Note 5 — Chapter XIX · THE HISTORY OF THE DISCUSSION

Of no myth-theories save those of Bruno Bauer and Pastor Kalthoff, which alike ignore the clues of mythology and anthropology, does Dr. Schweitzer seem to have any knowledge. He is capable of giving a senseless account of a book he has not seen, and, it may be, of one he has seen. Of Christianity and Mythology he alleges that “according to that work the Christ-myth is merely a form of the Krishna-myth”—a proposition which tells only of absolute ignorance concerning the book. If, as I suspect, he has no better ground for his account of Hennell’s Inquiry as “nothing more than Venturini’s ‘Non-miraculous History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth’ tricked out with a fantastic paraphernalia of learning,”5 it speaks ill for the regular functioning of his critical conscience. But where he has to deal with concrete arguments he is straightforward, alert, and readily appreciative; and his survey as a whole leads up to a complete dismissal of the whole work of the liberal school so-called. In his summing-up, the only critical choice left is between “complete scepticism” and “complete eschatology”—that is, between the avowal that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus, and the conviction that the historical Jesus was purely and simply a Jewish “hero and dreamer,” whose entire doctrine was the advent of the kingdom of God, the ending of the old order, in which consummation he secretly believed he was to figure as the Messiah.