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WHAT IS THE TRUTH
ABOUT JESUS CHRIST?

PROBLEMS OF CHRISTOLOGY

DISCUSSED IN

SIX HASKELL LECTURES

AT OBERLIN, OHIO

FRIEDRICH LOOFS, PH.D., Tn.D.

Professor of Church History in the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

RBCtS

BIBU MAJ,
COLLEG3J/

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK : : : : : 1913

, ••
0000

Published April, 1913

PREFACE

THE following lectures are here printed as
they were given between the 26th of September
and the 4th of October, 1911, at Oberlin, Ohio,
under the auspices of the Theological Depart
ment of Oberlin College. I have since added
only the notes. These notes may excuse the
delay of printing. For I was not able to find
the time for the work of preparing them before
our long autumn vacation.

Originally the lectures were written in Ger
man. In translating them, I enjoyed for the
second lecture the assistance of my nephew, Mr.
Gustav Braunholtz, M.A., of Cambridge, Eng
land; and for the five others that of Mr. Sieg
fried Grosskopf, M.A., of Bloemfontein, South
Africa. It is a pleasure for me to thank now
in public these friendly helpers.

Thanks are also to be carried by this book
to all the Americans whose friendship and hos
pitality I enjoyed during my sojourn in their
country, especially to my dear colleague, the

vi PREFACE

professor of church history at Oberlin College,
Dr. A. T. Swing, and to Mrs. Swing his wife,
whose house was really my home during the ten
days I was at Oberlin. I am also indebted to
Dr. Swing for his kindly share in reading the
proofs of this book.

And if these lectures should come into the
hands of one or another of my hearers to whom
I had no occasion to speak privately, I hope they
may greet them, too, with greetings of that
Spirit which is a spirit of unity, uniting not only
those whom the sea divides, but also men of
different character, different training, and dif
ferent views about matters of minor importance

in the unity of faith.

FRIEDRICH LOOFS.
HALLE A. S.

THE 20 OF MARCH, 1913.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. JESUS A REAL MAN OF OUR HISTORY ... i

Introduction. The theory of W. B. Smith, A.
Drews, P. Jensen, and others, who pretend that
Jesus was nothing but a mythical deity.

II. THE LIBERAL JESUS-PICTURE 40

The attempts of modern Jesus-research to under
stand the life of Jesus as a purely human one.

III. THE LIBERAL JESUS-RESEARCH AND THE

SOURCES 79

The liberal Jesus-research disputed by historical
arguments, its assumption that Jesus was merely
a man admitted.

IV. JESUS NOT MERELY A MAN 120

Refutation of the presupposition of liberal Jesus-
research, that the life of Jesus was a purely hu
man one.

V. THE ANCIENT CHRISTOLOGY UNTENABLE . . 162
The ecclesiastical doctrine about Jesus Christ ex
amined by rational arguments and by arguments
from the New Testament and from the history
of dogmas.

VI. MODERN FORMS OF CHRISTOLOGY .... 201
Modification of the ancient Christology and mod
ern attempts to understand the person of Jesus
in correspondence with Christian belief.

vii

WHAT IS THE TRUTH ABOUT
JESUS CHRIST?

I
JESUS A REAL MAN OF OUR HISTORY

" PROBLEMS of Christology" is the subject of
my lectures. A subject somewhat vaguely
defined, you may say. Certainly. But a less
general formulation capable of giving an idea of
what I wish to say could scarcely be found. I
shall discuss problems of the life of Jesus, but I
shall not confine myself solely to them, nor shall
I touch all questions brought before us by the
life of Jesus. I shall frequently refer to the his
tory of the ideas about the person of Christ, but
I do not intend to make this history as such a
subject of my lectures. I do not wish to show
how systematic theology has to formulate the
Christological problem in its details, and yet I
shall discuss many questions outside the scope
of historical consideration. This seems to prom
ise a great variety of views. But I hope that my

2 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

lectures will nevertheless form a homogeneous
whole, for ultimately it is only one question
which I shall try to answer — the question, What
modern Christianity has to think of Jesus; the
question, What is the truth about Jesus Christ?

This question has been asked for about nine
teen hundred years. All former centuries have
been occupied with it. But for every century
this question has had a new face. Our young
century, too, already has its own token in
this respect. When I attempt to show this,
I may start, on the one hand, from my native
country, Germany; on the other hand, from the
country rich in friendly hospitality in which I
have the honor now to speak.

It is Germany where research on the life of
Jesus originated, and up to the present day it
has remained the chief country for these studies.
In England, indeed, where we have an older
civilization, the age of the so-called enlighten
ment began earlier than in Germany, and in the
Anglican deism the biblical tradition about Jesus
was subjected to criticism at an earlier date.
Nevertheless it was Germany that first made
the attempt to understand the whole life of Jesus

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 3

from a purely natural point of view. Hermann
Samuel Reimarus (f 1768) was so bold as to
do this in a fairly long book found among his
papers after his death. And it was no other
than Lessing who, in 1774-78, brought parts of
this work on the literary market as Fragments
from the Wolff enbiittel-Library.1 The studies of
the next sixty years were more conservative.
Then, in 1835, David Friedrich Strauss made
a new beginning in the life-of-Jesus-question.2
And though he found many opponents, and
though the majority of the German theologians
in the nineteenth century went an essentially
other way, nevertheless we see the strong in
fluence of his views in an unbroken chain of
learned works in Germany up to the present
day. The aim of Reimarus, and later of Strauss,
had been to prove the life of Jesus a natural
human life and to give the development of the
traditions which raised Jesus into the super
human sphere. This has also been the aim of
the most progressive liberal German theology
since that time.

1 Lessmg's Werke, Berlin, Gustav Hempel, XIV, 79-439-

2 D. F. Strauss, Das Leben Jfsu, kritisch bearbeitet, Tubingen,
I, 1835, II, 1836.

4 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

This aim is not the right one, indeed, as I
think; but yet we must concede that an aston
ishing amount of work and sagacity were em
ployed to fulfil it. And in the courage to defend
their convictions, in readiness to make sacrifices
for what they considered to be the truth, the
supporters of these views often surpassed their
opponents. Even in our day not a few Ger
man theologians really have this aim; even the
last months brought a learned and careful docu
ment of this line of thought, intended for widest
circulation, viz., an exhaustive article by Pro
fessor Heitmiiller (Marburg) on Jesus Christ, in
the Handworterbuch edited by F. M. Schiele and
L. Zscharnack.1

Quite a different road has been followed for
many years by your countryman, a professor of
mathematics, and later of philosophy, in Tu-
lane University at New Orleans, William Ben
jamin Smith. He has expressed his thoughts
most clearly in a new book published in German
three months ago. The title of this book, Ecce

1 Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Handworterbuch in
gemeinverstdndlicher Darstellung. Unter Mitwirkung von Her
mann Gunkel und Otto Scheel herausgegeben von Friedrich Michael
Schiele und Leopold Zscharnack, Tubingen, III, 343-410.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 5

Deus,1 is characteristic, for Smith does not intend
to sketch a purely human, but a purely divine
Jesus. The man Jesus, whose life the biographers
of Jesus tried to give, according to Smith did not
exist. Smith himself sharply and clearly defines
the way he is going. The New Testament, he
says,2 teaches the divinity of Jesus, but also fre
quently introduces him as a man who was born,
grew, hungered, thirsted, was tired like other
men, suffered as man and died, was buried, and
was raised from the dead. The orthodox doc
trine, he says, has accepted this twofold scheme
and formed the high mystery of the God-man,
which people are called upon to believe. But to
our intellect, he thinks, the God-man is a contra
diction in itself, an absurdity which a reasonable
man cannot accept in peace. Consequently, he
thinks only one of two views possible: either
Jesus was a man whom posterity only deified,
or he was a god erroneously made a man by
tradition. In the past, Smith says, the critics
unanimously adopted the former view. But all
their learning and splendid sagacity was squan-

JW. B. Smith, Ecce Deus. Die urchristliche Lfhre des
gottlichcn Jtsu, Jena, 1911. — ! Comp. pp. 5-8.

rein-

6 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

dered on an impossible task, for Smith considers
as a failure the attempt to understand the rise
of Christianity under the supposition that Jesus
was a man. He sees the cradle of Christendom
in a pre-christian cult of Jesus in the Jewish
diaspora and in similar cults of the Roman Em
pire. Jesus, for him, is originally a god, or rather
a name of the one God who was revered in simi
lar cults under other names. When people spoke
of his death, they originally meant a dying god,
for such myths circulated widely. The story
that this God Jesus lived in Judea as man was
but the result of giving the subject of the myth
a human form. In reality the man Jesus never
existed.

If this theory of W. B. Smith were but the
fancy of an amateur, as is frequently said, it
would not be worth our while to waste any more
words about it. But this is not the case. Just
as the article of Professor Heitmuller, referred to
before, can only be appreciated in connection
with the whole history of the life-of-Jesus-
problem in Germany, so W. B. Smith, too,
must be considered as the representative, prob
ably the most important representative, of a

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 7

line of thought surely not singular in modern
times.

This is the first point that I have to discuss.

Even as long as a century ago, Smith had a
precursor in the French mathematician and
astronomer, Charles Francois Dupuis (f 1809),
one of the few members of the National Con
vention who survived the Revolution. This
Dupuis derived l Christianity, the worship of
Jesus and his life-story, from the Oriental solar
cult and from myths which the latter produced.
And in trying to show Jesus as the double of
Mithras, he declared without any restriction
that Jesus, the object of the Christian worship,
never existed as man. Although this theory
of Dupuis was brought before the public as
late as 1834 in a new edition of an epitome
of his great work,2 nevertheless it perished like
so many other theories, customs, and institu
tions of the National Convention times. But
the recent past revived it, as it did so many other
theories of the eighteenth century. As early as
1886 the English writer John M. Robertson

1 Ch. F. Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultfs, 3 vols., Paris, 1796.
2Ch. F. Dupuis, Abrege de I' origin* de tous les cultes, Paris, 1834.

8 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

endeavored to explain the stories of Jesus as
completely as possible from ancient mytho
logical traditions of various kinds, and, after
he had collected, in 1900, his essays in a bulky
volume bearing the title Christianity and My
thology, occasional notice of his ideas was
taken also outside of England. But Robertson
did not consider the Jesus of tradition as wholly
a fiction of the Gospels, for he held it to be a
tenable hypothesis that a certain Jesus was the
obscure founder of the cult-community in whose
midst the story of Jesus was formed and de
veloped.

Pastor Albert KalthofF, of Bremen (f 1906),
on the other hand, who, in 1902, tried to give a
solution of the Jesus problem without accepting a
historical Jesus,1 made but a limited use of my
thology to explain the Gospel history. But for
the Marburg professor of Assyriology, Peter Jen
sen, who, in 1906, published a book of one thou
sand pages on the Babylonian Gilgamesch-Epos,2

XA. Kalthoff, Das Christus-Problem, Leipsic, 1902; Die Ent-
stehung des Christentums. Neue Beitrdge zum Christus-Problem,
Leipsic, 1904; Was wissen wir von Jesus ? Berlin, 1904.

2 P. Jensen, Das Gilgamesch-Epos in der Weltlitteratur, I, Strass-
burg, 1906.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 9

Jesus is no other than the mythical hero of
that epos, his history but an echo of what is
told of Gilgamesch. And Arthur Drews, pro
fessor of philosophy at Karlsruhe, who in the
last two years has caused some excitement in
Germany with his book Die Christusmythe,1 here
expresses views similar to those of W. B. Smith;
moreover, he is directly dependent on a book
of W. B. Smith published in Germany in 1906.2
And besides A. Drews we could mention many
others who have supported similar views in
a more sporadic form.3 It is, therefore, not
an individual position which W. B. Smith de
fends; and he defends this position in the
most remarkable manner. In Germany, A.
Drews has until now been considered the most
remarkable supporter of the assertion that Jesus
was not a historical but a mythological person;
for Jensen, though unquestionably more learned,
defends with threadbare arguments an opinion
which, aside from its author, has not found a

1 A. Drews, Die Christusmythe, Jena, 1909; 2d edition, 1910.

• W. B. Smith, Der vorchristliche Jesus, Giessen, 1906.

3Comp. C. Clemen, Religions geschichtliche Erkldrung des Neuen
Testaments, Giessen, 1909, and the later work of the same author,
Der geschichtliche Jesus, Giessen, 1911.

io WHAT IS THE TRUTH

scientific sponsor. But I am convinced that,
as soon as the new book of Smith becomes more
widely known in Germany, Arthur Drews will
yield the first place to Smith, as the latter is the
wittier of the two and far more at home in the
ological literature. Moreover, it is a recom
mendation for his work that he is a man for
whom the question of the origin of Christianity
has been a real problem for many years, and,
as far as we can judge, Smith's aim is not to
propagate a sensational theory and acquire per
sonal notoriety, but only to serve the truth.
Finally, however strange the position of W. B.
Smith may seem, it is nevertheless not uncon
nected with a broader tendency in modern and
scientific thought.

Strange enough, indeed, will his position ap
pear to every Christian. The Gospel story
of Jesus was, in his opinion, originally nothing
but the announcement of the God Jesus, clothed
in the form of parables and symbolical history.
When, for instance, we are told that Jesus in
a synagogue healed a man with a withered
hand,1 then, according to Smith, the man is

1 Mark 3 : I /.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 11

meant to be the Jewish people, who are para
lyzed by the letter of the Jewish law and by
tradition but will be restored to strength and
power by the liberating influence of the Jesus-
cult. Only much later, as the parables were not
understood, the announcement of Jesus was
materialized. Even Saint Paul did not know
a man Jesus. The God Jesus who died for
all men filled his thoughts. These are certainly
strange assertions. They cannot make any im
pression on a Christian who really knows the
Gospels. Nevertheless we must, as I said, re
main aware of the fact that these statements are
not unconnected with a broader tendency in
modern and scientific thought. In the first
place, symbolism is beginning to become mod
ern. A person who has not gained an inward re
lation to the Gospel story will not find Smith's
interpretations of the parables and stories of the
New Testament essentially different from other
symbolistic wisdom. Secondly, the interpreta
tion of the New Testament according to the
comparative history of religion, has for some
time been the watchword of many scholars. Do
they not intend to open a new and promising

12 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

way for scientific investigation by this watch
word? A few examples1 will give us the answer.
The Leipsic philosopher, Rudolf Seydel
(t 1892), tried as early as 1882 to derive many
particulars of the evangelical story of Jesus
from the Buddha legend.2 Hermann Gunkel
(Giessen), in 1903, contended3 that the Chris-
tology of Saint Paul could only be understood
by assuming that a great part of it had its origin
in a Messianic theology already known to Paul
while still a Pharisee; and Arnold Meyer (Zurich)
treated this postulate as a tenable hypothesis.4
The well-known self-characterization of Jesus,
"Son of Man," has been brought into con
nection with old myths of the original man.5
The myths of the death and resurrection of a
deity have been used by Gunkel6 and others7 to
explain the primitive Christian ideas about the
death and resurrection of Christ. And several

Clemen, Religions geschichtliche Erkldrung, quoted
above, p. 9. — 2 R. Seydel, Das Evangelium von Jesu in seinen
Verhdltnissen zu Buddha-Sage und Buddha-Lehre, Leipsic, 1882.
— 3 H. Gunkel, Zum religion sgeschichtlichen Verstdndnis des Neuen
Testaments, Gottingen, 1903, p. 89 /. — 4A. Meyer, Die Aufer-
stehung Jesu Christi, Tubingen, 1905, p. 29 /. — B Comp. C.
Clemen, Religion sgeschichtliche Erkldrung, p. 119 ff. — 6 H. Gunkel,
"ZjUm religions geschichtlichen Verst&ndnis, p. j6 ff. — 7 Comp.
Clemen, p. 146 ff.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 13

scholars have pointed out the role played by
the term "Saviour" or "Redeemer-God" in the
syncretistic religious movement of the early
Roman Empire, even in the cult of the emperors.1
Certainly all these attempts to explain the
Christian ideas of Jesus by means of the history
of religions do not in the least intend to deny the
historicity of Jesus, but are rather meant to
support the conviction that the worship of Jesus
had its root in the deification of a man. Thus
they seem to be in complete opposition to the
theory of W. B. Smith. Here again, however,
we find the old truth that extremes meet.
For if we recognize all assertions made by the
many-voiced choir of the leading scholars in
terested in the history of religions, then we
should find parallels for everything in Jesus that
goes beyond the ordinary measure of men; and
these parallels often are not only regarded as par
allels, but appear as factors which produced the
Christian opinions about Jesus. It was, there-

1 A. Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 4th edition,
Tubingen, 1909-10, I, 136 /.; P. Wendland in the Ze itschrift fur
neutfstamentlichf Wissenschaft, 1904, p. 335 ff.'t comp. H. Lietz-
mann, Der W tithe Hand. Eine Jenaer Rosenvorlesung mil Anmer-
kungen, Bonn, 1909.

i4 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

fore, not so very far-fetched if people completely
denied the existence of the bearer of all these
amplifications derived from non-christian relig
ions. The theory of W. B. Smith is the most
extreme form and at the same time the cari
cature of the efforts to explain the Christian ap
preciation of Jesus on the basis of comparative
religion. It is, therefore, not an individual
fancy of one or more amateurs, but is undoubt
edly connected with a broad tendency of modern
scientific thought.

This theory of W. B. Smith, it is true, will
not find any more acknowledgment in the scien
tific world in the future than it has found till
now. Nevertheless, the fact of its having been
raised is significant for the present situa
tion. At the very moment when the history
of religions presumed to explain the godhead
of the man Jesus as derived completely from
other religions, at this very moment the theory
that Jesus was a deified man turned into the
opposite one, viz., that the godhead of Jesus
was the primary and intelligible factor and his
human life nothing but a fiction.

It is the aim of my lectures to show that

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 15

neither of the two alternatives formulated by
W. B. Smith is tenable: neither the view that
Jesus was purely a man whom posterity only
elevated beyond the human measure; nor the
other, that Jesus-worship was originally worship
of a god who only through complete misunder
standing of the oldest symbolical announcement
became changed into a man of human history.

The former view still prevails where the tra
ditional Christian ideas are abandoned. It is
also much more difficult to show that it is false.
Therefore, three of my following lectures will
deal with this side of the question. The other
side, I hope, will be settled in this lecture.

Of course, all my six lectures would not suffice
if I were to deal with all the conjectures made
by Smith and Jensen and Drews in support
of their position. Ink is cheap, and the sug
gestive force of a supposed truth has always
been exceedingly productive and misleading.
But nobody need check a complicated mathe
matical sum from beginning to end if he finds a
flaw in the first proposition. It is, indeed, de
serving of praise that some theologians1 sac-

1 For instance : H. von Soden, Hat Jesus gelebt ? Berlin-Schoene-
berg, 1910. J. Weiss, Jesus v. Nazareth— Mythus oder Geschichte?

16 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

rificed their time in order to show by a few
examples how untenable are the assertions of
Jensen, Smith, and others. But detailed criti
cism of supposed evidences for an impossible
view is neither interesting nor useful. It will
suffice if we prove the impossibility of the view
itself in a more simple manner.

In doing so I shall refrain from argumentation
by means of the Gospels, canonical and apocry
phal. Not because the Gospels cannot furnish
proof, for every one who reads the Gospels with
out prejudice will acknowledge that — even if
many particulars in the evangelical tradition
were fictitious — yet there is in the Gospels a suffi
cient amount of hard indissoluble rock on which
we can base our conviction of Christ's human
life. We may refer especially to the local color
of Palestine in the Gospels, and also to the close
connection between many words of Jesus and the
Jewish ideas and customs of the time spoken of
in the Gospels. With such arguments, a Swedish
rabbi, unquestionably an impartial scholar, Pro
fessor Gottlieb Klein, of Stockholm, tried last
year with some success to prove the historicity

Tubingen, 1910. H. Weinel, 1st das "liberate " Jesusbild widerlegt,
Tubingen, 1910. C. Clemen, Der geschichtliche Jesus, Giessen,i9i I.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 17

of Jesus.1 But against W. B. Smith we cannot
quote the Gospels if we do not disprove his in
terpretation of them in detail, and that would
require much time and afford little pleasure. I
shall have occasion to speak about the Gospels
in another lecture. To-day I pass them by.

Then the question rises whether there are any
other sources for the life of Jesus which could
disprove the view of W. B. Smith.

Smith tries to show that there are no non-
christian sources that refute his theory. I
could grant this to some extent, but in order to
make the whole question intelligible, I shall
enter into a discussion as to the real or supposed
non-christian references to Jesus. The strange
theory of Smith may become psychologically
more intelligible if I begin with evidences once
highly esteemed but now discredited by all con
scientious scholars.

The oldest non-christian evidence was once
considered to be two texts preserved by Eusebius,
Bishop of Caesarea, in his Ecclesiastical History,
brought to a close in 325.2 Eusebius had found

>G. Klein, 1st Jesus eine historische Personlichkdt? Tiibingen,
1910. — * Eusebius, //. E., I, 13, 6 /.

1 8 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

them, as he tells us, in a Syriac manuscript
which was deposited in the public archives of
Edessa. He quotes them in Greek translation.
They contain a letter of the king, Abgar Ukka-
ma, of Edessa, to Jesus and a short answer of
the latter. Both letters pretend to date from
the time of the public activity of Jesus. Abgar,
who has heard of the miracles of Jesus, asks
him to take the trouble to come to him and
heal the disease he has. Jesus does not ac
cede to his request because, as he writes, it
is necessary for him to fulfil all things there
for which he had been sent. But he promises
the king to send, after having been taken up
to his Father, one of his disciples. A narrative
passage following the letters in the manuscript
of the Edessa archives, and also quoted by
Eusebius, reports that, according to this promise
of Jesus, after his ascension, in the twenty-ninth
year of our era, Thaddaeus, one of the seventy
disciples, mentioned by Saint Luke, was sent to
Edessa, where he healed the king and preached
the gospel successfully to him and his people.

It cannot be doubted that Eusebius really
made use of a manuscript of the Edessa ar-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 19

chives, and it is certain that there was a king
Abgar Ukkama in Edessa at the time of Jesus
(9-46 A. D.). Moreover, the genuineness of this
correspondence between King Abgar and Jesus
has been defended recently by a German Cath
olic scholar.1 Nevertheless, there can be no
doubt that the correspondence is a forgery.
For, although Christianity came to the empire of
Edessa at a very early date2 — as early as 190
we find Christian communities there — still it is
certain that the first of the royal house to become
a Christian was Abgar IX in the beginning of
the third century. The alleged correspondence
between Abgar V and Jesus could only belong
to the time after this first Christian king. Hence
this correspondence cannot prove the historicity
of Jesus.

Another letter pretends to have been written
shortly after the death of Jesus. It is a letter of
Pilate to the Roman Emperor, preserved in

aj. Nirschl, Der Briefwechsel des Konig Abgar von Edessa mil
Jesus oder die Abgarfrage (Der Katholik, Zeitschrift fur Katho-
HscheWissenschaft und kirchliches Leben, ed. J. M. Raich, Mainz,
1896, II, I?/-, 97/-> etc.).

'Eusebius, //. £., 5, 23, 4; comp. F. C. Burkitt, Early Christian
ity outside the Roman Empire, Cambridge, 1894, and Early East
ern Christianity, London, 1904, first lecture.

20 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

some apocrypha of the fourth century.1 The
letter speaks in general of the miracles of
Jesus, states that Jesus had been handed over
to him, Pilate, by the Jews, and again by him,
after having been scourged, to the Jews. The
latter then crucified him, but Jesus rose from
the dead in spite of the guards at the grave.
Now, scholars do not agree as to the date of the
origin of this letter. As early as the end of the
second century, in the writings of the African
Christian Tertullian we find the opinion that
Pilate reported favorably on Jesus to his im
perial master,2 and in 150 the Christian apologist
Justin Martyr takes it for granted that minutes
were taken down under Pilate, by which the
evangelical narrations about Jesus were con
firmed.3 It is, therefore, not impossible that a
story, a part of which was the letter of Pilate
referred to, or a similar one, circulated as early
as the second century. But we cannot prove

lEvang. Nicod., Rec. A, cap. 13, ed.C. v. Tischendorf, Evangelia
apocrypha, ed. sec., Leipsic, 1876, p. 413; Acta Petri et Pauli, cap.
40/., ed. C. v. Tischendorf, Acta apostol. apocrypha, Leipsic, 1851,
p. i6/.; comp. A. Harnack, Die Chronologie der altchristl. Litteratur,
I, Leipsic, 1897, p. 605 /.

2 Tertullian, apol. c. 21, ed. Oehler, ed. min., p. 103.

3 Justin, apol. I, 35 and 48, ed. Otto, I, 106 C and 132 C.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 21

this satisfactorily. So much, however, is cer
tain — that this letter of Pilate is not genuine.
An official report of the procurator would show
quite a different face.

Forty years later than the letter of Pilate,
if genuine, would be, according to the opinion
of some scholars, a letter of a certain Mara,
son of Serapion, to Serapion his son, published
in 1855 from a Syriac manuscript of the British
Museum.1 It is a letter of advice from an
earnest father to his youthful son, and makes
no direct mention of the name of Christ. But in
connection with a commemoration of Socrates
and Pythagoras the letter alludes to the wise
king of the Jews and considers the destruction of
Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jews as an
act of divine vengeance for their having mur
dered him. Socrates, so the letter states, is not
dead, because of Plato (who kept his memory
alive), nor is the wise king because of the laws
which he promulgated.

If this letter, written as it seems by a heathen,
really dates from the year 73, as, for instance, the

1 W. Cureton, Spicilfgium Syriacum, London, 1855, pp. 43~48
and 70-76.

22 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

late Professor Zockler of Greifswald assumed,1
then this letter would perhaps be a pagan wit
ness for Jesus, independent of the Christian
tradition. But the first editor, the learned Cu-
reton, gave the letter a later date. He did
not deny that it was possibly written about
the year 95 A. D., but for himself he con
sidered it more correct to assign its date to
the latter half of the second century. Even in
the former case the knowledge of Jesus shown
by the writer probably originated in Christian
tradition. In the second case, which has many
arguments in its favor,2 this conclusion is una
voidable. Consequently, the letter of Mara can
probably not figure as a pagan witness for Jesus.
It is, therefore, no conclusive evidence of the
historicity of Jesus.

The uncertainty as to the date, which lessens
the value of the Mara letter, fortunately does
not exist in the case of the writer of whom I am
to speak now, viz., Josephus, the Jewish his
torian. For his Antiquitates Judaiccz (Jewish

1 Real-Encyklopddie fur prot. Theol und Kirche, 3. Aufl., ed. A.
Hauck, IX, 3, Leipsic, 1901.

2 Comp. A. Harnack, Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur bis
Eusebius, I, Leipsic, 1893, p. 763.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 23

Antiquities), which come into consideration, a
Jewish history from the first man to the twelfth
year of Nero, that is, 66 A. D., can be accu
rately dated. According to Josephus's own state
ment they were finished at Rome in the win
ter 93-94. And certainly it is highly probable
that Josephus's writings were not influenced by
Christian tradition. Therefore, assertions of
Josephus about Jesus would have great weight.
But nevertheless we have no definite non-chns-
tian reference to Jesus in Josephus. Twice in
our texts of the Antiquitates Jesus is mentioned.
The first passage is: At that time lived Jesus, a
wise man, if indeed it be proper to call him a man.
For he was a doer of wonderful works, and a
teacher of such men as receive the truth in gladness.
And he attached to himself many of the Jews, and
many also of the Greeks. He was the Christ.
When Pilate, on the accusation of our principal
men, condemned him to the cross, those who had
loved him in the beginning did not cease loving
him. For he appeared unto them again alive on
the third day, the divine prophets having told these
and countless other wonderful things concerning
him. Moreover, the race of Christians, named after

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

him, continues down to the present day.1 The
second passage relates that the high priest
Ananus made use of the interval between the
death of the procurator Festus and the acces
sion to office of his successor, Albinus (that is,
probably about the beginning of 62 A. D.) for
high-handed action: He called together, so Jose
phus narrates, the Sanhedrim, and brought before
them the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ, James
by name, together with some others, and accused
them of violating the law and condemned them to
be stoned?

The former famous passage is, up to the present
time, considered by almost all Roman Catholic
theologians as being genuine. But that means
defending a lost position. A person who writes
as the Josephus-text now reads confesses him
self a Christian. But Josephus was no Christian.
The fact that Eusebius, the church historian re
ferred to before, as early as about 325 A. D., had
the same text, as his quotations prove,3 and that
all manuscripts of Josephus, that are consider
ably later than Eusebius's time, have the present

1 Antiqu.it., XVIII, 3, 3. — 2 Antiquit., XX, 9, i.-
, 7; Demonst. ev., 3, 3, 105.

'#.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 25

text, only proves that this text of ours is older
than Eusebius, but not that Joscphus himself
wrote the passage in question. The present text
of the Josephus passage is interpolated or spuri
ous. Opinions differ as to which of these two
alternatives is the more probable,1 and a con
vincing decision is to my mind impossible. Two
arguments may be brought forward to prove
that something of our present text was written
by Josephus himself, that, therefore, the pas
sage is only interpolated, i. e., enlarged by spu
rious additions. In the first place, we may point
out that by expunging a few phrases a text may
be reconstructed which might have been written
by Josephus. A second argument may be de
rived from the second passage quoted, which
reports that, besides the others who were con
demned by Ananus, also James, the brother of
Jesus y the so-called Christ, was executed. For
if this second passage is genuine (and even the
most recent editor of Josephus, the late historian
of our University of Halle, Benedictus Niese,
considered it genuine), Josephus must have

1 Comp. E. Schiirer, Geschichte des judischen Volkes im Zeitalter
Jesv, Christi, I, 3d and 4th editions, Leipsic, 1901, pp. 545-549-

26 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

spoken before of "Jesus, the so-called Christ,"
because here he is introduced as a well-known
personage. But, to say nothing about the first
argument, the second, too, is unconvincing,
because it is not certain that the second passage
belongs to Josephus as it now reads. The men
tion of James may be a spurious addition. For,
in any case, the former passage proves that
Christian hands were at work in revising our Jo-
sephus-text. Therefore, with regard to the im
portance of Josephus in the question of the life of
Jesus, only two things are certain. First, that if
Josephus wrote anything about Jesus, we can
not know what he wrote; for if we must assume
a Christian interpolator in the former famous
passage, we cannot expunge what he added;
and, on the other hand, could he not also have
omitted something which he found in the text?
Secondly, it is certain that we do not know
whether Josephus said anything at all about
Jesus, for the mention of James may be an inter
polation and the whole passage about Jesus a
Christian addition. The context of Josephus is
not broken by striking out these passages.
Another Jewish historian of this time, Justus of

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 27

Tiberias, whose works are lost, likewise re
mained wholly silent about Jesus, as a learned
father of the church relates.1

According to Jewish tradition, on the other
hand, a younger contemporary of Josephus, the
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos, told how he met
a disciple of Jesus the Nazarene.2 Moreover,
the learned Swedish rabbi, Gottlieb Klein,3 al
ready referred to, professes to have proved, in a
book published two years ago, that Eliezer was
also well acquainted with the doctrine of Jesus,
and that he, like the older Rabbi Samuel the
Lesser, took an interest in his tragic fate. But
I do not consider these assertions as proved.
And the report of Eliezer that he met the Jewish
Christian, James of Kephar Sekhanja, cannot be
regarded as authentic word for word, as it was
only written down in later times following tra
dition. But here everything depends on the very
words which call James of Kephar Sekhanja
one of the disciples of Jesus the Nazarene. This

'Photius, Riblioth., cod. 33. Migne, Ser. grceca, 103, col. 65.

2 Handbuch zu dem neutestamentlichen Apokryphen, ed. E. Hen-
necke, Tubingen, 1904, p. 68.

3 G. Klein, Der dltestf christliche Katechismus und die judische
Propaganda-Litter atur, Berlin, 1909, p. 113 /.; comp. G. Klein,
1st Jesus eine historische Personlichkeit? Tubingen, 1910, p. 45.

28 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

evidence, too, therefore, remains uncertain and
is not convincing.

We are on firmer ground when we come to the
Roman historian Tacitus. Smith, it is true,
tries to show that the passage now in question
is also an interpolation.1 But here the wish was
father to the thought. Smith himself evidently
does not regard his arguments as conclusive, for
he thinks that he can get rid of the passage even
if it were genuine. It is a passage in the Annales
of Tacitus (completed about 116 A. D.).2 Here
Tacitus, when writing about the Neronian per
secution of " Christians," takes occasion to add a
short notice about Christ. The author of this
name, Christ, he says, was put to death during the
reign of Tiberius by order of the governor Pontius
Pilatus. Thus repressed for the moment, the dis
astrous superstition afterward broke out afresh,
not only in Judea, where the evil originated, but
also at Rome, where all atrocious and scandalous
things from every quarter flow together and become
celebrated. Karl Weizsacker, the well-known
German theologian (f 1899)? began his history
of the Apostolic Age with this quotation, to my

1 W. B. Smith, Ecce Deus, p. 234 /.— 2XV, 44.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 29

mind not very tactfully. He evidently took it
for granted that Tacitus there gives us informa
tion, independent of Christian tradition, but de
rived from an older source or from careful in
quiry. This opinion is shared by many scholars
even at the present day, and there is much to be
said in its favor. For Tacitus is accustomed to
mark particulars which he knows only from hear
say, and here we do not find such a mark. But
this position cannot be definitely proved. It may
be possible, I grant, that the notice of Tacitus in
its first part is merely an echo of gossip originally
Christian, and in its second part a mixture of
conjecture and observation by Tacitus himself.
The mention of Christ by Pliny the Younger, a
contemporary of Tacitus, is undoubtedly de
pendent on Christian narratives, and the same
is true of everything that later pagan authors
tell about Jesus, including a notice of Suetonius
(about 120 A. D.), the phrasing of which leaves
it entirely doubtful whether it refers to Christ
at all. In the same manner the Jewish blas
phemies against Christ, which we first find in
Celsus, the pagan controversialist, about 180
A. D.,are a caricature of the Christian preaching.

30 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

I am, therefore, at the end of my discussion
of the non-christian sources. Do they suffice
to refute the statements of Smith, Jensen, and
Drews? Do they give evidence of the human
life of Jesus ? I answer, they make it very diffi
cult to hold the view that the human life of
Jesus is only a fiction, but we can hardly say
that they refute it convincingly.

I said, they make the statements of Smith
and his group very difficult. I am prepared to
drop Josephus. It may be, as we saw, that he
said nothing about Jesus. But one fact must
be emphasized: that, if Josephus kept silent
about Jesus, his silence is not in favor of Smith
and those who agree with him. For it can be
satisfactorily explained by the circumstance that
Josephus, having become a friend of the Romans,
considered it advisable completely to ignore the
Messianic hope of his nation, as being suspicious
from the political point of view. But Tacitus
throws difficulties in the way of Smith, for it is
not likely that this conscientious historian would
tell what he knew only from hearsay without
mentioning this source. Still greater are the
difficulties arising from the Jewish tradition.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 31

I pass by the notice about Rabbi Eliezer men
tioned above; but it is an important fact that
in Jewish tradition we do not meet with the
least doubt about the human life of Jesus. The
Jewish theologians of the first and second cen
turies, whose doctrines and narrations are
handed down by the Jewish tradition, were con
nected by tradition with the time when Pilate
was procurator in Judea, and the preaching
about Jesus certainly scandalized them from
the very beginning. If they had been in a
position to extirpate this preaching by showing
that the whole story of a Jesus who lived and
died under Pilate was only a fiction, they would
undoubtedly have done so. And if this had
been the case, then the Jewish tradition would
certainly have preserved some notice of this
fact. This is an argumentum e silentio, indeed,
but a very weighty one. I concede, however,
that the historicity of Christ cannot be con
clusively proved by the non-christian sources.
Those who prefer to doubt this cannot be re
futed convincingly by the non-christian sources,
either by their silence or by their speaking.
But they can be refuted by the Christian

32 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

sources apart from the Gospels. This I wish to
show at the end of this lecture. I refrain from
using Acts, as it is closely connected with
the three synoptic Gospels; from the epis
tles of James, Jude, and John, because they
do not bring any convincing arguments; from
Revelation, because its figurative language is
not suited for argumentation; from the second
epistle of Peter, because, in agreement with
other critics, I do not consider it genuine; and
from the first Petrine epistle, because there are
weighty reasons against assigning it to Peter.
Thus, I confine myself to the letters of Saint
Paul. And even of these I shall make use of
only a few. But I shall try to give the little I
have to say in such a manner that even laymen
can gain an idea of the amount of certainty
which science in this respect may claim.

It is well known that none of the New Testa
ment books have come down to us in the original
of the author. They share this fate with all
books of antiquity. Copies only are preserved,
which are separated from the originals by a
countless number of older copies. This is quite
natural. For lasting manuscripts, written on

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 33

parchment, came into use only in the fourth
century. Before this time people wrote on papy
rus, and this material is very fragile. We need,
therefore, not marvel that we possess only very
few shreds of papyrus with copies of New Tes
tament writings.1 Our oldest parchment man
uscripts of the whole New Testament date from
about 400. We are, however, carried much far
ther back by the oldest translations, which are
naturally likewise preserved only in manuscripts,
and by the more or less copious quotations in
the oldest church writers. In this manner the
New Testament, as a whole, may be traced back
as far as about 180 A. D., if we ignore unim
portant variations in its contents. Farther
back we can trace only the single groups, the
Gospels, the epistles of Paul, etc., and ultimately
only the single writings.

In this respect we are in an especially lucky
position as regards the first epistle of Saint Paul
to the Corinthians. For while the oldest post-
biblical writers mostly weave passages from the
New Testament into their works without giving

1 Comp. C. R. Gregory, Textkritik des Neuen Testaments, Leipsic,
1909, p. 1084.

34 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the origin, this letter of Paul's is found expressly
cited at a very early date, and actually in a let
ter of the Roman community to that of Corinth,
written very probably in the year 95. 1 This
letter in its turn is used as early as about no in
a letter of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, and this
letter of Polycarp's, again, is known about 185
to Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, a native of Asia
Minor, who had personal connections with Poly-
carp. Irenaeus, in his turn, with his most famous
book, is made use of by Tertullian about 200
A. D., etc., etc. Thus, an unbroken chain leads
us to the time of the oldest manuscripts. More
over, we learn from a letter of Dionysius, Bishop
of Corinth, about 180, that the letter of the
Roman community, referred to above, had been
regularly read in Corinth during the service from
olden times.2 In short, the external evidence in
the case of I Corinthians is convincing to a
degree that is rarely found in antiquity. Add
to this, that I Corinthians reveals its personal
and historical individuality in such a marked

1 1 Clm. 47: " Take up the epistle of the blessed Paul the apostle.
What wrote he first unto you in the beginning of the gospel?"
Ed. J. B. Lightfoot, II, London, 1890, pp. 143 and 296.

2Eusebius, H. E., 4, 23, n.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 35

manner that the internal evidence, too, would
be conclusive for its genuineness.

But if I Corinthians is undoubtedly genuine,
then, even excluding external evidence, which,
by the way, is not wanting, the same is surely
the case with II Corinthians, Romans, Gala-
tians, and Philippians. We cannot but recognize
the same author and similar historical circum
stances. The other Pauline letters, excepting
the pastoral epistles, I also recognize as being gen
uine, but I make no use of them here. Romans,
too, I shall leave aside, because Smith1 asserts,
though with unsatisfactory arguments, that it
is not a Pauline letter but a later treatise which
employs old material and together with it was
dressed up as a Pauline letter to the Romans. In
reality, Smith is probably brought to this asser
tion because Romans i : 3 is fatal to his theory,
as it says of Christ: He was made of the seed of
David according to the flesh. Even apart from
Romans, Smith's view suffers shipwreck on the
rock of I Corinthians and Galatians. Also,
from Galatians, it is clear that Saint Paul knows

1 Der vorhistorische Jesus, Giessen, 1906, pp. 136-224; Ecce Deus,
p. 165.

36 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

that Christ was the seed of Abraham (3 : 16), that
he was made of a woman and made under the law
(4:4). In I Corinthians he relates that Christ -in
the same night in which he was betrayed, instituted
the Lord's Supper (11:23 jf.); he reminds the
Corinthians of that which he delivered unto them,
that Christ died for our sins and that he was buried
and that he rose again (15:3 /.)- And incident
ally in I Corinthians (9 : 5) he shows that he
knows brothers of Jesus who travelled about
with their wives; and in Galatians (i : 19) he tells
us that three years after his conversion he saw
Peter and James, the Lord's brother, in Jerusalem.
Smith makes short work of these passages. He
calls most of them later interpolations, and the
brothers of the Lord, for him, are nothing else
than a class of believers in the Messiah who
occupied almost the same position as the apos
tles and were distinguished by the honorable
name "Brothers of the Lord" or "Brothers of
Jesus." A specialist for nervous diseases, in
no wise prejudiced, whom I told about these
shallow arguments of Smith, was of opinion that
such argumentation could only be understood
from a psychopathic point of view. I de-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 37

fended Smith against this accusation, for church
history gives us hundreds of examples of sound-
headed men who, when wishing to defend a
favorite hypothesis which they believe in danger,
do not behave otherwise than a drowning man
catching at a straw. But so much is certain:
such fancies need not be discussed. The text
of Josephus could easily have been interpolated
in the two hundred years between its origin and
Eusebius's time; but in the case of the Pauline
epistles, especially I Corinthians, whose use we
can trace nearly from the time when it was
written till the time to which textual criticism
leads us, such a statement is folly, is scientific
bad-behavior. And to change the brothers of
Jesus into "Brethren in the Lord" is but a con
fession of hopeless perplexity. For the existence
of these brothers of Jesus suffices to wreck the
fantastic edifice of W. B. Smith in spite of all his
learning. Even apart from these Pauline pas
sages we have sufficient evidence for the existence
of brothers of Jesus. The Gospels know them.1
Hegesippus, about 180, acquainted with Jewish-

JMatt. 12:46; 13 : 55; Mark 3: 32; 6:3; Luke 8 : 19 ; John
7:3,5.

38 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

Christian traditions, was interested in their de
scendants and relatives, in the family of the Lord,
as he says.1 Even as late as about 230 the
relatives of our Lord according to the fleshy the so-
called Desposynoi, i. e., who belonged to the
Master, were well known to Julius Africanus.2
These " brothers of the Lord " were changed
to " cousins " as late as the fourth century, by
the development of the veneration for the Virgin
Mary. Circumspect scholars, therefore, do not
need the testimony of Saint Paul in order to be
convinced that Jesus had brothers, and, there
fore, lived as a man in this world of ours. Yet
it is fortunate that the personal acquaintance of
Paul with James, the brother of the Lord, does
not leave any doubt on this point.

And it is not only the fact that Jesus lived a
human life which is confirmed by Saint Paul,
who a few years after the death of Jesus changed
from a persecutor to a believer. For Ernest
Renan, the well-known author of a life of Jesus
which surely does not show belief in Christ, has
very correctly said that we can give a brief
sketch of the life of Jesus by the help alone of

1 Eusebius, //. E., 3, 20. — 2 Eusebius, II, E., I, 7, espec. I, 7, 14.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 39

the materials found in the Pauline letters to
the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians.1

Hence, the statement that Jesus was only a
deity, falsely changed into a man by tradition,
is simply disproved by what we know for certain
about Jesus from Saint Paul.

It is another question whether Smith is right
in rejecting the opposite statement that Jesus
was only a man whom later times erroneously
elevated beyond human measure. This ques
tion will occupy us in the three following lect
ures.

*E. Renan, Histoire du peuple <T Israel, V, Paris, 1893, p. 416,
not. i: Paul croyait certaincmcnt, quc Jesus avait existc. On
pourrait faire une petite "vie de Jesus" avec les epitres aux Ro-
mains, aux Corinthiens, aux Galates et avec 1'epitre aux Hebreux,
qui n'est pas de saint Paul, mais est bien ancienne.

THE LIBERAL JESUS-PICTURE

TN my first lecture I started with showing
the contrast between the liberal German
research on the life of Jesus and the theory
of your countryman, William Benjamin Smith.
Smith himself, as we saw, formulated the con
trast in the following manner: the liberal Ger
man theology tries to understand the life of
Jesus as a purely human life; he himself, on the
contrary, is convinced that Jesus was originally
a purely divine being and that the stories of his
human life were merely later fictions. Only by
this assumption does the rise of Christianity ap
pear to him to be comprehensible. We saw that
this theory of Smith's proved to be untenable
even if we do not examine it in detail. Now the
question rises whether his judgment about the
purely human conception of Jesus is more ten
able.

It is not Smith alone who asserts that the

WHAT IS THE TRUTH ? 41

German liberal Jesus-research — for brevity's sake
I shall henceforth use this expression instead of
research on the life of Jesus — cannot hold its
position. Nor is it only the older school which
shares in this criticism.

Five years ago there appeared in Germany a
singular, one-sided, but learned and eminently
ingenious history of the German Jesus-research,
a work which Dr. Sanday, of Oxford, told me
he considers one of the most interesting and im
portant German books he knows.1 The author
is a young German theologian, Albert Schweit
zer (born 1875), lecturer at the University of
Strassburg, and the title of the work is From
Reimarus to Wrede, a History of the Research
on the Life of Jesus? W. B. Smith could not
have been acquainted with this work, when in
1906 he published his book on the Pre-christian
Jesus, and in his new book, Ecce Deus, he also
shows no knowledge of it. At any rate, Smith's
judgment about the German Jesus-research is
independent of Schweitzer, and the conceptions
of Jesus by Smith and Schweitzer differ as widely

1 Comp. W. Sanday, The Life of Jesus in Recent Research, Oxford,
1907, p. 44 /. — 2 Tubingen, 1906.

42 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

as possible. For it does not occur to Schweitzer
to deny, as Smith does, the historicity of Jesus.
Jesus, according to Schweitzer, was a man who
played his part in history, a man who was filled
with erroneous thoughts of Messianic hope and
who was shipwrecked together with his hopes.
Schweitzer, therefore, is one of the extremest
supporters of those liberal views against which
W. B. Smith polemizes with great vivacity. And
yet the assertions of Schweitzer and Smith have
many points in common. What I said above in
the last lecture, about Smith and Arthur Drews
on the one side, and the school of comparative
religious history on the other, holds good here,
too: extremes meet. And here, too, this meet
ing of extremes is very significant for the present
situation of the Jesus-research.

Smith is of the opinion that the efforts of lib
eral German theology to describe a purely hu
man life of Jesus have been futile. He says that,
in spite of all deeply grounded knowledge and
talented constructions, none of these efforts have
been crowned with success. None of them lasted
longer than a very short time, and that, too,
only in a very small circle. The picture of Jesus

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 43

which has been painted by liberal German the
ology, the "liberal Jesus-picture," so to speak,
is for him only a chimera, a creation of fancy, in
reality unimaginable, and completely lacking in
historical value and justification. The ingenious
biographers of Jesus, he says, have stared into
the crystal sea of the Gospels and every one of
them has seen his own face mirrored in these calm
depths. Similar words are used by Schweitzer.
The last chapter of his book, where he deals
with the results of the Jesus-research, opens with
the following passage: Those who like to speak
of a negative theology have no great difficulty
here. There is nothing more negative than the re
sult of the Jesus-research. Such a Jesus as is
painted by this research, a Jesus who appeared as
the Messiah, preached the morality of the King
dom of God, and died in order to sanction his work,
never existed. His figure is a fanciful picture
sketched by Rationalism, revivified by Liberalism,
wrongfully represented by modern theology as the
result of historical science. This figure has not
been destroyed from without, but has collapsed,
being shattered and torn asunder by the real his
torical problems which arose one after the other.

44 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

Schweitzer, as well as Smith, brands the biog
raphers of Jesus as false psychologists, and, like
Smith, accuses them of having been guided in
painting their pictures of Jesus more by their
own personal ideals than by history.

Now, the question is, whether Smith and
Schweitzer are right in that which they have in
common. Can we agree with their judgment
about the liberal Jesus-research of our day,
which looks on Jesus as a purely human being?
Has this research work, extending over so many
years, this work for which both Schweitzer and
Smith have words of the highest, almost dithy-
rambic, praise, really led to no tenable results?

With this question we shall occupy ourselves
in this and the next two lectures.

Our first task will be — and that is the subject
of my lecture to-day — to gain a survey over the
German Jesus-research. This survey must be
such as to make the judgments of Smith and
Schweitzer intelligible. We can and must pass
over in silence those scholars who, as, e. g., Nean-
der1 and Tholuck2 seventy years ago, and at the

1 A. W. Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, Hamburg, 1837.

2 A. Tholuck, Die Glaubwiirdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte,
Hamburg, 1837.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 45

present day Bernhard Weiss,1 in Berlin, and
others, see not merely a man in Jesus. Nor is
it my duty to give all details of that line of the
development of the Jesus-research with which we
have to deal, that is to say, that which regards
Jesus as a purely human being. That would
only confuse and weary you with a host of names.
My aim must be to emphasize the principal
phases of the development and to make intel
ligible the genesis of the liberal Jesus-picture,
opposed so energetically by Smith and Schweit
zer, and to characterize the present situation of
the liberal Jesus-research.

The liberal German Jesus-research begins
under English deistic influence in a very rad
ical manner with Hermann Samuel Reimarus
(f 1768), the author of the so-called Wolffen-
biittel-Fragments, edited, as we saw,2 by Les-
sing. To Reimarus Jesus appeared wholly a
man, who belonged completely to the Jewish
people. Jesus considered himself the Messiah
in the sense of the politically colored Messianic
hopes of his time. He foretold the close ap-

1 B. Weiss, Das Leben Jesu, ^ vols., ist edition, Berlin, 1882.

2 Above, p. 3.

46 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

proach of the Messianic kingdom and wished
to prepare his countrymen for this approach
by his moral teaching. He did not destroy the
Jewish law nor did he propose new articles of
faith or institute new ceremonies. For bap
tism, as long as Jesus lived, was nothing but a
preparation for the Messianic kingdom already
practised by John the Baptist; and the Last
Supper of Jesus with his disciples was only an
anticipation of the Passover, which was to be
celebrated on the following day. Jesus was a
Jewish Messiah, nothing more. As such he
entered Jerusalem, as such he cleansed the tem
ple and harangued against the Scribes and the
Pharisees. But his Messianic hopes were bur
ied by his capture and crucifixion. His aims,
namely, to found a worldly Messianic kingdom
and to deliver the Jews from their unhappy
political situation, proved abortive. His last
words: My God, my God, why hast thou for
saken me! gave evidence of his being aware of
this failure. But the disciples stole his corpse
and within a few days they created their new
system, which did not harmonize with the orig
inal system of Jesus once shared by them, but

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 47

the system of a Saviour who died for the sins of
mankind and rose from the dead. According
to this system they disposed and fabricated the
history now found in the Gospels. But a keen-
sighted eye, in the opinion of Reimarus, can
recognize in the Gospels the lines of the first sys
tem under the colors laid on by the second.

The inconsiderate radicalism of these thoughts
has always been applauded by similarly inclined
men. Schweitzer praises Reimarus above all
for having done justice to the Messianic escha-
tological element, though he considers him mis
taken in his political conception of it. Neverthe
less, all scholars since Reimarus are unanimous
in thinking that Reimarus in his attempt to un
derstand the life of Jesus as a merely human
one has chosen an impossible way. For the
deception practised, according to Reimarus, by
the disciples, and the complete opposition be
tween their thoughts and those of Jesus — be
tween their second system, as Reimarus says,
and the first — make the beginnings of Christian
ity an insolvable riddle.

Indeed, the influence of Reimarus was at
first very small. Of course, the theologians of

48 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the rationalistic period, whose picture of Christ
is the second type to be mentioned, agreed with
Reimarus in the purely human conception of
Jesus. But they thought they could do without
the ugly judgments about the Gospels and about
the first disciples, which gave the conception of
Reimarus such an offending and odious char
acter. What the Gospels relate is, as far as the
external facts are concerned, essentially his
torical for the rationalistic theologians. But
the evangelists, and before them already the
first disciples, did not see how the facts were
produced in a natural manner. The stories that
Jesus raised some persons from the dead must
be interpreted as referring originally but to a
wakening from a condition of trance. And in the
same manner Jesus, too, is to be regarded as not
having really died on the cross. After having
recovered his strength in the grave, he had in
tercourse with his disciples for forty days at
such intervals as his weak state of health al
lowed. Then he died; where and how, the dis
ciples did not know. Hence the stories of the
appearances of the crucified Christ are through
out historical. The last parting of Jesus was

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 49

naturally interpreted by the disciples as his as
cension. But miracles did not take place either
here or elsewhere in the life of Jesus. The mir
acle was he himself, his character, pure, sunny,
and holy, and yet genuinely human and capable
of imitation by men. The eschatological sayings
of Jesus were rendered appreciable to enlight
ened thought, partly by means of an attenuat
ing interpretation, partly by the hypothesis that
Jesus accommodated himself to the ideas of the
people.

This conception of the life of Jesus continued
to live among the clergy in a few cases as far as
into the second half of the nineteenth century,
and had for a long time its friends among the
more enlightened middle classes. For theologi
cal science and the well-instructed laymen it was
made impossible as early as seven years after
the appearance of the standard work of this type,
the Life of Jesus, published, in 1828, by Heinrich
Eberhard Gottlob Paulus, professor at Heidel
berg. It was David Friedrich Strauss who, in
his famous Life of Jesus of 1835, criticised these
rationalistic constructions in the keenest and
most convincing manner. It was not difficult

50 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

to show that here the Gospels were not done jus
tice to, and that the events which, according
to the rationalistic interpretation, lay at the bot
tom of the evangelical stories were not capable of
explaining that which actually is narrated. This,
too, was evident — that the character of Jesus as
conceived by the rationalists was not such as to
allow his disciples to believe in miracles where
none had occurred. And it was not by his crit
icism alone that David Friedrich Strauss marked
a new stage in the Jesus-research. It was chiefly
his criticism of the narrations themselves that
was epoch-making, and that criticism formed
the main contents of his book. Apart from the
introduction and extensive closing remarks, the
two volumes consist merely of loosely connected
chapters which, bit by bit, try to prove the
evangelical history to be unhistorical. Strauss
attempted to gain this result by means of myth
ical interpretation. Myths are something other
than fabulous traditions. All historical tradi
tion, the farther it reaches, is more and more
contaminated by unhistorical traits, exaggera
tions, and amplifications; but the essential core
is a real historical fact. The myth, too, may

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 51

start from a historical event or a historical per
son, but its real subject is never a historical fact
but an idea; the myth is a thought clothed in
the garb of history. Such myths are found by
Strauss in the New Testament. He does not deny
that these myths had one starting-point in the
grandeur of Jesus' character. But a second is to
be found in the ideas of a Messiah which existed
among the Jews before Jesus. And this second
starting-point is for Strauss the more important.
For, whereas the first is, according to Strauss, a
little-known and, therefore, constant factor, it
is the second which brings variety into his de
ductions. What was expected of the Messiah
was told of Jesus. That is the song which is
sung by Strauss with continual variations. The
New Testament stories are fictions which express
the idea that Jesus was the Messiah. The his
torical residuum which is left by this interpre
tation is very small. Strauss nowhere collects
it; we must gather it from occasional notices.
Jesus grew up at Nazareth, was baptized by
John, considered himself the Messiah, wandered
about Palestine with disciples, contended with
the Pharisees, and succumbed to the enmity of

52 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the latter. There is also, according to Strauss,
much spurious matter in the words of Jesus,
transmitted to us by the Gospels. Yet he ac
knowledges some authentic material in the great
groups of sayings in Saint Matthew, especially
in the sermon on the mount. But he makes
little positive use of these sayings. His deduc
tions exhaust themselves, for the most part, in
the examination of the reliability of the material
handed down to us. Here, too, he remains es
sentially the critic.

Nevertheless Strauss's Life of Jesus marks a
real progress which must be admitted even by
those scholars who do not share his views. By
his efforts the unhistorical interpretations of the
rationalists were swept away. And an earnest
attempt was made to understand the genesis of
the New Testament stories without the odious
incredibilities into which Reimarus had been
led. This attempt also failed, as is generally
conceded by later scholars. The evangelical
history in its entirety cannot be understood as
a garland of myths produced only by the Mes
sianic belief. Strauss did not occupy himself
with literary criticism sufficiently to enable him

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 53

to see that the narratives of the Gospels were too
dissimilar to be treated alike. Lastly, liberal
theology, too, has acknowledged that that which
the Gospels narrate is historical to a greater ex
tent than Strauss had assumed. Nevertheless
Strauss, as Schweitzer1 justly remarks, was not
only the destroyer of former solutions of the
Jesus-problem, but was also the prophet of a
new science, the science of modern Jesus-re
search. Strauss himself had a presentiment of
this fact. When a friend asked him to sketch a
definite picture of Jesus and to show what his
torical remains were left after his criticism, he
granted the justice of this request, but declared
at the same time that he for himself could not
at that period fulfil it. In the darkness, said he,
which has been produced by the extinction of all
historical lights, one can only gradually regain
one's sight and learn to discern individual ob
jects} It was his hope that future research would
be more fruitful in this respect. And this has
come to pass. Strauss bequeathed to his suc
cessors, aside from the elimination of the super-

1 P. 94. — 2To his friend Binder, 12 Mai 1836, in Th. Zieg-
ler's David Friedrich Strauss, I, Strassburg, 1908, p. 171.

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

natural, practised already by Reimarus and the
rationalists, the conviction that the so-called
Gospel of Saint John, in comparison with the
three others, was of little value for a historical
life of Jesus.

It is true, however, that Strauss did not find
direct successors within the next twenty years
or more. For the next phase of liberal German
theology, which received its character from the
historical school of Ferdinand Christian Baur,
of Tubingen (f 1860), scarcely brought direct
results for the Jesus-research. That was the
consequence of the conception of the earliest
Christian history peculiar to the Tubingen
school. Here the Catholic church of the closing
second century was considered as the ultimate
result of a long controversy between the Jew
ish Christianity of the first apostles and their
followers and the liberal party of Paul. In
the course of this controversy, which gradually
smoothed down the contrast of the respective
parties, all New Testament books were regarded
by Baur as having played their part. They were
considered as having been written for the pur
pose of maintaining partial views, at first unre-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 55

strictedly but then more or less with a concil
iatory spirit. About Jesus little was said. His
person stood in the darkness which preceded the
controversy. His character was only vaguely
seen in the Gospels, which were considered as
quite later writings, treating their material in a
by no means impartial way. Yet the Tubingen
school has indirectly promoted the task pro
posed by Strauss. Firstly, the literary criticism
of the sources, neglected by Strauss, was taken
in hand. Later science, it is true, did not ac
cept to a large extent that which the Tubingen
school considered as being proved. Neverthe
less the Tubingen school has inaugurated the
modern biblical criticism. Secondly, the Tu
bingen school justified in the eyes of many
scholars the instinctive distrust felt by Strauss
for the fourth Gospel. Till this day the position
of most liberal theologians with regard to the
Gospel of Saint John is to some extent condi
tioned by the judgment of Baur. Lastly, the
Tubingen school brought to light the serious
ness of a question only touched upon by Strauss,
the question whether Jesus clung to Jewish par
ticularism or whether he himself inaugurated

56 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the universalism of later Christianity. The
most important of these three points is the first:
the Tubingen school stimulated serious work in
the field of New Testament criticism.

In the generation after Strauss this work had
good results in respect to the synoptic Gospels,
in Strauss' opinion the main sources for the life
of Jesus. These results not only deviated from
Baur in giving up step by step his dates for the
Gospels, but also produced a new hypothesis
about their genesis. Baur adhered to the hy
pothesis of Griessbach (f 1812) who considered
Saint Mark as an epitomizer of the two other
synoptic Gospels. Then (after 1838) arose the
hypothesis that our second Gospel, or a similar
work of the same author, had been used by the
other synoptics and, therefore, was the oldest
Gospel. Besides Saint Mark theological science
recognized a second source, used by the first
and third evangelists, which contained prin
cipally sayings of Jesus.

Before these results were widely accepted,
Theodor Keim, of Zurich (f at Giessen, 1878),
holding modified Tubingen views, published in
1 86 1 an outline of The Human Development of

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 57

Jesus,1 which may be called the first sketch of
his later Life of Jesus? the first sketch also of
the liberal Jesus-picture. Keim, it is true, con
sidered Saint Matthew and not Saint Mark the
oldest evangelist. Nevertheless his historical
description has great likeness to that of the
later liberal theologians who built upon Saint
Mark, for the sequence of events in Saint Mat
thew is nearly the same as in Saint Mark. I
shall not separate Keim's Outline from his later
work nor yet do I intend to give a summary of his
Life of Jesus. Not only because time is short,
but still more because it would not do justice
to Keim; for no brief summary can give an idea
of the charm of his descriptive powers, nor could
it show that he frequently reveals in the purely
human Jesus a majesty which agrees better
with the author's faith than with his histor
ical research. I therefore confine myself to laying
before you some characteristics of his conception
of the life of Jesus which are important for our
subject because they were of great influence for

xTh. Keim, Die menschliche Entwicklung Jesu Christi. Aka-
demische Antrittsrede am 17 December, 1860, Zurich, 1861.

2Th. Keim, Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, 3 vols., Zurich,
1867-72.

58 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

that conception of Jesus which is understood
when we speak of the "liberal Jesus-picture."

Firstly, the Johannine account which men
tions, as will be seen more accurately later, many
journeys of Jesus to Jerusalem, and, therefore,
divides his public life between Galilee and
Judea, is put aside as being unhistorical; Jesus
worked only in Galilee and the neighborhood
until he journeyed to Jerusalem to the "Death
Passover, " as Keim calls it.

Secondly, where Saint Luke diverges from
the other synoptics Keim follows the latter. He
dismisses the appearances of the risen Jesus in
Saint Luke, and even the appearance to the
women at Jerusalem related by the first Gospel,
as being unhistorical. Keim, as well as later
liberal biographers of Jesus, building upon Saint
Mark, knows only of appearances in Galilee.
The disciples, he thinks, fled to Galilee imme
diately after the capture of their Master.

Thirdly, the stories of the childhood in the
first and third Gospels are also put aside. Yet
much is told about the development of Jesus on
the ground of conclusions from his later life.

Fourthly, at the baptism by John, Jesus be-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 59

came conscious of his Messianic calling, and af
ter the imprisonment of the Baptist he con
sidered that his hour had come and appeared
publicly in Galilee as a teacher.

Fifthly, there followed a short period of only
four months of happy activity in Galilee, the
"Galilean Spring," as it has been called by Keim,
and often since by many others. The main sub
ject of Jesus' preaching at this time was, accord
ing to Keim, the kingdom of God. Jesus did not
exclude the Jewish ideas of a supernatural com
ing of the kingdom at the end of this world, but
he laid stress upon the spiritual and moral char
acter of this kingdom and always dismissed all
thoughts of an earthly Messiah. Nor did he de
clare himself to be the Messiah in this Galilean
period. Keim allows that Jesus, besides his
preaching, healed many sick people, but he does
not understand this in the sense of supernatural
miracles. In stories which cannot be naturally
explained, as for instance the story of the rais
ing of Jairus's daughter, he sees an exaggeration
of the tradition.

Sixthly, the continuation of this activity in
Galilee was made impossible to Jesus by the

60 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

increasing enmity of the Scribes and Pharisees.
After the execution of the Baptist he felt him
self forced out of Galilee. His wanderings to
Bethsaida, to Gadara, to the confines of Tyre,
and to Caesarea Philippi are "ways of flight,"
as Keim says. On these wanderings the resolve
to give his life another turn ripens within him.
He recognizes that he must in Jerusalem oppose
his enemies with a revelation of his Messianic
dignity. The confession of Peter at Caesarea
Philippi, Thou art the Christ, is the turning-point.
Jesus now begins to prophesy his Passion and
then he sets out for Jerusalem.

Seventhly, he there reveals himself as the
Messiah, first by his entrance and afterward by
cleansing the temple and contending with the
Pharisees. But he soon sees that his way leads
to his end, and in the idea that his death would
be an atonement, a sacrifice constituting a new
covenant, his thoughts of death, at first rest
less and hesitating, ultimately found peace.

Finally, we may remark that Keim, in the
framework of the history he tells, has great
knowledge of things never related by the sources.
He knows how Jesus was affected by the execu-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 61

tion of the Baptist. He interprets the wander
ings outside Galilee as "ways of flight," though
no source tells us anything of this kind. He sees
in Jesus at this time the ripening of the thought
that his activity must in the future be of another
kind. He knows how in his restless striving
after light and in his stormy and feverish groping
there rose in Jesus, though not quite on the level
of his former ideas, the thought that his death
would be the sacrifice of the New Covenant.

Already Keim's Outline, of 1860, was, in
spite of its small dimensions, regarded by Hein-
rich Holtzmann in 1863 as a work as useful as
any other of the period since Strauss. Indeed,
Holtzmann, together with Bernhard Weiss the
most successful defender of the priority of Saint
Mark, has, in spite of this divergence from Keim,
been strongly influenced by him in his concep
tion of the life of Jesus. But even before Keim
had published his great work, Holtzmann in his
book on the synoptic Gospels1 in 1863 gave a
sketch of the life of Jesus2 which, perhaps, more
than Keim's work influenced the views of liberal

'H. J. Holtzmann, Die synoptischen Evangelien, Leipsic, 1863.
JL. c., pp. 468-496.

62 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

German theologians. His reconstruction of the
life of Jesus is in all essential points the same as
Keim's. The above-mentioned characteristics
in Keim suit Holtzmann too. Holtzmann, it is
true, is more reserved in his construction. He
therefore criticises some points in Keim's de
velopment of Jesus. But, on the other hand, his
greater trust in Saint Mark reveals to him many
details more accurately than Keim saw them.
Holtzmann believes he can distinguish no less
than seven phases of the public life of Jesus in
Galilee. It is, therefore, very significant that
Holtzmann criticises the judgment of the famous
historian, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, who, in
1812, thought it impossible to sketch a critically
tenable history of Jesus. Such a judgment, said
Holtzmann,1 could now, fifty years after Nie
buhr, only be regarded as a prejudice. In fact,
it was the opinion of liberal German theology
that a reliable knowledge of the life of Jesus,
based on Saint Mark, had been attained. Keim
and Holtzmann have, in connection with earlier
and later research, drawn the outline of the
Jesus-picture which for more than a generation
1 L. c, p. 497.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 63

was considered by liberal theology to be the pict
ure of the historical Jesus.

Of course, the pictures painted by liberal the
ology down to the end of the century are not
wholly identical. On the one side, even in Saint
Mark unhistorical traits were found; on the
other, the trust in his narration was so great that
rationalistic interpretation revived, so that the
frame remained intact, whereas the picture was
retouched in a rationalistic manner. On the
one side, only the details of the prophecies of
Jesus' passion and resurrection were criticised;
on the other, such utterances of Jesus were
wholly put aside. On the one side, in the escha-
tological sayings of Jesus, as read in the Gospels,
a kernel of genuine words of Jesus was found, a
kernel regarded as not being in opposition to
Jesus' spiritual conception of the kingdom of
heaven; on the other side, in the great escha-
tological utterance (in Mark 13 and parallels)
a Jewish-Christian apocalypse of the time of
the Jewish war was recognized, and almost
the whole of this utterance, therefore, was con
sidered not to be genuine words of Jesus. Yet
these differences, with a few exceptions to be

64 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

mentioned hereafter, only point to variations
of the same type.

How deeply rooted the conviction was that
this was the historical type was shown by the
reception of Renan's Life of Jesus1 after 1863.
Renan, who, though supporting himself on Ger
man criticism, had reverted to rationalistic
views aesthetically transfigured and poetically
and sentimentally dressed up, was not able to di
vert German scholars from their way. Strauss
too, in his Life of Jesus for the German People, of
1864,2 accepted in its essential points the liberal
Jesus-picture. This picture was also received by
dictionaries of general information. It was re
garded as the picture of the historical Jesus in
its distinction from the Christ of the dogmas;3
the soaring flight of pious Christological im
postures, as Holtzmann called them,4 was ridi
culed.

*E. Renan, La vie de Jesus, Paris, 1863. — 2£>. F. Strauss, Das
Leben Jesu fur das deutsche Folk bearbeitet, Leipsic, 1864.

3 Comp. Jesus v. Nazareth im Wortlaut eines kritischbearbeiteten
Einheitsevangeliums dargestellt von W. Hess, Tubingen, 1900.

4 In Die synopt. Evangelien. p. 7, he characterizes Keim's outline
in the following manner: Line akademische Antrittsrede, die dem
himmelsturmenden Hochfluge des frommen christologischen Schwin-
dels . . . die ganze Macht und Klarheit der unmittelbar empfind-
baren Wirklichkeit entgegensetzt.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 65

But even before 1900 a phase of the Jesus-
research was announced which was new in two
respects.

More skeptical views, which saw in Saint
Mark also more symptoms of exaggerating tra
dition than traces of eye-witnesses, had never
been quite silent since Strauss. One of these
skeptics, who afterward had followers, especially
in Holland, Gustav Volkmar, of Zurich (f 1893),'
a pupil of Baur, as early as in 1882 defended
the assertion that Jesus was considered to be the
Messiah only after his death. This signified
nothing less than a heavy blow for everything
which liberal theology had hitherto set forth
with regard to the rise and development of the
Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus.

A second critical opposition to the liberal
Jesus-picture arose from quite another quarter,
since Baldensperger, at Giessen, in i888,2 on
the ground of the apocalyptic literature, which
had not been hitherto sufficiently appreciated,
had shown that the Messianic hope of the time

1 G. Volkmar, Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit, mil
den beiden ersten Erzdhlern, Ziirich, 1882.

»W. Baldensperger, Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der
messianischen Hoffnungen seiner Zeit, Strassburg, 1888.

66 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

of Jesus was determined not by the worldly po
litical but by the supernatural eschatological
form of the Messianic thoughts. Baldensperger
himself did not yet draw the consequences from
this view with regard to Jesus' preaching about
the kingdom of God. But Johannes Weiss, at
that time at Marburg, did so somewhat later,1 in
spired by the prize essays of two German clergy
men.2 Jesus' preaching of the kingdom of God,
such was Weiss' opinion in 1892, is to be under
stood merely eschatologically. Hence his ethics
is characterized by a world-renouncing ascetic
trait. His Messianic consciousness also, ex
pressed in the name Son of Man, participates in
the transcendental and apocalyptic character of
the conception of the kingdom of heaven. These
assertions, too, seriously affected the prevailing
views about the character of the Messianic self-
consciousness of Jesus.

The first tendency, which recommended an
elimination of the eschatology, was strength-

1 J. Weiss, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, Gottingen, 1892.

2 E. Issel, Die Lehre vom Reiche Gottes im Neuen Testament. Eine
von der Haager Gesellschaft . . . gekrdnte Preisschrift, Leyden,
1891; O. Schmoller, Die Lehre vom Reiche Gottes in den Schriften
des Neuen Testaments. Bearbeitung einer von der Haager Gesell
schaft . . . gestellten Aufgabe, Leyden, 1891.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 67

ened when, in 1896, Lietzmann, now at Jena,
undertook to prove that Jesus never called him
self "Son of Man."1 The second tendency, by
which, on the contrary, the eschatology was
placed in the centre, was promoted by the in
creasing interest in the history of religions. For
the stranger an idea, when understood by means
of the comparative history of religion, appeared
to modern thought, the more confidently did the
supporters of religious history believe that its
true meaning had been found.

The new phase of the Jesus-research, an
nounced and prepared in this manner by the
closing nineteenth century, made itself felt in
the beginning of the twentieth.

First to be mentioned is William Wrede,
of Breslau (f 1906), who ever since our student
days had been a dear friend of mine and whom I
esteemed for his purity and fine feeling and highly
valued for his learning and his sagacity, in spite
of our theological differences. In 1901 he pub
lished his book, The Messiah-Mystery in the Gos
pels (i. e.y the secret of Messiahship).2 Here the

1 H. Lietzmann, Der Menschfnsohn, Freiburg, 1896. — 2 W.
Wrede, Das Messiasgtheimnis in den Evangelien, Gottingen, 1901.

68 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

skepticism of Volkmar was combined with influ
ences from the school of comparative religious his
tory. And it was just this combination that made
Wrede's book a strong attack on the Jesus-
picture hitherto prevailing in liberal theology.

Here, too, I can single out only the most char
acteristic points.

Firstly, Jesus was, according to Wrede, con
sidered to be the Messiah only after his disciples
had believed in his resurrection. Then at first
the Messiahship was understood in the sense that
Jesus would soon come on the clouds of heaven
and establish his kingdom; later the Messianic
dignity of Jesus was referred back to his earthly
life. An intermediate stage in this development
is seen in Saint Mark. Frequently, it is true,
Saint Mark repeats the later tradition, which
pictures Jesus in his earthly life as the Messiah;
as, for instance, at the entry into Jerusa
lem and in his confession before the high
priest. And Saint Mark occasionally makes
Jesus confess himself as the Messiah even in the
beginnings of his activity. But essentially Saint
Mark, according to Wrede, has another theory.
Wrede characterizes it by the term he invented,

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 69

as " the Messiah-mystery.'' During the earthly
life of Jesus, that is the meaning of this term, only
the devils and the intimate companions of Jesus
knew of his Messiahship; to others, in conform
ity with Jesus' orders, this mystery remained
hidden until after the resurrection. Such, ac
cording to Wrede, is Saint Mark's main theory.

Secondly, the very juxtaposition of this theory
and the traces of the opinion that Jesus already
in his earthly life revealed his Messiahship
makes the narrative of Saint Mark hazy and
psychologically incomprehensible. It becomes
still less conceivable, according to Wrede, be
cause it presupposes a superhuman dignity of
Jesus as the son of God in a supernatural sense.
Hence it is governed by a dogmatic theory, not
by the author's insight into psychological ne
cessities. A real knowledge of the life of Jesus
is not to be found in Saint Mark.

Thirdly, those lives of Jesus, therefore, which
assert a development of his Messianic self-
consciousness and of his revelation of it, and a
gradual education of the disciples to Jesus' own
understanding of his Messianic calling, cannot
be supported by Saint Mark. For Saint Mark

70 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

knows nothing of such development. Moreover,
these modern descriptions of the life of Jesus
suffer in different degree from false psycholo
gizing. Often they behave themselves as if they
were acquainted with the most intimate emo
tions and reflections of Jesus.

Fourthly, the question whether Jesus consid
ered himself to be the Messiah at all, is left unde
cided by Wrede. If Jesus did so, the genuine
tradition is so interwoven with later ones that
it is not easy to recognize.

The impression of the whole of Wrede's treat
ment is, that we know much less about the life
of Jesus than was assumed by the liberal the
ology. Above all, Wrede found difficulties which
we cannot resolve in the catastrophe of Jesus'
life. Thus the liberal Jesus-picture is declared
by him to be untenable in all respects. Even
the main turning-point in the life of Jesus, which,
according to the liberal conception, is the con
fession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi, is set aside
as unhistorical.

In the same year, 1901, Albert Schweitzer pub
lished a sketch of the life of Jesus, which from the
opposite side, by emphasizing the eschatological

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 71

idea, opposed the liberal Jesus-picture.1 Ac
cording to Schweitzer, Jesus lived completely in
the eschatological Messianic ideas, based upon
the near approach of the supernatural kingdom
of heaven. The people, it is true, as well as
John the Baptist, regarded him only as the
forerunner of the Messiah. He himself thought
the time when he was to reign as Messianic king
immediately approaching. From his ethical in
structions, therefore, we cannot separate the
supposition that now the world would only last
for a very short time; they proposed only In
terims-Ethics, as Schweitzer says. When Jesus
sent forth the twelve with the sermon of in
structions, preserved in Saint Matthew 10, he
expected that the end would come before their
return. Disappointed in this expectation and
obliged by the confession of Peter at Caesarea
Philippi to concede his Messiahship, he resolved
to force the coming of the kingdom by his death.
His entry into Jerusalem was for him himself a
Messianic act, but the people greeted him only
as Elijah, the precursor of the Messiah. In the

1 A. Schweitzer, Das Messianitdts- und Leidensgeheimnis. Line
Skizzt des Lebens Jtsu, Tiibingen, 1901.

72 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

disputes of the next days, also, Jesus did not
reveal himself as the Messiah. But Judas be
trayed to Jesus' enemies the secret of his Mes-
siahship known to him since Caesarea Philippi.
The result was that Jesus met the death which
he had recognized as being necessary for the
coming of the Kingdom of God.

Of these two publications of the year 1901,
Wrede's book very much occupied the attention
of German scholars. Schweitzer's assertions
were not valued as important until he himself
qualified them as epoch-making in his second
book, mentioned at the beginning of this lect
ure, whose title, From Reimarus to Wrede,
should rather be From Reimarus to Schweitzer.
Here Schweitzer considers it as a divine dis
pensation that Wrede's book and his own sketch
appeared simultaneously. In both books, he
proclaims, war is declared against the liberal
Jesus-picture with its false psychology and af
fected historical clearness which could only
modernize Jesus. The liberal Jesus-research
is, in his opinion, on the point of suffering de
feat. The historical truth, of course, is not
found by Schweitzer in Wrede's ideas but in his

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 73

own consistently eschatological views. At the
same time, he admits that this really historical
Jesus, who with Messianic majesty tried to real
ize erroneous and antiquated hopes, can have
no value for us. The historical knowledge of
Jesus has become, so he thinks, an offence to re
ligion. Only the idea of Christ, plucked out of
its temporal soil, that is to say the spirit of
Jesus, will overcome the world.

The friends of the liberal Jesus-picture have
not given up their arms either to Wrede and
Schweitzer or to Drews and Smith. I will prove
this by only a few references to the copious litera
ture of the most recent time. The gray-haired
Holtzmann, who died in 1910, as late as 1907
contributed, as he said, to a revision of the judg
ment of death pronounced by Schweitzer upon
the views hitherto defended by him.1 Julicher,
in some ingenious, careful, and instructive lect
ures,2 refused to accept Wrede's statements, but
he did it with great esteem for Wrede himself,

1 H. J. Holtzmann, Das messianische Selbstbewusstsein Jfsu,
Tubingen, 1907; Die Marcus-Kontroverse in ihrer heutigen Gestalt
(Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft, Leipsic, 1907, pp. 18-40, 161-
207.)— 2 A. Julicher, Neue Linien in der Kritik der evangelischen
Uberlieferung, Giessen, 1906.

74 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

while he treated the assertions of Schweitzer
with supreme sarcasm. In opposition to Drews
and Smith, Weinel confidently gave a nega
tive answer to the question, Is the liberal Jesus-
picture refuted?1 And only a few months ago
Heitmiiller, in his article "Jesus Christ" in the
Handworterbuch of Schiele and Zscharnack, es
sentially followed the lines of liberal theology.
But Jiilicher concedes that in an examination
of the sources the subjectivity of the examiner
cannot be completely excluded, and that for
this reason alone an objectively true and abso
lutely indisputable picture of Jesus will not be
delineated by historical science. Weinel openly
acknowledged many faults in the liberal Jesus-
research, and an interesting question arises from
the manner in which he pronounces Jesus as
" the essence and standard of all Christianity,
and even more than this,"2 although his Jesus-
picture remains within purely human limits.
The question is, whether, if the whole of Chris
tianity one day should agree with his views, a
Christological development would not begin the

1 H. Weinel, 1st das "liberate" Jesusbild widerlegt ? Eine Antwort
an seine " positiven " und seine radikalen Gegner mil besondrer Ruck-
sicht auf A. Drews, Die Christusmythe, Tubingen, 1910. — 2P. 20.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 75

next day which would destroy the framework of
the purely human conception of Jesus. Heit-
miiller, too, admits that the height of the self-
consciousness of Jesus almost stupefies us and
that it nearly surpasses the limits of humanity.
Thus we see that confidence in the reliability
of the liberal Jesus-picture has been shattered.
Besides, the critical opposition is still alive. The
skepticism of Wrede and the eschatological zeal
of Schweitzer did not die out. A point of view
quite similar to Wrede's is held by no less a critic
than Julius Wellhausen.1 And the skepticism of
Wrede is even surpassed by Wellhausen in un
dermining the reliability of the biblical sayings
of Jesus: his exclusive confidence in Saint Mark
prevents him from doing justice to the words
of Jesus, preserved only by the first and third
evangelists, and in Saint Mark, too, he finds
much spurious matter in the sayings of Jesus.
Even the word "gospel" is considered as a term
first set in circulation by the Christian mission,

*J. Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Afarci, iibersetzt und erkldrt,
Berlin, 1903; Das Evangelium Matihaei usw., Berlin, 1904; Das
Evangelium Lucae usw., Berlin, 1904; Einleitung in die drei ersten
Evangflifn, Berlin, 1905; Das Evangelium Johannis, Berlin, 1908.
Comp. espec. Einleitung in die drei usw., pp. 89-115.

76 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

About the life of Jesus more is known, accord
ing to Wellhausen, than about his sayings. But
a development in the life of Jesus is to be found
in Saint Mark only by false interpretation. And
the tale of Saint Mark that Jesus went to Jeru
salem in order to be crucified there is untenable.
The suffering Messiah and the entire conception
of the Messiah, as understood by the Christians,
is an idea which first grew up with the belief in
the resurrection of Jesus. Wellhausen concedes
that Jesus during his lifetime was held by his dis
ciples to be the Messiah in the Jewish sense.
But Jesus himself, according to Wellhausen, was
more reserved in this respect. Perhaps he ul
timately confessed himself as the Messiah before
the high priest. But really he did not wish to be
more than a sower who scattered the seed of the
word of God and strove to prepare a religious
regeneration of his nation. Had he not died he
would scarcely have become a historical person.
He never spoke to his disciples either about his
death or about his resurrection, to say nothing
about his silence as to his second coming.1
This conception of Wellhausen's is a small frag-

*J. Wellhausen, Einleitung, p. 115.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 77

ment of the liberal Jesus-picture. The rest has
gone to pieces. Wellhausen himself confesses
that the historical Jesus as the foundation of
our religion is a doubtful and insufficient com
pensation for that which has been lost with the
gospel. This is a confession of the shipwreck
of the liberal Jesus-research which only knows
a human Jesus.1

Schweitzer's ideas, too, apart from his ab
struse fancies, did not find opposition alone. For
the emphasis laid on the eschatological element
in the self-consciousness of Jesus has in Germany
its friends, especially among younger theologi
ans. And hence, too, it appears that liberal
German Jesus-research is approaching ship
wreck; for if even Oskar Holtzmann, although
he is far from accepting Schweitzer's eschato
logical views, already saw in Jesus an ecstatic
person,2 still less can a sound human conscious
ness be found in a Jesus as pictured by Schweit
zer. Of course, the objectionable book of the
Danish philologist and theologian Rasmussen,
and the scarcely more pleasing work of the Ger-

1L. c. — 2O. Holtzmann, War Jesus ein Ekstatiker? Tubingen,
1903.

78 WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

man physician De Loosten,1 two books in which
the psychical soundness of Jesus is discussed and
denied, cannot be charged to German theology.
But it is significant that an ultra-liberal German
theologian who, to a certain extent, accepted
Schweitzer's assertions, took into account the
possibility that we may find in Jesus traits of
psychological abnormalities.2 If the purely hu
man conception of Jesus were forced to accept
this, then here too would be a confession of its
shipwreck.

Yet this judgment and the similar ones pro
nounced above are but anticipations. To-day
I must come to a close here. The question
whether the Jesus-research, dealing only with a
human Jesus, has produced tenable results will
occupy us in the next two lectures.

1 E. Rasmussen, Jesus. Eine psychopathologische Studie, ubertra-
gen und herausgegeben von Rottenburg, Leipsic, 1905; De Loos-
ten, Jesus Christus vom Standpunkte des Psychiaters, Bamberg,
1905. Comp. H. Werner, Die psychische Gesundheit Jesu (Biblische
Zeit- und Streitfragen, IV, 12), Gross-Lichterfelde, 1908.

2G. Hollmann, in Theol. Rundschau, IX, Tubingen, 1906,
P. 275-

Ill

LIBERAL JESUS-RESEARCH AND THE
SOURCES

TN the preceding lecture we obtained a survey
" of the liberal German Jesus-research, that is
to say, that branch of German Jesus-research
which considers Jesus a purely human being.
We have also seen that critics, reasoning from
quite opposite points of view, arrive at the re
sult that the liberal Jesus-research has suffered
shipwreck. However differently they may think
in other respects, in this verdict William Ben
jamin Smith and Albert Schweitzer do agree.
Are they right in pronouncing this verdict?
Has the liberal German Jesus-research really
led to no tenable results? This is the question
which is now to engage our attention.

One would deem it an easy task to give a nega
tive answer to this question. For it is not diffi
cult to quote one scholar against the other, and,
because of the many discordant views of the

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

different scholars, to impress their contradic
tions so strongly upon the hearers that they
lose all confidence in this contradictory his
torical research. But this is not the way to
settle the question. For, in the first place,
much difficult study, for instance the criticism
of the synoptic Gospels, has only gradually
worked its way out of the chaos of wild hypothe
ses, each depriving the other of light and breath.
And, in the second place, we cannot deny that,
e. g., the views of Heitmiiller in Schiele and
Zscharnack's Handwbrterbuch are held to be cor
rect by a great number of scholars even at the
present day. Quite a number of historical truths
would no longer hold their own if we were to
recognize as certain those only which have been
generally accepted.

Nor can we prove that the liberal German
Jesus-research has suffered shipwreck by merely
pointing out that the certainty with which The-
odor Keim once thought he had penetrated into
the details of the real life of Jesus and his de
velopment, proved to be illusive. Even though
a few scholars follow similar lines to-day, e. g.,
Oskar Holtzmann, still this phase of Jesus-re-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 81

search belongs to the past. Many of the scholars
dealing with a purely human life of Jesus will
agree with the complaints of W. B. Smith and
Schweitzer regarding unjustifiable sharp-sighted-
ness and false psychologizing in the older liberal
Jesus-research. Trivial criticism of mistakes
made by the older scholars and admitted by the
later ones themselves does not discredit the
whole attempt to sketch a purely human life of
Jesus.

We must go to work far more seriously. Let
us discuss our question in a twofold manner,
historically to-day, theologically in the next lect
ure. I shall first explain what I mean by this
twofold manner.

History has to reckon with the analogy from
other experience. No Protestant will find fault
with historical research for relegating to the
sphere of fiction or misunderstanding or exag
gerating the miracles told in the Catholic lives
of saints. Everything that is impossible ac
cording to all our experience is to be put aside
as being unhistorical. For historical research
has to make clear in its genetic connection what
happened in the past; and, as measure for what

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

is possible, it has to employ our experience.
If we read in a text-book of modern history that
the death of Queen Victoria on the 22d of Jan
uary, 1901, was the occasion for memorial ser
vices in Canada as early as the 2jd of January,
we have no reason to doubt this. Ten years
ago the telegraph carried news across the
ocean. But if an eighteenth-century report
were to tell us that the death of George
Whitefield, which occurred on September 20,
1770, in Newburyport, Mass., was the occasion
for a memorial service by John Wesley on the
ist of October of the same year, we should
have to conclude that this could not be true.
In those days what happened here in America
could only have become known in England sev
eral weeks later. Again, we shall not doubt the
report that Wesley held a memorial service for
his old friend in London on the i8th of Novem
ber, 177°) even if we do not know who brought
the news of Whitefield's death to England. It
is sufficient for us to know that, according to
our knowledge of the means of communication
between England and America at that time, the
report could have been in England at that date.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 83

Thus, historical science is often in a position to
recognize a fact upon contemporary evidence,
although it is not known by what it was caused.
If there is a possible cause to be presumed, our
ignorance regarding this cause does not matter.
But where we cannot find any cause which, ac
cording to our experience, is possible, then every
conscientious historian is prevented from speak
ing of a historical fact. Hence, when historians
are forced by credible reports to recognize a
fact as having really occurred, they must as
sume causes lying within the sphere of our ex
perience.

From this it follows that historical science,
when investigating the life of Jesus, must take
into consideration the supposition that it was a
purely human life and that nothing happened
in it which falls outside the sphere of human
experience. Giving up this supposition would
mean admitting that the life of Jesus, or this or
that event in his life, is incommensurable for
historical science.

Permit me to illustrate this by an example.
It is a fact, which Reimarus was wrong in try
ing to push aside, that the disciples of Jesus

84 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

were convinced of his resurrection. Historical
science, therefore, is not only allowed but also
obliged to explain this conviction of the resur
rection of Jesus from causes lying within the
sphere of natural human experience. If his
torians come to the conclusion that such an ex
planation is impossible, then they will have to
say: "Here historical knowledge and the possi
bility of scientific historical perception cease;
for the historian does not come to a satisfactory
solution of this question, nor can he do so; here
he comes into touch with the sphere of religious
belief." This was the position of the famous his
torian Leopold von Ranke1 regarding Christ's
resurrection. But as long as a historian does
not declare his science to be incompetent, he
must look for a natural explanation of the faith
of the disciples. No description of the life of
Jesus that recognizes supernatural factors is
purely historical. An author treating his sub
ject in some chapters as a historian would do,
but elsewhere emancipating himself from the
analogy of human experience, will produce a
mixture of history and assertions of faith. And,

lWeltgeschichte, III, Leipsic, 1883, p. 169.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 85

in my opinion, this combination of heterogeneous
modes of consideration is to be welcomed neither
by a believing Christian nor by a scholarly his
torian. Every one who undertakes the task of
writing a life of Jesus comparable to historical
biographies and, like these, requiring scien
tific consent of the reader, is forced to suppose
that his life was a purely human one. If, on
the contrary, the life of Jesus cannot be under
stood as a purely human one, then historical
science may give from its sources evidence to
this or that of the doings or sufferings or sayings
of Jesus, but to do full justice to his life and his
person is beyond its limits. The latter is my
conviction.

If I attempt to prove its soundness to you,
then, after what I have said above, a twofold
task lies before me.

First, I shall have to show that nobody, rely
ing on the supposition that Jesus was a purely
human being, is able to write a really historical
life of Jesus; and, secondly, I shall have to make
evident that this supposition itself, although
necessary for scientific historical treatment of
the subject, is yet a false one. The first proof

86 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

requires, as I said, historical discussion, and
the second cannot be furnished without theo
logical argumentation.

To-day only the former one will occupy us.
To-day, therefore, I let pass the supposition that
the life of Jesus was a purely human one. To
day I do not wish to do anything beyond at
tempting to prove that on this supposition a
really historical life of Jesus and a historically
tenable picture of Jesus' personality cannot be
built up.

Only that description and conception is his
torically justifiable which does justice to the
sources of our historical knowledge and is ten
able in itself. For to-day, therefore, our sub
ject has two principal parts: we have, first, to
test that criticism of sources which is made
necessary by the supposition of a purely human
life of Jesus; and, secondly, we have to ascer
tain whether by means of this criticism a tenable
reconstruction is attained of that which really
happened, a tenable description of the life of
Jesus and a tenable conception of his personality.

Now the criticism of the sources is a double
one: research has, in the first place, to ascertain

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 87

what the sources are, from what time they date,
from whom they come; and, in the second place,
it has to form an opinion as to the value of the
sources; that is, what amount of credibility we
may assign to them. Both these questions in
the Gospel of John are intricately intertwined.
Therefore, I cannot first treat the former ques
tion with regard to the synoptic Gospels and
John, and then the second one likewise for all
our Gospels. But it is just as impossible to dis
cuss both questions, first, with regard to the
synoptics, then, with regard to John. For the
question of the credibility of the synoptics can
not be settled without reference to the Gospel
of John. I should, therefore, like to go a mid
dle way. At first we shall confine ourselves to
the synoptics, in which liberal theologians since
Strauss see the real source of the life of Jesus.

Here research since the time of Strauss has
led to widely recognized results. There are, it
is true, even scholars of repute, like Theodor
Zahn, who hold an Aramaic Gospel of the apostle
Matthew, closely resembling our first Gospel,
to have been the oldest Gospel. Nevertheless, the
ruling view, and to my mind the correct one, is

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

that the Gospel of Mark, or a more original form
of it not essentially different from ours, was
the first Gospel. The Gospels of Matthew and
Luke are dependent on it; the arrangement of
the materials in Mark determines the order of
the stories in the other two. This is especially
noticeable in Luke. He follows the order of
Mark up to the journey of Jesus to the Passover
in Jerusalem at the time of his death, i. e., to
9: 51. Then he introduces materials which he
did not find in Mark; but nine chapters farther
on he again returns to the description of Mark.
Thus, it would seem as if everything between
9: 51 and 18: 14 happened on the journey from
Galilee to Judea. These chapters are, there
fore, called Luke's "report of the journey."
This "report of the journey" is the clearest
proof of Luke's dependence on Mark. For, if
Luke had possessed any knowledge of the order
of events apart from Mark, he would not have
introduced his new material so helplessly into
the framework of Mark.

Just as certain as the fact that Mark is one
of the sources of the first and third Gospels is
the other fact that the first and the third evan-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 89

gelists had a second common source in a book
probably originally written in Aramaic but made
use of by them in a Greek translation. This
book contained chiefly sayings of Jesus, and js,
therefore, often called "collection of sayings."
The differences of opinion about the reconstruc
tion of this lost source are of minor importance
for the questions which occupy us. But it may
be mentioned that, as is generally recognized,
the first, and particularly the third, evangelist
had special sources in addition to the afore
named two.

These outlines of synoptic criticism may be
looked upon as certain. Their recognition has
nothing to do with the question whether the
life of Jesus is to be considered as purely human
or not.

But it is this very question that makes it
difficult for many scholars to form an unbiassed
opinion about the date of these sources. Through
Strauss and the Tubingen school, who, it is true,
did not possess our knowledge of the sources of
the synoptics, the tendency had arisen to come
as far down as possible in fixing the date of
the Gospels. Strauss undoubtedly came to this

90 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

view from his desire to obtain as much time as
possible for the growing of myths. At present,
critics have everywhere recognized that it is not
correct to date the Gospels so late. But still they
often defend pretty late dates. Jiilicher, e. g.,
admits only the "collection of sayings" to be
earlier than the year 70; the Gospel of Mark is
placed by him shortly after 70, Matthew shortly
before 100, and Luke in the time between 80
and 100. Yet it is shown by a recent publi
cation of Adolf Harnack,1 that even critical
theology can come to quite different results.
In this new book Harnack is defending the
opinion that the Acts were written at the same
time as that in which their narrative closes; that
is, the time when Saint Paul had been in captiv
ity at Rome for two years. According to Har
nack, this second year of Paul's Roman cap
tivity ended in the year 59. 2 According to an
inscription, which Harnack did not make use
of, the year 61 or 62 is probably more correct.3

1 A. Harnack, Neue Untersuchungen zur Apostelgeschichte und zur
Abfassungszeit der synoptischen Evangelien, Leipsic, 1911. — 2 Die
Chronologic der altchristlichen Litteratur, I, Leipsic, 1897, p. 239.

3 Comp. H. Lietzmann, Ein neuer Fund zur Chronologie des
Paulus (Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Theologie, 53, 1911, pp.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 91

Earlier than the Acts, hence before 61 or 62
A. D., the Gospel of Luke must have been writ
ten. Of a still earlier date must be the first copy
at least of the Gospel of Mark which Luke made
use of and which probably is essentially iden
tical with the Gospel published by Mark in later
years. It is still farther back, about 50 A. D.
or even earlier, that Harnack places the "collec
tion of sayings," while he dates our first Gospel
shortly after 70.

The reasons which Harnack gives in favor of
these dates are undoubtedly worthy of consider
ation, though not convincing.1 But even if I
were convinced, I should be sure that Harnack
would not do away with the later dates which
are defended by liberal theologians. The very
interest in a purely human life of Jesus will pre
vent the critics from recognizing in the great
eschatological sermon of Luke 21 a prophecy of
Jesus about the destruction of Jerusalem and

345-354). Since my lectures there have appeared: A. Deiss-
mann, Paulus, eine kultur- und religionsgesc hichtliche Skizze, Tu
bingen, 1911 (comp. pp. 159-177), and A. Harnack, Chrono-
logische Berechnung des " Tags von Damaskus" (Sitzungsberichte der
konigl. Preuss. Akademie der JVissenschaften, 1912, pp. 673-682).

1 I think, e. g., Harnack has not done justice to the arguments
which are in favor of seeing a reference to the Jewish war and the
destruction of Jerusalem in Luke 21: 24.

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

from admitting so early a date to the Gospels.
The supposition that the life of Jesus was a
purely human one interferes with an impartial
opinion on the question as to the date of the
Gospels.

But I do not wish to lay much stress on this
point. For liberal theology, in my opinion, may
abandon the tendency to date the Gospels as
late as possible without endangering its presup
positions. Legends arise much more quickly than
is assumed by liberal theology since Strauss.
Whenever a narrator undertakes to call up in
somebody else the same deep impression which
an event or an alarming piece of news had made
upon himself, he is inclined to exaggerate, as
every-day life teaches us. Gustavus Adolphus
received two or three hostile shots through his
arm and breast in the battle of Liitzen on
November 6, 1632. In two reports, written
eight days after the event, though not by eye
witnesses, we are told that he received three bul
let wounds and two stabs, and in another report,
likewise not by an eye-witness, written on No
vember 1 8, i. e., twelve days after the battle, the
two or three wounds have become seven (six

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 93

bullet wounds and one stab). Another report not
made by an eye-witness, dated from two days
earlier, even tells of a brilliant speech uttered by
the dying king.1 The reluctance of the liberal
theology to accept an early date of the synoptic
Gospels is, therefore, quite unnecessary.

For — and now we come to the intrinsic value
of our sources — if the question were simply
whether the synoptic Gospels were written by
eye-witnesses or not, only then would it have
been worth while to date them as late as possible
in order to prove that they could not possibly
have been written by contemporaries of Jesus.
But that is not the question at all. It is only in
the case of the "collection of sayings," which
did not contain much narrative, that we may
assume apostolic authorship — the authorship of
Matthew according to tradition. But we cannot
prove this. Our synoptic Gospels are nothing
but the reflection of the tradition, oral and writ
ten, that existed in the congregations of their
time. And in the case of Mark we have, as it
seems, to do with oral tradition only. In addi-

1 Comp. G. Droysen, Die Schlacht bei Lutzen (Forschungen zur
deutschen Geschichif), 1865, pp. 69-236.

94 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

tion to the oral tradition and the two written
sources mentioned above, the only written ma
terial which the first evangelist could possibly
have had was the genealogical table which he
reproduces in chapter i . Luke undoubtedly pos
sessed other written sources besides the Gospel
of Mark, besides the " collection of sayings, " and
besides his genealogical table of Jesus. In the
first words of his Gospel he expressly refers to
many others before him, who, as he says, had
taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration
of those things which are most surely believed among
us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from
the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of
the word.1

Under these circumstances, it must be granted
that the first and third evangelists did not pos
sess any personal knowledge, based on special
traditions, about the course of events in the life
of Jesus. Otherwise they would not have sim
ply followed Mark in this respect. But nat
urally this does not signify that Mark was well
acquainted with the course of the life of Jesus.
Nevertheless, the liberal German Jesus-research

1 Luke i: I, 2.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 95

wrongly assumed this, though of late it has done
so with decreasing confidence. We shall soon see
why. For the present, permit me to return to
the assumption itself for a moment. On what
grounds was this confidence in the story of Mark
founded? According to Eusebius,1 Papias, a
bishop in Asia Minor about 140 A. D., heard the
following story about Mark from a man of the
older generation : Mark having been the interpreter
of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not indeed
in order, whatsoever of the things said and done by
Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed
him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who
adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers,
but with no intention of giving a connected account
of the Lord's discourses, so that Mark committed
no error while he thus wrote some things as he re
membered them. From this passage people in
ferred that Mark reproduced reminiscences of
Peter, and, therefore, they even spoke of traces
of an eye-witness in Saint Mark. To me this
appreciation of Mark by liberal theologians
has always been a very striking illustration of
the fact that even theologians who otherwise

'Euscbius, II. E., 3, 39, 15.

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

are very skeptical toward tradition can have
great faith in tradition when it serves their
purpose. I myself think that this notice of
Papias is of very doubtful value. It may have
had its origin in the tendency of the later church
to bring into connection with the apostles the
two Gospels that do not bear an apostolic name.
It need not be of greater value than the notice
in Irenaeus, that Luke wrote down the gospel
preached by Paul.1 Moreover, it is not at all
improbable that this notice in Irenaeus comes
from the very same passage in Papias to which
Eusebius owes the notice about Mark. In any
case, if we trust the notice of Papias about
Mark, we ought also to recognize the other fact
which Papias mentions, viz., that Mark wrote
what he wrote, not indeed in order. But this
is ignored, while the former notice is accepted.
And why?

The answer can only be: because the inter
est taken in a purely human life of Jesus fa
vored this view. People wanted a chronologi
cal sketch, but they were not inclined to accept
that of John. Hence, they presumed a correct

1 Ircnaus adv. HCET., 3, I, 2.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 97

order of events was to be found in Saint Mark.
Of John I shall speak in a moment. Even apart
from the Johannine question it can be shown that
Mark had no real knowledge of the course of the
life of Jesus. Wrede has brought forward many
arguments in favor of this point, which are inde
pendent of his theory about the Messiah-mys
tery. Everything in the line of development
that people thought they could possibly dis
cern in the narrative of Mark they discovered
only by unjustifiable sharp-sightedness. If this
is the case, then to prefer Mark above the other
two synoptics, when viewed generally, that is,
before the details are examined, is the result of
a prejudice, a prejudice so unfounded that it
proves the liberal Jesus-research to be in the
wrong on this point.

This becomes more evident when we intro
duce the Gospel of John into the discussion. To
Luther this Gospel was the unique, gentle, prin
cipal Gospel1 As late as the time of Schleier-

1 Vorrede zum Neuen Testament, Erlanger Ausgabe, deutsche
Schriften, 63, 115: " Weilan Johannes gar wenig Werk von Christo,
aber gar viel seiner Predigt schreibt, wiederum die andern drei
Evangelisten viel seiner Werk, wenig seiner Worte beschreiben:
1st Johannis Evangelium das einige zarte, rechte Haupteyangeh-
um und den andern dreien weit, weit vorzuziehen und hoher zu
heben."

98 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

macher it was valued far more highly than the
synoptics. But Strauss eliminated it from the
real sources for the life of Jesus. And all the
friends of the liberal Jesus-research, together
with Schweitzer, appreciate this as a great merit.

For the Gospel of John really throws insur
mountable obstacles in the way of describing a
purely human life of Jesus. We shall have to
glance at these difficulties before proceeding.

They are based at first on the evangelist's
opinion of Jesus. For him Jesus is the Word of
God, become flesh? i. e.9 the most perfect revela
tion of God. His Gospel leads up to the confes
sion of Thomas, My Lord and my God.2 If this
Gospel is written by the apostle John, and if he
is, as the Gospel at any rate then would cer
tainly show, the disciple whom Jesus loved* the
disciple who on the night before the death of
Jesus was leaning on Jesus' bosom4 — then lib
eral Jesus-research will have considerable diffi
culty in maintaining its view against that of
the disciple who cast the deepest glance into
the heart of Jesus. Moreover, if we may trust
the words of Jesus reported in this fourth Gos-

1 John i : 14. — 2 John 20 : 28. — 3 John 13 : 23; 19 : 26; 20 : 2;
21 : 7, 20. — 4 John 13 : 23.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 99

pel, then they unquestionably reveal in Jesus
a self-consciousness which does not agree with
a purely human life of him. Furthermore, some
miraculous works are told about Jesus in this
Gospel which suit a purely human Jesus no
better. I mention only the raising of Lazarus.1
Finally— and this is of special importance— the
sketch of the life of Jesus in this Gospel differs
from that in the synoptics in most essential
points. In the synoptic Gospels Jesus, after
being baptized in Judea by John, first worked
in Galilee exclusively. He only comes to Jeru
salem for his Death-Passover. And according to
the Gospel of Mark, which is supported in this
respect only by the apocryphal Gospel of Peter,
Jesus appears to his disciples as the Risen One
only in Galilee. In the Gospel of John, how
ever, Jesus, in consequence of his journeys to re
ligious feasts, is represented as being in Judea and
Jerusalem four times between his baptism and
his passion.2 And the appearances of the risen
Lord are, if we ignore the appendix to the Gos
pel, chapter 21, all located in Jerusalem, just as

'John ii : iff— 2 John 2: 13 -3 : 21; (comp. 4 : l); 5 ' 1~6 : X5
7 : 10-10 : 21; 10 : 22-39; 12 : I2/.

ioo WHAT IS THE TRUTH

is the case in the Gospel of Luke. If this nar
rative of the appearances of the risen Jesus was
written by the apostle John, then it would be
difficult for liberal theologians to deny that
the grave of Jesus on the third day was empty;
then they would have to give up the con
tention found everywhere in liberal Jesus-re
search that the disciples of Jesus immediately
after his capture fled in a fright to Galilee and
that there, far from the grave, which fiction
only later turned into an opened one, they came
to the impression that they had seen the Lord.

I could mention other traits in the fourth
Gospel that do not agree with a purely human
conception of the life of Jesus, e. g., the words
on the cross which are here given.1 But the ex
amples I have quoted will suffice to make it evi
dent that the purely human conception of Jesus
forces its supporters to declare that the fourth
Gospel does not come from John; moreover, that
it is not worthy of belief. But by doing so it
proves itself, from a really historical point of
view, unable to do full justice to the sources.

For from the really historical point of view

1 John 19 : 26-30.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 101

the following, to my mind, is certain for a man
whose judgments are unbiassed:

Firstly, the Gospel of John cannot have been
written later than about no A. D., as Harnack,
too, admits,1 although he attributes the author
ship to another John, who is not the apostle.
For the Gospel is known to Justin Martyr,2 who
was converted to Christianity at Ephesus about
130; and before 117 the letters of Ignatius
show that Ignatius was influenced by the say
ings of Jesus reported in the fourth Gospel.3
The tradition that the apostle John, still living in
the year 98, wrote this Gospel in his old age,4 can
not, therefore, as far as the date of the Gospel's
origin is concerned, be proved to be incorrect.

Secondly, the tradition that John the apostle
wrote the Gospel is old. Polykrates of Ephesus,5
about 190, and Irenaeus,6 about 185, are not
the first witnesses. This tradition existed when
about 170 the so-called Alogoi opposed it,7 and

1 Chronologic, etc., I, 674. — 2 Th. Zahn, Geschichte des Neutesta-
mentlichen Kanons, I, Erlangcn, 1888, pp. 516-533; admitted by
Harnack (Chronologic, I, 674). — 3Comp. P. Dietze, Die Briefe
des Ignatius und das Johannesevangelium (Theol. Studien u.
Kritiken, 78, 1905, pp. 563-603). — 4 Irenaeus, 3, 3, 4; comp. 3,
I, 2. — 6 Eusebius, //. £., 5, 24. — 6 Comp. not. 4. — 7 Epiphanius,
H&r., 51, 3 ff.; comp. Th. Zahn, Geschichte des Neutest. Kanons,
I, 252-254.

102

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

even Justin Martyr was acquainted with it1—
a fact which ought not to have been doubted.
Moreover, this tradition reaches back directly to
the time when the Gospel first became known,
for the appendix to the fourth Gospel, without
which the Gospel was probably never known
in the church, expressly names the disciple
whom Jesus loved, and thereby it means John,2
as the author of the Gospel.3

Thirdly, a true historical method demands
that we should carefully test the correctness of
the sketch of the life of Jesus given in the fourth
Gospel, apart from the question of its author
ship. For, even if the author or authors of the
appendix were mistaken in assigning the Gospel
to John the apostle, we should still have to ex
amine whether its statements about frequent so
journs of Jesus in Jerusalem might not be based
on good traditions.

The latter I leave aside for the present mo
ment, as belonging rather to historical criticism.
The manner in which the two other facts have
been dealt with in the liberal Jesus-research dur
ing the last seventy years has proved as clearly

1Comp. not. 2, p. 101. — 2 Admitted even by Jvilicher, Einlei-
tung in das N, T., 5th edition, 1906, p. 370. — 3John 21 : 24.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 103

as possible that liberal Jesus-research by its pre
suppositions is prevented from being able to
recognize unpleasant facts impartially.

Baur placed the fourth Gospel as late as 180.
Step by step critics retreated from this untena
ble position. Even to-day, however, some schol
ars think that the Gospel was not written before
130 A. D.

And the tradition regarding the author of the
Gospel has become a real martyr in the hands
of liberal critics. Even the most improbable
statements of later writers have been believed by
some scholars in order to render this tradition
suspicious. A notice of Papias, e. g., certainly
not handed down in its correct form, was re
garded as evidence proving that John was mur
dered by the Jews. And thus they fancied they
could refute the tradition of John's residence in
Asia Minor, closely connected with the tradi
tion about the origin of the Gospel.1 I do not
mean to say that these scholars had no honest
desire for truth. It is, on the contrary, this very
same desire for truth that must lead them to

1 Comp. J. H. Bernard, The Traditions as to the Death of John
the son of Zebedfe (The Irish Church Quarterly, 1908, pp. 51-66);
Th. Zahn, Einleitung in das N. T., II, Lcipsic, 1900, p. 467.

io4 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

impossible assertions about Saint John as long as
they assume that the life of Jesus was a purely
human one. For they correctly realize that, if
John had lived at Ephesus for many years in his
old age, the tradition that he was the author of
the fourth Gospel could not easily be pushed
aside.

Of late the Johannine question has entered a
new phase. Up to the present time the unity of
the fourth Gospel has been almost an axiom.
Since the time of Baur this Gospel has appeared
to scholars as the coat of Christ "without seam,"
which could not be divided. But during the
last four years especially, F. Spitta of Strassburg,
Edouard Schwartz the excellent philologist of
Freiburg, Wellhausen, and Wendt, who held these
views for many years (since 1886), have tried to
prove that we can discern several sources, or, at
least, different layers, in the fourth Gospel.1 Some

1 F. Spitta, Das Johannesevangelium als Quells der Geschichte
Jesu. Gottingen, 1910 ; E. Schwartz, Aporien im vierten Evangelium
(Nachrichten der Gesellschaft der Wissenschafan, philos.-hist.
Klasse, 1907, p. 343 /., 1908, pp. 115 /., 149 /•, 497/0; J- Well
hausen, Erweiterungen im vierten Evangelium, Berlin, 1907; Das
Evangelium Johannis, Berlin, 1908; H. H. Wendt, Die Schichten
im vierten Evangelium, Gottingen, 1911; W. Bousset, Istdasvierte
Evangelium eine litte rarische Einheit ? ( Theologische Rundschau,
Tubingen, 1909, pp. 1-12 and 39-64). Comp. C. R. Gregory,

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 105

of the observations made by these scholars are
not wholly wrong, to my mind. I think we cannot
help recognizing that the first copy of the original
author (in my opinion, John the apostle) per
haps suffered alterations and additions from one
or more hands before it took the shape in which
the Gospel now lies before us, perhaps even be
fore it had reached the stage of a uniform whole.1
But the form in which these theories are offered
cannot be considered as acceptable. Of Spitta's
and Wendt's thoughts perhaps it may be said
that they, more than the earlier liberal scholars,
do more justice to the important, though in
many respects puzzling, source which we have
in the fourth Gospel. But the statements of
Edouard Schwartz and Wellhausen, in my opin
ion, are but another illustration of the fact that
the presupposition of a purely human life of
Jesus forces literary criticism to assertions with
regard to the sources which can only be regarded
as mistakes of learned sagacity.

Wellhausen und Johannes, Leipsic, 1910; Th. Zahn, Das Evange-
lium des Johannes unter den Ildnden seiner neuesten Kritiker, Neue
kirchliche Zeitschrift, XXII, Erlangen, 1911, pp. 28-58, 83-115;
A. Juncker, Zur neuesten Johannes kritik, Vortrag usw., Halle, 1912.
1 A similar view seems to be held by my colleague, Professor
Paul Feine (comp. his Theologie des Neuen Testaments, 2d edi
tion, Leipsic, 1911, p. 515).

io6 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

Now, after having given some remarks about
the Johannine question, I return to the general
criticism of the Gospels. If the fourth Gospel
is more than a fiction dealing arbitrarily with
the synoptic tradition, then it becomes perfectly
evident that the synoptic tradition, apart from
the sayings of Jesus which are attested by the
"collection of sayings," is but one form of the
tradition which lived in the Christian commu
nity at that time, and liberal Jesus-research
appears as not doing justice to the sources when
wholly rejecting the fourth Gospel by means of
a so-called literary "criticism."

The same objection must be made against the
manner in which liberal theology answers the
question how much of our tradition about Jesus
is to be regarded as credible in its details. This
question falls outside the scope of the criticism of
the sources. It is already part of historical recon
struction. In its sphere we may now distinguish
historical criticism, which tries to ascertain what
really happened, and historical description. It
remains for me to show that the liberal Jesus-
research has proved itself and must prove itself
in both to be unable to do full justice to the
sources.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 107

I shall first confine myself to the historical
criticism. I wish to call attention to two facts:
first, that the inability referred to shows itself
when the fourth Gospel, too, is taken into con
sideration; second, that it also appears when
the synoptic story only is dealt with.

The narration of John differs from that of the
synoptics — apart from the character of the say
ings of Jesus — not only in dividing his public
activity, as we have seen, between Galilee and
Judea, and in extending it, in connection there
with, over two years and a quarter, but also in
making a different statement about the last day
of Jesus. For, while according to the synoptics
Jesus still partook of the Passover meal with
his disciples on Thursday evening,1 so that this
Thursday was the I4th of the Jewish month
Nisan, the very day of the Passover, and Jesus
died on the I5th, the story of John makes it
perfectly clear that the last meal of Jesus with
his disciples on the Thursday evening could not
have been the Passover. For he tells us2 that
the Jewish accusers of Jesus on the next day

'Comp. Mark 14:12-16; Matt. 26:17-19; Luke 22:7-15.
2 John 18 : 28.

i o8 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

went not into the judgment hall (of Pilate), lest
they should be defiled, but that they might eat the
Passover. Thus, according to the fourth Gos
pel, Jesus died on the I4th of Nisan.

There is also a difference expressly emphasized
in the fourth Gospel with regard to the begin
ning of Jesus' public activity. According to
Mark and Matthew Jesus went to Galilee in
order to begin his public activity after that John
the Baptist was put in prison.1 John, however,
states expressly with regard to the first activity
of Jesus : John was not yet cast into prison?

The latter notice, which is generally recog
nized as an intentional correction of the state
ment in Mark and Matthew, cannot possibly
be understood as being a piece of fiction with
a distinct tendency. We have here, therefore, a
tradition or a personal reminiscence, of whose
correctness, in spite of its opposition to Mark
and Matthew, the author of the fourth Gospel
was convinced. Unbiassed research ought to
give preference to this statement above that of
Mark, because it is given with such confidence
and because it is supported by the fact that Luke

1 Mark i : 14; Matt. 4 : 12. — 2 John 3 : 24.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 109

has not taken over the notice of Mark. But
the advocates of a purely human life of Jesus
may not assume the fourth evangelist capable of
having more accurate knowledge in any respect
than Mark, although, as we have seen, nothing
supports the belief that Mark had a more inde
pendent acquaintance with the life of Jesus.

Regarding the differences about the day on
which Jesus died, we are in a similar position.
Only lately Heitmiiller admitted that the sy
noptic narrative is very improbable.1 We can
not imagine all the trouble taking place on the
very day of the Passover. Simon of Cyrene,
too, is coming from the field at the time when
Jesus is led to Golgotha.2 Was this possible on
the day of the Passover?

But sooner than give preference in such an
important matter to the fourth Gospel, which
is otherwise not recognized as a source, liberal
scholars make every possible, and even impos
sible, effort. Declaring, as the Tubingen school
already had done, that the death of Jesus, in
the fourth Gospel, was laid on the I4th of Nisan,

1 Artikel "Jesus Christus," Handworttrbuch, III, 369.

2 Mark 14 : 21.

no WHAT IS THE TRUTH

in order that Jesus might appear as the true
Passover lamb, and admitting that the account
of the synoptic Gospels is even less credible,
Heitmuller says1 we have to abandon all hope
of fixing the exact date, and to be satisfied with
knowing that Jesus was crucified shortly before
the feast. Thus, these critics follow neither of the
accounts that have come down to us. They know
better than both of them ! And all this to escape
the necessity of agreeing with the fourth Gospel!
This may be rendered inevitable by the presup
positions of scholars who acknowledge only a
purely human life of Jesus, but I cannot con
sider it the correct method.

The situation is practically the same in the
case of the more important differences with re
gard to the scene of Jesus' public activity. A
word of Jesus in the "collection of sayings"—
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have
gathered thy children together even as a hen gath-
ereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would
not2 — speaks volumes in favor of John's state
ment. And what the synoptic Gospels tell us of
Jesus' doings and sayings in Jerusalem hardly

*L. c., p. 370. — 2Matt. 23 : 37; Luke 13 : 24.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? in

fits into the frame of the few days during which
Jesus, according to them, dwelt in Jerusalem;
nay, much that they relate brings us to the con
clusion that Jesus was better known in Jerusalem
than he could have been according to the synoptic
story.1 Nevertheless, the scholars who acknowl
edge only a purely human life of Jesus are forced
by their anti-Johannine interest to abide by the
framework of Mark. When they come to the
appearances of the risen Lord this is still more
necessary, although Luke, too, reports appear
ances only in Jerusalem. Their presuppositions
make impartial historical criticism of the fourth
Gospel impossible.

But even as regards the synoptics, the condi
tion is the same.

I do not wish to spend any time on the mir
acles related by the synoptics. For here many
liberal scholars try to retain as much as pos
sible by means of rationalistic interpretations.
We have to attend principally to the treatment
of the synoptic speeches of Jesus.

Only one other point may first be men
tioned. All the synoptic Gospels presuppose

1Comp. Mark 14 : 14, 29, 43; Luke 23 : 27.

ii2 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

that the twelve disciples were still in Jerusalem
on Easter morning. According to Luke, they do
not leave Jerusalem at all till Pentecost.1 Ac
cording to Mark and Matthew the women are
bidden at the grave of Jesus to go to see them
and send them to Galilee.2 In spite of this, the
liberal Jesus-research knows that the disciples
fled to Galilee immediately after the capture of
Jesus. Not a single source says so. But liberal
Jesus-research must so assume in order that
the disciples may be far from the grave on the
third day. Judging by what I understand of
historical method, such criticism is historically
unjustifiable because it violates the sources in
stead of doing justice to them.

We meet with the same kind of criticism in
the treatment of the words of Jesus reported by
the synoptic Gospels. All these words are
handed down by people who believed in Christ
—that is also the case with the "collection of
sayings." We may admit, therefore, quite gen
erally that they may have been altered by the
views of the community. Moreover, in a few
cases this fact cannot be in the least denied.

1 Luke 24 : 49. — * Mark 16 : 7; Matt. 28 : 7.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 113

Thus, to give one example, no sensible man will
deny that, by the side of the feeding of the five
thousand (Mark 6:35 /.), the feeding of the
four thousand (Mark 8 : I ff.) represents a
doublet of tradition. Luke already felt this; he
omitted the second story of Mark. But if the sec
ond story is unhistoric, then the words of Jesus
(Mark 8 : igf.) When I brake the five loaves among
the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken
pieces took ye up ? And when the seven among
the four thousand, how many basketfuls of broken
pieces took ye up? cannot possibly be anything
else than a fiction of the evangelist or of the tra
dition he followed. Consequently, it is evident
that, among the sayings that are handed down
to us as words of Jesus, there are at least sev
eral which are erroneously ascribed to Jesus in
the Gospels, as they originated in the thoughts
of the later community. But which of the bib
lical words of Jesus are reliable, which not?
Wellhausen is highly suspicious even as regards
the sayings of the "collection" and the parables.
The tradition about the deeds, he says, is more
reliable; the words were altered by the views of
the community. Schweitzer, on the other hand,

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

manoeuvres with the eschatologically colored
words of Jesus in Mark and Matthew as if he
had accurately dated short-hand reports at his
disposal. On the one hand, the parable of the
prodigal son in Luke 15 is regarded undoubt
edly as one of the most genuine, because it
knows nothing of a mediatorial office of Jesus.
Wellhausen, on the other hand, is exceedingly
skeptical in the case of the speeches of Jesus re
ported only by Luke. The Gospel of Luke has,
as he says somewhat indelicately, a marked par
tiality for outcast people.1 Is this method of
judging by individual taste historically permissi
ble? The answer is given by the question itself.
Critics have tried to introduce rules for pick
ing out the genuine words. As basis, says Heit-
miiller,2 we have to take all the materials that
are not in accordance with the belief, theology,
worship, and customs of the ancient Christian
community or, at any rate, do not completely

:J. Wellhausen, Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, p. 69:
" Lukas hat eine ausgesprochene Forliebe nicht bloss fur die gedriick-
ten, verkommenen und missleiteten OX^DC, sondern fur verworfene
Individuen; er treibt Wucher mil dem Spruch : die Gesunden bedurfen
des Arties nicht, sondern die Kranken" In his Das Evangelium
Lucae, Berlin, 1904, however, he deals with the parable of the
prodigal son (pp. 81-85) without uttering direct doubts about its
authenticity. — 2 L. c., p. 361.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 115

agree with it. We may absolutely trust all this
and everything that is organically united there
with. On the other hand, we must pass the
verdict "not genuine" wherever a story or a
word agrees too obviously with the thoughts
and customs and the dogmatic and eschato-
logical wants of the later community. This
sounds very circumspect, and certainly contains
correct ideas. A word of Jesus like that in the
"collection of sayings/' The Son of Alan came
eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man
gluttonous and a winebibber, a friend of publicans
and sinners,1 would be incomprehensible as a
fiction of the community. The accurate proph
ecies of his resurrection, on the contrary, which
the synoptics— but not John— ascribe to Jesus2
were probably first formulated in the commu
nity. Yet we cannot make use of this canon as
a general rule. For, in the first place, if we con
sider with how much freedom tradition treated
the words of Jesus (as we can see on many oc
casions), we shall not at all expect a word of
Jesus in the Gospels which does not agree with

'Matt, ii : 19 = Luke 7 -.34.

'Mark 8:31= Matt. 16 : 21 = Luke 9 : 22; Mark 9:31 =
Matt. 17 : 23 (omitted, Luke 9 : 44).

n6 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the belief of the reporter. If we interpret any
word in this way we have to fear that we mis
interpret it. And, secondly, it would be con
trary to all sound logic if we suspected those
words of Jesus which agree most obviously with
the belief of the ancient Christians simply for
this reason. For there was no greater authority
for these Christians than Jesus. We are also in
practice brought to evident absurdities if we ap
ply this rule. Just one example of the two pos
sibilities: one of the most genuine words of
Jesus, according to liberal Jesus-research, is the
prayer in Gethsemane: Father, take away this
cup from me! Nevertheless, not what I will, but
what thou wilt.1 For people say it does not
agree with the belief of later days that Jesus
sacrificed himself voluntarily. But from whom
could the disciples have heard of this prayer?
Jesus went forward a little from them and they
fell asleep.2 And liberal critics do not know of
any narratives the risen Lord told his disciples.
If somebody were to consider this prayer in
Gethsemane as a later fiction, that would be
quite conceivable from a methodic point of view.

*Mark 14 : 36 = Matt. 26 : 39; Luke 22 : 42. — 2 Mark 14 : 35,37.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 117

And, on the other hand, what agrees more with
the belief of later days than the conviction that
Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, and that the end
of the world was impending! Ought not, there
fore, if the aforenamed rule is admitted to be
right, all the sayings of Jesus that testify to his
Messiahship, and all eschatological speeches, to
be regarded with suspicion?

This conclusion really has been drawn; other
liberal scholars start from this very point, as we
saw in the last lecture. Scholars who acknowl
edge only a purely human life of Jesus do not
rise above arbitrary results because they cannot
make any use of the Jesus of the Gospels and
do not have, all in all, another standard for
eliminating what they consider not genuine,
than their individual taste.

This, naturally, influences the whole descrip
tion, the whole conception of Jesus, to which we
have thus come without noticing it. Scholars
who acknowledge only a purely human life of
Jesus stand here between a Scylla and a Cha-
rybdis. If they resolutely eliminate what they
cannot assimilate, the whole tradition becomes
suspected, and, as we saw in the case of Wrede

ii8 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

and Wellhausen, they do not retain enough ma
terial for a total conception of Jesus, not to say
for a description of his life. If, on the other
hand, they trust these traditions, they have to
take much into account that does not agree
with a purely human self-consciousness in Jesus.
Then let them try, as some have done, to lay
stress on the eschatological thoughts of Jesus
in order to find the frame for the words and
deeds, which surpass human measure, in a high-
flown Messianic consciousness of majesty far
exceeding actual reality. Nevertheless, they do
not find a satisfactory solution of the Jesus-
problem. For a self-consciousness of this kind
will have an abnormal look about it. The next
step, to assume psychic abnormality in Jesus,
is then an easy one.

Thus, the Jesus-research, acknowledging but
a purely human life of Jesus, comes to the con
clusion either: We know next to nothing about
Jesus, or: Jesus was a religious enthusiast.

The former of these two positions is not in
harmony with our most definite knowledge, viz.,
that there was a growing community shortly
after the death of Jesus which highly revered

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 119

Jesus, and which must, therefore, have had a
lively interest in his words and deeds. The
latter does not agree with the impression which
the deepest and, therefore, the genuine words of
Jesus make upon us.

But if neither of these two views, which are
the only consistent ones, is tenable, then the
error must lie in the assumption that Jesus of
Nazareth can be understood from a purely
historical point of view or — which is the same
thing — that his life was a purely human one.

That the error is really to be found there, be
cause that presupposition is untenable, I shall
try to show in the next lecture.

JESUS NOT A MERE MAN

TN my last lecture I tried to show that the
liberal Jesus-research, resting on the as
sumption necessary for historical science, that
the life of Jesus was a purely human one, can
not prevail before the tribunal of historical
science itself, because it does not do justice to
the sources and is not tenable in itself. It is
bound either to come to such a skeptical atti
tude toward the sources that it is forced to give
up all hope of obtaining a picture of the person
and the activity of Christ — and that is not in
harmony with our most definite knowledge, viz.,
that there existed a community shortly after the
death of Jesus which revered him very highly
and must have taken a lively interest in his
words and deeds. Or, if it puts more confidence
in the sources, Jesus and his deeds and his experi
ences must seem to exceed the ordinary human
measure so far that the only possible frame for

120

WHAT IS THE TRUTH? 121

his self-consciousness might be found in a highly
exaggerated Messianic consciousness of majesty,
which no longer agrees with normal human life.
Then Jesus appears as a religious enthusiast,
and it seems natural to ask whether he was psy
chically sound. But such a view does not agree
with the deepest and greatest, and therefore
certainly most genuine, words of Jesus which we
have in the Gospels.

Now, if neither of these attitudes toward the
problem, which the tradition about Jesus sets
us, although they are by themselves historically
possible and consistent, is tenable, then the as
sumption must be wrong that historical science
can solve the problem of the person and life of
Jesus, and the presupposition necessary for his
torical science, that the life of Jesus was a purely
human one, must be untenable. That this is
the case I shall to-day try to prove.

Here again I wish to make some introductory
remarks. I once had a private conversation
about Jesus-research with my honored teacher
and friend, Adolf Harnack, and when I expressed
similar views to those at the end of my third lect
ure, which I have reproduced to-day, Harnack

122 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

said to me in his witty manner, "That is gath
ering apologetic figs of skeptical thistles.'* That
is not my intention. Some conservative the
ologians, it is true, decline scientific historical
research about Jesus for no other reason than
because they wish, after rejecting historical crit
icism, to stick to the whole tradition about Jesus
as something certain for the believer. This is —
in most cases not subjectively, but still objec
tively — insincere. It is true that belief has its
place where history has to abandon all hope of
mastering the biblical tradition with the assump
tions and means at its disposal. Just as science
and religion do not exclude one another, because
the sphere of religion is different from that of
science and perfectly inaccessible to science.
Nevertheless, we must concede that faith cannot
accept anything that does in no way agree with
natural science — I mean science that is conscious
of its due bounds. Even the most earnest be
liever would not, for instance, because he is in a
great hurry, pray to God to make the day six
hours longer. In the same manner, nobody is en
titled to think that anything could or should be
considered to be true by faith that historical sci-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 123

ence through the means at its disposal is forced
to recognize as unhistorical. And we have such
material that is unhistorical in this sense in the
biblical tradition. I shall give three examples.

The sentence of the so-called apostolic creed,
born of the VirginMary, is based only on Matthew
I and Luke i .* The other New Testament writ
ings know nothing of a virgin birth. Moreover,
there are not a few passages which speak openly
of Jesus' parents2 or of his descent from the seed
of David.3 Even in the Gospel of John Jesus twice
is called the son of Joseph,* once by the murmur
ing Jews, once by one of the first disciples. Add
to this, that criticism of the sources shows Mat
thew i and Luke I to be later strata of the ev
angelical tradition. Under these circumstances
I think it is the duty of truthfulness to state
openly that the virgin birth, perhaps, or even
probably, arose out of fabulous tradition.

This is also the case with the story of Christ's
ascension forty days after his resurrection. It
is related only in Acts i.5 None of the Gospels
mentions an ascension of this kind. John and

1Matt. 1:18-20; Luke 1:34, 35. — 2E. g., Matt. 13:55;
Luke 2 : 27, 41, 43, comp. 2 : 33, 48. — 3Matt. I : i; John 7:42;
Rom. 1:3; II Tim. 2 : 8. — 4 John i : 46; 6 : 42. — BActs 1:3.

i24 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

Paul seem to place the ascension immediately
after the resurrection;1 and as late as about 130
A. D. a non-biblical Christian document, the so-
called letter of Barnabas, says: We celebrate the
eighth day (the Sunday) in great joy, for on that
day Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into
heaven after revealing himself.11 The ascension
just forty days after Easter is but a legend.

And, to come to the third example, it is also
undoubtedly true that the reports of the appear
ances of the risen Lord — in Luke and the Acts;3
I only mention the meals of the risen Jesus— have
even within the New Testament become more
massive and rough than is in keeping with the
oldest view about the resurrection of Jesus.4

I know that such statements are even to-day
considered as offsprings of infidelity by many
Christians. But nevertheless the words of Paul
remain true : We can do nothing against the truth,
but for the truth.5 It is, therefore, in my opinion,
the duty of all honest friends of the truth among
the leading Christians to accustom their con
gregations to the thought that not the whole

1 John 20 : 17; Rom. 10 : 6, 7; Eph. 4 : 8-10. — 2Ep. Barnab.
15:9.— 3 Luke 24:43; Acts 10:41. — 4I Cor. 15:5-8; Gal.
I : 16. — BII Cor. 13 : 8.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 125

biblical tradition about Jesus is undoubtedly
historical. More than a century ago a good
German Christian, an opponent of rationalism,
Matthias Claudius, who is highly esteemed in
Christian spheres up to the present day, said,
referring to the biblical reports of Jesus: In
deed, all that the Bible tells of him, all the fine
legends and fine stories, are not to be mistaken
for him (the Lord himself), they are but witnesses
of him9 only bells on his coat — but nevertheless the
best treasure we have on earth.1 If even the hon
orable Claudius, in whose time Bible criticism
lay still in its cradle, could openly speak of
legends that are told about Jesus in the Bible,
it is, indeed, the duty of us, children of a more
advanced century, not to mistake the bells for
the person but to educate our youth and our
grown-up fellow-Christians, in this respect too,
in that freedom which becomes our faith.

This is never to be forgotten whenever we deal
with the miracles told in the Gospels. That

1 Werke, vierter Teil, Brief f an Andres, erster Brief (Werke, II,
4th edition, Cannstadt, 1835, p. in): "Was in der Bibel von
ihm steht, all die herrlichen Sagen und herrlichen Geschichten, sind
frcilich nicht er, sondern nur Zeugnisse von ihm, nur Glocklein am
Leibrock; aber dock das Beste, was wir auf Erden haben."

126 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

Jesus healed many sick people in a manner which
seemed marvellous to his contemporaries and
which would, perhaps, remain unintelligible for
our century too, is a fact which even the liberal
Jesus-research recognizes. And Christians who
have a greater opinion of Jesus will believe him
capable of greater things. But nobody who is
acquainted with historical research can deny
that we can even within our Gospels discover
a dash of exaggeration of the marvellous which
later on led to the fictions of the apocryphal Gos
pels. Tradition always exaggerates, as I showed
by an illustration from modern history in the
last lecture.1 About some miracles told in the
Gospels we may assert with a certain amount
of assurance that tradition reported here what
never happened in this manner. I mention only
the story of the many bodies of the saints which
arose and came out of the graves when the earth
did quake at the moment of Christ's death, and
the other that the veil of the temple was rent in
the same moment.2 And these examples, which
hardly any one will find fault with, are not the
only ones. I consider it my duty to say this too,

1 Above, p. 92. — 2Matt. 27 : 51-53.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 127

that, in spite of my position with regard to the
Gospel of John, some of the miracles told in that
Gospel1 call up grave doubts within me. Exag
gerations, insufficient acquaintance with the so-
called natural laws, and wrong interpretation
of metaphoric language undoubtedly helped to
form our tradition. But we cannot clearly mark
off the share they had in it and separate what
is credible from what is incredible. Nor is this
necessary. The tradition about Christ can be an
invaluable treasure for us, even if, like Claudius,
we recognize fine stories and fine legends in it.

And not only in these particulars I mentioned
has faith to learn to take into account what his
torical research can ascertain without infringing
on strange territory; faith has to make even a
greater concession to the historical conception
of Jesus: faith, too, must start from the fact
that Jesus was a real man. As a man he spent
his life among men; as a man he was regarded
by his first disciples when they came to him; as
a man he died. Even in the Gospel of John
Jesus is spoken of as calling himself plainly a
man : Ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you

1 Comp. John 2:9; 1 1 : 39; 20 : 27.

128 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the truth,1 and Paul contrasted the one man by
whom sin entered into the world with the one man
Jesus Christ by whom the grace of God did abound
to many.'2' And this concession that Jesus was a
man means more than that he had a human
body and a human soul, with which many people
rest satisfied. To be a man, Harnack rightly
says,3 also with regard to Jesus, is, firstly, to
possess such and such a definite and, therefore,
limited and restricted mental disposition; and,
secondly, to be placed with this mental disposi
tion in a likewise limited historical connection.
Every one who knows his Bible must admit that
Jesus was a man of flesh and blood also in this
sense of the word. He not only spoke the lan
guage of his countrymen; he not only shared
their conception of the universe; but he is also
in many other respects influenced by the culture
of his world, by the views into which it drew
him.

But, in spite of all this, the assumption that
the life of Jesus was a purely human one, and
that we can appreciate his personality as a

8 :4O. — z Romans 5 : 12 /. — 3 Das Wesen des Christen-
turns, ist edition, Leipsic, 1900, p. 8.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 129

purely human one, is false. I have thus reached
the subject of the present lecture. I shall try
to prove my statement in a threefold way: from
the words of Jesus himself, from the belief of
his first disciples, and from the belief of the cen
turies after him.

If, therefore, I begin with Jesus' own words,
I must first remind you of something I said in
the preceding lecture. All the words of Jesus
lie before us, as we have seen, in the form in
which they were handed down to us by the com
munity which believed in him. We can, there
fore, in no single case disprove the assertion that
the belief of the later community altered the
words of Jesus. Hence, it is impossible to prove
by any single saying of Jesus that his own words
bear evidence that his life was not purely human.
Only the general impression of the words of
Jesus can be used.

Perhaps this skeptical attitude will surprise
you. Then, permit me first to convince you of
its necessity by a famous and particularly in
structive example.

We should expect that if one of the sayings
of Jesus were preserved authentically word for

i3o WHAT IS THE TRUTH

word, this would be the case with the words in
stituting the Lord's supper. For, without the
slightest doubt, the oldest community in Jeru
salem already celebrated, as Acts relates, the
Lord's supper. That the Pauline congregations
did so is known quite definitely.1 And Paul as
sumes that this meal unites all Christians to one
body.2 This celebration of the Lord's supper,
one would expect, would have kept the words
with which Jesus instituted this supper alive in
the church from the first beginnings of Chris
tianity. In addition to this, we have a report
about the institution of the Lord's supper not
only by the synoptic Gospels, but also by Paul.
And Paul says distinctly : / received of the Lord —
certainly not directly, but by information from
those who were eye-witnesses of the events of
his last night — that which also I delivered unto
you.3 Then he declares: The Lord Jesus, the
night on which he was betrayed, took bread, and
when he had given thanks, he brake it and said:
Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you,
this do in remembrance of me. In like manner also
the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new

JI Cor. ii : 20 ff. — 2 1 Cor. 10 : 17. — 3I Cor. n : 23.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 131

covenant in my blood; this do, as oft as ye drink,
in remembrance of me.1 But none the less we are
not in a position to ascertain with undoubted
historical accuracy what Jesus said. Mark,
whom the first Gospel follows pretty closely,
Luke, and Paul give us three reports that differ
on very essential points.2 In the text of Luke we
cannot even reconstruct its exact wording with
certainty. The manuscripts differ too much.
Perhaps the text of Luke originally read as fol
lows : And he said unto them: With desire I have
desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.
For I say unto you, I will not any more eat it, until
it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he re
ceived a cup, and when he had given thanks, he said:
Take this and divide it among yourselves. For I
say unto you, I will not drink from henceforth of
the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall
come. And he took bread, and when he had given
thanks, he brake it and gave to them, saying: This
is my body.3 In our printed texts there is still

*I Cor. II : 24, 25. — 2Comp. the Preisverteilungsprogramm der
Universitdt Halle for 1894, written by my deceased colleague and
friend Erich Haupt (f February 19, 1910): Ueber die ursprungliche
Form und Bedeutung der Abendmahlswortc, Halle, 1894. — 3 Luke
22 : 15-193.

132 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

added i1 Which is given for you ; this do in remem
brance of me. And the cup in like manner after
supper, saying: This cup is the new covenant in
my blood, even that which is poured out for you.
But as some important manuscripts omit these
words, which are almost identical with those of
Paul, we cannot absolutely refute the statement
that these words are an addition taken over
from I Corinthians. It is, therefore, possible to
reconcile the last supper of Jesus with the as
sumption that his life was a purely human one.
But in order to explain this, I shall have to in
troduce the report of Mark and Matthew also.
It reads:2 As they were eating he took bread,
and when he had blessed, he brake it and gave to
them and said: Take ye; this is my body. And
he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he
gave to them, and they all drank of it. And he said
unto them: This is my blood of the covenant, which
is shed for many (Matthew adds: for the remis
sion of sins). Verily I say unto you, I will no
more drink of the fruit of the vine, until that day
when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. Here,3

:Luke 22 : igb, 20. — 2Mark 14 : 22-25; Matt. 26 : 26-29.—
3 Mark 14 : 25 = Matt. 26 : 29.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 133

just as in Luke,1 we find the remark, which does
not agree with our views of the last supper and
which is missing in the report of Paul: that this
drinking of Jesus with his disciples here takes
place for the last time, but that it will be re
peated in the Messianic kingdom. Here the
attempts to bring the tradition of the first Lord's
supper into consonance with a purely human
life of Jesus have a starting-point.2 The critics
say that Mark, Matthew, and the original text
of Luke do not draw any parallel between the
bread and the body of Jesus as given to death.
This parallel, they say, is a later tradition, like
the characterization of the wine as the blood of
the new covenant, not yet found in Luke. The
new meaning given to the words of Jesus by
these additions is, in their opinion, still more de
veloped by Paul. But originally, they say, the
last supper of Jesus was but a farewell meal and
a joyful anticipation of the fellowship in the
Messianic kingdom; and when Jesus called the

1 Luke 22 : 16.

2 Comp. E. Grafe, Die neuesten Forschungen uber die urchrist-
liche Abendmahlsfeier (Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche, V,
Tubingen, 1895, pp. 101-138) and W. Heitmullcr, Article " Abend-
mahl im Neuen Testament," in Die Religion usw.. H andworterbuch
herausgeg. von F. M. Schiele, I, Tubingen, 1909, pp. 20-52.

134 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

bread his body he merely referred to this fel
lowship.

It can be shown without much difficulty that
this interpretation hardly does justice to the
sources. In the synoptic account two events are
interwoven— as we see very clearly in Luke, es
pecially if we take the text as it reads in most
manuscripts— and these are the last Passover
and the institution of the Lord's supper. To the
former belongs the word about the repetition or,
as it is called in Luke, the fulfilment of this table
fellowship in the kingdom of God. Now, the fact
that the last meal of Jesus with his disciples was
no Passover, as we saw in the preceding lecture,1
is not favorable to the genuineness of this word.
But even if it is genuine and in any way re
ferred to the future fellowship in the kingdom of
God, which Jesus often likens to a great supper,
even then they are irrelevant for our conception
of the Lord's supper, since they have nothing
to do with it but rather belong to the preceding
last meal of Jesus with his disciples. With re
gard to the last supper, purely historical criti
cism may prove it to be probable that the idea

1 Above, p. 107 jf.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 135

of the New Covenant, as offered by Mark, Mat
thew, and Paul, and the larger but probably
nevertheless genuine text of Luke, elucidates its
meaning. Of Moses the book of Exodus1 tells us
that, when the Sinai covenant was made, he sacri
ficed peace-offerings of oxen unto the Lord, and
took half of the blood and sprinkled it on the altar;
the other half he sprinkled on the people, saying:
Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord
has made with you. And in the book of Jeremiah2
is found the prophecy: Behold the days come,saith
the Lord, that I will make a new covenant, with the
house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not
according to the covenant that I made with their
fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to
bring them out of the land of Egypt . . . , but this
shall be the covenant that I will make with the house
of Israel after those days, etc. And, among the
gifts of this covenant, the last and most decisive
one mentioned is : They shall all know me ... ,
for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember
their sin no more. These two passages Jesus evi
dently had in mind when in that night he thought
of his death. Metaphorically, he calls it the

1 Exodus 24 : 5, 6, 8. — 2 Jcr. 31 : 3 1 /.

136 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

sacrifice of the New Covenant; and — even if the
words found only in Matthew, viz., for the re
mission of sins, cannot be accepted as genuine —
nevertheless, according to their purport, they are
at home in the context, as the obvious reference
to the prophecy of Jeremiah proves.

It is very natural that the liberal Jesus-research
of our day should shun this interpretation of
the Lord's supper. For, if Jesus considered his
death the sacrifice of the New Covenant, he has
thereby assigned to himself such a central posi
tion within the history of God's people that this
is not compatible with an ordinary human self-
consciousness. I am convinced that obscuring
the fact that Jesus thought so when he instituted
the Lord's supper is violating the sources. But
I repeat, historically this interpretation cannot
be proved convincingly. Moreover, since the
assumption that the life of Jesus was a purely
human one is in a certain manner necessary for
scientific historical research, as we saw, no one
need be surprised that liberal scholars try by
all possible means to avoid this interpretation.
Perhaps we shall all agree that it would be more
correct for historical scholars to admit that

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 137

Jesus considered his death as the sacrifice of the
New Covenant, and then to declare that this
Jesus who had such views — if he is not to
be taken for a religious enthusiast — cannot be
measured by any of the standards of historical
science. Nevertheless, when considering the
liberal interpretation, we shall bear in mind, as
emphasized above, that we cannot prove by
any single saying of Jesus that his self-con
sciousness surpassed human measure.

But you may say it is not so strange as it seems
at first that the disciples did not remember ac
curately the words Jesus spoke when instituting
the Lord's supper. For the events of the follow
ing night and the next day were exciting enough
to obscure the recollections of the previous even
ing. That is quite right. Surely, in the case of
other sayings of Jesus, e. g.y in the case of the par
ables which easily impressed themselves on the
mind, and in the case of such words as could be
easily remembered on account of their form, tra
dition was really in a more favorable position.
Nevertheless, I adhere to my statement that we
are not so sure of the exact wording of any one of
the sayings of Jesus that we could crush all op
position with any single word ascribed to him.

i38 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

But what the single words cannot achieve,
that is achieved by their whole, even apart from
the Gospel of John.

Our most reliable sources for the words of
Jesus are the "collection of sayings" and the
Gospel of Mark and some material peculiar to
Luke. I shall quote from these sources some
passages that are of importance in this connec
tion, but for the present I shall ignore the Mes
sianic consciousness of Jesus in order to discuss
it afterwards.

A self-consciousness surpassing human meas
ure is already to be seen in the words of Jesus
which are handed down to the first and third
evangelists by the "collection of sayings/'1 All
prophets and the law prophesied until John, Jesus
says here.2 With him (that is the meaning) be
gins a new period. He calls his disciples blessed
for having lived to see this time: Blessed are
your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they
hear. For verily I say unto you, that many proph
ets and righteous men desired to see the things which
ye see and saw them not, and to hear the things

»Comp. A. Harnack, Spruche und Reden Jesu. Die zweiu
Quelle des Matthaeus und Lukas, Lelpsic, 1907. The numbers given
in the following notes are those of the texts printed in this book,
pp. 88-102. — 2Matt. 11:3; Harnack, No. 50.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 139

which ye hear and heard them not.1 He says
outright: Behold a greater than Jonah is here and
a greater than Solomon is here.11 He knows that
through his activity Capernaum is exalted unto
heaven* He sends answer to John the Baptist:
Blessed is he whosoever shall find none occasion cf
stumbling in me.4 Concerning John he even says
to the multitudes: This is he of whom it is writ
ten. Behold I send my messenger before thy face,
who shall prepare thy way before thee.5 With ma
jestic authority he opposes his I say unto you
to the commandments of the Old Testament.6
He expects the people to believe in him, for he
is glad that in the centurion of Capernaum he
found so great a faith as he had not found in
Israel,1 and he knows that the position taken up
toward him is decisive for all eternity: Whoso
ever shall deny me before men, he says, him will I
also deny before my Father which is in heaven*
Hence the enormity of the stupendous demand:
He that loveth father or mother more than me is

!Matt. 13 : i6/.; Harnack, No. 26. — 2 Matt. 12 : 41 /.; Har-
nack, No. 38. — 3 Matt. 11 : 23; Harnack, No. 23. — 4Matt. 11 : 6;
Harnack, No. 14. — 6Matt. n : 10; Harnack, No. 14. — 6Matt.
5 : 44; Harnack, No. 6; and Matt. 5 : 32; Harnack, No. 52. —
7 Matt. 8 : 10; Harnack, No. 13. — 8Matt. 10:33; Harnack,
No. 343.

140 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

not worthy of me, and he that loveth son or daughter
more than me is not worthy of me.1

Exactly the same thoughts are found in Mark
in a different form. Here, too, Jesus knows that
John the Baptist belongs to an older order,
while the new one begins with himself: No man
seweth a -piece of undressed cloth on an old gar
ment, nor putteth new wine into old wine-skins,
Jesus says, when he is asked why his disciples
do not fast as do the disciples of John.2 Here,
too, his disciples are blessed because they have
him; he likens them to the children of the bride-
chamber in the time when the bridegroom is with
them.3 He is conscious of acting by an authority
of which the Pharisees have no idea.4 He says,
he has power on earth to forgive sins.5 He calls
himself metaphorically the stronger man who
has bound the strong man, i. e., gained the vic
tory over Satan.6 He even employs the climax:
No one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the
Son.7 And yet he says that he did not come to be
ministered unto but to minister, and to give his
life a ransom for many.8 Here, too, he demands

1 Matt. 10 : 37; Harnack No. 45. — 2Mark 2 : 21. — 32 : 19. —
4 II : 33. — 62 : 10. — 63 : 27. — 7 13 : 32. — 8 10 : 45.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 141

faith: Thy faith hath made thee whole, he says to
the woman who had an issue of blood twelve
years.1 Here, too, he expects that people will
make the greatest sacrifices for his sake, leave
house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother,
or wife, or children, or lands, even lose their lives
for his sake.2 Here, too, his words are weighty
for eternity: Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but my words shall not pass away.3

From the tradition peculiar to Luke I shall
add only one word, the word from the cross
which testifies how far Jesus was from any con
sciousness of guilt: Father, forgive them; for they
know not what they do.4

Are these sayings still in harmony with a
purely human self-consciousness?

Here we have to revert to the Messiahship of
Jesus. Can we, as Schweitzer suggests, account
for the dignity revealed in the words of Jesus I
quoted by pointing out that he considered him
self the Messiah ? I do not in the least deny that
he so considered himself. As early as in the " col-

1 Mark 5 : 34. — ? 10 : 29. — 3 8 : 35. — 4 Luke 23 : 24. I would
have quoted also Luke 9:35: Ye know not what manner of spirit
ye are of; but these words probably are not genuine.

H2 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

lection of sayings " this is shown by the answer he
gave the disciples of John.1 And in Mark he did
not lay claim to the title of Messiah for the first
time by his entry into Jerusalem; in the very be
ginning of the Gospel Jesus explains his power
to forgive sins by pointing out that he is the Son
of man, i. e., the Messiah.2 Nor may this claim
to the title of Messiah be considered as a some
what natural tendency to comply with the views
of the time. Messiahship was not a title with
which an earnest man could trifle. For the
Messiah was, for the Jews of that time, the ful-
filler of God's final intentions with the human
world, the one toward whom all prophets had
pointed. By Jesus, too, according to some words
of his in the "collection of sayings," even the
final judgment is closely connected with the ul
timate heavenly coming of the Messiah. We
shall, therefore, not venture to think out what
it means that Jesus considered himself the Mes
siah.

Nevertheless, in Jesus' own words Messiah-
ship does not appear as the real basis of his self-
consciousness. For his Messianic consciousness

1Matt. 11:4-11; Harnack, No. 14. — 2Mark 2 : 10.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 143

is, in our oldest source, the "collection of say
ings," seen to be free from all the fantastic-
majestic traits which Schweitzer ascribes to it.
Our sources account for his dignity with another
fact. A well-known utterance of Jesus in the
"collection of sayings" suggests a basis of his
self-consciousness which certainly is not opposed
to his Messianic consciousness, but still is inde
pendent of it; he knows that his relation to
God as his father is unique: All things, he says,1
have been delivered unto me of my Father; and no
one knoweth the Son, save the Father, neither does
any know the Father, save the Son and he to whom
soever the Son will reveal him. Even if we could
recognize a simpler form of these words behind
the text as it now reads — as Harnack contends,2
but without convincing arguments — this sim
pler form would still give evidence that Jesus
was conscious of a unique relation to God. This
very fact becomes evident also when in all the
Gospels Jesus speaking to the disciples fre
quently calls God your Father and my Father, but
never our Father. For the Lord's prayer is not

1Matt. ii : 27; Harnack, No. 25. — 2 A. Harnack, Spruche und
Reden Jesu, Leipsic, 1907, Excurs I, pp. 189-211.

i44 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

a prayer which he prayed himself, but a prayer
which he taught his disciples.1

These quotations may suffice. I have made
no use here of the Gospel of John, because in
this Gospel the words of Jesus certainly are
tinged by the thoughts of the evangelist. And
also, concerning the words I have quoted, I
repeat: we have no guarantee that any one
of them was spoken by Jesus in exactly this
form. The one circumstance that Jesus spoke
Aramaic while his words are preserved in Greek
shows clearly that the words of Jesus may have
been modified by the belief of his community
without their being aware of the fact. But
against these words, taken as a whole, the objec
tion that these words may have been altered is of
no avail. For we find them essentially on the
same level in all the sources. The assumption
that the faith of the later Christians first created
all these words or raised them to their present
level by modifying them, is surely very difficult
even from a historical point of view. For from
nothing nothing comes. And only on the sup
position that the Christians had extraordinary

1 Comp. Matt. 6 : 9; Luke n : I, 2.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 145

views about Jesus from the very outset, can
historians understand that even the oldest
Christian community was convinced that Jesus
did not remain among the dead, but was raised
by God and exalted to the right hand of the maj
esty on high.1 Still more so does this apply to
theological observations. But before we turn to
these we must first take a glance at the belief of
the primitive Christian community.

Where shall we find it? Bearing the name
of an apostle, the two epistles of Peter, the
writings of John, and the Pauline epistles, are
handed down to us. The second epistle of Pe
ter is, in my opinion, certainly spurious and
probably the latest part of the New Testament.
I Peter is much older, but many people are of
the opinion that it was not written by Peter,
and to my mind this is at least not improb
able. The Johannine writings are ascribed to
the apostle John by very few liberal theo
logians; they can, therefore, not supply con
vincing arguments. Thus, only the Pauline
epistles remain as evidences.

But attempts have been made to minimize

1 Acts 2 : 32/.; Ileb. I : 3.

i46 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the importance of their evidence, too.1 We are
told that Paul shows his own individual belief,
not that of the oldest Christian community.
These critics admit that Paul did not place
Jesus on a level with other men, but they state
that this individual faith of the apostle had its
individual causes. Paul, they say, had no vivid
impression of the historical Jesus at all; he saw
Jesus only in the glare of light he observed on
the road to Damascus. There is some truth in
this statement. The faith of Paul has an indi
vidual tone; his ideas about Christ cannot be
taken for common property of the apostolic age.
It is likewise true that the vision on the road to
Damascus was of decisive importance for Paul's
relation to Jesus. But this does not yet settle
the matter. For, in the first place, we can gather
much valuable information about the faith of
the oldest Christian community from the letters

1 Comp. C. Holsten, Zum Evangelium des Paulus und Petrus,
Rostock, 1868, pp. 65-114 (Die Christusvision des Apostels Paulus
und die Genesis des paulinischen Evangeliums) ; H. J. Holtzmann,
Lehrbuch der Neutestamentlichen Theologie, Freiburg and Leipsic,
1897, II, 56-97; W. Wrede, Paulus, Halle, 1905; A. Jiilicher,
Paulus und Jesus, Tubingen, 1907; J. Weiss, Paulus und Jfsus,
Berlin, 1909; P. Feine, Theologie des Neuen Testaments, 2d edi
tion, Leipsic, 1911, p. 284 /.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 147

of Paul, and, secondly, the individual thoughts
of the apostle are not satisfactorily accounted
for by the vision of Damascus.

Both these assertions will need to be treated
more fully.

Paul frequently came into contact with the
Jerusalem community. Three years after his
conversion, a few years after the death of Jesus,
he visited Peter in Jerusalem and also spoke
with James, the brother of Jesus.1 At least three
times he returned to Jerusalem in later days,2
so that he must have known very accurately what
Peter, John, and James thought about Jesus.
And, on the other hand, he came into touch, in
Antioch and other places, with Christians who
came from Palestine or had intercourse with
Christians there. The faith of the whole primi
tive community cannot have been unknown to
him. Hence, if Paul assumes that all Christians
see in Jesus the risen Lord exalted to the right
hand of God, who will come again for the great
judgment, we cannot in the least doubt — nor is

»Gal. i :i8/.

2 A: Gal. ^ : i-io; Acts 15 : 1-34; b : Acts 18 : 21 /.; c : Acts 21 :
17-27. The journey reported in Acts II : 30, as not being men
tioned by Saint Paul himself (Gal. I and 2), must be disputed.

148 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

it doubted — that this assumption was correct.
History, indeed, does not know of any commu
nity in those primitive times that saw in Jesus
merely the teacher and the exemplar of Christian
faith. To the earliest Christians, too, Jesus was
an object of their belief. Paul also assumed that
all Christians prayed to Christ. He character
izes the Christians as people who call upon the
name of Jesus Christ.1 The correctness of this
assumption cannot be proved inductively by
the few other passages of the New Testament
that also mention prayer to Christ.2 But so
much is certain, that in Paul's sphere of obser
vation — and Jerusalem belonged to this sphere
—he met prayer to Christ so often that he could
look upon it as common to all Christians.

Now the experiences of Paul go back, as was
said, to the earliest times after Jesus' death.
Two or three years after the death of Jesus, and
perhaps at a still earlier date,3 Paul was won

*I Cor. i : 2; comp. Rom. 10 : 3; Phil. 2 : 10, n; II Cor. 12 :
8, 9.— 2 Acts 7 : 58; 9 : 14, 21; 22 : 16; Rev. 5 : 13; 22 : 17, 20;
John^ 14 : 13 /.; comp. 5 : 23.— 3That is Harnack's opinion.
In his^Chronologie, I, 237. he placed the conversion of Saint
Paul "in the year of Jesus' death or in the following" (i. e., 30
A. D.); now (Chronologische Berechnung des Tags von Damas-
kus; Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie, 1912, pp. 673-682)
he dares to give an accurate date: autumn 31 A. D.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 149

over to Christianity. What Paul could look
upon as general Christian conviction must reach
back as far as this time. Moreover, it must
be just as old as the belief of the first disciples
in the resurrection of Jesus. For the following
two or three years of the Jerusalem community
could only have made it more difficult to believe
in the exalted Lord, or, if this belief already
existed, they could at most have developed
it further in spite of all difficulties; certainly
they could never have produced it. But how
is the faith of the primitive Christian commu
nity to be accounted for if the life of Jesus
was only a purely human one? Even from a
merely historical point of view this is a weighty
argument against the results or, better, pre
suppositions of liberal Jesus-research; and still
more so, as we shall see, from the theological
point of view.

Two other points, too, are to be noticed with
regard to what we hear about the faith of the
oldest Christian community from the letters of
Paul.

First, Paul expressly says in I Corinthians:
I delivered unto you first of all that which also I

i5o WHAT IS THE TRUTH

received, how that Christ died for our sins.1 Paul
then is made a bearer of false testimony when
people speak as if the belief that Christ's death
is important for the forgiveness of sins was an
idea peculiar to Paul. This belief, too, must
date from the earliest times.

Secondly, we must remember that the older
apostles at Jerusalem could not have remained
ignorant of Paul's views about Jesus in their
frequent intercourse with him. But we do not
find the least hint that these Pauline views ever
became an object of opposition or dispute.2
From this it follows that the views of the older
apostles about Christ, as far as faith, not the
ology, was concerned, stood on the same level
as those of Paul.

This is sufficient to justify the inference that
Paul's individual views about Jesus, to which we
now turn our attention, cannot be derived from
his Damascus experience and from the thoughts
about the Messiah which he brought with him as
a Jewish theologian. Both certainly exerted their
influence. The fact that we hear from Paul more

^ :I Cor. 15 : 3. — 2Comp. even C. Weizsacker, Das apostolische
Ztitalter der christlichen Kirche, Freiburg, 1886, p. no.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 151

about the exalted Lord than about the historical
Jesus is connected with the former. And the
latter we can bring into line with the Pauline
views about the pre-existence of Christ. But
the decisive question is not whether the vision
of Damascus and the Jewish theological tradi
tion had a share in forming Paul's views about
Jesus. The question is rather this, whether
these two factors alone can sufficiently explain
the fact, that Paul, as all will admit, did not
consider the life of Jesus a purely human one.

In discussing this question we need not be
satisfied with the argument advanced before,
viz., that the older apostles did not find anything
strange in Paul's Christological views. From
the epistles of Paul themselves we can show
that Paul's religious appreciation of Jesus
had stronger and deeper roots than the glare of
light which, according to Acts,1 he saw before
Damascus and the traditions of a Messianic
theology which he possessed while still a Jew.
We shall have to pay attention to four points in
this respect.

Firstly, it is nothing but a fable convenue of

'Acts 9:3; 22 : 6; 26 : 13.

1 52 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

former liberal theology that Paul knew next to
nothing about the earthly life of Jesus, or that
he did not even care to know anything about it.
It is true we cannot make out whether Paul saw
Jesus personally while he was still a Jew. But
I think it likely all the same. For we have no
reason to suppose that Paul, who received his
rabbinical education in Jerusalem1 and dwelt
there when Stephen died,2 was absent from Jeru
salem just at the times when Jesus visited the
holy city; and Paul's utterance, though we have
known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him
so no more? becomes more intelligible if he in
cludes himself in the number of those who once
knew Christ after the flesh. But this question is
of minor importance. Weighty, however, is the
fact that Paul is very far from betraying merely
a superficial acquaintance with the earthly life
of Jesus. He mentions his birth,4 his being be
trayed,5 the institution of the Lord's supper in
the night before his passion,6 his death on the
cross,7 his resurrection,8 and the appearances of
the risen Lord.9 He sums up his whole life in

JActs 22 : 13. — 2 Acts 7 : 57. — 3II Cor. 5 : 16. — 4Gal. 4 : 4. —
5 I Cor. 11:23. — 6I Cor. 11:23-25. — 7Comp. I Cor. 2:2. —
8 1 Cor. 15 14. — 9 I Cor. 15 : 5-8.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 153

the few suggestive words, He humbled himself
and became obedient unto death.1 And though
he seldom refers to sayings of Christ, yet words
of Jesus are echoed by many passages of Paul,2
as Weinel, too, now admits.3 Moreover, Paul
did not write Gospels, but occasional letters to
his congregations. The letters cannot show all
that Paul knew of Jesus; we cannot expect to
learn from them how much Paul told of Jesus
in his missionary sermons. Harnack pointed
out very aptly, a short while ago, that one might
feel inclined to judge from the Acts that its
author knew really nothing else about the life of
Christ than what he had gleaned from Chris-
tological dogmatics — and yet the same author
wrote the third Gospel. Paul, too — Harnack
himself calls attention to this parallel4 — evi
dently knew far more about Jesus, and related
more in his missionary sermons, than he had oc
casion to reveal in his letters.

Secondly, I think it is just as big a mistake not
to recognize that Paul's faith was, to a large ex-

1 Phil. 2 : 8. — 2 Comp. P. Feine, Jesus Christus und Paulus,
Lcipsic, 1902. — 3H. Weinel, 1st das "liberate" Jesusbild wider-
Ifgt? Tubingen, 1910, p. 16. — 4 A. Harnack, Neue Untersuchungcn
zur Apostelgeschichte und zur Abfassungszeit der synoptischcn
Evangelien, Leipsic, 1911, p. 81 /.

i54 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

tent, dependent on the historical Jesus even apart
from his death on the cross. Twice Paul calls
Jesus the image of God,1 and once he expressly
adds: of the invisible God.2 As early as in the
fourth century Marcellus of Ancyra remarked
correctly that Paul could not have conceived
the image of the invisible God as invisible in
itself.3 Paul, therefore, calling Christ the image
of God, cannot refer to the pre-existent Christ,
but only to the historical and now exalted Lord.
Similarly Paul can only mean the historical and
then exalted Jesus, when in the same passage
in which he mentions the image of God he says
that we see the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ* The historical Jesus is to him just as
well as to John5 an appearance full of grace and
truth.

And why was this the case? This brings us to
the third point I wish to speak about. Why did
Paul see the glory of God in the face of Jesus ?
Only superficial interpretation, I think, may rest
satisfied with seeing the explanation in the vi
sion of light on the road to Damascus. The-

^I Cor. 4 : 4; Col. i : 15. — 2 Col. I : 15. — 3 Fragment No. 93
in Eusebius, Werke, vol. IV, ed. E. Klostermann, Leipsic, 1906,
p. 205. — 4II Cor. 4 : 6. — 5 John I : 14.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 155

ological discernment, in my opinion, suggests a
different interpretation. We find it in II Corin
thians 5 : 19: God was in Christ, reconciling the
world unto himself. For the grace of God is the
central thought in Paul. And this is the rock
on which he stands, that we by believing in
Christ have access to this grace of God.1 There
fore he says that nothing shall be able to separate
us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord.2

And this leads us up to the fourth and last
point, viz., on what ground this knowledge of the
love of God which is in Christ was based. On
theories which Paul had built up? or on ideas
of a Saviour-God which in those times cropped
up here and there and, which Paul transferred
to Jesus? Such a statement would be as foolish
as if we were to say that a bridegroom's expres
sions of gratitude and happiness were but the
echo of the many love-songs in the world's lit
erature, of which he could not have been ig
norant. Every one who knows what inner life
is, hears a different answer out of the words of
Paul: That life which I now live in the flesh I live

1 Comp. Rom. 5 : 2. — 2 Rom. 8 : 35-39.

156 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself up for me.1 The inner
most experiences of the apostle are behind these
words, experiences that have to be appreciated
theologically.

This is the case also with the writings of John.
But I shall mention only one circumstance which
will go to prove that here, too, not a theory, but
most grateful inward dependence on Jesus, was
the basis on which John's high appreciation of
Jesus was ultimately founded. Seven times in
the first epistle of John we find the Greek pro
noun e/cetz/05, "that one";2 six times3 it is Jesus
who is thus characterized. The English trans
lation simply reads: He, e. g., every one that hath
this hope set on him, purifieth himself, even as he is
pure.* In the same manner, this pronoun is
used by the Gospel of John in a well-known pas
sage: He that hath seen (viz., John the apostle)
hath borne witness, and his witness is true, and he
(viz., Jesus) knoweth that he (John) saith true?

^al. 2:20.— 2I John 2:6; 3:3; 3:5; 3:7; 3 : 16; 4 : 17;
5 : 16. — 3 1 John 5 : 16 only is to be excepted. — 4 1 John 3 : 3. —
B John 19 : 35. I have not the slightest doubt that the interpre
tation of this passage accepted above is the right one. It was
proposed by Theodor Zahn (Zeitschrift fur kirchliche Wissen-
schaft, 1888, p. 594; comp. his Einltitung in das Neue Testament,

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 157

Speaking only of "him," the writer knew that
his readers would understand who was meant.
All his thoughts were full of thanks and love to
ward him; speaking of him he could not mean
any one else. As Zinzendorf, consoling a mother
whose two sons had died in missionary work in
West India, said only: He is worthy of all this.
Where we meet such inward indebtedness of
love to Jesus, it is foolish to explain the high
titles which the Johannine writings heap on
Jesus as borrowed from other religious move
ments or as gradually exaggerated out of the
faith of the community. John is backed by his
personal experience, when in his first epistle he
says of Christ: This is the true God and eternal
life.1

Permit me, finally, to support these argu
ments by referring in a few words to the faith
of the centuries after. Not more than eighty to
ninety years after the death of Jesus we find
in a man who could not have known Jesus per
sonally, viz. Ignatius of Antioch, of whom we

II, 1900, p. 483 /., not. 16); but has not yet found the attention
which it deserves (comp. H. Dechent, Z«r Auslegung der Stelle
Joh. 19 : 35, in Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 72, 1899, pp.
446-467). — * I John 5 : 20.

158 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

possess seven letters, such a faith in Jesus Christ,
such a thankful love of Jesus, that religious his
tory is forced to admit: this is a singular phe
nomenon compared with all we can observe in
the non-christian sphere. But it is no singular
phenomenon in the Christian development which
followed. Again and again in the history of
Christianity, faith and charity have been great
est where living and grateful belief in Jesus have
been found in the church. Augustine, Bernard of
Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, Paul Gerhardt, the
Wesleys, Charles Kingsley, and many others are
examples of this fact. And up to the present
time thousands of Christian hearts re-echo the
words:

Jesus, our only joy be thou,

As thou our prize wilt be,
Jesus, be thou our glory now

And through eternity.

Is all this but a dead echo of what Paul and
John once said? Nobody who knows living
Christian faith will say so. But a friend of mine
once objected: similar thoughts are also found
in the veneration of Mary by the Catholic
church. And we must admit that here, too,

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 159

there is personal experience at the back of it.
Certainly. But the Catholic faith in Mary is
only a duplicate of the faith in Christ. It would
not have come into existence had not the faith
in Christ existed before. The faith in Christ
is unique in the history of religion on account
of its intimate character, its clear motivation,
and its power over sin, hardships, and death.

And this faith can experience for itself what
Paul and John experienced in their belief. It
feels that the faith of these apostles, in spite of
all differences due to their different surroundings,
was essentially the same as the faith in Christ
of our time. And, besides, this faith finds a sup
port and a foundation in those very words of
Jesus we spoke of in the first part of this lecture.
It is not historical reasoning; it is theological,
religious reasoning, if we now say: here the one
supports the other. But we do not need to
creep into a corner with such reasoning before
the science of our time. Science has to respect
realities. And it is a reality that the faith in
Jesus the Saviour has been a power in history,
and still is a power in the world up to the present
day. Historical science cannot do justice to the

160 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

sources with its assumption that the life of
Jesus was a purely human life. It cannot draw
a credible picture of Jesus. But the faith of all
times carries a picture of Jesus in its heart which
has its prototype in the Jesus of the Gospels
and in his own self-consciousness. Every one
who knows this faith from his own experience,
who can appreciate and join in feeling, however
imperfectly, what Paul said: That life which I
now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith
which is in the Son of God, who loved me and gave
himself up for me,1 will be firmly convinced that
historical science can as little conceive Jesus
correctly as natural science can appreciate God
correctly. Its method cannot reach up to him.
The presupposition, without which historical
science cannot undertake to describe the life of
Jesus, the presupposition that this life was a
purely human life which did not go beyond the
analogy of our human experience, cannot do
justice to the life of Jesus and to his person. This
presupposition is false.

But what then is the correct opinion about
Jesus? Is the old Christological tradition of the

1 Gal. 2 : 20.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 161

church the true one, in spite of the scornful
manner in which it is often treated by modern
science? Or have we to look for new roads to
ward an appreciation of Jesus?

These questions will be dealt with in my last
two lectures.

THE ANCIENT CHRISTOLOGY
UNTENABLE

PERMIT me to start from William Benjamin
Smith once more. He is in the wrong with
his assumption of a purely divine Jesus, who
never lived the life of a human being. But he
is right in saying that liberal Jesus-research,
which acknowledges only a purely human life
of Jesus, has not succeeded in sketching a pict
ure of Jesus which does justice to the sources
and is credible as it stands. He is also right,
as we saw, in the last place, in opposing the as
sumption itself that the life of Jesus must have
been a purely human one. Now, for Smith, it
seems, there is no other choice besides these two.
The orthodox church doctrine about Jesus is not
considered by him worth any serious discussion.
He does not deny that it is respectable and ven
erable in its kind, and to a certain extent even
logical and consistent. But still it is not worth

his while to spend any time over it. May it be

162

WHAT IS THE TRUTH? 163

right or wrong, good or bad, he says, the human
mind has, at last, and once for all, gone beyond it,
and it is sheer madness to suppose that the human
mind could ever turn back on the road it has once
set its foot on. It could not do so even if it would.
Reason, in this and the following centuries, he
says, can believe just as little in the God-man as
in the geocentric theory of the Ptolemaic system.1

What is the truth about this assertion, which
is far from being defended only by W. B. Smith ?
—to this question we were brought at the end
of the preceding lecture. Is the old church
doctrine about Christ able to give us the right
conception of Jesus, or is it to be set aside as an
tiquated without the least attempt to vindicate
it?

If we turn our attention to this question, we
shall first have to take into consideration the
orthodox doctrine itself. For inaccurate opinions
about it, and very general and superficial con
ceptions of it, such as are wide-spread in Chris
tendom, make earnest discussion of the prob
lems of Christology practically impossible.

Christ is, in the New Testament, often called

1 W. B. Smith, Ecce Deus, p. 6.

1 64 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the Son of God, and the so-called symbol of the
apostles, following the Gospel of John,1 calls him
the only begotten Son of God. How is this under
stood in the orthodox tradition of the Christian
churches? In two respects, according to the
orthodox doctrine, Christ is the Son or the only
begotten Son of God* He is this, in so far as he
was man, because the miraculous overshadowing
of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost had formed
without the ordinary course of nature the first
beginnings of his human body in the womb of his
mother.3 He is this, secondly — and this sense is
the more important one to the orthodox tra
dition — as the Word of God, as Saint John says,4
because he is begotten of the Father from all
eternity. Begotten here surely is a metaphorical
expression; its meaning is that the Son is not a
creature of God, but educed from the substance
of the Father. And this begetting was from all
eternity. Just as no light is ever without lustre,
so the Father is never without the Son. Nor was
he ever without the Holy Ghost, who, eternally

1John i : 14, 18; 3 : 16. — 2 Comp., e. g., Gilbert, Bishop of
Sarum, An Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of
England, revised and corrected by J. R. Page, London, 1839, p. 51.
— 3 Gilbert, 1. c— 4John i : i.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 165

proceeding from the Father and the Son, is also
educed from the same substance. But the Holy
Ghost is not said to be begotten. And, though
we cannot assign a reason why the emanation
of the Son and not that of the Holy Ghost like
wise is called a begetting, nor understand what
begetting strictly signifies here, yet begotten is
the right word for signifying the eternal relation
between the Father and the Son.1

This eternal Son of God, of course, is another
than the Father and the Holy Ghost. But these
three persons, or hypostases, as they are called,
are of one substance, of one power, of one eter
nity; and the diversity of "persons," therefore,
does not dissolve the unity of the Godhead.
The Trinity, or better : Tri-unity, is the one God,
of whom it is said : Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our
God is one Lord?

Nevertheless — so the orthodox doctrine af
firms — only the second person of the holy Trin
ity became incarnate, taking man's nature upon
himself in the womb of the Virgin Mary and of
her substance. Two natures therefore were,
and since that time are, joined together in the

. Gilbert, 1. c., p. 52. — 2 Dcut. 6 : 4.

1 66 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

one person of Christ, the divine and the human
one. Two natures, I say, not two individuals.
For it is not a human personality that the Son
of God assumed. He assumed human nature as
a potential human individual. And he himself,
the one Son of God, became the formative and
controlling agency of the two natures, the hu
man nature coming to individual existence in
the personality of the incarnate Son of God.
The human nature, however, is not altered, nor
is the divine; the two natures are united in
the one person unconfusedly, unchangeably, indi-
visibly, inseparably, the properties of each nat
ure being preserved in the union.1 The two nat
ures, as has often been said since olden time, form
a unity like that of body and soul in man. And
yet, in a modern exposition of the thirty-nine
articles of the Anglican church,2 this compari
son is expounded in the following way: In man
there is a material and a spiritual nature joined
together. They are two natures as different as any
we can apprehend among all created beings; yet
these make but one man. The matter which the body

1 So it is defined at the council of Chalcedon, 451 A. D. — 2 Gil
bert, 1. c., p. 62.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 167

is composed of does not subsist by itself, is not gov
erned by all those laws of motion to which it would
be subjected if it were inanimate matter, but by the
indwelling and agency of the soul it has another
spring within it and has another course of opera
tions. Now, as the body is still a body, and oper
ates as a body, though it subsists by the indwelling
and agency of the soul, so in the person of Jesus
Christ the human nature was entire, and still acted
according to its own character; yet there was such
a union and inhabitation of the eternal word in it
that there did arise out of that a communion of
names and characters as we find in the scriptures.
Nevertheless, of course, the church orthodoxy of
all times continued to hold that the divine Word
of God, though being the acting subject in the
life of Christ, properly speaking did not suffer
or die, but only, in virtue of the personal union
with the human nature, took part in the passions
of his human soul and body.

This will have to suffice, although it is but a
very short survey of the orthodox doctrine. I
am sorry that it does not show what deep
thoughts are woven into this doctrine and with
what ingenuity all the details were thought

168 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

out. I shall, therefore, illustrate the great
amount of mental labor which was devoted
to this doctrine by one testimony which will
certainly not be suspected. Lessing surely in
cluded the orthodox Christology when once he
declared about the orthodox system that he
knew nothing in the world in which human
ingenuity showed and exercised itself in a greater

manner.1

Notwithstanding, I wish at the outset to state
quite openly that I cannot hold this old Chris
tology, this old orthodox answer to the question,
Who was Christ? And for three reasons. First,
because to rational logic the old Christology
appears untenable; secondly, because it does
not agree with the New Testament views; and,
thirdly, because we can show that it was in
fluenced by antiquated conceptions of Greek
philosophy. These three points of view will
have to determine the order of treatment in the
present lecture.

Rational arguments had a bad reputation in
the domain of religion up to the time of the so-

1 Letter to his brother Charles, 2d Feb., 1774, Lessings Werke,
Hempelsche Ausgabe, 20, I, 572.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 169

called Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment,
which, in religion too, was prepared to recognize
only what reason accepted as correct, has not
held its own. It is generally admitted now that
it expected too much from reason. The religious
thoughts which it presumed to retain in the
name of reason — the belief in God, the convic
tion of the freedom of man and the necessity
of a moral life, and the belief in the immortality
of the soul — these thoughts are to-day regarded
as rational ideas by but a few scientifically
trained men. And I believe this modern posi
tion can be better defended than that of the En
lightenment. Our reason cannot make any defi
nite assertion about supersensual things. Even
the freedom of will is, to say the least, a prob
lem it cannot solve. But, if our reason cannot
make any definite statements about supersen
sual things, it is in reality but a poor critic of
religious doctrines. That I grant absolutely.
Faith has to do with supersensual things; no
reason, no science, can reach up to its objects.
Hence, I adduce no rational arguments against
the church doctrine of the holy Trinity itself. It
is beyond all doubt, I grant, that this doctrine

1 7o WHAT IS THE TRUTH

gives grave offence to reason. But it would be
wrong to reject the doctrine on this account. It
is absolutely impossible for our reason to com
prehend God; his eternity, his creation and
maintenance of all things, his omnipotence and
omniscience are absolutely incomprehensible for
us. I can, therefore, very well understand that
people keep on saying: We must silence all ob
jections against the doctrine of the divine Trin
ity, considering that the fact of our not under
standing it as it is in itself makes the difficulties
appear much greater than they otherwise would
seem, if we, while in this earthly life, had suffi
cient light about it or were capable of forming a
more perfect idea about it.1 People have even
tried, with some appearance of success, to make
the idea that the holy Trinity is the one God
more acceptable to our minds. And this did
not happen for the first time in the days when—
seventy to eighty years ago — the philosophy of
Hegel reigned. Augustine had already tried to
make the oneness of the triune God intelligible
by analyzing human self-consciousness. He said
that, just as in our spiritual being there can be

1 Gilbert, 1. c., p. 44.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 171

distinguished memory, and understanding, which
conceives all that is in our memory, and will,
which connects our understanding with the
contents of our memory, so also in God we
may distinguish the Father, and the Son his
intellect, and the Holy Spirit uniting both in
love.1

But none the less we cannot and ought not
to exclude reason completely from religious
thoughts. Even if we claim that reason should
recognize religious truths that lie beyond its
sphere, no one could expect it to approve such
thoughts as hopelessly contradict themselves.
But the orthodox Christology can be convicted
of three such contradictions.

The first one Augustine already experienced2
as a disturbing element, and the scholastic the
ology of the Middle Ages tried in vain to get
rid of it.3 If, as Augustine thinks — and this
has been the orthodox opinion since — the dis
tinction of persons in the Trinity is limited to

1 Comp. A. Dorner, Augustinus, Berlin, 1873, pp. 8-16.

2 Comp. O. Scheel, Die Anschauung Augustins iiber Chrisii
Person und Werk, Tubingen, 1901, p. 47 /.

3 Comp. F. Loofs, Dogmengeschichte, 4th edition, Halle, 1906,
p. 500, not. 4; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol., III, 3, 4.

1 72 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

their internal relation to each other within the
triune God, how was it possible that only the
second person was incarnated? And, on the
other hand, if the incarnation of the second per
son only is certain, how can the oneness of the
triune God, i. e., how can Christian monotheism
be retained ? This unsolvable dilemma, perhaps,
may be escaped and the incarnation of the Son
only be retained, without endangering monothe
ism, by emphasizing that the Father and the
Holy Ghost were not separated from the in
carnated Son.

But then the second difficulty I was going to
mention becomes all the greater. Even as it is
in itself, the idea of the incarnation, the idea
that a divine person became the subject of a
human life, restricted with regard to time and
space, involves the greatest difficulties. For
we cannot imagine the Godhead as being con
stricted by the limitations of human existence.
Then only two alternatives remain. We must
either assume that the "Son of God," when he
became man, did not cease, separate from his
humanity, to pervade the world in divine maj
esty. Or, with Luther, we must venture the

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 173

bold thought that, in virtue of the union of the
two natures, the human nature from the first
moments of its beginning has been partaking of
the divine omnipotence and omnipresence.

This latter view, viz., the Lutheran doctrine of
the "ubiquity of Christ's body," leads us to ab
surdities. If we wish to avoid these really un
bearable absurdities we are referred to the for
mer view. But does it not destroy the idea of
incarnation? Could we still say of the divine
person who was also outside the historical
Jesus, pervading the world in divine majesty,
that he was in reality incarnated? Is not the
idea of the incarnation in this manner really
changed into the idea of a divine inspiration, an
inspiration such as the prophets experienced
without any change in God's position to the
world? But then it would be impossible still to
say that the second person of the holy Trinity
was the acting subject in the historical Jesus.
This difficulty evidently becomes greater still
if the Father and the Holy Ghost were not sep
arated from the incarnated Son. For in that
case it is still more impossible to retain the idea
of a real incarnation of the Son. Perhaps these

.174 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

arguments are too difficult to be made intelli
gible with a few short words. But I may not
spend more time on them. I must be satisfied
with having just mentioned them. This men
tion of them was necessary. For here lie the
greatest difficulties of the orthodox Christology,
which cannot be surmounted by any tricks of
reasoning.

More easily understood is the difficulty which
I am going to mention in the third and last place.
The divine Trinity can, if need be, perhaps be
thought of as the one God, the triune God, before
the incarnation of the second person. But how is
it after the incarnation ? It is orthodox doctrine
that the incarnated Son of God retained his hu
man form, i. e. the human nature he had assumed,
even after his ascension. Can, then, the distinc
tion between the incarnated Son, on the one
hand, and the Father and the Holy Ghost, on the
other, be conceived of as being confined to the in
ternal relations in which each person stands to
the other within the one Godhead ? And if this
is not the case, the oneness of the Trinity is dis
solved after the incarnation; the Trinity has
become something different after the incarnation

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 175

from what it was before.1 If neither is the case,
then the humanity of Christ stands beside the
Trinity. And then, also during the earthly life
of Jesus, it could not have stood in a real personal
union with the second person of the Trinity.
Then the idea of the incarnation here again
changes into that of an inspiration. Our dog
matics, I think, does not frankly face these diffi
culties. This, however, does not overcome them.
These difficulties alone are sufficient to wreck
the orthodox Christology. Augustine, the cre
ator of the Occidental doctrine of the Trinity,
when pressed by others, asked himself whether
the exalted Christ could see God with his bodily
eyes, and he answered the question in the nega
tive.2 This proves that the difficulties we have
discussed broke up the dogma of the Trinity and
the closely related Christology even for Augustine
himself. And the cause of this was not only that

1 As F. L. Steinmeyer, once professor at the University of Ber
lin (f 1900), did not hesitate to assume when he said: ""Oder wann
hdtte der Valer je zuriickempfungen, was er in dieser heiligen Nacht
(Christmas) gegeben ? Was Gott gibt, das verbleibt den Empfdngern ;
in dem Sinne wird es nie wieder das Seine, in welchem er es einst
besessen" (Beitrdge zum Schriftverstdndnis in Predigten, I, 2d edi
tion, Berlin, 1854, p. 41).— 2Ep. 92, Migne, series lat. XXXIII,
p. 318; comp. ep. 161, ibid., p. 702 /.

176 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

Augustine and the whole church orthodoxy as
far as the eighteenth century pictured Christ's
body of glory1 too much like an earthly body
when speaking of the bodily eyes of the exalted
Christ; the difficulties, on the contrary, un
avoidably remain so long as the humanity of the
exalted Christ is conceived as something differ
ent from his Godhead.

There are probably Christians on whom these
rational arguments will make no impression.
The belief in the triune God, they think, is ir
rational as it is; a few irrationalities more do
not make the matter more difficult. I do not
think that such thoughts are pious. In our
time, too, we must be on our guard lest it may
be said of us: The name of God is blasphemed
among the Gentiles through you.'1 But so much is
true: no one of us could find fault with Chris
tians for accepting these irrationalities if the
orthodox Christology, which includes these ir
rationalities, were presented by the Scriptures.

But that is not the case. This is the second
point I have to prove to-day. It is an extremely
wide domain, viz., the whole domain of the Chris-

^hil. 3 : 21. — 2Rom. 2 : 24.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 177

tological views of the New Testament, which
we now come to face. It is impossible in a short
lecture to enter into these views of the New
Testament in all their details. I must be sat
isfied with calling attention to a few decisive
points. Five will suffice.

It is a view of vital importance to orthodox
Christology that the historical Jesus is the pre-
existent Son of God. Do we find anything about
this in the New Testament? Certainly many
New Testament passages assert the pre-exist-
ence of Christ; that is, they assert or assume
that Jesus did not begin to exist when his earthly
life began. 0 Father, Jesus says in the high-
priestly prayer in the Gospel of John, glorify me
with the glory which I had with thee before the
world was.1 But where in the New Testament
is this prehistoric, yea, this antemundane, Christ
called the Son of God? Where are we told that
he is as such begotten of the Father before the
world ? In the prologue of the Gospel of John,
the pre-existent Christ is not called the Son but
the word, and we are told that this was in the
beginning?- Only one passage in the Pauline

JJohn 17 : 5. — 2John I : I, 2.

1 78 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

epistles might be suspected of referring to an an-
temundane birth of Christ. In Colossians i : 18
Paul calls Christ the first-born of every creature.
But here the Greek equivalent for first-born1
only means that he was before every creature
and above all creatures.2 Then the only remain
ing support of the later doctrine is Jesus' title
Son of God, which, as we all know, occurs very
often in the New Testament. But in the New
Testament it is applied to the historical Jesus,
either with reference to his birth out of the
Spirit of God,3 or because the Spirit came down
upon Jesus at his baptism,4 or — without ref
erence to a date of its entrance — because the
Spirit of God lived in him,5 or because Jesus was
the Messiah,6 or because he stood in a unique
position of love toward God.7 The term, the
only begotten Son, too, only signifies what was
mentioned last. For the Greek equivalent for
only begotten8 does not mean anything else than

— 2 Comp. E. Haupt's interpretation of Col.
1:15 (Kommentar uber das N. T., begriindet von H. A. W. Meyer,
viii and ix, Die Gefangenschaftsbriefe, Gottingen, 1897, p. 25 /.)
and Psalm 89 : 27, where it is said of the King of Israel: " I will
make him my first-born (irpwrdroKov), higher than the kings of the
earth" — 3Luke 1:35. — 4Mark I : n. — 6 Rom. 1:3. — 6Matt.
1 6 : 16. — 7 Matt. II : 27, and in the Gospel of John. — 8 /xo voyev/js.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 179

unique or peerless.1 And it was not modern
exegesis that first interpreted the term Son of
God thus. In the first half of the fourth cen
tury Marcellus of Ancyra emphatically pointed
out that in the New Testament Jesus is called
the Son of God only after the incarnation, and
not in his pre-existence. And the older apostolic
fathers, the so-called first epistle of Clement,
dating from about 95 A. D., and the Ignatian
letters2 interpret the term Son of God in this
manner only.

It is easier to show, secondly, that the idea
of the triune God, as dogmatized later, is for
eign to the New Testament. We surely find
the belief in the New Testament that God was
in Christ, and that the Holy Spirit that lives in
the single Christians and in the whole commu
nity is the spirit of God. That God the Father
reveals himself also in the Son and in the Spirit,
that is a conviction which is in accordance with
the New Testament. But there cannot be the
least doubt, nor can we alter the fact, that when

1 When the widow's son at Nam is characterized as the only son
of his mother (Luke 7:12), the same word is used in the Greek New
Testament which in John I : 14, 18 is translated only begotten.

1 Written about no A. D.

i8o WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the New Testament speaks of God, it is think
ing only of the one God whom Jesus called his
Father and the Father of the faithful, too. This
is shown without the shadow of a doubt by the
apostolic greeting: Grace be unto you and peace
from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus
Christ.1 And the case is not different throughout
the New Testament. In the Gospel of John, in
the high-priestly prayer of Jesus, we even read :
This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the
only true God, and Jesus Christ.'2 Also the well-
known prayerful wish of the apostle Paul: The
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God
and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you
all* points in the same direction. For the apos
tle does not speak here about three persons in
the one God, but about the love of the one God,
and in addition thereto, or better: in connection
with it, of the grace of Jesus Christ and the com
munion of the Holy Ghost.

It is easier still to show that orthodox Chris-
tology does not agree with the New Testament
views in a third respect. According to the ortho-

. 1:7;! Cor. 1:2; II Cor. I : I ; Eph. I : I. — 2 John
17 : 3. — 3II Cor. 13 : 13.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 181

dox Christology, the personal subject, the su
preme I, of the historical Jesus is the second
person of the holy Trinity. Does the fact that
Jesus prayed harmonize with this? Does the
circumstance that he said to Mary Magdalene:
/ ascend unto my Father and your Father and
to my God and your God,1 harmonize with it ? We
have seen, indeed, that the self-consciousness of
Jesus surpassed the measure of a human self-
consciousness. But can we deny that in the
whole New Testament a human self-conscious
ness is the frame in which the inner life of Jesus
first comes to our notice? His humility, his
obedience, his trust in God cannot be inter
preted differently. We shall discuss in the last
lecture how this view can be reconciled with the
fact that the frame of a human self-consciousness
proves to be too strait to make the personality
of Jesus intelligible. Here it will suffice to have
shown that the orthodox Christology which con
siders a divine person as the personal subject in
Christ does not correspond with the New Tes
tament views.

The fourth point I wish to mention is, that

1 John 20 : 17.

1 82 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the experiences of Jesus, like his self-conscious
ness, are at variance with orthodox Christology.
Orthodoxy of all ages was worried by the fact
that we are told of Jesus, with regard to his
youth, that he increased in wisdom and stature
and in favor with God and men.1 Could this be
harmonized with the assumption that the real
subject of the historical Jesus was the eternal
Son of God? Orthodoxy of ancient times con
sidered these two statements as being harmo
nized by the assertion that the eternal Son of
God grew, suffered, and died only according to
his human nature. But who will deny that our
very self itself is growing during our life? And
certainly it sounds very forced to say that the
Son of God, who by his own nature could never
suffer, suffered nevertheless in his human flesh
and in his human soul! Surely such forced con
structions are quite foreign to the New Testa
ment.

Fifthly and lastly, I shall have to point out
that in the New Testament Jesus, even after
his exaltation, appears in such an organic con
nection with the human race as hardly to

1 Luke 2 : 52.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 183

agree with orthodox Christology. Especially
those very writers of the New Testament who
most obviously do not assume that the life of
Jesus was a purely human one — viz., Paul and
John — make this very clear. For Paul the risen
Lord is the first-born from the dead,1 the first-born
among many brethren? The faithful, in Paul's
opinion, are predestinated by God to be con
formed to the image of his Son as heirs of God and
joint heirs with Christ? Very similarly we read
in the high-priestly prayer in the Gospel of
John : They are not of the world, even as I am not
of the world* and : Father, I will that they also, whom
thou hast given me, be with me where I am;5 that
they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me and
I in thee, that they also may be one in us, . . .
that they may be one even as we are one;6 and Thou
hast loved them as thou hast loved me.7 In Rev
elation we find the same thoughts. Here the
exalted Christ says: He that overcometh I will
give to him to sit down with me in my throne, as I
also overcame and sat down with my Father in his
throne?

1 Col. i : 18. — 2 Rom. 8 : 29. — 3 Rom. 8 : 29 and 8 : 17. — 4 John
17 : 16.— » John 17 : 24.— 6 John 17 : 21.— 7 John 17 : 23.— * Rev.
3 :2i-

1 84 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

I admit that these words would be misin
terpreted if they were used to remove the dis
tance which, according to the New Testament,
exists between Christ and his faithful followers.
Christ is, according to Paul — and also according
to John — the Lord, in whose name every knee
should bow of things in heaven and things in earth
and things under the earth.1 But the passages
quoted show undoubtedly that, according to the
New Testament conception, Jesus is the first-born
among many brethren in a deeper sense than or
thodox Christology is able to recognize — for,
according to it, Christ, although he was a man
because he assumed human nature, yet remained
a divine subject.

These five points show that orthodox Chris
tology does not agree with the New Testament
views. And those who are impartial enough to
see this are thereby convinced that the old ortho
dox Christology cannot give us the correct inter
pretation of the historical person of Jesus. And
there is hardly a single learned theologian — I
know of none in Germany — who defends the
orthodox Christology in its unaltered form. And

1 Phil. 2 : 10.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 185

all modifications which can be observed lie in
the direction of removing the most obvious mis
take of the orthodox Christology by doing more
justice to the humanity of Christ. I shall have
to say something about such modifications of the
old doctrine in the following lecture.

To-day it only remains for me to strengthen
the proof that orthodox Christology is untenable
by pointing out that this Christology was born
under the influence of Greek philosophical ideas
which we no longer share.

In going through this proof I shall have to
appeal to the closest attention and to consider
able mental exertion on the part of my respected
hearers. But if I succeed in mentioning only
the principal facts I hope to be understood with
out any difficulty.

I must follow a somewhat circuitous path.
The Gospel of John, as we all know, begins with
the words: In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God,
and in the fourteenth verse of the same chapter
we read : And the Word was made flesh and dwelt
among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of
the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and

1 86 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

truth. John here undoubtedly speaks about
Jesus Christ; of him, he says, that the word of
God was made flesh in him. But it is not so cer
tain what is meant by this expression the Word.
At the time when the Gospel of John was written
philosophical speculations were current which
employed this expression in a peculiar sense.
The Greek term for word (Xttyo?) has two mean
ings, "word" and "reason." In the latter sense
the term had been used by the pantheism of the
Stoic philosophy when it described God both as
the primitive matter of the world and as the
"Logos," i. e. the reason, which pervades the
world. This Stoic idea of the "Logos "was modi
fied in a peculiar way by the Jewish — and, with
regard to his thoughts, also Greek — philosopher,
Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus.
Philo did not, like the Stoic philosophy, con
sider God immanent in the world. With Plato
he held the transcendence of God, and in his
teaching there was even a sharp dualistic an
tithesis between God and the world, between
the supreme Being and matter. Philo, there
fore, could not imagine any action of God upon
the world of matter save through intermediate

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 187

powers. The central power of God, comprehend
ing in itself all subordinate powers, is for Philo
the Logos. He, too, considers this Logos as the
reason which pervades the world. But, in di
vergence from the Stoic philosophy, Philo dis
tinguishes the Logos from God. He calls him
"the first-born Son of God," "the second God,"
"the organ of the creation." But on the other
hand he combines this Logos so clearly with God
that people have asked again and again whether
the Logos is conceived of as personal by Philo
or whether all the personality ascribed to the
Logos by Philo is only meant figuratively. How
ever this may be, for Philo the Logos, i. e., the
reason of God pervading the world, is certainly
to some extent one with God and again to some
extent a second beside him.

Now, people have not been wanting who as
serted that the term Logos in the Gospel of John
is to be taken in this philosophical sense advo
cated by Philo and circulated widely after him.
In favor of this they quoted what John, too, says
of the Logos: All things were made by him, and
without him was not anything made that was
made.1 There was also a time in German the-

1 88 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

ology when every one, who did not interpret the
term Logos in John in the philosophical sense,
was considered behind the times and unscien
tific. This time is not quite past, but it is ap
proaching its end. I, for my part, never con
sidered this hypothesis probable. For it is quite
plain that the beginning of John's Gospel refers
to the beginning of the first book of Moses.
There we have the same introduction: In the
beginning. And every school-boy knows what
the medium of creation was here. The word!
For and God said is repeated in the narrative
like the burden of a song. It is likewise well
known how often we read in the prophets of
the Old Testament: The word of the Lord came
unto the prophet.1 John, in my opinion, was think
ing of these two circumstances. God first re
vealed himself in the creation, and then to Israel,
especially when his word came to the prophets.
Jesus Christ not only brought the word of God,
as the prophets did; he was the Word in every
thing he said and did; the word was made flesh
in him. I do not believe that there is an incar-

., e. g., I Sam. 15 : 10; Jer. I : 2; 2 : i; 7 : i; Ezek. 6 : i;
Hosea i : i; Joel i : i; Jonah i : i; Micah I : i; Zeph. I : i;
Haggai i : i; Zech. i : i.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 189

nation theory behind these words. The sen
tence, "The word was made flesh," means more
than when we say, e. g., "In this man all the
amiable qualities of his forefathers are person
ified." But this way of speaking, in my opinion
comes nearer to the meaning of what John says,
"The word was made flesh," than the later in
carnation theories. But this is of minor impor
tance. What I want to say is this: in the Gospel
of John the term Logos has nothing to do with
philosophy. Here it simply means "word."

I may adduce two arguments in favor of
this assertion. In the book of Revelation the
term Logos also takes a prominent place. In
a grand picture, in which the seer describes
Christ's return for the last judgment, he says:1
I saw the heaven opened, and behold a white horse,
and he that sat thereon was called Faithful and
True . . . and he hath a name written (viz., upon
him or upon his horse) that no one knoweth but he
himself. Then, in the next verse, it is said: And
he is arrayed in a garment sprinkled with blood,
and his name is called " The Word of God." Here
it is not the pre-existent Christ who is called the

^ev. 19 : 1 1/.

190 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

Logos. Hence, there is no room here for the
logos-idea of Philo. The returning Christ, who
fulfils all the words and prophecies of God, and
who is therefore called Faithful and True, is
called the Word of God for this very reason, that
God's Word becomes full truth in him. No
less convincing are two passages in the letters
of Ignatius, written about no A. D. These
letters are strongly influenced by Johannine
thought. For this reason it is important that
Ignatius calls Christ the Word of God coming
forth out of silence,1 i. <?., the Word of revelation
with which God breaks the silence which he had
observed up to that moment. In the same sense
Ignatius also calls Christ the truthful mouth,
through which the Father has spoken.2 Here, in
Ignatius, there can be no doubt that the
term Logos has nothing to do with philosophy.
And, as Ignatius is dependent on John, his con
ception may give us a clew for the correct inter
pretation of the term in John.

But what we do not have in John and Ignatius
we find in later times. And we must admit that
the characterization of Christ as the Logos in

1 Ep. ad. Magnes., 8, 2. — 2 Ep. ad. Romans, 8, 2.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 191

John made this possible. The Greek apologists
of the second century, educated Christians, who
tried to defend Christianity against the pagans,
combined the philosophical logos-idea of their
time with their Christology. To them the pre-
existent Christ was the reason of God pervading
the world, his Son, because before all worldly
time he was produced by God, being a second one
beside the God of the universe, but of the same
kind with him, as produced of his substance.
There we have the foundation of the orthodox
Christology. But only the foundation. For to
the apologists the Logos and God were two in
number without any restriction, and, besides,
the apologists did not regard the Logos as being
eternal; he is begotten or created by God (they
do not yet make a sharp distinction between
these two) at the time of the creation of the
world and with the purpose that he might be the
creative organ.

The latter was the first to be corrected by
the later development. Origen, the greatest
theologian of the old Greek church, who died
in 254, made this correction. He was highly
educated in philosophy, and his philosophical

i92 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

thoughts were akin to those of the first teachers
of the Neoplatonic philosophy, which arose in
his time. These Neoplatonists regarded as the
eternal core of this sensible world, if I may
say so, an eternal ideal world of immaterial
beings, which existed also before the created
world. An eternal ideal world, I say. That did
not exclude the idea of God in their thought.
God, in their opinion, is the original source of
this ideal world. Eternally he calls this world
into existence, as light always radiates splendor
and brightness and heat. Thus, too, Origen
thought. The first of the immaterial spiritual
beings of the immaterial world which he derived
from God is the Logos. Through him the Holy
Ghost and all other immaterial beings, the angels
and the souls of men, were created. Here, for
the first time, we have the idea of the eternal
begetting, that is, the idea that the Logos or
Son was begotten of the Father from all eternity.
In the case of Origen, this idea was not a strange
one. For just as the Logos is begotten of the
Father from all eternity, so all other immaterial
spirits are eternally created through him by
God. For Origen the idea of an eternal beget-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 193

ting of the Son was, therefore, nothing irrational,
but rather a special case of the eternal causation
of the immaterial ideal world by God. Later
on the Origenistic idea of an eternal immaterial
world was abandoned. But the idea of the eter
nal begetting of the Logos, or Son, remained, —
now nothing more than an irrational fragment
of a total conception which was formerly more
intelligible.

The second shortcoming which, as we saw,
the thoughts of the apologists, when compared
with the later church doctrine, show, was not
remedied even by Origen. Just as for the apol
ogists God, the creator of the universe, and his
Logos were two in number — occasionally, Justin,
one of these apologists, also adds the Spirit and
the whole angelic host1 — so for Origen the su
preme God and the Logos and the Holy Ghost
were three in number, a Trinity, not a Triunity,
three hypostases, or essences, as he called them.
In the fourth century, after long struggle, which
I cannot describe here, the point was reached
where a distinction was made between the terms
which for Origen still had the same meaning,
*Apol.y I, 13, 1-3.

194 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

viz., between hypostasis and essence. Now it
became orthodox doctrine: the Father, the Son,
and the Spirit have one essence or substance,
but they are three hypostases — or "persons," as
the Occident said. The Orient has, on the whole,
not gone beyond this conception. The doc
trine of the Trinity there retained a tritheistic
character. For to the orthodoxy of the Orient
the Godhead is one, because the Son and the
Spirit only derived their origin from the one
Father-God and because they are with him of the
same kind or substance, of the same power, of
the same eternity. We may find it strange that
this was considered as doing justice to Christian
monotheism. But it becomes more intelligible
when we consider that our clearly defined idea
of personality was unknown in those times. God
was looked upon as the highest essence, and as
long as no other equally high Being was placed
side by side with him, people thought monothe
ism was preserved intact, even if two further
hypostases were regarded as having emanated
from this one highest essence.

In the Western church Christian monothe
ism has been restored by the great Augustine

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 195

(f 430). For him the Father, the Son, and the
Spirit are the one God. He, too, in thinking so
was influenced by philosophical ideas. As phi
losopher, he considered the idea of oneness and
the idea of simplicity indispensable to the idea
of God. God is for him the highest absolute in
divisible and, therefore, simple Being or essence,
in contrast with the world, which exists only
conditionally in its manifoldness and change-
ableness. But biblical ideas, too, induced
Augustine to modify the older doctrine of the
Trinity. He wished to do justice to monothe
ism, to do justice to the Old Testament word:
Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is one God.1 For
this reason he said that with regard to the world
the Father, the Son, and the Spirit always act
together as the one God. The distinctions of the
persons were in his mind limited to the internal
relations within the Godhead, viz., that the Son
is begotten of the Father, and the Holy Ghost
proceeds from the Father and the Son. This
is the origin of the orthodox doctrine about the
Son of God and the holy Trinity or, better, Tri-
unity, in the Western church.

1 Deut. 6 : 4.

196 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

In the same way we may show that the doc
trine of the two natures in Jesus Christ originated
in the culture of the Graeco-Roman world.
Quoting Goethe's Faust, we may speak of two
souls which we feel in our breast, a lower one
with sensual desires and a higher one which is
open to everything ideal. In ancient times peo
ple would in such a case speak of "two natures"
in man. We even know of a more developed
form of this idea by not a few Christians of the
second century, which, by combining philosoph
ical thoughts and Christian traditions, tried to
form a general view of the world and its history.
I refer to the so-called Gnostics. Many of them
distinguished three elements in the world— the
spiritual, the psychical, and the material. Man
according to them had or could have three nat
ures—a spiritual, a psychical, and a material or
bodily one. The question how the unity of self-
consciousness was to be realized in such a case
did not cause these speculators any great diffi
culty. The strongest of these natures in each
case was considered as the leading one, which
really ruled over the others. In a modified form
this terminology of different natures was even

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 197

applied to animals. We possess a book on the
peculiarities of several animals, the so-called
Physiologus, which is preserved in a later Chris
tian revision, but is in its original pagan form
perhaps as old as the second century. Here the
characteristic peculiarities of the animals which
are mentioned are called different "natures "of
these animals. Thus, we are told of the lion
that he has three natures : the first is, that he,
when scenting a hunter, wipes out his footprints
with his tail; the second, that he sleeps with
open eyes; the third, that his whelp is born
dead but begins to live on the third day.1 Here
"natures" means nothing else than character
istic peculiarities.

Now, it is natural that Christians at a very
early date — I believe from the very begin
nings of Christianity — observed characteristics
of human lowliness and characteristics of di
vine majesty and glory in Jesus Christ. Under
these circumstances it was not strange for that
time that people as early as the end of the sec
ond century spoke of "two natures," the human

1 F. Lauchert, Geschichtc des Physiologus, Strassburg, 1889,
p. 229 /.

198 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

and the divine one, which were to be distin
guished in Christ. The question how the unity
of such a person was to be imagined did not
cause any difficulties for more than three cen
turies. In the Eastern church many theologians
as early as the fourth century considered the
higher nature, the divine nature — that is, the di
vine Logos — as the actual subject in the histor
ical Jesus, while his humanity was looked upon
as not having a personality of its own. In the
Western church people for a long time thought
differently. But ultimately the Greek view pre
vailed.

If you look back upon all I have gone through,
I hope you will understand why orthodox Chris-
tology could seem quite acceptable as long as
Greek culture survived. It harmonized with the
culture of the time. The incarnation question,
too, caused no difficulty to Greek thinkers.
When Celsus, the pagan controversialist, mock
ingly asked whether the Logos left his throne
vacant when he became a human being, Origen
opposed him with the argument that God fills
all in all, that he does not vacate one place in
order to betake himself to another, and that,

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 199

therefore, he descends to men only by means of
his grace.1 And, as I have already said, all Greek
theologians clung to this view, thinking that the
Logos, the divine reason, pervading the world,
after his incarnation, in spite of his being in
Christ, retained his position toward the world,
i. e.y continued to pervade and to govern the
world. Even about the year 200 Clement of
Alexandria, the teacher of Origen, still said quite
naively that the Logos was made flesh also in
the prophets.2 In short, in the early church the
idea of "incarnation" was not yet sharply dis
tinguished from that of a divine inspiration,
but in the course of time the distinction became
more and more defined, and this made the church
doctrine more irrational than it had been at first
when people began to use the term Logos.

And that is the case with the whole Christol-
ogy of the early church. In the older times the
terms of Greek culture were the natural forms
by which the people of those times tried to do
justice to that which the New Testament says
about Christ. What we find unsatisfactory in

I0rig. c. Celsum, 4, 5 and 4, 14, ed. Koetschau, Leipsic, 1879,
I, 277 and 285.

2 Excerpta 19, Opera, cd. W. Dindorf, Oxford, 1869, III, 433, 5.

200 WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

those forms remained hidden to them. No age
knows itself sufficiently. In those forms people
had their faith in Christ as far as it was under
stood by them.

But the case is different with us. We either
think that human philosophy can form no ten
able ideas at all about God and things divine,
or if we think differently we have, at any rate,
other views than Philo and the Neoplatonists.
Hence, the orthodox doctrine about Christ,
which was derived from the Christology of the
ancient church, contains elements which to our
mind are contradictions. We also notice, there
fore, what remained hidden to the theologians
of the ancient church, viz., in how many points
the old Christology does not do full justice to
the New Testament views. It is, therefore, our
duty to concede that orthodox Christology does
not give us an appreciation of the person of
Christ which is able to satisfy us.

Can we come to such an appreciation by the
aid of other views ? This question will occupy
us in the next and last lecture.

VI
MODERN FORMS OF CHRISTOLOGY

T BEGIN now my last lecture. It may be
useful, first, to recapitulate the results of
my previous lectures. We have seen that Jesus
was a man who lived in this world of ours. But
the attempts to describe his life as a purely hu
man one have not led to tenable results. They
proved to be inadequate from the scientific his
torical point of view, because they do not al
low an unprejudiced appreciation of the sources.
Besides, they proved inadequate, because the
assumption that the life of Jesus was a purely
human one is disproved by the sources and by
the experiences of believers in all ages. For the
self-consciousness of Jesus breaks the frame of
a purely human life, and the experience of be
lievers in all the Christian centuries confirms
the assumption that the disciples of Jesus were
right in seeing more in him than a mere man.
But we have also seen that orthodox Christology
cannot give us a satisfactory appreciation of the

201

202 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

person of Jesus. It not only puts insurmount
able obstacles in the way of thinking people, but
also does not harmonize with the New Testa
ment, and is intricately interwoven with a philo
sophical view of the world which we no longer
share.

This criticism of orthodox Christology, which
I tried to justify in the last lecture, is not the
property of a few people only. To a certain ex
tent it may be considered as generally recog
nized by the whole German Protestant theology
of the present time. In the preceding genera
tion there was still a learned theologian in Ger
many who thought it correct and possible to
reproduce the old orthodox formulas in our time
without the slightest modification, viz., Friedrich
Adolph Philippi, of Rostock (f 1882). At present
I do not know of a single professor of evangelical
theology in Germany of whom this might be said.
All learned Protestant theologians of Germany,
even if they do not do so with the same empha
sis, really admit unanimously that the orthodox
Christology does not do sufficient justice to the
truly human life of Jesus and that the orthodox
doctrine of the two natures in Christ cannot be

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 203

retained in its traditional form. All our sys
tematic theologians, so far at least as they see
more in Jesus than the first subject of Christian
faith, are seeking new paths in their Christology.

The modern systematic constructions as such
are of no interest for the question we have to
deal with. Not this is important for us, how
systematic theology is to formulate the doctrine
about Christ, but only this: how we are to
interpret the historical person of Jesus. Now,
we have seen that orthodox Christology cannot
give us a satisfactory appreciation of the person
of Jesus. We must, therefore, ask whether we
are, by the aid of other views, in a position to
come to an appreciation of the person of Jesus
which harmonizes better with the sources and
with modern thought. That is the question with
a discussion of which I shall to-day bring my
lectures to a close.

I begin the discussion by referring once more
to orthodox Christology. It has one peculiarity
not yet touched upon, which we must under
stand before proceeding.

Orthodox Christology professes to be a scien
tific knowledge. In orthodox times it was con-

204 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

sidered possible for a learned theologian to ex
pound this knowledge even if he possessed no
living faith himself. This opinion was the nat
ural consequence of the views about the holy
Bible current at that time. The Bible was
looked upon as the verbally inspired book of rev
elation, which communicates knowledge about
the supersensual world just as a knowledge of
natural things may be gained from nature and
history. The principal thing was to understand
this book of revelation and to combine its state
ments in the right manner. This view of the
Bible has rightly been abandoned by modern
theology. The Bible itself does not claim to be
verbally inspired divine revelation, and its con
tents frequently do not harmonize with this
assumption. If a divine revelation has really
taken place, as we Christians believe, then it
took place not through a book which God in
spired, but by means of men endowed by God,
who through their words and actions made God's
truth known to their fellow-men and deepened
it. The books of the Bible are the historical
records of this revelation. And we have already
seen how this is the case with the New Testa-

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 205

ment books. They record this revelation when
they attest the faith of the New Testament
writers to us. Even the Gospels, we have seen,
give us the story of Jesus as it lived in the faith
of the community. And still more the remain
ing New Testament books are testimonies of
the faith of the primitive Christian times. This
shows that orthodox Christology is not knowl
edge that is independent of faith. It is a mixt
ure of historical knowledge and assertions of
faith, partly of the New Testament writers,
partly of later Christians, even of such as com
bined their faith with philosophical thoughts.

Such a mixture can, as such, not give a satis
factory answer to the question who Jesus was.
It is possible, indeed, and, as we shall see, the
right thing for us to do, to combine historical
knowledge and assertions of faith in answering
the question who Jesus was. But such an an
swer can satisfy us only if it is a combination of
our convictions of faith with historical truths, and
if we have a clear notion as to the character of
this combination, i. e.y as to how far the historical
truths extend and where the convictions of faith
begin. Our first task for to-day will, therefore,

206 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

be this: to ascertain what historical knowledge
gives us, and what faith in Christ contains in
itself.

The first question we already considered some
time ago. Historical research shows us a num
ber of traits in the historical Jesus which it can
not combine into a homogeneous picture on the
basis of its presuppositions. It shows us a hu
man being in Jesus, a real man, who in many re
spects stood within the limitations of his time;
but at the same time a man who considered
himself the Messiah promised by God, who was
aware that he had much to say to the human
race in the name of God, who called his death
the sacrifice of the New Covenant, who was con
vinced that he stood in a unique relation to God
—a man who did not leave in suspense the fact
that it was of great import to the fate of everyone
what position he took up with respect to him.
We saw that there is no scope for this self-con
sciousness of Jesus within the frame of a purely
human life. Historical science, which is forced
to recognize the analogy of human experience,
is, therefore, in the case of Jesus, placed before
a dilemma. It must either reduce the notices

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 207

about the self-consciousness of Jesus to such an
extent that they fit into the frame of a purely
human life; or it must declare itself incom
petent to speak the last word on this question,
i. e.9 it must be satisfied with a frank acknowl
edgment of the existence of these heterogeneous
elements which it cannot combine, and must
then leave it to other, not purely historical, ob
servation to unite the heterogeneous elements
into one uniform whole.

If such a union is possible at all, it can only
be effected by faith. Our question now is,
therefore, this: What convictions are included
in the belief in Christ? In the belief, I say. Be
lief is not the acceptance as true of what other
people have said a generation or sixty genera
tions before us. Belief is confidence which is
sure of itself, confidence which is based upon
real inner experiences. But human experiences
are of different depths. Not those experiences
are to be considered as authoritative which are
gained by a man who has only just begun to
take notice of Jesus. Those experiences here
come into consideration which are the common
property of ripe Christians of all ages. We shall

208 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

not go wrong if we, in pointing to these ex
periences, lay stress on that which belief in
Christ, as it is found to-day, has in common
with the faith of the first Christians shown by
the New Testament. This faith, in my opinion,
includes two things: First, that Christ becomes
a revelation of God for us, and, secondly, that
he shows us — and that in his own person — what
we are to become like.

I shall have to enter more fully upon these
two points. I need not prove that the former is
a New Testament view. It harmonizes with
definite statements of Jesus which are handed
down to us. Not only in John does he say: He
that hath seen me hath seen the Father? in the
synoptic Gospels also it is said: No man knoweth
the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the
Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will
reveal him.2 John gives expression to the thought
that Christ is the revelation of God, when he says :
The word was made flesh* and without any im
agery he declares : No man hath seen God at any
time, the only begotten Son . . . he hath declared
him.4 And, as we saw, Paul calls Jesus the image of

1 John 14 : 9. — 2 Matt. 11 : 27. — 3 John i : 14. — 4 John I : 18.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 209

the invisible God,1 speaks of the knowledge of the glory
of God in the face of Jesus Christ.2 These asser
tions of faith are repeated, often in a new shape,
through all the centuries of the Christian era,
not because people simply repeated what the
apostles had said, but because their inner voice
recognized the claims of Jesus as claims of the
holy God, because the merciful love of Jesus
preached the love of God, and because faith
gained the courage from its confidence in Jesus
and his innocent suffering to trust in this merci
ful love of God. And it is not only the past that
has experienced this. The present, too, knows
this experience; many in our midst know it.
We can easily show this if we try to eliminate
from our thoughts everything we have experi
enced of God merely through Jesus, either directly
or indirectly. Would any knowledge of God
remain? Much, indeed, if we recognize the
prophets of the Old Testament. But they be
long to Jesus; Jesus did not preach a new God,
but wished to reveal more fully the one God
whom Israel already knew. And still even the
prophets would leave us in many imperfections.

'Col. i : 15.— 2II Cor. 4:6.

210 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

For relics of Jewish national limitations are still
to be found in them, and all their expectations
of God's loyalty to his covenant would appear
buried with the Babylonian exile, with the poor
state of affairs which followed, with the destruc
tion of Jerusalem and the dispersion of Israel
among all nations. And if we eliminate the
prophets, can the philosophy of the Greeks and
Romans teach us to know God? Their God is
after all but a part of the world, the primitive
matter and the rational order of the universe-
nothing more. The philosophy of the Christian
centuries likewise does not bring us any farther.
If we eliminate what it took out of the New
Testament, it is not a hair's breadth in advance
of the philosophy of the old Greeks and Ro
mans. All we possess of the knowledge of God
we have through Jesus, though in his connec
tion with the Old Testament. We are impressed
as by a word of God when we hear Jesus say
ing: Blessed are the pure in heart, j or they shall
see God; 1 and : Whosoever is angry with his brother
without a cause shall be in danger of the judg
ment ;2 and: Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust

1 Matt. 5 : 8. — 2 Matt. 5 : 22.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 211

after her hath committed adultery with her already
in his heart;1 and: Be ye, therefore, perfect even as
your Father which is in heaven is perfect;- and
many other sayings. We hear a kind invitation
of God when Jesus says: Come unto me all ye
that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you
rest? or: The Son of man is come to save that which
was lost.4 Above all, to my mind, it is the cross
of Christ which to-day still reveals God's char
acter to us. Here, too, I grant, many erroneous
ideas have crept in. It was erroneous to say
that it was the suffering and death of Jesus which
moved God to mercy toward the human race.
Here an erroneous theory has been combined
with the faith in God's love, a theory which
originated in paganism. For it is pagan to think
that God has to be reconciled by sacrifices.
Even among the Jews sacrifices had a different
meaning. They were looked upon as instituted
by God himself, in his grace, lest the Jews should
forget his holiness when approaching him. And
especially the sacrifice of the covenant was but a
token which was to assure Israel of the grace of
God; it did not cause this grace. And in,ac-

1 Matt. 5 : 28 — * Matt. 5 : 45.— 3 Matt. 1 1 : 28.—* Matt. 18 : 1 1.

212

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

cord with this view the New Testament says:
God so loved the world that he gave his only be
gotten Son,1 and Paul declares : Go d was in Christ
reconciling the world unto himself.2 The sacrifice
of the New Covenant, therefore, was not neces
sary in order that God's wrath might be changed
into love, but in order that we might believe in
the grace of God without making light of sin.
The holy God can only forgive if people accept
his grace in the right manner. And we can ex
perience to the present day that the suffering
of Christ enables us more than anything else to
accept the grace of God in the right manner.
The man who feels his sin and then remembers
that Jesus, who committed no sin and had no
other wish than to serve mankind, was put to
death, in spite of this, by the wickedness of men,
that man will feel again and again what the first
Christians felt: he suffered what we deserved
to suffer; he was wounded for our transgressions;
he was bruised for our iniquities? That man will
understand that God permitted Jesus to suffer
(or, better: made him suffer) thus in order that
all who cling to him might gain the courage to

1 John 3 : 16. — 2 II Cor. 5 : 19. — 8 Isaiah 53 : 5.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 213

believe in God's grace without forgetting the
great contrast of their sins with his holiness.
People can, therefore, experience at the present
day what marvellous power belongs to that
faith which Paul expresses with the words: Gcd
made him to be sin who knew no sin (that is, he
treated Christ as a sinner by giving him up to
such an opprobrious death), in order that we
might be made the righteousness of God in him.1
This faith makes the heart confident before God,
and yet, conscious of God's holiness, for it does
not allow us to look upon sin as of little conse
quence. At the same time it strengthens our
power to do good, for the faithful Christian is, as
Paul says, dead with Christ unto sin? Thus an
ever-deepening knowledge of the grace and love
and holiness of God is opened by this faith in
the cross of Christ. That these experiences are
not foreign to the New Testament, every Bible
reader knows. That they are not found out
side of the Christian community is shown by an
observation of the life surrounding us. It is
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of the
crucified Christ;* it is the knowledge in which
the revelation of God in Christ is brought to

*II Cor. 5 :2i.— 2Rom. 6:8, n.— 3 II Cor. 4:6.

2i4 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

perfection for the single Christian. To the eye
of faith Christ is the revelation of God. That is
one thing which faith possesses in Christ.

The other one I characterized thus: that
Christ shows us in his own person what we, too,
are to become like remains. There have been
times, in the days of deism and rationalism, when
of faith in Christ only this remained, that he is
our example. For this very reason the idea that
Christ is the Christian's prototype was in dis
favor with many Christians during the time
following. And it is true that the idea can be
interpreted wrongly. For we cannot here on
earth think and act and live and die as Christ
did. For this he stands too high above us, and
his life had a mission with which ours cannot
be in the least compared. Nevertheless, the
idea that Christ is our example was very real
to the first Christians, and even to-day it im
presses itself upon every faithful Christian.

The former I shall prove not only by the
words of Jesus in the Gospel of John : I have given
you an example that ye should do as I have done to
you,1 or by the well-known words with which
Paul places the unselfishness of Jesus before

13 : 15.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 215

Christians: Let this mind be in you which was
also in Christ Jesus,1 or by the also well-known
passage from I Peter: Christ suffered for you, leav
ing you an example that ye should follow his steps?
We must here attend to a train of thought
which extends much farther and which is seen
most clearly in Paul. We see it in other parts
of the New Testament, too,3 but I shall confine
myself to pointing it out in Paul. It is the idea
that Jesus and those who believe in him, the
Master and his disciples, the Lord and his ser
vants, belong together — an idea which Paul ex
presses most clearly in his conception of Jesus
as the beginner of a new mankind. This idea
is found not only in the famous passage of Ro
mans in which Paul compares Christ as the new
Adam with the first man,4 and in the kindred
passage in I Corinthians where he places Christ,
as the beginner of a spiritual mankind, i. e., a
mankind guided by the Spirit of God, by the
side of Adam, the beginner of the natural man
kind.5 We find this idea everywhere in the writ
ings of Paul: when he says that we shall put on

^hil. 2:5. — 2I Peter 2:21. — 3 Comp., e. g., Matt. 10:25;
John 17 : 10, 18 /., 21-24; Heb. 12 : 2; Rev. 2 : 28; 3:4, 12, 21.
— 4 Rom. 5 : 12-21. — • I Cor. 15 : 45-49.

216 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

the new man,1 or put on Christ? or when he calls
Christ the first-born among many brethren? the
first-fruit of them that slept? or the first-born from
the dead.5 And the apostle connects this opin
ion about Christ as the beginner of a new man
kind closely with the other one, that he is the
image of God. We all, he says, with unveiled
face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord are
transformed into the same image from glory to
glory even as from the Lord the spirit* And when
in the next chapter he says : It is God that said.
Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in
our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ1 — it is evi
dent that he, when writing this, was thinking
of that which we read in the story of the crea
tion: God said, Let there be light, and there was
light* Here, too, the beginning of a new man
kind in Christ is placed beside the first creation.
To modern believers this idea is perhaps not so
full of life as it was to the apostle Paul. But
even in our day every one who begins to be
lieve in Christ experiences this, viz., that an im-

^ol. 3 : 10; Eph. 4 : 24. — 2Gal. 3 : 27. — 3 Rom. 8 : 29. — 4I
Cor. 15 : 20.— * Col. I : 18.— 6II Cor. 3 : 18— 7 II Cor. 4 : 6.—
8 Gen. I : 3.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 217

age is put before him of what he is to become.
And even to-day it is a very common form of
Christian hope: "Christ lives; with him I too
shall live." Even to-day we are comforted at
the grave-side by the words : Our citizenship is in
heaven, from whence also we wait for a Saviour,
the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall fashion anew the
body of our humiliation that it may be conformed
to the body of his glory.1

We have thus proved what I stated, viz., that
faith in Jesus contains these two points: that it
is Christ in whom God is revealed to us, and that
he is the beginner of a new mankind. In what
relation does this faith now stand to the con
tradictory traits which historical science can
show in the historical Jesus without being able
to unite these traits in one picture? Evidently
what the historical science can show harmonizes
very well with faith. If Jesus had not been a
real man, who lived in this world of ours, he
could not have been the beginner of a new man
kind nor could he have been our example. And,
on the other hand, the circumstance that the
self-consciousness of Jesus surpassed purely hu-

1 Phil. 3 : 20.

2i8 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

man bounds harmonizes perfectly with the fact
that he becomes a revelation of God to the
believer.

Faith will, therefore, have to oppose the sci
ence of history, if the latter, unwilling to recog
nize that Jesus stands beyond the reach of its
standards, thinks that it has to eliminate those
traits in the picture of Jesus which surpass the
ordinary bounds of human life. Faith will have
to claim — and it has a right to do so — that his
torical science shall acknowledge that it cannot
say the last word about Jesus. Faith and the
seemingly contradictory traits in the picture of
Jesus which historical science can show — those
truly human and those surpassing human bounds
— these two support one another.

We have thus gained one important result,
given one answer to the question, who was
Jesus? And this answer runs thus : he was a real
man, and yet not a man like all others,— a man
in whose case the analogy of all other human ex
perience is of no use, a unique man among all
the children of God, (or sons of God as the New
Testament says,) the unique one, the only be
gotten son.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 219

But does this give us a real appreciation of
Jesus, an appreciation such as we aim at with
regard to other historical personages, an appre
ciation which enables us to comprehend how
Jesus became what he was, an appreciation
which makes all the details intelligible as the
effects of the inmost kernel, if I may use this
expression, of his personality? Such an appre
ciation is not given with our answer. Can we
attain to such an appreciation? Can formulas,
can ideas, be found which are able to make the
unique historical person of Jesus more intelli
gible than in the orthodox Christology?

It will be in accordance with the importance
which the apostolic testimony about Christ has
for us, if we first ask whether the New Testa
ment gives us such formulas or such ideas. But
it is easier to put the question than to answer it.
For those New Testament writers who seem to
have had an explanation which satisfied them
of Christ's unique position have not expressly
spoken about it anywhere. Even in Paul— with
the views of whose faith we are more fully ac
quainted than with those of any other biblical
writer — even in Paul we find only a few hints

220 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

as to how he explained to himself the unique
position of Jesus. Like John, he assumed that
something eternal, divine, appeared in this his
torical person, and, like John, he unified in his
thoughts this eternal something and the his
torical Christ. In John we see this in the words
of Jesus he reports: 0 Father, glorify thou me
with the glory which I had with thee before the
world was ;l and Paul, not for the first time in
Colossians2 but even in I Corinthians, says of
Jesus Christ: We have one Lord Jesus Christ, by
whom are all things and we by him? This idea,
too, that Christ, or the divine element in him,
had already been the organ of the creation of
the world, is not peculiar to Paul. We find the
same idea in the Gospel of John4 and in the
epistle to the Hebrews.5 But, in spite of this,
we cannot tell how Paul, how John, how the
epistle to the Hebrews looked upon the rela
tion of this divine element in Jesus to the one
God. People who, without the least scruple,
interpret Paul, John, and Hebrews according to
the dogmatics of later times will probably not

^ohn 17:5.— 2 Col. i : 16.— 3I Cor. 8:6.— 4 John 1:3.—
•Hcb. i :2.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 221

understand this. But it is none the less un
doubtedly true. It is even proved by the great
variety of interpretations which the Pauline
Christology has found in the theology of to-day.
Thus, up to the present day, the view — an er
roneous one in my mind — which interprets I
Corinthians 15 : 47 /. as if Paul thought of Jesus
in his pre-existence as a heavenly man, has not
yet died out. And even to-day scholars are not
agreed whether Paul is speaking of the pre-ex-
istent Christ1 or, as I believe with other critics,2
of the historical Jesus, when he says of Christ,
Philippians 2:7: He emptied himself, taking the
form of a servant, being made in the likeness of
men. These uncertainties in the interpretation
—not to mention other reasons — are sufficient
to make it impossible to call the idea of Christ's
pre-existence in the form which it has in Paul,
John, and Hebrews, a solution of the problem
we are speaking about. In the form which later
interpretations gave to this idea it will occupy

1 This is still the prevailing opinion among modern theologians.

*Comp. A. Schlatter, Die Theologie des Neuen Testaments, II,
Calw, 1910, p. 303 /. ("not only the pre-existent Christ"); W.
Lutgert, Die V ollkommnen im Philipperbrief, Giitersloh, 1909, p.
39 /•; W. Warren on Phil. 2 : 7 (Journal of Theological Studies,
XII, London, 1911, pp. 461-463).

222 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

us later on. The case is somewhat different
with another idea which frequently occurs in
the New Testament, the idea that God's Spirit
lived and worked in Christ. For this idea is not
exposed in the same degree to such a variety of
possible interpretations. Nevertheless, it will
be expedient to treat this idea, too, in a later
connection. I therefore refrain from entering
more fully on the New Testament views here.
In the interpretation given to them by later the
ologians, we shall meet them again.

I also ignore for the present the older post-
biblical time. Does modern theology hold out
formulas or ideas which might explain to us the
unique character of Jesus ?

It can, of course, not be my task to answer
this question by investigating the great number
of modern Christological constructions. It will
be sufficient if I mention a few characteristic
types.1

Firstly, I shall refer to a theory which for
some time people believed would constitute the
final solution of the Christological problem. I

1 Comp. E. Giinther, Die Entwicklung der Lehre von der Person
Christi im 19. Jahrhundert, Tubingen, 1911.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 223

refer to the kenotic theory.1 This theory en
joyed a great reputation in Germany in the
latter half of the past century among those peo
ple who wished to remain near to the orthodox
traditions; nor has it died out among us, though
it has been pushed pretty far back. And in
England this theory found supporters at the
very time when it began to disappear in Ger
many.2 In Sweden, too, it was confidently de
fended as late as 1903 by Oskar Bensow.3 In
Germany it was especially the Erlangen the
ologians and their followers that defended this
kenotic theory. Following a more insignifi
cant predecessor, Gottfried Thomasius (f 1875)
was the first to treat it fully, in 1845, and
Franz Frank (f 1894) still retained it in a care
ful form. The Greek term Kenosis, after which
the theory is called, is taken from the pas
sage in Philippians already quoted above, in
which Paul says: Who (viz., Christ), being in
the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an

1 Comp. my article "Kenosis" in the Realencyklopddie fur pro-
testantische Theologie und Kirche, 3. Aufiage, herausgeg. von A.
Hauck, X, Leipsic, 1901, pp. 246-263. — 2Comp. W. Sanday,
Christologies, Ancient and Modern, Oxford, 1910, pp. 74-78. —
3O. Bensow, Die Lehre von dcr Kenose, Leipsic, 1903.

224 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the
form of a servant, being made in the likeness of
men.1 The Kenosis is the self-emptying of the
divine nature of Christ as found by the ke-
notic theory in these words of Paul. In order to
make a really human life of Jesus conceivable
in spite of his divinity, the theory asserts that
the eternal Son of God, in the moment of his in
carnation, emptied himself more or less of his
divinity, and so became the subject of a really
human life, while his divine self-consciousness
was changed into a human one. In this way
people thought they could do justice to both,
viz., to the really human life of Jesus and to the
superhuman self-consciousness which is revealed
by not a few of his words. Jesus could, because
the Son of God had really become a man in him,
increase in wisdom and stature and in favor with
God and man? He could pray, develop morally,
hunger, thirst, and suffer. Only gradually the
reminiscence of his eternal glory awoke more
and more in his self-consciousness, and, at the
exaltation, the glory, which the Son of God
had put off at his incarnation, was given back to

1 Phil. 2 : 6, 7. — 2 Luke 2:52.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 225

the God-man. The detailed treatment of these
thoughts was given by their various supporters
with a varying amount of carefulness or care
lessness. Wolfgang Friedrich Gess, of Breslau
(f 1891), the most reckless advocate of the
kenosis theory, went so far as to say that the
self-consciousness of the Son of God was ex
tinguished at the moment of the incarnation.
Only gradually, he thought, did it emerge again
out of the darkness of unconsciousness in which
the earthly life of the incarnate Logos, like every
human life, began. But even in a more carefully
expressed form, indeed, even in the most carefully
expressed form, the theory is untenable. I shall
not employ my time to show that this is not
what Paul meant, nor shall I prove that the
theory manoeuvres with a conception of the di
vine Trinity which causes monotheism to perish
in tritheism.1 Here it will suffice to point out that
this theory is not suited to effect a satisfactory
appreciation of the person of Christ. To plain
thinkers the theory may seem intelligible. Is
it not possible for a German officer to resign
his position, to come over to America, and, if

1 Comp. Realencyplopddie usw., X, 263,

226 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

he likes, to live here as a plain workman ? But
he surely cannot put off his self as he doffed his
uniform. It is even more inconceivable that a
divine being should have changed into a man.
The theologians of the early church would have
turned from such an assertion with horror. No
church theologian would have dared before the
nineteenth century to speak of changes which
the eternal Son of God suffered in his essence at
the incarnation. Thoughts that remind us of the
kenotic theory are found only in a heretical
group of the early church, among a few Apol-
linarists, and, after the Reformation, outside of
the school traditions, in Menno Simons and in the
lay-theologizing of Zinzendorf. It is mythology,
not theology, which is at the root of this theory.
Nor are, secondly, those modern ideas more
tenable which likewise decline the old doctrine
of the two natures in Christ, but wish to retain,
although without a kenotic theory, the idea of
the orthodox Christology that the eternal Son of
God himself became the personal subject of a
human life.1 The eternal Son of God — so is

1 Comp. K. Thieme, Die neuesten Christologien in Verhdltnis
zum Selbstbewusstsein Jesu (Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kir c he},
18, Tubingen, 1908, pp. 401-472.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 227

the opinion, e. g., of Professor Kunze, of Greifs-
wald,1 and in a closely related form of Professor
Schaeder, of Kiel2 — did not cease to be God.
For to be God and to cease to be so is self-
contradiction. But as man Christ employed his
Godhead (his omnipotence, his omniscience, etc.),
only in a human form, e. g., when he performed
the miracles of divine omnipotence in the power
of his prayer, etc. This theory is also untenable.
For, as we have seen, the historical picture of
Jesus does not show us a divine self-conscious
ness of this kind. And to speak of the divine
omnipotence, omniscience, etc., acting in hu
man form is an ingenious but illicit play with the
attributes of divine majesty. I can understand
when people say that from the wonderful help
often afforded by Jesus faith can learn that the
almighty God can help wherever he wishes, and
that in the sharp-sightedness with which Jesus
knew what was in man faith can see an il-

JJ. Kunze, Die ewige Gottheit Jesu Christi, Leipsic, 1904 (an
enlarged lecture).

2E. Schaeder, Die Christologie der Bekenntnisse und die mo
dern* Theologie (Beitrdge zur Forderung christlichen Theologie,
herausg. von A. Schlatter und W. Liitgert, IX, 5), Giitersloh, 1905;
Das Evangelium Jesu und das Evangelium von Jesus (Beitrdge usw.,
X, 6, 1906); Die Einzigartigkeit Jesu (in Jesus Christus fur unsere
Zeit von Haussleiter, Walther usw., Hamburg, 1907).

228

WHAT IS THE TRUTH

lustration of the fact that God understands
our thoughts afar off.1 But such a practical re
ligious thought is surely quite different from
the rash attempt to explain in human words
that divine self-consciousness was present in
Jesus in human form, that divine conscious
ness of omnipotence is shown, e. g., by the
circumstance that Jesus knew that his Father
heard his prayers at all times.2 The humanity
of Christ does not receive full justice from this
theory, in spite of all earnest attempts. And, if
we are expected to understand the person of
Jesus from the point of view of a divine self-
consciousness acting in human form, we are
placed before a task which surpasses all our
human faculties and is, besides, contradictory
in itself. These explanations certainly do not
furnish a solution of the Jesus-problem which
is intelligible to us human beings.

The construction of Reinhold Seeberg, of
Berlin, 3 looks more intelligible on first sight.

1 Psalm 139: 2. — 2 John II : 42.

3 R. Seeberg, Die Grundzvahrheiten der christlichen Religion, Leip-
sic, 1902, 4th edition, 1906; Warum glauben wir an Christus?
(Hefte fur evangelische Weltanschauung usw., I, 9), Gr. Lichterfelde,
2d ed., 1903; Die Personlichkeit Christi der feste Punkt im flies-
senden Strom der Gegenwart (Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift, XIV,

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 229

Seeberg, too, starts from the doctrine of the
Trinity. But he knows better than the support
ers of the kenotic theory, and better than Pro
fessor Kunze and Professor Schaeder, that the
term "person" in the doctrine of the Trinity
does not mean, according to the orthodox tradi
tion, that personal independence which we other
wise connect with the term "person"; he knows
that it points only to a relation within the God
head between Father and Son. In Seeberg's
opinion, the term is an expression for a particu
lar direction of the divine will-energy which aims
at the realization of the church. This divine
will-energy — such is the opinion of Seeberg—
created the man Jesus as its organ and worked
through him. The personality of Jesus is that
of his humanity; but God's personal will worked
through Jesus, and in such a manner that Jesus
in his personal life became fully at one with this
personal will of God. I refrain from criticising
the ideas on the Trinity and the incarnation
which Seeberg proposes in these views — I should
more easily praise their correctness than their

Frlangen and Leipsic, 1903, pp. 437~457; separately edited, Ber
lin); Wer war Jesus? (Abhandlungen und Vortragc, II, Zur syste-
matischen Theologie, Leipsic, 1909, pp. 226-253.)

23o WHAT IS THE TRUTH

orthodoxy — I only ask: Has this theory solved
the Jesus-problem? has it made the unique
character of Jesus intelligible ? Too intelligible !
I should say. Seeberg is as well acquainted with
the inner life of Jesus as if he had been the
confidant of his inmost thoughts. And that, I
think, condemns this attempt to explain the
unique situation of Jesus. For the sources do
not give us such accurate information.

Quite differently Schleiermacher1 and Al-
brecht Ritschl2 tried to make the unique posi
tion of Jesus intelligible by statements which
confine themselves to his human life. According
to Schleiermacher, the unique character of Jesus
consisted in the singular strength of his conscious
ness of God; according to Ritschl, it consisted
in the facts that Jesus did not allow anything to
interrupt his communion with God, and that
he had the unique mission to establish the king
dom of God on earth. I do not say that these
thoughts leave no room for the superhuman
self-consciousness of Jesus. Neither Schleier-

1F. Schleiermacher (f 1834), Der christliche Glaube nach den
Grundsdtzen der evangelischen Kirche, II, Berlin, 1822.

2 A. Ritschl (f 1889), Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung
und Fersohnung, III, Bonn, 1874, 3d edition, 1888.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 231

macher or Ritschl denied this characteristic of
Jesus' self-consciousness. But for this very rea
son these formulas are no explanation, but only
a description of the unique character of Jesus. I
do not wish to blame them for this. You will
see that I myself, like many other theologians
who were educated in Ritschl's school, know
no other way out of the difficulties. But, if we
confine ourselves to a description, this descrip
tion must be complete. And I do not believe
that this is the case with Schleiermacher and
Ritschl. The revelation of God in Christ is for
Schleiermacher and Ritschl an indirect one, so
to speak: we are to recognize God's character so
far as it is reflected in Christ's consciousness
of and confidence in God. But the New Tes
tament assertions of faith and our own expe
rience point, to my mind, toward a more direct
form of the revelation of God in Christ. Christ
becomes the revealer of God to us not only, and
not at first, indirectly, through his faith in God,
but also directly, through his words and deeds
that speak to us.

This is made more clear in the views of See-
berg mentioned before. But, as I said, See-

232 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

berg appears too rich in knowledge of the inner
life of Christ. But I know a living divine who
shows more reserve, although he occupies a sim
ilar position to Seeberg, and either has greatly
influenced Seeberg or is united with him in the
influence which Isaak August Dorner (f 1884)
exerted on both. I refer to the highly esteemed
oldest professor of our theological faculty of
Halle, Martin Kaehler (born I835).1 Kaehler,
like the early Christian tradition, finds the ex
planation of the unique character of the man
Jesus in his substantial connection with God.
But he does not explain the union of the divine
and human life in Jesus as the combination of
two independent beings, but as reciprocal inter
action between two personal movements, a be
getting action on the side of the eternal God
head and a receiving activity on the side of the
humanity. In a progressive moral development
the human soul of Jesus had appropriated the
contents of the life of the Godhead, and the
God-man manifested and manifests his increas
ing unity with God in the prophetic, priestly, and

1 M. Kaehler, Die Wissenschaft der ckristlichen Lehre, Leipsic,
1883, 36 edition, 1905. Since this lecture was given Professor
Kaehler has died, September 7, 1912.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 233

kingly influence which he exerted and exerts on
the human race. Kaehler shows a close con
nection with the church tradition in his views
on the Trinity. But he remains here in strictly
Augustinian paths; the triune God is the one
God; all semblance of tri theism is absent. And
although the influence exerted by God on the
humanity of Jesus is ascribed especially to the
second hypostasis of the Godhead, that is, as
Kaehler says, to God as far as he is restricting
himself in his self-revelation, nevertheless, also
in this influence exerted on the manhood of
Jesus, God is the indivisible one God, and the
second hypostasis remains unlimited in its rela
tion to the world as creator, in spite of the in
carnation. And, although Kaehler considers the
doctrine of the Trinity indispensable to theology,
he admits that it is of but relative value for ac
quiring salvation.

There is a closer connection between these
views and tradition than I can approve. For,
however reserved Kaehler may be, still, when he
derives an essential Trinity from the economic
Trinity, i. e., from the revelation of God in the
economy, that is, in the history of salvation, he

234 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

asserts more than I venture to support. But,
in spite of this, I considered it expedient to
draw your attention to his views, because from
them we can see how far even conservative
theology meets the views which I find myself
finally brought to. I lay stress, therefore, on
three points which seem to me important in
Kaehler's statements.

(1) The idea of the incarnation is here, in ac
cordance with the tradition of the early church,
brought nearer to that of inspiration, perma
nent inspiration. The incarnation, conceived in
this manner, does not include a change in God,
but is the indwelling of God in the man Jesus,
and this indwelling is proportionate to the re
ligious and moral development of Jesus.

(2) The divine character of Jesus is not
proved by analyzing his person, not by physi
ological or psychological investigations, but by
pointing to the prophetic, priestly, and kingly
influence he exerts upon men.

(3) Hence, no attempt is made to ascertain
what it was that constituted the personality
in the historical Jesus. Kaehler, it is true,
really seems to regard the eternal Son of God

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 235

as having been the personal subject of the his
torical Jesus, but nevertheless he seems to
assume that Jesus as a real man possessed also
a human self-consciousness. It is not want of
clearness, as I think, but only reserve, that
makes Kaehler abandon the attempt to under
stand how the human self-consciousness of Jesus
was modified by the indwelling of God in him.1

If I were forced to give a speculative Chris-
tology, no one would be more welcome to me
than that of Kaehler. But I think we have to
become even more independent of the later
traditions than Kaehler has done.

In trying to prove this, I shall at first go a
little out of my way. The oldest doctrine of the
Trinity which we know, and which we can trace
back as far as the former half of the second cen
tury, is only an economic one.2 The one God is

1 This is not meant as if I would deny every want of "clear
ness" in Kaehler's statements. What he says, e. g., on the
enhypostasia (1. c. §392 b, p. 343; comp. §381, p. 335 /),js, to my
mind, neither intelligible nor tenable (comp. what is said above,
p. 128, e. g., about the language of Jesus).

2 For the following statements comp. my Dogmengeschichte,
4th edition, 1906, pp. 103 /., 140 ff., 245 ff.; my paper, Die Trini-
tdtslehre Marcells v. Ancyra und ihr Verhdltnis zur dltern Tradition,
Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie, 1902, pp. 764-781); and the
notes in my edition of the so-called Symbolum Sardicense (Das
Glaubensbekenntnis der Homousianer von Sardika, Abhandlungen
der Berliner Akademie, 1909, pp. 1-39).

236 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

threefold in his revelation in history. His Spirit
or his Logos, who was his energetic power also
at the creation, lived in the man Jesus in such a
manner that Jesus was both the unique Son of
God who reveals the Father and the beginner
of a new spiritual mankind, the first-born among
many brethren. Exalted to the right hand of
God, to a position of royal sway, he left his
Spirit, the Spirit of God, in the community.
The Spirit leads the way to the Son, and through
him to the Father; and, when all the redeemed
have been made perfect, the Spirit of God will
fill all children of God, as it first filled the first
born among many brethren. The special sov
ereignty of the latter will then cease, as Paul
says : Then shall the Son also himself be subjected
to him that did subject all things unto him, that
God may be all in all.1

It is of no direct importance for the question
which occupies us to penetrate deeper into these
views on the Trinity. For us the three following
thoughts, held out by these views, are the most
valuable: first, that the historical person of
Christ is looked upon as a human personality;
secondly, that this personality, through an in-

JI Cor. 15 :28.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 237

dwelling of God or his Spirit, which was unique
both before and after, up to the end of all
time, became the Son of God who reveals the
Father and became also the beginner of a new
mankind; and, thirdly, that in the future state
of perfection a similar indwelling of God has to
be realized, though in a copied and therefore
secondary form, in all people whom Christ has
redeemed.

These thoughts have their root in the New
Testament. In support of this I refer to what
I said in the fifth lecture.1 I add only that
here, in the idea of the indwelling of God's Spirit
in Jesus, we meet with the oldest formula which
tries to explain the unique character of Jesus,
the formula which lies at the root of the story
that Jesus was born out of the Spirit of God,2
at the root of the story of his baptism,3 at the
root of the words on the cross, Father, into thy
hands I commend my spirit,* and of many other
New Testament statements — the formula which
Paul employs in a prominent passage of Romans,
where he says of Christ: Who was born of the

1 Above, p. i82/. — 2Matt. I : 20; Luke I : 35. — 3Mark i : io/.,
and parallels. — 4 Luke 23 : 46.

238 WHAT IS THE TRUTH

seed of David according to the flesh . . ., declared
to be the Son of God with power, according to the
Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead.1
Is this the formula which solves the Chris-
tological problem; the formula which combines
into a harmonious whole the convictions of faith
about Christ and those facts which historical re
search, remaining in its bounds, has to recognize?
We might feel inclined to answer the question in
the affirmative, because the formula does justice
to both, to the real human life of Jesus and to his
superhuman self-consciousness on the one hand,
on the other hand to the belief that he is the per
fect revelation of God and at the same time the
beginner of a new mankind. And there are sys
tematic theologians — of German ones I men
tion only Professor Wendt, of Jena2 — who are
satisfied with this formula. To every layman to
whom this formula seems intelligible, we ought
therefore to say: Be content with it. The con
viction that God dwelt so perfectly in Jesus
through his Spirit, as had never been the case
before and never will be till the end of all time,

1 Rom. i : 3 /. — * H. H. Wendt, System der christlichen Lehre,
Gottingen, 1906-07.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 239

does justice to what we know historically about
Jesus, and may, at the same time, be regarded
as satisfactorily expressing the unique position
of Jesus which is a certainty to faith. It also
justifies our finding God in Christ when we
pray to him.

But do we understand what the Spirit of God
is? God himself is spirit.1 The activity of his
Spirit is his activity. If we distinguish between
God and his Spirit, we only do so, as Wendt also
says, in order to point out that God's infinite
essence is not exhausted in any one of his ac
tivities.

Thus, we are again placed before a mystery
when we speak of the indwelling of God's Spirit
in Jesus. And we could also argue against the
formula, that it can easily be softened down;
in which case the unique character of Jesus
would no longer be expressed by this formula
as clearly as faith has a right to wish.

My last refuge, therefore, is the term which
Paul strongly emphasizes in the epistles to the
Colossians and Ephesians, the mystery of Christ?

1 John 4 : 24. — 2 Col. 4 : 3 (comp. i : 26, 27; 2:2); Eph. 3 : 4,
9(comp. I :9/.; 6 : 19).

24o WHAT IS THE TRUTH

And what is this mystery? God was in Christ
reconciling the world unto himself,1 that is the
mystery. It would be attempting impossible
things if we tried to understand the historical
person of Christ. The saying of Goethe: Man,
thou art as the Spirit whom thou conceivestf is
very apt in this connection. We must learn to
content ourselves with that which historical
science and the experiences of our faith teach us.
Both, as we have already seen, harmonize very
well with each other. The "historical" Jesus
is not the Jesus whom historical science paints
when it eliminates all those observations which
do not fit into the frame of a purely human life.
Historical science is not able to do full justice
to Jesus. Jesus is set for the falling and rising
up of many3 — in our world, too. In respect of
Christ, only a position either of belief or of dis
belief is possible. And no science can prevent
us from saying: The historical Jesus is the same
as the Christ of faith, i. e., the Christ who was a
man, but also the beginner of a new mankind,

1 II Cor. 5 : 19. — 2The first part of Goethe's Faust. From the
German by John Anster, London, 1887 (Henry Irving edition),
p. 38. — 3 Luke 2 : 34.

ABOUT JESUS CHRIST? 241

and the Christ in whose face we behold the glory
of God, our Saviour and our Lord.

But if we ask: How could Jesus be this? we
must answer, we can never penetrate so deep
as to learn how God made him what he was.
No one knows the Son save the Father,1 says Jesus
in Matthew, and in another passage we read:
The stone which the builders rejected, the same was
made the head of the corner. This was from the
Lord, and it is marvellous in our eyes.'2 And Paul
says after a similar metaphor, and with these
words I close: He that believeth on him shall not
be put to shame?

ii : 27. — 2Matt. 21 : 42. — 3Rom. 9 : 33.

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Full text of "What is the truth about Jesus Christ? : problems of Christology, discussed in six Haskell Lectures at Oberlin, Ohio / Freidrich Loofs"

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