Note 43 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

There the matter ends: we know nothing of Jesus, of an historical personality of that name to whom the events and speeches recorded in the Gospels refer. “In default of any historical certainty the name of Jesus has become for Protestant theology an empty vessel, into which that theology pours the content of its own meditations.”43 And if there is any excuse for this, it is that that name has never at any time been anything but such an empty vessel: Jesus, the Christ, the Deliverer, Saviour, Physician of oppressed souls, has been from first to last a figure borrowed from myth, to whom the desire for redemption and the naïve faith of the Western Asiatic peoples have transferred all their conceptions of the soul’s welfare. The “history” of this Jesus in its general characteristics had been determined even before the evangelical Jesus. Even Weinel, one of the most zealous and enthusiastic adherents of the modern Jesus-worship, confesses that “Christology was almost completed before Jesus came on earth.”44