Note 1 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

In the opinion of liberal theologians, not the God but rather the man Jesus forms the valuable religious essence of Christianity.1 In saying this it says nothing less than that the whole of Christendom up to the present day—that is, till the appearance of a Harnack, Bousset, Wernle, and others of like mind—was in error about itself, and did not recognise its own essence. For Christianity, as the present account shows, from the very first conceived the God Jesus, or rather the God-man, the Incarnate, the God-redeemer, suffering with man and sacrificing himself for humanity, as the central point of its doctrine. The declaration of the real manhood of Jesus appears, on the other hand, but as an after-concession of this religion to outer circumstances, wrung from it only later by its opponents, and so expressly championed by it only because of its forming the unavoidable condition of its permanence in history and of its practical success. Only the God, therefore, not the man Jesus, can be termed the “founder” of the Christian religion.