Note 99 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

It is, then, settled that we cannot with certainty trace back to an historical Jesus any single one of the expressions of the “Lord” that have come down to us. Even the oldest authority, the Aramaic collection, may have contained merely the tradition of a community. Can we then think that the supporters of an “historical” Jesus are right in treating it as nothing more than a “crude sin against all historical methods,” as something most monstrous and unscientific, if one draws the only possible inference from the result of the criticism of the Gospels, and disputes the existence at any time of an historical Jesus? There may after all have been such a collection of “words of the Lord” in the oldest Christian communities; but must we understand by this words of a definite human individual? May they not rather have been words which had an authoritative and canonical acceptation in the community, being either specially important or congenial to it, and which were for this reason attributed to the “Lord”—that is, to the hero of the association or cult, Jesus? It has been generally agreed that this was the case, for example, with the directions as to action in the case of quarrels among the members of the community99 and with regard to divorce.100 Let us also recall to our minds the “words of the Lord” in the other cult-associations of antiquity, the ἀυτὸς ἔφα of the Pythagoreans. And how many particularly popular, impressive, and favourite sayings were current in antiquity bearing the names of one of the “Seven Wise Men,” without any one dreaming of ascribing to them an historical signification! How then can it be anything but hasty and uncritical to give out the “words of the Lord” in the collection, which are the basis of Jesus’ sermons in the Gospels, as sayings of one definite Rabbi—that is, of the “historical” Jesus? One may have as high an opinion of Jesus’ words as one likes: the question is whether Jesus, even the Jesus of liberal theology, is their spiritual father, or whether they are not after all in the same position as the psalms or sayings of the Old Testament which are current in the names of David and Solomon, and of which we know quite positively that their authors were neither the one nor the other.