nazareth, with which 
they had no close connection. 2 It is not at all impossible 

1 Psalm 121. The fact that the protector is here called schomer, not 
nozer, has nothing to do with the matter, any more than the fact that the 
Palestinians of the time about the birth of Christ did not use the Hebrew 
noaarfor"the protector," but the Aramaic ne' tar: it is well known that 
the language of a sect tends to preserve antique words, and we are 
concerned here, not with the word itself, but its meaning. 

2 Smith, The Pre-Christian Jesus, 1906. Also see his article on " The 
Real Ancestry of Jesus " in the Open Court, January, 1910, p. 12, and the 
article " The Nazarene," by Dr. P. Carus, the editor, in the same number 
(p. 26). Differently from the German theologians, who cannot speak 
disdainfully enough of Smith's hypotheses, on philological grounds, 
Carus admits the possibility of that origin of the name, and regards the 
existence of a place called Nazareth at the time of Jesus as improbable. 
Indeed, in his book The Pleroma : An Essay on the Origins of Christianity 
(1910), he says that it is absolutely impossible that the Nazarene could 
mean the man from Nazareth (p. 46). Moreover, Schmiedel has recently 
maintained against Weinel in the Protestantenblatt, 1910, Nr. 17, p. 438, 
that Smith's hypothesis is philologically admissible. Hence the charge of 
" gross ignorance of the Semitic languages " which Weinel brings against 
Smith is quite unjustified. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 203 

that the place Nazareth took its name from the sect of 
the Nazaraeans, instead of the reverse, as is admitted by 
so distinguished a scholar as W. Nestle. 1 According to 
the Assyriologist Haupt (of Baltimore), Nazareth was a 
new name for the older Hethlon (Ezech. xlvii, 15), or 
Hittalon or Hinnathon, which means " protection," and 
has reference to the protected position of Nazareth among 
the hills. In that case it would be natural for the 
evangelist to choose a place called " protection " as the 
birthplace of the " protector." 

According to Mark x, 47, the blind Bartimeus, hearing 
that " Jesus the Nazarene " is passing by, calls out to 
him, " Jesus, thou son of David." It is possible that we 
have here another indication of the original meaning of 
the name. In Isaiah nazar is the Hebrew word for the 
" branch," called zemah in Zechariah ; and he is called 
in Isaiah " a rod from the stem of Jesse " that is to say, 
a " son (descendant) of David." May it not be that the 
expression Nazarsean or Nazarene also contains an 
allusion to the " branch," as Robertson suggests ? 2 If the 
figure of Jesus, and even his name, as we have seen, are 
derived from Isaiah, it is natural to assume that his 
secondary name " the Nazarsean " may also be traced to 
the same source, and that in the name of his sect there 
is a relation to the prophet's branch of David. " He 
grew up as a tender plant, a nazar" (Isaiah liii, 2); 
from this a later age has made him a " Nazarene " and 
put his birth at Nazareth. 3 This would also afford a 

1 Sildwestdeutsche Schulblatter , 1910, Heft 4 and 5, p. 163. M. 
Bruckner also says, in regard to Smith's hypothesis : "His proof that the 
epithet ' Nazarsean ' applied to Jesus in Matthew ii, 23, cannot have 
been derived from Nazareth, but was the name of a pre-Christian Jewish 
sect, especially deserves attention" (p. 47). In Hugo Winckler we read : 
" From the word neqer comes the name of the religion of those who believe 
in the ' saviour ' the Nazarene-Christians or Nazaraeans. Nazareth as 
the home of Jesus is merely a confirmation of his character as saviour for 
the symbolising tendency" (Ex oriente lux, Band ii, 1906, p. 59, note). 
Cf. also Winckler, Die babylonische Oeisteskultur (1907), p. 147. 

2 Cf. also Alfred Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im Lichte des alien 
Orients, 2 Aufl., 1906, pp. 353, 577. 

3 Possibly nazar also has an astral significance, as the Hyades in 



204 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

simple explanation of the curious reference in Matthew 
ii, 23, to some unknown passage in the prophets, and we 
need not suppose that Nazareth only became the name 
of a place at a later date ; it may have existed already, 
and have been chosen as the birthplace of Jesus because 
of its connection with nazar. 

We are disposed to believe that the sect of the 
Nazoraeans was originally the same as the Nasiraeans, 
the "initiated" or "holy," who were distinguished from 
the rest of the Jews by their abstinence from oil and 
wine and the use of the razor, and by the rigour of their 
lives ; and that the Nazoraeans were those Nasiraeans who 
conceived the expected Messiah in the sense of the nazar 
of Isaiah. In Lamentations (iv, 7) the " pure " are called 
" Nazarites " [Nazaraeans] , and Josephus writes Nazaraios 
in Antiquities iv, 4, 4, but Naziraios in xix, 6, 1. 

It is admitted that the origin of Jesus from Nazareth 
is in contradiction to the belief that the Messiah was to 
be born in Bethlehem as a shoot from David. But it is 
not a contradiction between the Messianic dogma and a 
" hard fact of history," as Weiss says (p. 22) ; it is due 
simply to the fact that the man of the race of David is 
called by the prophet a " branch " (nazar) ; and, when 
men began to make an historical person of Jesus, they 
found the agreement of the word with Nazareth a very 
welcome opportunity to conceal the real origin of Jesus 
in Isaiah. The contradiction gave no more trouble to 
the early Christians than the circumstance that possibly 
there was no such place as Nazareth at the time of Jesus. 
There was also probably no such place as Capernaum, 
Emmaus, Bethesda, Nain, Gethsemane, or Golgotha. 
And if our opponents say that, if that were so, the story 
of Jesus would have betrayed its character as fiction, and 
a Jew would have seen the defect at once, we may remind 
them that the massacre of the children at Bethlehem, the 

Taurus have the form of a branch ; and Orion, in which we have already 
suspected the Baptist, seems to bring the " twig " (Fuhrmann). 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 205 

wandering about of people to be included in the census, 
the astronomically impossible eclipse of the sun, which 
is supposed to have lasted three hours, at the death of 
Jesus, and many other details, did not give the evangelists 
the least concern. Even to-day the pious reader of the 
Bible is not disquieted by these things. Nor was there 
any fear of Jewish objection to the derivation of Jesus 
from Nazareth, because the process of the historicisation 
of the Christ-myth was only completed at a time when 
no historical evidence whatever of the real origin of Jesus 
could be adduced, since, as we have seen, the oldest 
gospel uses the name Nazarsean probably not to indicate 
the birthplace of Jesus, but as a sect-name with reference 
to the " protector " or " saviour " and the nazar of Isaiah. 1 

II. JERUSALEM. 

So far, then, from the name Nazaraean, or Nazoraean, 
or Nazarene, being derived from the town of Nazareth, we 
must say that this is the least probable of all possible 
suggestions. The names of places in the gospels, in fact, 
afford no evidence whatever of the historicity of Jesus, 
since the whole topography of the life of Jesus is in its 
main lines borrowed from Isaiah and other prophets. So 
it was inevitable that, as soon as the process began to be 
regarded from the historical point of view, the great 
drama of the suffering and death of the servant of God 
and the associated redemption of mankind should be 
located in Jerusalem. As Luke says (xiii, 33 see also 
Psalm cxvi, 14-19) : " It cannot be that a prophet perish 
out of Jerusalem." It is the unvarying theme of the 
prophets that Jerusalem will be glorified by Jahveh, and 
become the centre of the world's history (Isaiah Ixii, 7). 
In the prophet Zechariah we read of the inhabitants of 
the city : 

And they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, 

1 Compare Robertson, Christianity a-nd Mytliology, p. 311, and P. van 
Dyk's Erit. Kommentar zu den Evangelien, pp. 28 and 152. 



206 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his 
only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is 
in bitterness for his firstborn. 

In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jeru- 
salem, as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of 
Megiddon. 

And the land shall mourn, every family apart; the 
family of the house of David apart, and their wives apart 
(xii, 10-12). 

On Jerusalem the eyes of the whole nation are bent. 
There will their desire be consummated. From there 
will salvation spread over the earth, and judgment be 
meted out to men (Isaiah ii). 

" Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried 
stone, a precious corner-stone, a sure foundation " (Isaiah 
xxviii, 16). "And he shall be for a sanctuary, for a 
stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence to both the 
houses of Israel, for a gin and for a snare to the inhabi- 
tants of Jerusalem. And many among them shall 
stumble, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be 
taken " (Isaiah viii, 14, 15 see also xxviii, 13). So the 
evangelist makes Jesus say, with reference to the prophet : 
" The stone which the builders rejected, the same is 

become the head of the corner [Psalm cxviii, 22] 

Therefore I say unto you : The kingdom of God shall 
be taken from you and given to a nation bringing forth 
the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this 
stone shall be broken ; but on whomsoever it shall fall, 
it will grind him to powder" (Matthew xxi, 42-44). 
In Isaiah the prophet speaks in the same vein to those 
who held Jahveh holy, his "disciples": "Behold, I and 
the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs 
and for wonders in Israel from the Lord of hosts, which 
dwelleth in mount Zion " (viii, 18). " He that is left in 
Zion, and he that remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called 
holy, even every one that is written among the living in 
Jerusalem" (iv, 3). So the Tarsic tent-maker Paul calls 
the Christians in Jerusalem "the saints"; and we are 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 207 

reminded of Acts, of the Pentecostal gathering, and the 
first Christian propaganda, when it is written : 

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort 
you ; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem 

It shall come, that I will gather all nations and tongues ; 
and they shall come, and see my glory. 

And I will set a sign among them, and I will send those 
that escape of them unto the nations, to Tarshish [!] , Pul, 

and Lud to the isles afar off, that have not heard my 

fame, neither have seen my glory ; and they shall declare 
my glory among the Gentiles. 

And they shall bring all your brethren for an offering 

unto the Lord to my holy mountain Jerusalem, saith 

the Lord, as the children of Israel bring an offering in a 
clean vessel into the house of the Lord. 

And I will also take of them for priests (Isaiah Ixvi, 
13-21). 

In what does this comfort consist that Jahveh promises 
to his people ? He himself will come as the king of 
Israel, and lead his own towards Jerusalem : " How 
beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that 
bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that 
bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation ; 
that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth"! (Isaiah lii, 7 
compare xii, 6). "Go through, go through the gates; 
prepare ye the way of the people ; cast up, cast up the 

highway; gather out the stones Say ye to the 

daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh ; behold, 
his reward is with him, and his work before him. And 
they shall call them, The holy people, The redeemed of 
the Lord ; and thou shalt be called, Sought out, A city 
not forsaken " (Isaiah Ixii, 10 see also xxvi, 2). The 
prophet refers the words immediately to Jahveh. But 
we have already seen how Jahveh is constantly identified 
with the figure of the servant of God and redeemer. 
How easily might the story of the entry into Jerusalem 
develop from these passages ! 

" Eejoice greatly, daughter of Zion ; shout, daughter 
of Jerusalem," says the prophet Zechariah (ix, 9), in 



208 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

similar words to those of Isaiah: "Behold, thy king 
cometh unto thee : he is just, and having salvation ; lowly 
and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass." 
Hence, in Matthew xxi, 2, Jesus bids the disciples bring 
him the ass and its foal that they shall find, the evangelist 
having in mind also the words of Genesis xlix, 11 : 
" Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto 
the choice vine." And Mark (xi, 2) adds to the words of 
Jesus that no man had yet ridden the ass, because it is 
said in Numbers (xix, 2) that a faultless cow " upon which 
never came yoke " shall be brought to the priest Eleazar. 1 
The hosanna of the people and their cry, " Blessed is 
he that cometh in the name of the Lord " (Matthew 
xxi, 9), are taken from the 118th Psalm: " Save now, I 
beseech thee, Lord [" Save now " is the meaning of the 
Hebrew hoschia-na, which the evangelist seems wrongly 
to have taken to be a cry of joy !] : Blessed is he that 
cometh in the name of the Lord " (26). The words that 
Jesus is supposed to have said about his followers on 
entering into Jerusalem, "If these should hold their 
peace, the stones would immediately cry out " (Luke 
xix, 40), are based on the prophet Habakkuk : " For the 
stone shall cry out of the wall " (ii, 11). Even the name 
" Gethsemane," which is nowhere else found as the name 
of a place, is, as Smith observes, inspired by Isaiah. The 
name means "oil-press," or "olive-press." It seems to 
refer to Isaiah Ixiii, 2, where it is said of Jahveh : 
" Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy 
garments like him that treadeth in the press [Hebrew 
gath~\ ? " "I have trodden the press alone," says Jahveh ; 
" and of the people there was none with me ; for I will 
tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury ; 
and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and 
I will stain all my raiment. For the day of vengeance is 
in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come. 

1 Compare Dent, xxi, 3. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 209 

And I looked, and there was none to help ; and I 
wondered that there was none to uphold ; therefore mine 
own arm brought salvation unto me." Here we have a 
clear relation to the abandonment of Jesus on Gethsemane 
and his comforting by an angel (Luke xxii, 43), and the 
reference to the blood (Luke xxii, 44) accords. Jahveh's 
vengeance on the Gentiles is transformed in the gospels 
into the contrary act of the self-oblation of Jesus ; and 
whereas in Isaiah it is the wine of anger and vengeance 
that flows from the press, here it is the oil of healing 
and salvation that pours from the press (gath) over the 
peoples. 

Like Gethsemane, Golgotha, " the place of skulls," is 
another place that we cannot verify. It is possible that 
the name is connected with the pillars (golgoi) of the 
western-Asiatic mother of the gods, and points to an 
ancient Jebusitic centre of the cult of Adonis under the 
name Golgos. But possibly there is an astral element, 
seeing that Matthew (xxvii, 33) makes the word mean 
" place of skulls " (from the Hebrew gulguleth, the skull), 
and suggests the skull or beaker (skull as a drinking 
vessel) which is found under the vernal cross in the 
heavens. 1 

III. GALILEE. 

According to the gospels, the Saviour does not at first 
live in the holy city. Whence did he come ? Again we 
find the answer in Isaiah : "I have raised up one from 
the north" (xli, 25). In the north is Galilee, of which 
it is said in the prophet : "At the first he lightly afflicted 
the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, and after- 
ward did more grievously afflict her by the way of the 
sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations. The 
people that walked in darkness have seen a great light ; 
they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon 



1 Niemojewski, p. 420. Reflect on the familiar pictures of a cup or 
skull at the foot of the crucifix. 

P 



210 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

them hath the light shined " (Isaiah ix, 1-2). That, in 
point of fact, Galilee was generally regarded as the land 
from which the Messiah would come is confirmed by 
the Talmud, which says that, as the Galileans were the 
first to be driven into exile, they should be the first to 
receive consolation, in harmony with the law of com- 
pensation which governs all the divine plans. 1 Hence 
the following words of the prophet might be referred to 
the Galileans and their rejoicing : " They joy before thee 
according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice 

when they divide the spoil For unto us a child is 

born, unto us a son is given ; and the government shall 
be upon his shoulder : and his name shall be called 
Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting 
Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his 
government and peace there shall be no end, upon the 
throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and 
to establish it with judgment and with justice from 
henceforth even for ever " (Isaiah ix, 3, 6, 7). 

Hence it is the word of the prophet, not a " hard fact 
of history," that demands the birth of the Saviour in 
Galilee. Then Nazareth, with its relation to nazar, 
occurred at once as the proper birthplace of Jesus, as 
soon as men began to conceive the episode historically. 

Astral considerations may have co-operated. Galilee, 
from galil circle, connects with the zodiacal circle 
which the sun traverses; even in the prophet the 
Saviour is identified with the sun. The " people that 
walk in darkness " and that " dwell in the land of the 
shadow " might easily be identified with the " familiar 
spirits" of whom Isaiah speaks (viii, 19), in whom 
" there is no light," who " pass through" the land " hardly 
bestead and hungry ; and it shall come to pass, that 
when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves 
and curse their king and their God, and look upward; 

1 Sohar on Exodus, quoted by Gfrorer, Das Jahrhundert des Heils, 
1838, ii, p. 231. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 211 

and they shall look unto the earth, and behold trouble 
and darkness, dimness of anguish, and they shall be 
driven to darkness." They suggest the souls in the 
nether world, the stars in their course below the celestial 
equator, which "rejoice" at the birth of the "great 
light " at the winter solstice and are led to their time of 
brilliancy. On this view Galilee of the Gentiles (Galil- 
ha-goim) coincides with the lower half, the " water- 
region," of the zodiac, in which are found the aquatic 
signs of the southern fish, Aquarius, the Fishes, the 
Whale, and Eridanus. 1 We thus understand why " Galilee, 
the way to the sea, the land by the Jordan," plays so 
great a part in the story of Jesus ; it was bound to be 
recognised in a Messianic age. Hence this " watery 
region " of the sky is the chief theatre of the Saviour's 
life ; hence in the gospels the " Sea of Galilee," the Sea 
of Genesareth, and the many names of places in the 
district. For the Greeks and Eomans they had no 
ulterior significance, and were mere names, but much 
like the names of places in Homer or Vergil, or the 
description of the voyage of the Argonaut by Apollonius 
of Khodes. It is incredible that von Soden should seek 
a proof of the historicity of the gospel narrative in these 
names. 2 



1 In truth, Zebulun, according to Genesis xlix, relates to the sign of the 
zodiac Capricorn and Naphtali to Aries, both of which belong to the water- 
region of the zodiac, the dark part of the year. (Cf . A. Jeremias, Das Alte 
Testament im Lichte des alien Orients, p. 398.) According to M. Miiller, 
galil means, in a derivative from the Coptic, the "water-wheel." A 
water-wheel might (according to Fuhrmann) be traced in the constel- 
lation Orion, the spokes being represented by the four chief stars and 
the axis by the stars of the belt, the wheel being set in motion by the 
falling "water" of the Milky Way. In so far as Orion is the hanging 
figure of the 22nd Psalm, we may note that the latter is a galil (Galilean), 
and as the constellation Orion is, as we saw, astrally related to the nazar 
(the Hyades), the birth of the Saviour in Nazareth might be deduced 
from this. See Niemojewski, pp. 161 and 193. 

2 Work quoted, p. 21. Herr von Soden's attempt to prove the 
historicity of Jesus from the " smell of the soil of Palestine " seems to me 
much the same as if one were to conclude that Tell was historical because 
of the many place-names in the legend. A Swiss hotel-keeper might do 
that, but a student of history ! 



212 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

We have already seen that the Jordan has an astral 
significance in the gospels, and corresponds to the 
celestial Eridanus (Egyptian, iero or iera=the river) or 
to the Milky Way. It may be the same with other 
supposed names of places. In regard to the most 
important of them all, Capernaum, Steudel has called 
attention to Zech. xiii, 1, where it is said : "In that day 
there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David 
and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for 
uncleanness," and reminds us that in his Jewish War 
(iii, 10, 8) Josephus mentions a "very strong" and 
fertilising spring "which is called Capharnaum by the 
inhabitants of the district." When we read in Josephus 
the description of the fish-abounding Sea of Genesareth 
and the country about it, with its beauty and charm, its 
palms, nuts, figs, olives, and fruit-trees of all kinds, we 
feel that no other "knowledge of the locality" was 
needed in order to " invent " the whole regional back- 
ground of the life of Jesus with the aid of these 
indications. 

(/) The Chronology of the Gospels. Not only is the 
topography of the gospels clearly based on Isaiah, but, as 
we have already seen, the chronological frame of the 
events described in them presents very serious difficulties. 
Many names of supposed historical persons in the gospels 
seem to have been originally of an astral character, and 
to have been later pressed into the historical scheme ; 
such are Herod, the high-priests Annas and Caiaphas, 
and Pilate. There is hardly anything related about them 
that agrees with the facts known to us in other ways, but 
it agrees very well with astral features and constellations. 1 

1 Niemojewski, pp. 367, 370. The high-priest Annas, who is supposed 
to have held office with Caiaphas, is identical in name with the prophetess 
Anna (Sib-Zi-Anna of the Babylonians, Anna Perenna of the Romans), 
and according to Niemojewski (p. 367) corresponds to the star 7 in 
Gemini, but according to Fuhrmann to the constellation Cassiopeia 
which dwells " in the temple," or at the highest point of the Milky 
Way. Caiaphas is clearly, in that case, the constellation Cepheus, near 
Cassiopeia ; and the two names were subsequently applied to the Jewish 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 213 

The conception of the just one as "hanging" and the 
symbolic transformation of the martyr's stake into the 
mystic form of the cross as a sign of fire and life, corre- 
sponding to the constellation Orion, suggested the idea of 
making the servant of God and life-bringer, who dies on 
the cross, be put to death by the Eomans, not the Jews, 
as the Jews killed the blasphemer by stoning. This 
settled the period for the story of Jesus. It can also be 
imagined that the figure of Augustus had some influence 
on this ; it would be natural to oppose to the Roman lord 
of the world, whose reign opened a new era of history and 
who was greeted as saviour and redeemer of the world, 
the true saviour in the person of Jesus, born in his time. 1 
Then there was, perhaps, a more general reason for 
fixing the time of the death of Jesus. According to 
Luke's gospel, Jesus must have died in the year 29. 
As he died in the same year as John, and John, according 
to the indications in Josephus, died shortly before the 
year 36, Keim 2 and others have assigned the death of the 
saviour to that year. Keim recalls the general feeling of 
strain in the Roman Empire in the year 34, and with 
this he connects the appearance of the Baptist. At Rome 
the death of Tiberius was expected daily. The Parthians 
threatened from the east, and their prince Artabanes had 
wrested Armenia from the Romans and turned his atten- 
tion to Syria. About the same time great events were 
announced in Egypt, which seemed to indicate the opening 
of a new epoch. In the year 34 it was believed that the 
fabulous phoenix, which came every five hundred years to 
Heliopolis to burn itself and rise again rejuvenated, had 
been seen. The phoenix was connected with the Messianic 

high-priests on account of the similarity. The Talmud enumerates the 
names of the principal men who directed the sanhedrim from Antigonas 
(B.C. 250) until the destruction of the temple ; a Caiaphas is not to be 
found among the number. He was high priest for eighteen years ; but 
this also is not mentioned in the Talmud, although it gives the names of 
all who have been high priests for ten years or more. 

1 Compare Del Mar, The Worship of Augustus CcBsar. 

a Geschichte Jesu, 1873. 



214 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

expectation of the Jews. Just as the marvellous bird 
destroyed itself at the close of each world-epoch and re- 
created itself, so the Messiah was expected as the creator 
of a new world. 1 The whole world was discussing the 
extraordinary event at the time, and it may have con- 
tributed to the locating at that period of the death of the 
saviour and his glorious resurrection from the flames of 
the old world. 

Further, the Hindoo Krishna, who, as saviour, con- 
queror of dragons, and " crucified," is in many respects 
as like Jesus as one egg is like another, was said to have 
predicted at his death that the fourth world -period, 
Kaliyuga, the iron-age, would commence thirty-six years 
afterwards, and men would become wicked and miserable. 
For the Jews the year 70, in which Jerusalem was taken 
and the temple, the national sanctuary and centre of the 
faith, destroyed, was the turning-point in the history of 
the world. It was the year of the great judgment on the 
Jews, as Isaiah had predicted, the coming of which the 
saviour was supposed to forecast. Beckoning backwards, 
this again gives the year 34 as that of the death of Jesus, 
and agrees with the idea that the gospels reached their 
present form in the first quarter of the second century, in 
the terrible period when the Jews and Christians began 
to separate, as Lublinski has so vividly shown. 2 

1 We may recall that Joseph, who was believed to have been sold into 
Arabia, gone from there to Egypt, and married the daughter of the priest 
at On (Heliopolis), bore in Egypt the name Zaphnat Phanech (" biding of 
the phoenix " that is to say, of the sun or year-god in the five Epago- 
mena or intercalary days during which the old year passes into the new). 
Joseph was a kind of Adonis or Tammuz ; he was a foretype of the Messiah, 
and is called even in Apollodorus (iii, 14, 4) a" son of the Phoenix," just 
as Joshua is called a son of the dove (Semiramis-Mirjam), and Asclepios 
a son of the crow, from whose burning womb he was delivered. See 
Gruppe, Griech. Mythologie, ii, p. 144, where it is suggested that the myth 
of the birth of Asclepios may be a version of the legend of the phoenix. 
Jesus also seems originally to have had a dove for mother, as the baptism 
in the Jordan was, according to some, the act of birth of the saviour ; and 
the Holy Ghost, who descended on him in fire and flame in the form of a 
dove, was represented in certain Gnostic sects as " the mother of Jesus " 
(The Christ-Myth). 

2 Compare A. Kniepf, Zehn Thesen zur natttrlichen Welt- und Lebens- 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 215 

Whether this is so or not, we have no certain date of 
the death of the saviour, and every attempt to reconcile 
the contradictory indications is futile. 1 These facts, how- 
ever, enable us to suspect why, when the myth of the 
servant of God began to assume historical form, his death 
was fixed about the year 30 of our era. The life of Jesus 
may for a long time have been told unhistorically as far 
as any definite period of time is concerned ; possibly it was 
originally astral, as Niemojewski believes. We can only 
repeat that from the chronological point of view also there 
is no need whatever to take the supposed historical data of 
the gospels seriously. That is unfortunate for those who 
represent them as history, as they for the most part derive 
their material from the gospels alone. It is quite time 
to listen to the learned Jews (Graetz, Joel, Chwolson, 
Lippe, Lublinski) who say that in point of fact it is 
the conditions of the second, not the first, century 
that have provided the framework of the gospel story 
in detail. The Gnostic sects, from which Christianity 
originated, knew at first only an astral Jesus, whose 
mythic "history" was composed of passages from the 
prophets, Isaiah, the twenty-second Psalm, and Wisdom, 
In this they were not far removed from the Pharisees, 
who, being " believers in fate," as we know from Josephus 
and the Talmud, also favoured astrological ideas. 2 It was 
only after the destruction of Jerusalem, when the 

anschauung, 1903, p. 34. Notice also the story of Jesus, the son of Ananus, 
told by Josephus, which happened shortly before the destruction of Jerusa- 
lem (see further below), and may also be a reason for putting the death of 
the evangelical Jesus about that time. 

1 This applies also to the attempt to determine the date of the cruci- 
fixion that is made from time to time on astronomical grounds. To all 
such speculations we may say that eclipses, earthquakes, and other natural 
catastrophes are part of the standing requisites in descriptions of the birth 
and death of saviours, such as Krishna, Buddha, Dionysos, etc. Even at 
Caesar's birth a remarkable star is supposed to have announced the event, 
and an earthquake is said to have taken place at his death. Much 
the same is related about the birth and death of Augustus, whose life, 
moreover, is made to resemble that of the divine saviour in many respects 
by contemporary writers. See Alex, del Mar, pp. 92, 99, 124, 162, and 169. 

2 Cf. E. Bischof, Babylonisch-Astraks im Weltbilde des Talmud imMid- 
rasch, 1907. 



216 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

Pharisees abandoned these speculations and adhered 
strictly to the law indeed, expressly combated the 
fancies of astral mythology and when the new faith 
spread to wider circles which did not understand the 
astral meaning of the Jesus-myth and regarded the myth 
as a real history, that the knowledge of the astral features 
was gradually lost, and people began to seek standing- 
ground for the story of Jesus in the real course of events. 

The Gnostics of the second century, however, still held 
in principle the astral character of the story of the saviour, 
and possibly we have an echo of the increasing struggle 
against the narrowness and one-sidedness of the Pharisaic 
view by those who were " initiated " into the " mysteries " 
of the astral doctrine in the words of Jesus to the scribes : 
" Woe unto you, lawyers, for ye have taken away the 
key of knowledge ; ye entered not in yourselves, and 
them that were entering in ye hindered" (Luke xi, 52). 

(g) The Pre-Christian Jesus. We saw that there was 
a pre-Christian Christ as well as a pre-Christian Jesus. 
In both cases Isaiah furnished the immediate occasion for 
the figure. There was a belief in the suffering and the 
death of the "servant of God," his resurrection and 
exaltation by God, and the spiritual and corporal redemp- 
tion of men by this means, as the Jews expected of their 
Messiah. The servant of God, it is true, was not himself, 
in his human lowliness and poverty, to be the Messiah, 
for with the Messiah was associated the idea of a worldly 
conqueror triumphing over the enemies of Israel, restoring 
the power of David, a powerful lord of life and death, 
descending from heaven to judge sinners, to found a new 
heaven and new earth, and inaugurating a golden age for 
his followers (Isaiah Ixv). But his appearance on earth 
was to be the condition for the coming of the Messiah, 
and his death was to be the great expiation for the guilt 
of men, without which the Jews could not share the glory 
of the Messianic kingdom (Isaiah Iviii). The figure of 
the servant of God, moreover, sometimes blended with 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 217 

that of Jahveh himself, and it was he who was to hold 
the last judgment and lead his people into the coveted 
kingdom (Isaiah xiii, 7 ; xxv, xxvi, xxxi, etc.) ; at other 
times he seemed to be a special being, beside or below 
Jahveh, the " son of God," or the representative of " the 
just," who, according to Plato and Wisdom, endure much 
from their enemies on earth, but are raised to divine 
heights after death and attain eternal life. It was a view 
closely akin to the belief, among non-Jewish peoples, in 
a suffering, dying, and rising saviour-god, celebrated in 
secret cults and represented by various sects. It is 
natural to suspect that the idea of the Messiah's mission 
derived from Isaiah was a secret doctrine among the 
Jews, and had its chief representatives in peculiarly 
mystic circles or sects apart from the official Jewish 
religion. 

Possibly the Nazoraeans or Nazaraeans, as Epiphanius 
calls the first Christians, were such a sect, as he observes 
that they existed before Christ, and knew nothing of 
Christ that is to say, of an historical man of that name 
(Hceres, xviii, 29). It is true that he only affirms this of 
the Nasaraeans, a Jewish sect that lived east of the 
Jordan, practised circumcision, observed the Sabbath and 
the Jewish festivals, but rejected animal food and sacri- 
fices, and regarded the Pentateuch as a forgery, 1 and 
takes the greatest care to distinguish between the two 
sects, the Nazoraeans and the Nasaraeans. But it is not 
easy to believe that they were really distinct, and the 
confusion of his text at the relevant passage is due, Smith 
suspects (The Pre-Christian Jesus), merely to his attempt 
to obscure the real situation. 

According to Epiphanius, the Nazoraeans were closely 
related to the Jessaeans ; indeed, the name is said to have 

1 According to Nilus, a younger contemporary of Epiphanius (x, 430), 
they were not Christians (in the current sense), but a sort of Rechabites, 
living in tents, avoiding wine and other luxuries, and living an extremely 
simple life. This would agree with our idea of a coalescence of the 
Nazarseans and Nasirseans. 



218 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

been originally a name of the Nazoraeans. Epiphanius 
leaves it open whether they took their name from Jesus 
or from Jesse (Isai), father of David and ancestor of the 
Messiah. Either is possible, since the Hebrew name 
Joshua can be rendered either Jesus or Jessus in Greek, 
as is seen in the relation of Maschiach and Messiah. 
Possibly, however, we have in their name (Jessaeans = 
Jesaiseans [Jessaioi]) an echo of the name of the prophet 
to whom they owed their particular conception of the 
suffering Messiah. The name Isaiah is, moreover, closely 
connected with the name Jesus, Jehoschua, or Joshua, and 
means "Jahveh salvation." "God-salvation" would, of 
course, be just as fitting a name for the " saviour-god " as 
" God-Help." 

Further, the Jessaeans or Jessenes must have been 
closely connected with the Essaeans or Essenians who, 
like the Therapeuts of Egypt, cultivated a mystic esoteric 
doctrine, and cured disease and expelled devils by the 
magic of names. The " servant of God " in Isaiah was 
also a physician of the soul, a healer, and an expeller of 
demons. When, therefore, Epiphanius observes that the 
name Jesus means in Hebrew curator or therapeutes 
(healer or physician), it is not at all improbable that the 
Essaeans worshipped their god under the name Jesus or 
Joshua. 

In the gospels (Mark ix, 39; Luke ix, 49; x, 17), in 
Acts (iii, 16), and in the Epistle of James (v, 14), we read 
that the name Jesus had a miraculous power, and the 
Talmud also says that about the end of the first century 
disease was healed in the name of Jesus. According to 
Weiss, this is " one of the strongest proofs that he was 
known to Jews and Gentiles as a successful exorcist " 
(p. 19) ; and Weinel charges Smith with " a poor know- 
ledge of the subject," because he concludes from this that 
the name Jesus must from the first have been the name 
of a god. " For," he sagely informs us, " devils were 
expelled in the name of Solomon, for instance, as well as 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 219 

in the name of God or of a god. 1 In this way they 
secured the mysterious power which, according to the 
ideas of the age, Solomon or Jesus possessed the latter 
in virtue of the cures which he had actually accom- 
plished " (p. 94). Indeed! Unfortunately, in the passage 
quoted from Josephus it is not said at all that the Jewish 
magician Eleazar exorcised demons " in the name of 
Solomon," but merely that he exorcised them and at the 
same time "remembered" the name of Solomon and 
pronounced the magical formulae composed by him. 
From this it does not follow at all that it was the 
name of Solomon, and not the name of some divine 
being, that worked the miracles. Is Solomon supposed 
to have expelled demons in his own name ? That would 
be too much like Zeus in Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in 
the Underworld, who swears "by me"! That was not 
even done by Jesus, who drove out devils in the name of 
the Holy Ghost (Matthew xii, 28). We read in Justin, 
moreover, that the Joshua of the Old Testament was only 
made capable of performing miracles when Moses changed 
his name from Hosea into that of the Christian saviour 
(Numbers xiii, 16) . 2 Hence, miracles were not done in 
the name of Jesus because the historical Jesus had been 
" a successful exorcist," but the name itself was supposed 
to have the power of expelling demons and compelling 
nature, quite independently, it seems, of the miracles of 
the " historical " Jesus. 

In this connection there seems to be more probability 
in the suggestion of Smith that the words of the magic- 
papyrus published by Wessely, "I adjure thee by the 
God of the Hebrews, Jesus," points to a pre-Christian 
use of the name Jesus in exorcisms. Weiss, it is true, 
says that the papyrus was " certainly " written by a 
pagan " who was unable to distinguish between Jews and 
Christians" (p. 19). Deissman also believes that the 

1 Josephus, Antiq., viii, 2, 57. 2 See Justin, 113, 4. 



220 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

name was subsequently interpolated by a pagan, since 
neither a Christian nor a Jew would call Jesus the God 
of the Hebrews. But what if Jesus was originally the 
name of a god ? What if there were a pre-Christian 
Judaeo-Gnostic Jesus-god ? Is it possible that Deissman 
has himself fallen here into the error of the " destroyers 
of names " whom he so much despises those who think 
" nothing genuine that is not trivial," and who strike out 
" a great name " wherever they find it ? The copyist 
has added " the cathari" (i.e., " the pure ") to the words 
quoted. No less a scholar than Albrecht Dieterich has 
declared that the " pure " are identical with the Essenes 
or Therapeuts, and pointed out that the papyrus betrays 
no Christian influence whatever, but belongs to Judaeo- 
Hellenistic circles, 1 and, if this is so, the Essenes must 
have recognised a Jesus-god. What does Weinel, who 
thinks it " childish " to identify " the pure " with the 
Essenes, say to this ? He says flatly : " Everybody 
knows that we have Christian influence here ; that it is 
the Christian Jesus who is meant, and he is mistakenly 
represented as a God of the Hebrews" (p. 103). The 
truth is that theologians have hitherto thought they had 
proved this, because they did not consider any alternative 
to their own view. 

Then there is the Naassene hymn, which Hippolytus 
has preserved for us, in which the name Jesus occurs. 
He " prays his father " to send him down to bring 
redemption to those who walk in darkness. " In posses- 
sion of the seal will I go down : all aeons will I traverse : 
all mysteries will I solve, the forms of the gods will 
I reveal, and what is hidden of the holy way [gnosis] 
will I make plain." Theologians say, in opposition to 
Smith, that this hymn is post-Christian. But as there 
were Naassenes or Ophites before the appearance of 
Christianity, as Mosheim (Geschichte der Schlangen- 

1 Abraxas, 1891, p. 143 ; see also his Mithrasliturgie, 1903, pp. 27 and 44. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 221 

bruder) and Baur (Die christliche Gnosis, 1835, pp. 37, 
52, and 194) supposed, and Honig has completely proved 
(Die Ophiten, 1889), it is merely begging the question to 
say that in the case of this psalm we have " Christian 
Naassenes," especially seeing that the psalm itself has a 
very ancient character and is closely related to the 
corresponding Babylonian forms of adjuration. On the 
contrary, it is difficult to resist the suspicion that the 
ancient Babylonian name-magic was combined at an 
early date with the idea of a divine healer, and Jesus 
(Joshua, Jason, Jasios) was a name used in exorcisms by 
the pre-Christian Gnostic sects. Further, the name 
must indicate some sort of divine being, as few will 
doubt who have any acquaintance with the old ideas of 
adjuration and magic. 

Whittaker (The Origins of Christianity, 2nd ed., 1909, 
p. 27) has drawn attention to Jude 5, where it is written : 
" I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye 
once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the 
people out of the land of Egypt, afterwards 1 destroyed 
them that believed not ; and the angels which kept not 
their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath 
reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the 
judgment of the great day." So it reads in the revised 
text. But in the original text, as we have it in Butt- 
mann's Greek edition of the New Testament, we read 
the name Jesus instead of " the Lord," and this, as we 
saw, is equivalent to Joshua. If we then remove the 
comma after " Egypt," where it is quite arbitrary and 
has no meaning, and put it after " a second time," we 
read : " that Jesus, having saved the people out of the 
land of Egypt a second time," and we have a strong 
proof that there was a pre-Christian saviour of that name 
known in the Judaeo-Christian circles to which the 
Epistle is addressed. Not only does it confirm the belief 

1 [Not "afterwards," but "a second time," in the Greek text. J.H.] 



222 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

in a god Jesus in these circles, as, of course, only a god 
could judge the angels and put them in chains ; it at the 
same time shows us the identity of this Jesus with the 
Joshua of the Old Testament, and strengthens our con- 
viction that Joshua also, who saved the Israelites from 
the bondage of Egypt a second time, Moses having saved 
them once before, was regarded in those circles as a 
divine being and not as a mere hero. That " Jesus " is 
really the earlier reading is shown by the fourth verse, 
where Jesus is described as the " only Lord " of the 
Christians, so that it is impossible that in the very next 
verse the writer should call another say, Jahveh the 
Lord, especially as Jesus Christ is also expressly called 
the "Lord" in verses 17, 21, and 25. Hence we have 
in the Epistle of Jude and the changes of its original 
text a positive proof of an attempt to conceal the traces 
of a pre-Christian Jesus-god. 

With this passage in the Epistle of Jude Whittaker 
compares one in the " Sibylline Oracles," an essentially 
Jewish work, in which we read : " Now a certain 
excellent man will come again from heaven, who spread 
forth his hands upon the very fruitful tree, the best of 
the Hebrews, who once made the sun stand still, speak- 
ing with beauteous words and pure lips." The German 
translation runs : " Whose hands outspread on the 
fruitful tree of the best of the Hebrews," and relates the 
"one" to Moses and the cross to Exodus xvii, 22. But 
Moses does not stretch his hands on the cross, but in the 
form of a cross ; and it was not Joshua who made the 
sun stand still, but Aaron and Hur who supported his 
arms, Joshua in the meantime being engaged with the 
Amalekites. Here again the figures of Jesus and Joshua 
are blended, and we learn from the passage that they 
identified the Old Testament Joshua, not only with the 
" crucified " servant of God, but also with the Messiah 
descending from heaven. 

A further proof that Jesus was the name of a god in 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 223 

pre-Christian times is found in the " Teaching of the 
Twelve Apostles," according to Harnack and others an 
originally Jewish work, which was afterwards, somewhat 
superficially, Christianised. It says, in connection with 
the Last Supper : " We thank thee, our father, for the 
holy vine of David, thy servant, whom thou hast made 

known to us by thy servant Jesus We thank thee for 

the life and the knowledge that thou hast given us 

through Jesus, thy servant We thank thee for thy 

holy name, for which thou hast prepared a dwelling in 
our hearts, and for the knowledge and the faith and the 
immortality that thou hast made known to us through 
thy servant Jesus." How is it that the words of institution 
of the Last Supper in the gospels, which must have been 
so important and dear to Christians, are omitted and 
replaced by the above words? Is this Jesus of the 
" Teaching," who is supposed to have made known to 
his followers the " holy vine of David," the same as the 
Jesus of the gospels? This Jesus who reveals life and 
knowledge, and in this way communicates immortality 
to his followers, has a suspicious resemblance to the 
Jesus of the ancient Gnostics, in whose case also the 
knowledge (gnosis) revealed by him was the essential 
mark and condition of eternal life. 

Then there is the so-called " Kevelation " of John ! 
Here, again, apparently, we have an originally Jewish 
work which was afterwards modified in a Christian sense, 
and no one can say confidently whether the nucleus of 
the revelation was composed before or after the supposed 
time of Jesus. There is the terrible form of the " son of 
man " coming in the clouds, who says : "I am the Alpha 
and the Omega," just as Jahveh says of himself in Isaiah : 
"I am the first and the last" (xlviii, 13). "His head 
and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow ; 
and his eyes were as a flame of fire ; and his feet like 
unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace ; and his 
voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his 



224 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

right hand seven stars; and out of his mouth went a 
sharp two-edged sword ; and his countenance was as the 
sun shineth in his strength " (Eev. i, 14-16). Then there 
is the lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, that is "as 
if slain," and the mysterious book opened with the seven 
seals (v, 5), and the child of the woman " clothed with the 
sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a 
crown of twelve stars," who is carried to the throne of 
God, and of whom it is said that he will " rule all nations 
with a rod of iron " (xii). Or consider the rider on the 
white horse, with many diadems on his head, clothed in 
a blood-stained garment, whose name is " the word of 

God and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness 

and wrath of Almighty God ; and he hath on his vesture 
and on his thigh a name written, King of Kings and Lord 
of Lords" (xix, 11). What have all these forms to do 
with the " simple " Jesus of the gospels ? How could we 
explain the transformation of such a Jesus into these 
extraordinary mixtures of the grotesque and gigantic so 
soon after his death ? Have we not rather a product of 
the unrestrained imagination of some religious sect or 
conventicle, to whom Jesus was from the start, not a 
man, but a supernatural, divine being, and in whose 
ecstatic visions mythical and prophetic elements grew 
into the frenzied figures which we have in Revelation ? 

In details we perceive a connection with the prophet 
Isaiah in the form of the child and the lamb which is 
slain, in the allusion to the " root, the offspring of David, 
and the bright and morning star " (xxii, 16 ; Isaiah Ix), in 
the figure of the rider who treads the winepress of the 
anger of judgment (Isaiah Ixiii), in the reference to the 
sufferings of the saints, which by no means relates to the 
persecutions of the Christians, as has hitherto been 
believed, but rather to the sufferings of the just in 
Wisdom, in the comforting with the " fountain of life " 
and the eternal light of the lamb, in which the nations 
walk and to which the kings of the earth bring their 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 225 

glory (Isaiah Ix), in the promise of the new Jerusalem, 
in which the treasures of the nations will be heaped up 
and only the just shall live, in the struggle of Jahveh 
with the Leviathan, and the figure of the last trumpet 
(Isaiah xxvii). The historical Jesus, who is supposed to 
have been the occasion of all this, is nowhere to be 
recognised, and could not be found at all in Revelation, 
if it were not read under the conviction that it belongs to 
Christian circles, and that the Jesus of whom it speaks is 
the one whose supposed life-story is told in the gospels. 
It may be an esoteric work of the "Jessaeans," in the 
sense of the word previously explained. There is no 
proof that it is a Christian work and relates to the 
" historical " Jesus. The numerous astral-mythological 
allusions in the work which were indicated by Dupuis 
point, not to an historical, but a purely mythical Jesus. 

If, therefore, Jesus had a mythic significance in pre- 
Christian times, it would be very surprising if he were 
not also worshipped in certain sects, especially in view of 
the part played by the similarly-named Jasios or Jason as 
healer and patron of physicians in the Greek mysteries. 
It is certain that Moses was regarded as divine, not only 
in the Alexandrian religious philosophy of Philo, which is 
closely connected with the Palestinian sects, but also in 
the belief of the sects themselves. Just as Philo sees in 
him the lawgiver and prophet, the " purest spirit," the 
ideal type of humanity, the mediator and reconciler with 
God, even a divine being, and makes him equal to the 
Messiah, so, on his own showing, this happened in many 
of the Judaeo-Gnostic sects, who looked up to Moses as a 
kind of god, had a legend of his being taken into heaven, 
and on this account venerated him as the conqueror of 
death and the demons. Philo says that the Therapeuts 
held a great festival on the seventh Sabbath, the fiftieth 
day of the year at that time, in which, after a festive 
nocturnal meal, which probably had a mystic significance, 
the men and women were arranged in a double choir, 

Q 



226 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

which Philo calls an imitation of the choir which Moses 
and his sister Miriam arranged to sing their victory and 
gratitude after the passage of the Ked Sea. In Philo and 
the Therapeuts the delivery of the Jews from the bondage 
of Egypt means the delivery of the soul from the bonds of 
sense and the passage to the kingdom of the pure spirit. 
But as the meal of the Therapeuts was certainly related 
to the Passover meal, which the Jews celebrated before 
the escape from Egypt, it had an historical as well as a 
mystic significance, like the Christian Supper. " The soul 
prepares in the Passover or in its imitation the Therapeutic 
meals for delivery from the bonds of sense ; it then asks 
divine aid in the passage through the Bed Sea which 
borders Egypt (or the body), and rejoices in the sacred 
choirs, inebriated with heavenly love and full of gratitude 
to the saving God, the redeemer." 

Now Joshua is a close relation, if not a mere duplicate, 
of Moses. In his case the passage of the Bed Sea is 
paralleled by the passage of the Jordan, the river of 
heaven, as the Mandaeans regarded it ; 2 and in his case 
also the passage is connected with the feast of the 
Passover (Joshua v) . The story of Joshua is built, point 
by point, on that of Moses; 3 indeed, it seems as if they 
are only two different forms of the same mythical figure, 
the lawgiver and leader of Israel that is to say, the sun 
in its passage through the watery region in the spring, in 
combination with Cannes as determining and announcing 
the division of the year (see p. 190). After this, is it a 
strained and precarious supposition that Joshua also was 
originally an Ephraimitic name for the sun, an ancient 
Jewish sect-god, a hero of the cult in certain Gnostic 
circles, who were in this influenced by their heathen 
pastoral neighbours and their veneration of similar 



1 Gfrorer, Philo und diejildisch-alex. Theosophie, 1835, ii, p. 295. 

2 Brandt, Die mandd'ische Religion, 1889. 

8 Jeremias, Das alte Testament im Lichte des alien Orients, 2 Aufl., 
1906, p. 4G5. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 227 

mythic personalities ? If Melchisedech, who is, like 
Moses, put by Philo on the same footing as the divine 
" word," the Logos and Messiah if Noah, Henoch, 
Joseph, and even Cain were worshipped, is it likely that 
Joshua, the second Moses, was overlooked ? 

We now know that there was a pre-Christian Jewish 
Gnosticism. In his admirable work, Der vorchristliche 
judische Gnostizismus (1898), Friedlander has amply 
described it and its connection with the religious philo- 
sophy of Alexandria; 1 Gunkel has traced its relations to 
Persian and Babylonian ideas. 2 Must we reject outright 
the idea of a pre-Christian cult of Jesus because we have 
no direct evidence of it? We can, however, deduce its 
existence from the few extant traces on the same rules of 
science on which we deduce any other facts from indica- 
tions and survivals in historical investigation when there 
is no direct evidence. It is true that we can only attain 
more or less confident suppositions, especially as there is 
question of a secret cult, the teaching of which was 
probably not committed to writing (Gunkel, p. 63), and 
because the Christian Church and Jewish synagogue have 
done all in their power to destroy heretical works and all 
traces of the real origin of Christianity. 

We have ample experience of the conduct of the Roman 
Church in suppressing inconvenient writings. How was 
it likely to act when it had better means of doing so than 
now, when it still had unlimited power over souls, and 
when the difficulty of publishing works was such as to 
restrict their number in a way that we can now hardly 
appreciate ; especially as there would, in any case, be few 
copies of these esoteric Gnostic works? All that we 
know of Gnosticism is derived from the biassed accounts 
of its ecclesiastical opponents, as the Church moved 
heaven and earth to destroy the works of its supporters. 
We can no more forget the treasures we have lost in this 

1 Also see Harnack, Oesch. der altchristl. Literatur, i, p. 144. 

2 Zum religionsgesch. Verstandniss, etc. 



228 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

way than we can forget its brutal destruction of our 
earliest literature (songs of the gods, legends of heroes, 
magical formulae, etc.) in the first years of the Christian 
mission in Germany and during the Middle Ages; in 
those years we lost an invaluable treasure, torn by the 
hands of fanatical priests, trampled under the heavy feet 
of monks, and given to the flames. 

And even if we reject the idea of a pre-Christian cult 
of Jesus, those who believe in his historical character gain 
nothing. It is not true at all that, as is constantly said 
in pamphlets, lectures, and journals, The Christ-Myth 
stands or falls with the existence of a pre-Christian Jesus. 
The mythical nature of the Christian saviour is sufficiently 
proved by the character of the gospels themselves and 
the lack of independent evidence ; it is entirely inde- 
pendent of the question whether Jesus had or had not 
been previously worshipped. The belief in an earlier 
cult would merely throw a welcome light on the origin 
of Christianity and its connection with the surrounding 
Jewish and pagan world. One may venture to say that 
theologians have found so much in their documents, when 
it suited their purpose, that they will certainly be able to 
discover a pre-Christian Jesus whenever their theory 
requires one, and they are no longer prevented by their 
dependence on the Church from studying the subject 
impartially. 

(h) The Conversion of the Mythical into an Historical 
Jesus. We must now make a special inquiry into the 
question how the mythical Jesus the Isaiahian (or 
Jessaean) saviour, the suffering, dying, and rising servant 
of God and just one was converted into the historical 
Jesus, and see how far prophetic promises and astral- 
mythological speculations of the Gnostic sects co-operated 
in the process, and how far personal experiences and 
religious dispositions of the communities determined the 
figure of the historical Jesus and transformed an abstract 
scheme into a living personality. The Christ-Myth has 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 229 

been content with a few general indications in this regard. 
It has merely gathered together material from which 
one may obtain some idea of the origin of Christianity. 
Perhaps the time has not yet come for a fuller study of 
the matter, as one has first to accomplish the work of 
clearing a veritable Augean stable of prejudices and errors 
and preparing the ground for a sober construction. It 
is clear that the conversion of the mythical into the 
historical Jesus could not have taken place before the 
beginning of the second century, when there would be 
no living witnesses of the events related. The seventy 
or eighty years that would elapse after the supposed 
death of Jesus would be quite enough to permit his 
" history " to seem plausible, especially as the destruction 
of Jerusalem had so disturbed the life of the people that 
there was no fear of Jewish opponents proving the false- 
ness of their assertions. At the same time, we need not 
postulate a deliberate deception in the conversion of the 
myth into history. As all the chief features of the 
character of Jesus had, as we saw, long been in existence, 
and the myth would naturally tend to take the form of 
narrative, as if there were question of real events in the 
past, the whole process might take place so gradually and 
unconsciously that there is no occasion to speak of " glib 
lying " and " thorough swindle," as some say. 

The cult-legend spoke of an Immanuel or Jesus who 
had, according to Isaiah, sacrificed himself for the sins of 
the people, and would then come down from heaven in 
the shape of the expected Messiah and lead his followers 
into the kingdom they desired. As the question of the 
Messiah had become urgent after the destruction of 
Jerusalem and the collapse of all the political hopes of 
the Jews, and amid the sufferings of the people from the 
Roman oppression, the further questions were found to 
rise spontaneously to the lips : When did the servant of 
God really suffer ? Where did he die ? What was he 
like ? What did he do before he was put to death by his 



230 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

enemies ? Who were these enemies ? And so on. And 
it was just as inevitable for the answer to be found in the 
indications of the prophets and of astral-mythological 
speculation, and thus to lead to the historicisation of the 
originally mythical figure of Jesus. 

His death could not be placed too long before the 
destruction of Jerusalem for the reasons we have already 
seen. The Messiah must have been born in the days of 
Augustus, whom the pagans have regarded as the desired 
saviour of the world. Astral mythology furnished the 
name of Pilatus to pierce with his spear (pilum) the son 
of God hanging on the world-tree, the Milky Way ; and 
Pilate had, according to Josephus, been procurator in the 
time of Tiberius. According to the words of the prophet, 
the servant of God was to be a healer of spiritual and 
corporal ills, a supporter of the poor and oppressed. 
Miracles of extraordinary kinds were to reveal his future 
Messianic significance, yet he was not to be understood 
by his own people and was to succumb to the attacks of 
his enemies. And who could these enemies be but the 
Pharisees and scribes, who had been more and more 
hostile to the Jewish sects after the destruction of 
Jerusalem 9 1 

As long as their belief in the redeeming death of the 
servant of God was a secret belief within the sect there 
could be no conflict with the Pharisees ; in fact, some- 
times the Pharisees were united with the sectarians, 
both in their mystic and astrological tendencies and in 

1 Chowlson says that it was the Sadducees, not the Pharisees, who were 
the real enemies of Jesus and brought about his condemnation. That is 
historically not very probable, as Steudel has shown (Im Kampf um die 
Christus-Mythe, p. 45). If there is any truth in it at all, it can only be 
that, according to Wisdom, which, as we saw, contributed much to the 
picture of the sufferings of the just one, the impious enemies of the just 
might be regarded as the Sadducees, as it is written in the second chapter 
(verse 22) : "They knew not the mysteries of God, or hoped for a reward 
of eternal life, and would hear nothing of a recompense for stainless souls. 
For God has created man for immortality, and made him in the image of 
his own likeness." The chief difference between the worldly-minded 
Sadducees and the Pharisees was that the former did not believe in immor- 
tality, or the eternal reward or punishment of men beyond the grave. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 231 

their hostility to the worldly-minded priestly nobility of 
the Sadducees. We saw how in Isaiah the figure of the 
Saviour constantly blends with that of Jahveh. As is 
known, the aim of the preaching of Isaiah is to confirm 
the people in monotheistic ideas, in belief in the one God, 
who says : "I am Jahveh and no other, and there is no 
god beside me. I am the first and the last." These 
words are put in the mouth of the " son of man " in 
Revelation. In Isaiah xlv, 15, Jahveh is called a " hidden 
God," a " Saviour," just as the servant of God and 
Saviour was supposed to grow up in obscurity, and the 
just to expiate sins by his death without attracting much 
attention or the real significance of his death being 
recognised. What if, after the manner of Isaiah, the 
belief in Jahveh were to coalesce with the belief in Jesus 
in the mind of the sect, and Jesus become the form in 
which Jahveh was worshipped as healer, expiator, and 
redeemer in the mystic and esoteric cults ? For the 
religion of Jesus was merely a religion of Jahveh of 
deeper mysticism, a new and special form of Jewish 
monotheism; and the orthodox Jews, for whom mono- 
theism was the sum of their faith, had on that account 
no occasion to put difficulties in the way of the original 
Christians, the Jessseans or Nazorseans, the " saints," as 
they were called in Isaiah. 1 

Weiss thinks that the early Christians, with their 
belief that the crucified Jesus was the Messiah, put 
themselves in the sharpest opposition to Judaism, and 
incurred hatred and persecution, and says that it is 
" absolutely ridiculous to think that the first Christians 
would have voluntarily encountered this difficulty ' ' 
(p. 44). But that was not the belief of the "first 
Christians "; they believed that Jesus, the servant of 
God, the Saviour of Isaiah, who was believed to have 

1 This is suggested by Smith in his Ecce Deus, who tries to show that 
the original Christian movement was a protest against polytheism, a 
" crusade in favour of monotheism." 



232 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

suffered a humiliating death among men, as Messiah, 
would return in glory, and realise their hope of eternal 
life. It may seem " bold " and " paradoxical " to imagine 
Jahveh sacrificing himself for his people and so entering 
the ranks of the pagan saviour-gods Marduk, Adonis, 
Tammuz, Attis, Osiris, etc. Yet this may have been 
simply a revival of an older idea, that Jahveh was himself 
Tammuz, dying every year, mourned by the women of 
Jerusalem according to Ezechiel (viii, 13), rising and 
dying again, to enter once more into life. 1 A reluctance 
to connect Jahveh with finiteness may have prevented 
those who held this belief from identifying the Saviour 
strictly with the supreme God. This may have been the 
reason why Jesus, though essentially one with God, was 
nevertheless distinguished from him as a special being. 
It was a " stumbling-block to the Jews " that their God 
was related to the pagan saviour-gods ; a " folly to the 
pagans " that the redeemer of the world should be a 
Jewish deity. But this seems impossible only when one, 
like Weiss, conceives the crucified Jesus as an historical 
human being. That the Christians would arbitrarily 
create the difficulty of representing such a person as the 
Messiah we should certainly hesitate to think. But the 
ground for believing in a crucified saviour need not have 
been in historical events at all ; it may have been because 
the fact of the suffering and death of Jesus was revealed 
by the prophet Isaiah. 

As long as Jesus was the object of worship of a very 
small body, and the belief in him was obscured by mystic 
confusion and mythological mists, it seemed to the 
orthodox Jews to be harmless. The figures of Jesus and 
Jahveh were blended, and the religious foundation of 
Judaism, monotheism, seemed not to be endangered. 
But when, after the destruction of Jerusalem, the 
orthodox Jews, deprived of their political independence, 

1 See H. Schneider, Kultur und Denken der Babylonier und Juden, 1910, 
p. 282. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 233 

now placed their national unity and cohesion in a unity 
of faith, and therefore drew up the ranks of the ecclesias- 
tical regiment more strictly and hardened the ritual law 
of monotheism into a dogma, Jesus was detached from 
Jahveh, the god of the sect was opposed to the god of the 
official religion as an independent divine being, and a 
bitter hostility set in between the scribes and Pharisees 
on the one hand, who represented monotheism in its 
most abstract form and, in connection with it, held 
rigidly to the forms of the law, and the sects on the 
other hand, with whom the common folk sympathised 
as we read in the gospels. Under the fearful pressure 
of the uprooting of the Jewish people, and in view of 
the religious need of the time, which had reached its 
highest pitch with the loss of the temple, it seemed that 
the terrible time foretold by the prophets had come, and 
that they should look for the immediate appearance of 
the Messiah. The promises that had been made must 
now be fulfilled. This was the opportunity of the 
Jewish sectaries to come out of the seclusion of their 
mystic sects and conventicles with their " gnosis " and 
proclaim to the whole people their faith in Jesus. 

Possibly exalted by visions, in which they believed 
that they saw the risen " Lord " in bodily form, the 
emissaries of the faith went about announcing the " glad 
tidings " of the coming of the Messiah and the speedy 
establishment of the kingdom of heaven on earth. In 
market-place and on the street the appeal for change of 
heart through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ rang out. 
Then the innovation became dangerous to the official 
Jewish religion. Weiss can only attribute to a "real 
Jesus," the " influence of a personality," and the expe- 
rience of his life on earth, " the immense step from the 
vague Messianic hope to the confidence of possession, 
fulfilment, and the joy and gratitude for what God has 
given them in his servant Jesus, as we find it in the 
prayers of that early time" (p. 48). But this confidence 



234 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

of possession had long been a peculiarity of Jewish 
sectarianism before they gave publicity to their faith and 
made it the object of a popular propaganda ; Paul and 
others may have begun this at an earlier period. If this 
is now done more vigorously and on a larger scale, it is 
not because an historical Jesus has caused it, but because 
the general conditions of the time inflamed the religious 
sentiment and made it seem a duty to the sectaries to 
communicate their " knowledge " (gnosis) to their com- 
patriots and the rest of mankind and " reveal " the 
approach of the kingdom of heaven, and thus bring them 
to a change of heart. It is true that the rest of the Jews 
also believed in the speedy coming of the Messiah. But 
the belief had so often been falsified that its strength and 
sources threatened to become weaker. The sectaries, 
however, had a powerful framework for that belief in 
their astrally and prophetically grounded legend of Jesus, 
who was supposed voluntarily to have sacrificed himself 
and to be about to return as king and judge of his people. 
That was new and unfamiliar, and precisely on that 
account it appealed to the feeling of the time, and found 
credence among their Jewish compatriots the more easily 
as the belief gave them a weapon against the detested 
sanctity and pride of the Pharisees, and the concentration 
of the sectarians on the plain and intelligible morality of 
the prophets and proverbial books offered the possibility 
of religious salvation to all men who would endeavour 
to lead good lives. It may have been then that the 
saying of Luke was formulated : " Woe unto you, 
lawyers, for ye have taken away the key of knowledge 
[gnosis]. Ye entered not in yourselves, and them that 
were entering in ye hindered" (xi, 52). It means that 
the representatives of the official Jewish religion had 
abandoned their earlier predilection for astrology, and 
now attached the astrological speculations to the Gnostics. 
This made an end of the astral ground of the hope in a 
Messiah; there remained only the prophetical, and the 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 235 

original astral Jesus became more and more vague and 
was replaced by the historical Jesus. The more the new 
faith spread among the people the more the gnosis was 
adapted to their intelligence, and thus the supposed 
historicity of the Saviour was substituted for the mythical 
and astral character of their religious ideas. 1 

(i) Jesus and the Pharisees and Scribes. We turn now 
to consider the relation of Jesus to the Pharisees. Jewish 
scholars like Chwolson 2 have often expressed their aston- 
ishment at the way this relation is described in the 
gospels. What, they ask, could be the reason for the 
deadly enmity between Jesus and the representatives of 
the official Jewish religion? Religious-moral reasons 
could not possibly suffice of themselves to explain it. 
In this respect there was not a very sharp opposition 
between them. " In the teaching and sayings of Jesus," 
says Chwolson, " there was nothing that could offend the 
religious feeling of anyone educated according to Pharisaic 
laws and acquainted with the Pharisaic that is to say, 
Rabbinical literature" (p. 88). Jesus is supposed to 
have preached in the synagogues, of which the Pharisees 
were the masters ; he cannot, therefore, have infringed 
the law. Moreover, he is supposed to have adhered 
strictly to the law, since he says that he had not come 
to undo, but to fulfil, it (Matthew v, 17) a saying that is 
found almost word for word in the Talmud : " Not a letter 
of the law will ever be destroyed," and " The laws of Noah 
have not been abolished, but increased" (Cosri, i, 83). 3 
Matthew xxiii, 3, makes Jesus bid his disciples listen in 
all things to the commands of the Pharisees. This, 
however, seems to be based on Ecclus. vii, 31 : " Fear the 



1 In every heathen religion the dying and risen god is an astral being ; 
the sun descending in the summer-solstice or in the autumn-equinox, and 
ascending in the winter-solstice or spring equinox. So Dupuis, in his 
monumental work L'origine de tons les cultes (1794), has shown in reference 
to Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Mithra, etc. Cf. also Jeremias, the 
work above mentioned. 

2 Das Passahmahl, p. 85. 3 Sanhedrim, 107 ; Bereschit rabba, 27. 



236 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

Lord, and honour the priest, and give him his part, as it 
is commanded from the beginning." In passing over one 
or other prescription, or interpreting it in an unfamiliar 
sense, he did nothing extraordinary. There were among the 
Pharisees and scribes themselves many differences in the 
exposition and application of the prescriptions of the law, 
though this never led to charges of heresy or persecution. 

One of the worst of his transgressions is that he and 
his disciples are said to have violated the law of the 
Sabbath by healing the sick on that day. Even among 
the rabbis, however, the holiness of the Sabbath had to 
give way when a man's life was in question. In fact, it 
was obligatory to disregard the Sabbath when there was 
danger in the observance of it, and the man who in such 
a case held to the letter was regarded as a " murderer." 
We read in Lev. xviii, 5 : " Ye shall therefore keep my 
statutes and my judgments ; which, if a man do, he shall 
live in them." And in the Talmud (Tract. Joma, 856) 
we read : " The Sabbath is given to you, not you to the 
Sabbath." To heal by merely stretching out one's hand 
over the patient, as Jesus is said to have done on the 
Sabbath in Mark iii, 5, was not forbidden by the rabbis, 
and therefore the Pharisees could not be " filled with 
madness," as they are said to have been on such an 
occasion in Luke vi, 11. 

Even on the question of divorce Jesus did not take up 
a position opposed to that of the Pharisees. We read in 
Matthew v, 31 : " It hath been said, Whosoever shall put 
away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement ; 
but I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his 
wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to 
commit adultery." But it is also said in the Talmud : 
" Whosoever shall put away his wife, over him the altar 
sheddeth tears" (Pessachim, 113), and "Whosoever 
putteth away his wife is hated of God" (Gittin, 906). 
Even the prophet Malachi had said : " Let none deal 
treacherously against the wife of his youth, for the Lord, 



237 

the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away " 
(ii, 15). Divorce is permitted only when an internal 
breach between the spouses has already taken place 
because of the infidelity of one or other, as is said in 
Isaiah in regard to the union of Jahveh and his people, 
which is conceived as a marriage-bond : " Thus saith the 
Lord, Where is the bill of your mother's divorcement, 
whom I have put away ? or which of my creditors is it to 
whom I have sold you ? Behold, for your iniquities have 
ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your 
mother put away" (1, 1). In the passage quoted in 
regard to divorce, Jesus merely pronounces for the stricter 
opinion of the school of Gamaliel against the laxer school 
of Hillel. 

Not only is there no opposition between Jesus and the 
Pharisees on this point, but even the fact that he is 
supposed to have openly proclaimed himself the Messiah 
was not calculated to turn them against him. Not only 
the children of Israel, but even individual men, are called 
" sons of God," and the priests and rabbis themselves 
have at times called a man the Messiah and supported 
him with their respect ; consider Zerubbabel, and the 
relation of the rabbi Akiba to Bar-Kochba. 

In Matthew xv, 5, and Mark vii, 11, Jesus reproaches 
the Pharisees with perverting the command to honour 
one's father and mother in favour of one's duty to God. 
We find, however, no trace of such a thing in Jewish 
tradition, which expressly forbids any misinterpretation of 
the commandments of the law. Again, in regard to the 
laws regulating food, Jesus cannot possibly have acted as 
he is supposed to have done in Matthew xv, 11, and 
Mark vii, 15, because in that case it would be unin- 
telligible for Peter to refuse to touch unclean food 
(Acts x, 14). Moreover, Jesus is supposed to have given 
him full power to bind and to loose, or to decide questions 
of law according to his own judgment. 

It is just as accurate for Jesus to blame the Pharisees 



238 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

for making proselytes (Matthew xxiii, 15). If we were to 
take his words seriously, they were wholly absorbed in 
bringing men into the Jewish faith wherever they could. 
As a matter of fact, the Talmud expressly forbids this indis- 
criminate making of proselytes, and makes the entrance 
into Judaism dependent on righteousness of heart. Still 
less can there be question of the Pharisees declaring that 
to swear by the temple and altar was not binding, but it 
is binding to swear by the gold of the temple and the 
sacrifice on the altar (Matthew xxiii, 16). If Jesus meant 
that the sanctity clung to the temple and altar, not to the 
things therein, that is precisely the view of the rabbis. 1 
And when Jesus says (Matthew xxiii, 23) : " Woe unto 
you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye pay tithe of 
mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the 
weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and 
faith : these ought ye to have done, and not to leave 
the other undone," the charge falls to the ground, from 
the simple fact that plants that grow wild, and vegetables, 
were not subject to tithe. 2 

These charges are either brought by someone who was 
unacquainted with the real facts, or have been invented 
arbitrarily to confuse opponents, without any regard to 
historical truth. It is the same when Jesus accuses the 
Pharisees of the murder of prophets, and charges them 
with having slain Zacharias, son of Barachias, between 
the temple and the altar, and holds them responsible for 
the shedding of his innocent blood (Matthew xxiii, 35). 
Here Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, who was stoned in 
the court of the temple by order of King Joash (2 Chron. 
xxiv, 21), is combined or confused with Zachariah, the 
son of Baruch, who was slain by the zealots in the temple 
for supposed treachery during the siege of Jerusalem 
by the Komans. 3 Indeed, the whole of the words in 

1 See Nedarim, 106 and 146. 2 Menachoth, i. 

8 Josephus, Jewish War, iv, 5, 4. See also on the subject K. Lippe, 
Das Evangelium Matth&i vor dem Forum der Bibel und des Talmud. 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 239 

Matthew xxiii, 34 : " Wherefore, behold, I send unto you 
prophets, and wise men, and scribes ; and some of them 
ye shall kill and crucify, etc.," together with the subse- 
quent prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem, are 
based on the prophet Jeremiah (vii, 25) : 

Since the day that your fathers came forth out of the 
land of Egypt unto this day I have even sent unto you all 
my servants the prophets, daily rising up early and send- 
ing them : 

Yet they hearkened not unto me, nor inclined their ear, 
but hardened their neck ; they did worse than their 
fathers. 

Therefore thou shalt speak all these words unto them ; 
but they will not hearken to thee ; thou shalt also call 
unto them, but they will not answer thee 

Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and 
take up a lamentation on high places ; for the Lord hath 
rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath 

And the carcases of this people shall be meat for the 
fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth ; and 
none shall fray them away. 

Then will I cause to cease from the cities of Judah, and 
from the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of mirth and the 
voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the 
voice of the bride ; for the land shall be desolate. 

Many writers have insisted that the relation of Jesus 
to the scribes and Pharisees affords a proof of his 
historicity. Yet almost the very same charges which 
Jesus makes against the Pharisees are brought by Isaiah 
against the heads of the people. " Your hands are full 
of blood," the prophet says (i, 15 ; see also lix, 3) ; 
" Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your 
doings from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil. Learn 
to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge 
the fatherless, plead for the widow." And Isaiah bemoans 
that Jerusalem, "the faithful city, full of judgment, 
righteousness lodged in it," has " become a harlot " and 
is full of " murderers." " Thy princes are rebellious and 
the companions of thieves ; every one loveth gifts, and 
followeth after rewards ; they judge not the fatherless, 



240 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them." 
" Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and 
that write grievousness which they have prescribed ; to 
turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away 
the right from the poor of my people, that widows may 
be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless " 
(x, 1 and 2; cf. Mark xii, 40). "Woe unto them that 
call evil good, and good evil ; that put darkness for light, 
and light for darkness : that put bitter for sweet, and 
sweet for bitter. Woe unto them that are wise in their 
own eyes, and prudent in their own sight" (v, 20). 
Compare with this the charges which Jesus brings against 
the Pharisees and scribes, and it will be seen that here 
again Isaiah was the model of the evangelists. Jesus 
calls the Pharisees " blind leaders of the blind " (Matthew 
xv, 14) and " blind Pharisees," and blames them for the 
perverse ways they have chosen to attain salvation 
(Matthew xxiii, 16, 19, 24, and 26). But we read in 
Isaiah (iii, 12) : "0 my people, they which lead thee 
cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths," and 
the prophet returns incessantly to the blindness of the 
people and their leaders. Jesus reproaches the Pharisees 
with hypocrisy, and tells them that their service of God 
is mere lip-service, and that by their refining and multi- 
plying commandments they have made the way of salva- 
tion difficult for themselves (Matthew xv, 8). Isaiah 
also complains to " the Lord " that his people approaches 
him only with its lips, but its heart is far from him ; that 
its fear of God is only learned from the precept of men 
(xxix, 13), and it does not honour him in the right way. 

"For your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath 

muttered perverseness. None calleth for justice, nor any 
pleadeth for truth ; they trust in vanity and speak lies ; 
they conceive mischief and bring forth iniquity " (lix, 
3 and 4). Jesus calls the Pharisees " serpents and genera- 
tion of vipers," as John is supposed to have done (Matthew 
xxiii, 33). Here again he merely does what Isaiah had 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 241 

done : " They hatch cockatrice' [vipers'] eggs, and weave 
the spider's web ; he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and 
that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper. Their 
webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover 
themselves with their works ; their works are works of 

iniquity their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity 

they have made them crooked paths " (lix, 5-8). 

We have, therefore, every reason to doubt the historical 
truth of the relevant passages in the gospels, and this 
doubt increases when we find that even so important a 
scene as the expulsion of the merchants from the temple 
and the words put into the mouth of Jesus on that occasion 
are inspired by Isaiah, and closely follow passages in the 
prophet. What does " the Lord " say in the first chapter 
of the prophet ? 

To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto 
me ? saith the Lord : I am full of the burnt offerings of 
rams, and the fat of fed beasts ; and I delight not in the 
blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. 

When ye come to appear before me, who hath required 
this at your hand, to tread my courts? 

Bring no more vain oblations ; incense is an abomina- 
tion unto me. 

"Behold," says the prophet Malachi (iii, 1), continuing 
this, 

I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way 
before me ; and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly 
come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, 
whom ye delight in ; behold, he shall come, saith the Lord 
of hosts. 

But who may abide the day of his coming ? and who 
shall stand when he appeareth ? for he is like a refiner's 
fire and the fullers' soap. 

And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and 
he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold 
and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering 
in righteousness. 

Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be 
pleasant unto the Lord, as in the days of old, and as in 
former years. 

And I will come near to you to judgment ; and I will 

R 



242 THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 

be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the 
adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those 
that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the 
fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his 
right, saith the Lord of hosts. 

Add the words of Zechariah (xiv, 21) : 

Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be 
holiness unto the Lord of hosts ; and all they that sacrifice 
shall come and take of them, and seethe therein ; and in 
that day there shall be no more the Canaanite [merchant] 
in the house of the Lord of hosts. 

And if we further conclude that the words of Jesus, " My 
house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer, 
but ye have made it a den of thieves " (Mark xi, 17), are 
a combination of Isaiah Ivi, 7 (" Mine house shall be 
called an house of prayer for all people "), and Jeremiah 
vii, 11 (" Is this house, which is called by my name, 
become a den of robbers in your eyes?"), the historicity 
of the narrative breaks down altogether. The seventh 
chapter of Jeremiah also describes a closely similar situa- 
tion, as the first chapter of Isaiah and the narrative of 
the cleansing of the temple : 

Stand in the gate of the Lord's house, and proclaim 
there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all 
ye of Judah, that enter in at these gates to worship the 
Lord. 

Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel : Amend 
your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell 
in this place 

For if ye throughly amend your ways and your doings ; 
if ye throughly execute judgment between a man and his 
neighbour ; 

If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the 
widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither 
walk after other gods to your hurt ; 

Then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land 
that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever. 

We see from this why Jesus had to go to Jerusalem 
and begin his work with the cleansing of the temple, and 
why his threatening speech on the Pharisees and his 



THE WITNESS OF THE GOSPELS 2