Note 7 — PREFACE TO THE FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS

In other respects the “progress” in the province of religious history is not so great as I formerly believed I could assume. That is to say, in essentials modern learning in this connection has only brought facts to light and given a new focus to points of view which were already possessed (cf. Dupuis and Volney) by the eighteenth century. In the twenties and forties of the nineteenth century investigations, unprejudiced and independent of theology, had already reached in the case of some of their representatives, such as Gfrörer, Lützelberger, Ghillany, Nork, and others, the point which is to-day again represented by the most advanced learning. The revolution of 1848 and the reaction consequent on it in ecclesiastical matters then again shook, on account of their radical tendency, those views which had been already arrived at. The liberal Protestantism, too, that rose as a recoil against orthodoxy in its effort to work out the “historical” Jesus as the kernel of Christianity on its part had no interest in again bringing up the old results. Indeed, it actually makes it a reproach to a person of the present day if he quotes the works of those earlier investigators, and reminds him that religious learning did not begin only with the modern Coryphaei, with Holtzmann, Harnack, &c. Whoever looks upon things from this point of view can most probably agree in the melancholy reflection of a reviewer of the first edition of “The Christ Myth,” when he says with reference to the “latest investigations”: “Apparently the whole learning of the nineteenth century so far as relates to investigations into the moving forces of civilisation and national upheavals will be considered by future research as an arsenal of errors” (O. Hauser in the Neue Freie Presse, August 8, 1909). ↑