Note 109 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

Thus it was for a time customary in theology, under the influence of Holtzmann and Harnack, to consider the ethical deepening and return of God’s “fatherly love” as the essentially new and significant point in Jesus’ “glad tidings,” and to write about it in unctuous phrases. Recently, even this seems to have been abandoned, as, for example, Wrede openly confesses, with respect to the “filiation to God,” that this conception existed in Judaism very long before Christ; also that Jesus did not especially preach God as the loving “Father” of each individual, that indeed he did not once place in the foreground the name of God as the Father.109 But so much the more decidedly is reference made to the “enormous effects” which attended Jesus’ appearance, and the attempt is made to prove from them his surpassing greatness, “uniqueness,” and historical reality. As if Zarathustra, Buddha, and Mohammed had achieved less, as if the effects which proceed from a person must stand in a certain relation to his human significance, and as if those effects were to be ascribed to the “historical” and not rather to the mythical Jesus—that is, to the idea of the God sacrificing himself for humanity! As a matter of fact, his faith in the immediate proximity of the Messianic kingdom of God, and the demand for a change of life based on this, which is really “unique” in the traditional Jesus, is without any religious and ethical significance for us, and is at most only of interest for the history of civilisation. On the other hand, such part of his teaching as is still of importance to us is not “unique,” and only has the reputation of being so because we are accustomed by a theological education to treat it in the light of the Christian dogmatic metaphysics of redemption. Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Laotse, or Buddha in their ethical views are not behind Jesus with his egoistical pseudo-morals, his basing moral action on the expectation of reward and punishment in the future, his narrow-minded nationalism, which theologians in vain attempt to debate away and to conceal; and his obscure mysticism, which strives to attain a special importance for its maxims by mysterious references to his “heavenly Father.”110 And as for the “great impression” which Jesus is supposed to have made on his own people and on the following age, and without which the history of Christianity is supposed to be inexplicable, Kalthoff has shown with justice that the Gospels do not in any way reflect the impression which a person produced, but only such as the accounts of Jesus’ personality would have made on the members of the Christian community. “Even the strongest impression proves nothing as to the historical truth of these accounts. Even an account of a fictitious personage may produce the deepest impression on a community if it is given in historical terms. What an impression Goethe’s “Werther” produced, though the whole world knew that it was only a romance! Yet it stirred up countless disciples and imitators.”111