Note 54 — Chapter I · CONCERNING THE TWO KINDS OF THINKING

Compare with this the statements of Drews (“The Christ Myth”), which are so violently combated by the blindness of our time. Clear-sighted theologians, like Kalthoff (“Entstehung des Christentums,” 1904), present as impersonal a judgment as Drews. Kalthoff says, “The sources from which we derive our information concerning the origin of Christianity are such that in the present state of historical research no historian would undertake the task of writing the biography of an historical Jesus.” Ibid., p. 10: “To see behind these stories the life of a real historical personage, would not occur to any man, if it were not for the influence of rationalistic theology.” Ibid., p. 9: “The divine in Christ, always considered an inner attribute and one with the human, leads in a straight line backward from the scholarly man of God, through the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament, to the Apocalypse of Daniel, in which the theological imprint of the figure of Christ has arisen. At every single point of this line Christ shows superhuman traits; nowhere is He that which critical theology wished to make Him, simply a natural man, an historic individual.”