II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

However widely views may differ even now in the sphere of Gospel criticism, all really competent investigators agree on one point with rare unanimity: the Gospels are not historical documents in the ordinary sense of the word, but creeds, religious books, literary documents revealing the mind of the Christian community. Their purpose is consequently not to give information as to the life and teachings of Jesus which would correspond to reality, but to awaken belief in Jesus as the Messiah sent from God for the redemption of his people, to strengthen and defend that belief against attacks. And as creeds they confine themselves naturally to recounting such words and events as have any significance for the faith; and they have the greatest interest in so arranging and representing the facts as to make them accord with the content of that faith.

(a) The Synoptic Jesus.

Of the numerous Gospels which were still current in the first half of the second century, as is well known, only four have come down to us. The others were not embodied by the Church in the Canon of the New Testament writings, and consequently fell into oblivion. Of these at most a few names and isolated and insignificant fragments remain to us. Thus we know of a Gospel of Matthew, of Thomas, of Bartholomew, Peter, the twelve apostles, &c. Of our four Gospels, two bear the names of apostles and two the names of companions and pupils of apostles, viz., Mark and Luke. In this, of course, it is in no way meant that they were really written by these persons. According to Chrysostom these names were first assigned to them towards the end of the second century. And the titles do not run: Gospel of Matthew, of Mark, and so on, but “according to” Matthew, “according to” Mark, Luke, and John; so that they indicate at most only the persons or schools whose particular conception of the Gospel they represent.

Supplement: Jesus in Secular Literature.

(b) The Objections against a Denial of the Historicity of the Synoptic Jesus.

If we allow this, an explanation is given of the “clearness” which is so generally praised in the style of the Gospels by the theologians and their following, and which many think sufficient by itself to prove the historical nature of the Synoptic representation of Jesus.

Even if the Evangelist is supposed to have expressed the original meaning, what is to assure us that this phrase was spoken by Jesus just in this way, and not in other connections, if even the phrases were taken down as soon as uttered? But this is admittedly supposed not to have occurred till after Jesus’ death, after his Messianic significance was clearly recognised, and after people were making efforts to go back in memory to the Master’s figure and preserve of his sayings any that were serviceable. Bousset, indeed, in his work, “Was wissen wir von Jesus?”—which was directed against Kalthoff—has referred to the “good Oriental memory of the disciples.” All who know the East from personal experience are in tolerable agreement on one point, viz., how little an Oriental is able to repeat what he has heard or experienced in a true and objective fashion. Consequently there are in the East no historical traditions in our sense of the word, but all important events are decorated like a novel, and are changed according to the necessities of the moment. Such maxims, indeed, as “Love your enemies,” “To give is more blessed than to receive,” “No one but God is good,” “Blessed are the poor,” “You are the light of the world,” “Give to Cæsar that which is Cæsar’s,” &c., once heard may be “not easily forgotten,” as the theological phrase runs. But also they are not of such a kind that the Jesus of liberal theology was necessary for their invention.

In fact, in the Gospels we have nothing but the expression of the consciousness of a community. In this respect the view supported by Kalthoff is completely right. The life of Jesus, as portrayed by the Synoptics, merely brings to an expression in historical garb the metaphysical ideas, religious hopes, the outer and inner experiences of the community which had Jesus for its cult-god. His opinions, statements, and parables only reflect the religious-moral conceptions, the temporary sentiments, the casting down and the joy of victory, the hate and the love, the judgments and prejudices of the members of the community, and the differences and contradictions in the Gospels prove to be the developing material of the conception of the Messiah in different communities and at different times. Christ takes just the same position in the religious-social brotherhoods which are named after him as Attis has in the Phrygian, Adonis in the Syrian, Osiris in the Egyptian, Dionysus, Hercules, Hermes, Asclepius, &c., in the Greek cult-associations. He is but another form of these club-gods or patrons of communities, and the cult devoted to him shows in essentials the same forms as those devoted to the divinities above named. The place of the bloody expiatory sacrifice of the believers in Attis, wherein they underwent “baptism of blood” in their yearly March festival, and wherein they obtained the forgiveness of their sins and were “born again” to a new life, was in Rome the Hill of the Vatican. In fact, the very spot on which in Christian times the Church of Peter grew above the so-called grave of the apostle. It was at bottom merely an alteration of the name, not of the matter, when the High Priest of Attis blended his rôle with that of the High Priest of Christ, and the Christ-cult spread itself from this new point far over the other parts of the Roman Empire.

(c) The True Character of the Synoptic Jesus.

If in all this it is shown to be possible, or even probable, that in the Jesus of the Gospels we have not a deified man, but rather a humanised God, there remains but to find an answer to the question as to what external reasons led to the transplanting of the God Jesus into the soil of historical actuality and the reduction of the eternal or super-historical fact of his redeeming death and of his resurrection into a series of temporal events.

So that there were very mundane and very practical reasons which after all gave the impulse for the God Jesus to be transformed into an historical individual, and for the central point of his action, the crisis in his life, his death and his resurrection, which alone affected religious considerations, to be placed in the capital of the Jewish state, the “City of God,” the Holy City of David, of the “ancestors” of the Messiah, with which now the Jews connected religious salvation. But how could this fiction succeed and maintain its ground, so that it was able to become an absolutely vital question for the new religion, an indestructible dogma, a self-evident “fact,” so that its very calling in question seems to the critical theologians of our time a perfect absurdity?

Before we can answer this question we must turn our attention to the Gnostic movement and its relations to the growing Church.

(d) Gnosticism and the Johannine Jesus.

Christianity was originally developed from Gnosticism (Mandaism). The Pauline religion was only one form of the many syncretising efforts to satisfy contemporary humanity’s need of redemption by a fusion of religious conceptions derived from different sources. So much the greater was the danger which threatened to spring up on this side of the youthful Church.

Gnosticism agreed with Christianity in its pessimistic valuation of the world, in its belief in the inability of man to obtain religious salvation by himself, in the necessity for a divine mediation of “Life.” Like Christianity, it expected the deliverance of the oppressed souls of men by a supernatural Redeemer. He came down from Heaven upon earth and assumed a human form, establishing, through a mystic union with himself, the connection between the spheres of heaven and earth. He thereby guarantees to mankind an eternal life in a bliss to come. Gnosticism also involves a completely dualistic philosophy in its opposition of God and world, of spirit and matter, of soul and body, &c.; but all its efforts are directed to overcoming these contradictions by supernatural mediation and magical contrivances. It treats the “Gnosis,” the knowledge, the proper insight into the coherence of things, as the necessary condition of redemption. The individual must know that his soul comes from God, that it is only temporarily confined in this prison of the body, and that it is intended for something higher than to be lost here in the obscurity of ignorance, of evil and of sin; so that he is already freed from the trammels of the flesh, and finds a new life for himself. The God-Redeemer descended upon earth to impart this knowledge to mankind; and Gnosticism pledges itself, on the basis of the “revelation” received directly from God, to open to those who strive for the highest knowledge all the heights and depths of Heaven and of earth.

This Gnosticism of the first century after Christ was a wonderfully opalescent and intricate structure—half religious speculation, half religion, a mixture of Theosophy, uncritical mythological superstition, and deep religious mysticism. In it Babylonian beliefs as to Gods and stars, Parsee mythology, and Indian doctrines of metempsychosis and Karma were combined with Jewish theology and Mystery-rites of Western Asia; and through the whole blew a breath of Hellenic philosophy, which chiefly strove to fix the fantastic creatures of speculation in a comprehensible form, and to work up the confusion of Oriental licence and extravagance of thought into the form of a philosophical view of the world. The Gnostics also called their mediating deity, as we have already seen of the Mandaic sect of the Nassenes, “Jesus,” and indulged in a picture rendering of his pre-worldly existence and supernatural divine majesty. They agreed with the Christians that Jesus had been “human.”

The extravagant metaphysical conception which they had of Jesus at the same time prevented them from dealing seriously with the idea of his manhood. So that they either maintained that the celestial Christ had attached himself to the man Jesus in a purely external way, and indeed, first on the occasion of the baptism in the Jordan, and only temporarily, i.e., up to the Passion—it being only the “man” Jesus who suffered death (Basilides, Cerinthus); or they thought of Jesus as having assumed merely a ghostly body—and consequently thought that all his human actions took place merely as pure appearance (Saturninus, Valentinus, Marcion). But how little they managed to penetrate into the centre of the Christian doctrine of redemption and to value the fundamental significance of the Christ-figure, is shown by the fact that they thought of Christ merely as one mediator among countless others. It is shown also by the romantic and florid description of the spirits or “æons,” who are supposed to travel backwards and forwards between heaven and earth, leading their lives apart. These played a great part in the Gnostic systems.

All these dangers, which threatened Christianity from the Gnostic movement, were set aside in one stroke by the recognition of the true “manhood” of Jesus, the assertion of the “historical” Jesus. This preserved the connection, so important for the unhindered spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, with Judaism and its “revealed” legality—the heteronomous and ritualistic character of which had indeed been shown by Paul, and the moral content of which was nevertheless adhered to by the Christians even later. It was made possible, in default of any previous written documents of revelation, even yet to regard the Old Testament in essentials as the authoritative book of the new faith, and as a preparatory testimony to the final revelation which appeared in Jesus. And most of all, it put a check on Gnostic phantasy, in drawing together the perplexing plurality of the Gnostic æons into the one figure of the World-redeemer and Saviour Christ, in making the chief dogma the redeeming sacrificial death of the Messiah, and in concentrating the religious man’s attention on this chief turning-point of all the historical events. This was the reason why the Apologists and “Fathers” of Christianity, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, Irenæus, &c., spoke with such decision in favour of the actuality and true manhood of Jesus. It was not perhaps a better historical knowledge which caused them to do this, but the life-instinct of the Church, which knew only too well that its own position and the prosecution of its religious task, in contrast with the excitements of Gnosticism and its seductive attempts to explain the world, was dependent on the belief in an historical Redeemer. So the historical Jesus was from the beginning a dogma, a fiction, caused by the religious and practical social needs, of the growing and struggling Christian Church. This Jesus has, indeed, led it to victory; not, however, as an historical reality, but as an idea; or, in other words, not an historical Jesus, in the proper sense of the word, a really human individual, but the pure idea of such a person, is the patron-saint, the Genius of ecclesiastical Christianity, the man who enabled it to overcome Gnosticism, Mithraism, and the other religions of the Redeemer-Gods of Western Asia.

The importance of the fourth Gospel rests in having brought to a final close these efforts of the Church to make history of the Redeemer-figure Christ. Begun under the visible influence of the Gnostic conception of the process of redemption, it meets Gnosticism later as another Gospel; indeed, it seems saturated through and through with the Gnostic attitude and outlook. To a certain degree it shares with Gnosticism its anti-Jewish character. But at the same time it adheres, with the Synoptics, to Jesus’ historical activity, and seeks to establish a kind of mediation between the essentially metaphysical conception of the Gnostics and the essentially human conception of the Synoptic Gospels.

The author who wrote the Gospel in the name of John, the “favourite disciple of Jesus,” probably about 140 A.D., agrees with Gnosticism in its dualistic conception of the universe. On one side is the world, the kingdom of darkness, deceit, and evil, in deadly enmity to the divine kingdom of light, the kingdom of truth and life. At the head of the divine kingdom is God, who is himself Light, Truth, Life, and Spirit—following Parsee thought. At the head of the kingdom of earth is Satan (Angromainyu). In the middle, between them, is placed man. But mankind is also divided, as all the rest of existence, into two essentially different kinds. The souls of the one part of mankind are derived from God, those of the other from Satan. The “children of God” are by nature destined for the good and are fit for redemption. The “children of Satan”—among whom John, in agreement with the Gnostics, counts the Jews before all—are not susceptible of anything divine and are assigned to eternal damnation. In order to accomplish redemption, God, from pure “Love” for the world, selected Monogenes, his only-begotten Son, that is, the only being which, as the child of God, was produced not by other beings, but by God himself. The author of the Gospel fuses Monogenes with the Philonic Logos, who in the Gnostic conception was only one of countless other æons, and was a son of Monogenes, the divine reason, and so only a grandson of God. At the same time, he transfers the whole “pleroma”—the plurality of the æons into which, in the Gnostic conception, the divine reality was divided—to the single principle of the Logos, defines the Logos as the unique bearer of the whole fulness of divine glory, as the pre-existent creator of the world; and calls him also, since he is in essence identical with God his “Father,” the source of life, the light, the truth, and the spirit of the universe.

And how then does the Logos bring about redemption? He becomes flesh, that is, he assumes the form of the “man” Jesus, without, however, ceasing to be the supernatural Logos, and as such brings to men the “Life” which he himself is, by revealing wisdom and love. As revealer of wisdom he is the “light of the world”; he opens to men the secret of their filial relation to God; he teaches them, by knowing God, to understand themselves and the world; he collects about himself the children of God, who are scattered through the world, in a united and brotherly society; and gives them, in imitating his own personality, the “light of life”—that is, he inwardly enlightens and elevates them. As revealer of love he not only assumes the human form and the renunciation of his divine bliss connected with it, but as a “good shepherd” he lays down his life for his flock; he saves them from the power of Satan, from the terrors of darkness, and sacrifices himself for his people, in order through this highest testimony of his love for men, through the complete surrender of his life, to regain the life which he really is, and to return to his celestial glory. This is the meaning of Christ’s work of redemption, that men by faith and love become inwardly united with him and so with God; whereby they gain the “life” in the higher spirit. For though Christ himself may return to God, his spirit still lives on earth. As the “second Paraclete” or agent, the Spirit proceeds with the Saviour’s work of redemption, arouses and strengthens the faith in Christ and the love for him and for the Brotherhood, thereby mediating for them the “Life,” and leading them after their death into the eternal bliss.

In all this the influence of Gnosticism and of the Philonic doctrine of the Logos is unmistakable, and it is very probable that the author of the fourth Gospel was influenced by the recollection, still living at Ephesus, of the Ephesian Heraclitus’ Logos, in his attachment to Philo and to the latter’s more detailed exposition of the Hellenic Logos-philosophy. But he fundamentally differs from Philo and Gnosticism in his assertion that the Logos “was made flesh,” sojourned on earth in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, and suffered death. It is true, however, that the Evangelist is more persistent in this assertion than successful in delineating a real man, notwithstanding his use of the Synoptic accounts of the personal fate of Jesus. The idea of the divine nature of the Saviour is the one that prevails in his writings. The “historical picture” which came down to him was forcibly rectified, and the personality of Jesus was worked up into something so wonderful, extraordinary, and supernatural that, if we were in possession of the fourth Gospel alone, in all probability the idea would hardly have occurred to any one that it was a treatment of the life-story of an historical individual. And yet in this the difference between the Johannine and the Synoptic Gospels is only a slight one. For the Synoptic Jesus also is not really a man, but a “superman,” the original Christian community’s God-man, cult-hero, and mediator of salvation. And if it is settled that the quarrel between the Church teachers and the Gnostic heretics hinged, not on the divinity of Christ, in which they agreed, but rather on the kind and degree of his humanity, then this “paradoxical fact” is by itself sufficient to corroborate the assertion that the divinity of the mediator of redemption was the only originally determined and self-evident presupposition of the whole Christian faith; and that, on the contrary, his humanity was doubtful even in the earliest times, and for this reason alone could become a subject of the bitterest strife.