Note 30 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

How distinguished, as compared with this kind of theologian, Kalthoff seems! It is true that we are obliged to allow for the one-sidedness and insufficiency of his positive working out of the origin of Christianity, of his attempt to explain it, on the basis of Mark’s handling of the story, purely on the lines of social motives, and to represent Christ as the mere reflection of the Christian community and of its experiences. Quite certainly he is wrong in identifying the biblical Pilate with Pliny, the governor of Bithynia under Trajan, and in the proof based on this; and this because in all probability Pliny’s letter to the Emperor is a later Christian forgery.30 But Kalthoff is quite right in what he says about modern critical theology and its historical Jesus. The critical theologians may think themselves justified in treating this embarrassing opponent as “incompetent,” or in ignoring him on account of the mistaken basis of argument; but all the efforts made with such great perseverance and penetration by historical theologians to derive from the authorities before us proof of the existence of a man Jesus in the traditional sense have led, as Kalthoff very justly says, to a purely negative conclusion. “The numerous passages in the Gospels which this theology, in maintaining its historical Jesus, is obliged to place on one side and pass over, stand from a literary point of view exactly on the same footing as those passages from which it constructs its historical Jesus; and consequently they claim historical value equal to these latter. The Synoptic Christ, in whom modern theology thinks it finds the characteristics of the historical Jesus, stands not a hair’s breadth nearer to a human interpretation of Christianity than the Christ of the fourth Gospel. What the Epigones of liberal theology think they can distil from this Synoptic Christ as historical essence has historical value only as a monument of masterly sophistry, which has produced its finest examples in the name of theological science.”31 Historical research should not have so long set apart from all other history that of early Christianity as the special domain of theology and handed it over to churchmen, as if for the decision of the questions on this point quite special talent was necessary—a talent far beyond the ordinary sphere of science and one which was only possessed by the Church theologian. The world would then long since have done with the whole literature of the “Life of Jesus.”