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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

Christian Origins

Christian Origins

BY
OTTO PFLEIDERER, D.D.
Professor in the University of Berlin

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
DANIEL A. HUEBSCH, Ph.D.

Authorized Edition

NEW YORK
B. W. HUEBSCH 1906

Copyright, 1906, by
B. W. HUEBSCH

"Die Entstehung des Christentums"
Published April 25, 1905.
Privilege of Copyright in the United States
reserved under the Act approved March 3, 1905, by
J. F. Lehmann, Mttnchen.

: <.. o

PREFACE
[This book is the outcome of public lectures, de
livered at the University of Berlin during the past
winter semester, in the presence of the students of
all departments and many non-collegiate visitors of
both sexes. With almost no other change than the
addition of a few notes I sent the manuscript to
press. Forced to cover the subject in sixteen lec
tures, a condensation of the abundant material de
manded a selection of the essential, and the regard
for the interest of the non-theological public directed
the choice. All technical matter, particularly criti
cism of related literature, had to be omitted; those
readers who are interested therein, will find it in my
larger work : " Das Urchristenthum, seine Schrif-
ten und Lehren, in geschichthchem Zusammenhang
beschrieben," 2 Aufl. 1902.
The viewpoint from which the origin of Chris
tianity is herein described is purely historical; the
Introduction gives information concerning the mean
ing of this method and its relation to other methods
of treatment. It lies in the nature of things that
such a purely historical description of the origin of
our religion will differ vastly and in many ways
from the traditional Church presentation. Hence,

Preface
this book has wof been written for such readers as
feel satisfied by the traditional church- faith. It may
hurt their feelings easily and confuse them in their
convictions; I would feel sorry for that because I
cherish a, respect for every honest faith. But I
know that in all classes and circles of society to-day
there are many men and women who have entirely
outgrown the traditional church-faith and who are
possessed of an urgent desire to learn what is to be
thought, from the standpoint of modern science,
concerning the origin of this faith and concerning
the eternal and temporal in it. To go out toward
such truth-seekers is a duty which the trained repre
sentative of science dare not shirk; he may not
withdraw where there is the added fear that un
trained leaders will push themselves forward and
increase the confusion of souls by their arbitrary
notions. It is self-evident, that no historical research-
worker considers himself infallible; that would be
foolish in any department, but the folly were three
fold in the branch of early-Christian history, with
its problems of unusual difficulty. Certain as is the
declaration in the majority of cases, that something
could not possibly be historical reality, so certain it
is that the question, what is to be considered the
actual course of events, can be answered only by
relative possibility. This book, too, does not pre
tend to contain any more than those results of the
critical research in early Christianity which are in
4

Preface
my opinion most probably true. Nevertheless, I
may say that what is here offered to a large: circle
of readers for private reflection and consideration
is the mature product of more than forty years of
earnest study.
Science is ever-progressing and, naturally, the
state of knowledge here presented will be but a step
in the onward march. In which direction? With
certainty, nothing can be foretold, but, judging by
all past experience and by many a sign of the pres
ent, it may well be supposed that the progress of
knowledge will not be toward the old tradition, but
rather to a greater departure from it. Hence, we
will do well to dwell more and more in the thought,
that the real subject of our pious belief is not what
has been, but what is eternal! " That alone which
never transpired in any place, never becomes time-
worn !"
That is no reason at all why the history of the
past should be held valueless; it contains the signs
and guides of the eternal, but not the final and the
highest at which we ought to stop. Otto Pfleiderer.
Gross-Lichterfei.de, March, 1905.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface  3
Introduction  9
I. Preparation and Foundation of Christianity
Preparation of Christianity in Greek Philosophy . . . . 31
The Jewish-Greek Philosophy of Philo  . 49
Preparation of Christianity in Judaism  59
Jesus  83
The Messianic Congregation  133
II. The Evolution of Early-Christianity into the
Church
The Apostle Paul  155
The Three Older Gospels  217
The Gnostic Movement  249
The Gospel of John  261
The Establishment of Church Authority  281

INTRODUCTION
The real historical conception of the origin of
Christianity is of recent date. So long as the prob
lem was approached with the presupposition of the
church belief, it was impossible. If the origin of
Christianity consisted in the descent of the second
person of the Deity from heaven to earth, in his
becoming man in the body of a Jewish virgin, in his
bodily resurrection after dying on the cross, and
his ascent to heaven, then the origin of Christianity
is a complete miracle, incapable of any historical
explanation. rFor, the historical understanding of
a phenomenon means comprehending it in its causal
connections with the circumstances of a particular
time and a particular place of human life.'' The
entrance of a superhuman being into the mundane
world would constitute a new beginning absolutely,
standing in no causal relation whatever with any
thing preceding; therefore it could not be grasped
by analogy with any other human experience, in
short, the phenomenon withdraws from all historical
explanation. Such a Christian origin could only be the object
of faith, not of historical knowledge. But this
faith, according to the Church doctrine, is based on
9

Christian Origins
God's revelation in the Bible, which had been given
in all its parts by God, a direct divine testimony for
humanity, hence, also a miracle. The miraculous
origin of Christianity finds its support in the miracu
lous character of the Bible. That is logical and is
the only thing possible from that viewpoint. Chris
tians could rest content therewith, so long as reli
gious consciousness lived without guile in the world
of the miraculous, the supernatural and the mysteri
ous, and so long as the Bible was regarded by the
eye of faith as a source of edification, without test
ing its separate books with critical understanding.
As soon as this was done, it became apparent that
the reports of the New Testament concerning the
person of Christ are by no means so harmonious
as church-faith presupposed, that the Christ of the
first three Gospels appears as a real man and not yet
as a God become man, that only two of the gospels
tell of his supernatural birth and that the narratives
of his resurrection and ascension are full of con
tradictions. As soon as this condition of affairs was
seriously considered, the ingenuous Church-belief in
the miracle of the supernatural origin of Chris
tianity was shaken and soon made way for the more
reasonable and natural conception.
The beginning of this change is to be found in
that tendency which appeared in England in the
seventeenth century under the name of Freethinking
or Deism, spread to the Netherlands and France,
and in Germany in the eighteenth century acquired
10

Introduction
the name " Enlightenment " or " Rationalism."
Various causes united in developing this movement.
After the religious wars, the parties divided by
dogmas felt the need for mutual toleration, hence
they sought a universally valid norm of truth out
side the dogmas, and that could be found only in the
reason and experience common to all men. In addi
tion, there came the exercise of scientific thinking in
the newly-flourishing natural sciences and mathe
matics ; accustomed by them to the correct sequences
of logical thinking as well as the closeness of the
causal relation in all natural events, it was impos
sible to rest content with the simple faith in miracles
in the religious field, and there began a search for
the natural and reasonable explanation of things.
John Toland's famous book ( " Christianity not
mysterious, a Proof that in the Gospels nothing is
opposed to or beyond the reason " ) is written from
this standpoint. Matthew Tindal sought to prove
that Christianity is as old as creation, and that the
gospel of Jesus is no more than a new proclama
tion of that original, natural religion which had been
defiled by the additions of heathens and Jewish
superstition and the deception of priests. The
enlightened followers of the Leibniz- Wolff philos
ophy in Germany took the same ground ; such a one
was Reimarus, a scholar of Hamburg, and it is
from his " Schutzschrift " (Treatise of defense for
the sensible worshippers of God) that Lessing took
the " Wolfenbiitteler Fragmente." In this publica-
n

Christian Origins
tion, the evangelical reports of the resurrection of
Jesus are subjected to searching criticism; after the
miracle has been critically dissected, a supposedly
natural explanation of the narrative is looked for
in a deception of the disciples, which would have it
appear that they stole the body of Jesus.
This is a characteristic example of the want of
real historical sense and psychological understanding
in handling religious problems, which, without
exception, was peculiar to that Rationalism. Com
mendable as its honest courage of truth and keen
as its criticism of dogmatic and legendary tradition
were, nevertheless it seemed unable to move beyond
mere negation to any kind of satisfying position.
Its rigid intellectuality lacked all adaptability to the
manner of thinking and feeling of another, of enter
ing into the spirit of past periods and of seeking
out with sympathetic understanding the unconscious
activity and poetry of the religious imagination. It
had not the faintest foreknowledge of the concep
tion of " evolution " in the history of the human
spirit; it presupposed that reason employed one
method of thinking, alike everywhere and complete
from the beginning, and that method it held to be
the true one. This very narrow, subjective standard
of measure, it applied to every phenomenon of his
tory. Wherever the stories or teachings of the
Gospels and the Apostles did not suit, either a forced
exegesis would give the desired interpretation or
the passage was declared to be an unreal figure of
12

Introduction
speech ; but it was just this which robbed the biblical
figures of their characteristics and reduced every
thing to the monotonous plane of a rational ethics,
which could never lead one to understand how the
movement of Christianity which shook the world
could have gone forth from it.
With regard to the evangelical miracle stories this
rationalism occupied a peculiarly difficult position;
though it did not regard the Bible as the inspired
word of God, yet it did consider that the book had
been written by authors, who wished to speak truth
for the sake of piety, and as eye-witnesses were in
position to do so; thus, it felt in duty bound to
accept the evangelical miracle stories as historical,
and yet, according to the general principles on which
its rational world-view rested, it could not really
believe in miracles. What was to be done ? It was
granted that the story told did describe an actual
event, but it was stripped of its miraculous character
by reducing it to a natural, generally trivial, occur
rence which had been regarded as a miracle because
of a mistinderstanding either on the part of the
narrator or the reader.
The rationalist Paulus, for example, explains the
miracle of Jesus walking on the waters, by saying
that the Greek word had been misunderstood, so that
the passage means not " on " but " by " the waters ;
the miracle at the baptism of Jesus rests on a mis
taken interpretation of the fact that a dove chanced
to alight near Jesus at that moment ; the miracle of
*3

Christian Origins
the transformation of the water at Cana is reduced
to the mere trick of a prestidigitator, which Jesus
performed as a bit of amusement at the wedding;
less comically innocent but repugnant and low is the
rational explanation of the birth story, wherein the
thought-laden poetry of legend is dragged in the
mire of vulgar prose.
From two sides came the release from the narrow
limitations of this rationalistic treatment of history ;
the one was a deeper psychological understanding of
religion and its poetic picture language, and the
other was the more thorough investigation of the
historical sources. In the former case, it was
Herder who gave the impetus to the movement,
generally designated " Romanticism," which had
such powerful effect both for good and evil on the
theological treatment of history in the nineteenth
century. Herder recognized, with Hamann, that
poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race, the
natural outlet of the emotions in general, and of
religious feeling in particular. This was the key
to a new and intimate appreciation of the Bible
language, leading beyond the stiff pedantry and petty
literalism of the orthodox as well as of the Rational
ists. With the same fine sense of religious content and
poetic form which had enabled him to penetrate into
the spirit of Hebrew poetry, Herder was able to
attune his spirit to the New Testament stories and
to realize their edifiqatory value; but Herder's crit*
H

Introduction
ical understanding did not keep pace with the sympa
thetic suppleness of his feelings. Because the
miraculous gospel stories were congenial to his spirit
and his aesthetic taste, therefore he believed that
they actually took place, however impossible might
be the reconciliation with his world-view as a phi
losopher. He believed in them because his heart was
their advocate and because the reciprocal recognition
of idea and reality had become such a need and
habit of his intuitive way of thinking that the
reasonable demand of a distinction between ideal
content and historical fact in the biblical traditions
never rose clearly into his consciousness.
The direct identification of idea and reality, which
was still naive Romanticism with Herder, Schleier-
macher developed into a Christological theory and
fixed as the central point of his theological system.
Therewith, the miracle once more was placed at the
head of Christian history ; no longer as the miracu
lous descent of a God to earth and no longer on
the basis of the inspired word of the Bible, but now
it was held to be the presupposition of all Christian
feeling, that in the man Jesus there actually had
been realized the absolute ideal of religious perfec
tion, bliss, freedom from error and sin, and therefore
his person demands recognition as the unique and
complete existence of God in humanity. In the
Ritschlian theology this grew into the bold assertion,
that the man Jesus must stand as God for us, because
he is the only revelation of God in the world's
history. 15

Christian Origins
Self-evidently this romantic deification of the man
Jesus, this precedence of a " super-man " and
miraculous being at the beginning of the history of
Christianity, hindered the scientific understanding
thereof to a high degree; and this was clearly seen
in the course of that Life-of- Jesus-Theology which
was dominated by the dogmatics of Schleiermacher
and Ritschl. Naturally enough, after the miracle
of a superhuman being was placed at the forefront,
miracles of all kinds were stationed at all decisive
points along its further history ; thus, the continuity
of causal connection in all events, the principle of
all real historical research, was abandoned. Where
this was not so palpable, there was still the attempt
to read the ideal of the individual into the Gospels
and so paint over characteristic features that they
seemed to correspond accurately with the Christ
ideal of the present; — this attempt, more or less
visible everywhere, was a great hindrance to unprej
udiced research into the origin of Christianity.
German theology was first rudely awakened from
her romantic illusions by the celebrated " Life of
Jesus," by David Frederick Strauss. Not only was
the rationalistic critique of the miraculous Bible
stories carried out with logical strictness and keen
ness in every detail, but for the first time a satis
factory explanation of these stories was offered by
the employment of the conception of the " myth "
or pious folk legend which had long been applied to
profane history. According to this new conception,
16

Introduction
the miraculous stories of the Gospels are not super
natural stories (as the Supernaturalists held) nor
natural stories (as the Rationalists held), but they
are myths, that is, poems or legends ; not in the de
liberate work of an individual is their origin found,
but in the activity of the folk-consciousness, the
involuntary thinking and poetizing of the many at
once. According to Strauss, the Old Testament
served as the prototype, and for the most part fur
nished the material for the miraculous legends of the
Gospels. The effect of this book was tremendous ; in many
circles, the impression obtained that it had resolved
the whole life of Jesus into a myth, a simple poem
lacking all historical foundation. Strauss himself
did not seek to make this impression, nevertheless,
it was his fault because he stopped at the destructive
criticism of the miracle stories, without making any
attempt to bare the positive historical kernel hidden
in the mythical shell. He had shown that what
had been regarded before as the early history of
Christianity, had not actually occurred so; but he
did no more, for as to what really did take place,
the darkness was profound as ever. Strauss was
unable to say anything positive on the subject, for
he lacked methodical criticism of the source-books.
Under the circumstances, it is not remarkable
that shortly thereafter Bruno Bauer, a Berlin critic,
who always tended to extremes, exaggerated this
mythical interpretation of the Gospels tg^TLffa3^
17

Christian Origins
of all historical content. According to Bauer, the
life of Jesus does not belong to. history, but is the
invention of the Evangelist Mark who, in the reign
of Hadrian, used the philosophic ideas of his time
to sketch the ideal picture of a popular king as
opposed to the Roman Caesars. This bold hy
pothesis which leaves Christianity without any his
torical Jesus and makes an ideal-poem of the second
century its source, was little regarded at first; but
lately, it has been taken up by an Englishman,
Robertson, who would explain the biblical Christ as
a mixture of heathen and Jewish mythology,* and
again by Kalthoff, a theologian at Bremen, who
traces it back to the social tendencies of the period
of the Roman Emperors as its source.f
The only importance which I can attach to these
radical mythical hypotheses is that they form the
extreme reaction against the one-sided personalistic
theory of the Romanticists, according to which
Christianity appears in the miraculous person of
Jesus, a thing complete, as Athene is supposed to
have emerged from the head of Jupiter; whereby
the inner connection with the religious ideas and
the social conditions of the time are either entirely
overlooked or at least greatly underestimated. The
more unbiassed the consideration of the sources of
* " Pagan Christs, Studies in Comparative Hierology," by John
M. Robertson. Watts &Co., London, 1903.
f Alb. Kalthoff, "Das Christusproblem. Grundlinien zu einer
Sozialtheologie." By the same author — " Die Entstehung des Chris
tentums." Diederichs, Leipzig, 1903 und 1904.

Introduction
early-Christian history in their relation to the allied
phenomena of the history of the period, the clearer
becomes the persistent conviction that the origin of
Christianity is not to be conceived as merely the
resultant of the one person Jesus, but that it is the
product of a powerful and many-sided development
of the ancient world in which various factors had
long been at work. It is the merit of the latest
champions of the mythical hypothesis that they
emphasized this social-evolutionistic aspect. But in
their contention against the Romantic theory, they
shoot far beyond the mark, when they imagine that
they will be able to explain the origin of Christianity,
without the historical Jesus, merely by mass-instinct
and mass-tendencies.
Is it thinkable that out of the chaos of the masses,
the new congregation could have formed itself with
out some decisive deed, without some fundamental
experience, which might serve as the nucleus for the
crystallization of the new idea? Everywhere else
in historical new-formations, the sum-total of
existing energies and efforts is directed into one
particular channel by the deed of a heroic person
ality; he fixes the goal and gathers them up into
an organism possessing vitality. Just so the
impulse to the formation of the Christian congre
gation must have found a beginning at some particu
lar point, which, according to the testimony of the
Apostle Paul, and the oldest Gospels, can be found
only in the person, the life and the death of Jesus.
19

Christian Origins
The preservation of a golden mean between a
Romantic personalism which overlooks the import
ance of the social environment, and a social-evolu
tionism which undervalues the importance of the
personality in history — that seems to me to be the
task of the historian here as elsewhere.
Half a century ago, the great church-historian
Ferdinand Christian Baur of Tubingen pointed out
this right path. He was the first one who dared to
apply to the history of Christianity the thought of
" evolution," which had long been normative in
every other department of science; he applied that
thought with an earnest zeal which is remote even
to-day from most of the theologians, supernatural-
ists, rationalists and romanticists. His opponents re
proached him with a lack of understanding of the
person of Jesus ; this was a gross injustice so far as
historical understanding is concerned. He was most
hearty in his recognition of the moral greatness of
Jesus ; but his sober and upright sense of truth did
restrain him from the Romantic deification of the
person of Jesus and his segregation from all histor
ical conditions and limitations.
As a scholar versed in ancient religion and phi
losophy, Baur could not possibly grant that the world
before Christ had lacked God and spirit entirely and
had been immersed completely in the darkness of
heathen error; he did find there various seeds of
truth, which were positively preparatory for and
achieved their fullest development in Christianity.

Introduction
If it is true, then, that the varied tendencies of the
spirit of the times were gathered together into a
higher unity in Christianity, then it could not pos
sibly have appeared in the individual life of Jesus as
a fixed and finished product, so that all which fol
lowed, as the Romanticists claim, must be regarded
as apostasy, degeneration and diseased conditions.
The origin of Christianity is to be thought of as a
developing process, in which various other factors
were working along with the life-work of Jesus;
these united and adjusted themselves gradually but
not without inner contradictions and struggles.
This thought, that the origin of Christianity is
not to be understood as a single miraculous deed but
as a developing process, in which the life and death
of Jesus moved the tendencies of the time to act and
react upon one another until they finally united
in the new-formation of the Christian Church : this
was Baur's fruitful discovery, and science will not
and can not lose sight of it again. Whatever has
been brought to light by the industrious research of
the last decades in the way of new knowledge con
cerning heathen, Jewish and early-Christian religious
history, — and it has not been a little*— has not dis-
* Among the representatives of this branch of science let me make
particular mention of Weiszacker, Baur's successor in the professor's
chair at Tubingen, Hilgenfeld, Holfzmann, Holsten, Hausrath,
SchUrer, Weiss, Harnack, Wellhausen, Gunkel, Jtilicher, Bousset,
Schmiedel. The science of early-Christian religious history is much
indebted to these men and others for their learned works, however
often their results diverge on single points.
21

Christian Origins
proved Baur's fundamental thought, but has merely
corrected and supplemented it in details. For, to
be sure, the picture of the early development of
Christianity will be a more varied and more intricate
one than even Baur supposed. Our acknowledg
ment of gratitude for this acquisition of increasingly
accurate knowledge is the more freely given by rea
son of the fact that the fundamental thought of
Baur's development theory has not been dissipated
but is confirmed thereby.
By what means did Baur arrive at this deeper
insight into the origin of Christianity? Not by
lucky chance, not by a priori philosophic speculation
(as is often foolishly declared), but by criticism of
the biblical sources, the Pauline Epistles and the
Gospels, a thorough criticism free from all dogmatic
presuppositions. This criticism of the Epistles and
Acts of the Apostles produced a picture of the apos
tolic period, differing greatly from the traditional;
it was a period of lively struggle by which Christian
freedom from Mosaic law had to be wrung labori
ously from Jewish-Christian conservatism.
More important still was Baur's analysis of the
fourth Gospel, which resulted in the knowledge that
not the Apostle John, but some Hellenistic theologian
of the second century was the author of the book;
also, that it was not and did not purport to be a
historical work, but a doctrinal one, on Jesus, the
logos incarnate or the Son of God from Heaven;
further, that this Gospel, accordingly, must be

Introduction
removed from the group of historical source-books
on the life and teachings of Jesus and must be placed
among the documents relating to the history of the
post-Apostolic Church. The New Testament writ
ings in general were valued by Baur as original
documents treating of the various phases and tend
encies of development of the early-Christian faith
and congregational life; thus, the origin of the
New Testament became an essential part of the
origin of the Christian Church itself.
So the fetter of Church tradition was broken, —
that tradition which held that all New Testament
writings were of inspired apostolic origin because, as
we shall see later, of purely dogmatic presupposi
tions, which made a historical understanding of these
writings impossible from the beginning. Baur's
keenness and unusual loyalty to truth were required
to break this fetter of dogmatic tradition, which
sealed the entrance to the beginnings of our religion
for every historian as tightly as the Cherub's flam
ing sword did the gates of Paradise.
True, others before Baur had rattled the tradi
tional fetter by doubting the "genuineness " of one
or the other writing, but little was gained thereby
for the historical understanding. Baur was
the first one who had found courage enough to
free himself from the traditional fiction; heedless
of the dogmatic romancing of the church-fathers,
he scrutinized the New Testament writings with his
keen, seund eyes to see to what time and place their
23

Christian Origins
peculiar content, religious character, and historical
motives might belong. These writings ceased to be
oracles of apostolic inspiration for him as they are
for the Church-belief ; they became witnesses to the
natural origin and growth of the Christian religion
and Church. Such a long step forward was this,
that single errors in the judgment of certain writ
ings cannot offset it.
When we hear " Return to Tradition " recom
mended to us to-day, that means nothing else than a
return to the fundamental Catholic principle that
dogma must rule history ; for the tradition concern
ing the New Testament is the child of the old church-
dogma, and the motive for such a return is in its
turn dogmatic, namely, the wish to employ the post-
apostolic writings as the witnesses for the apostolic
period and to substitute for a gradual becoming a
completed thing, existent from the beginning, mys
terious in origin and incommensurable in authority.
This reactionary Romanticism cannot lead us
astray; we still maintain that the origin of Chris
tianity can be understood as actual history only,
when dogma no longer rules history, but when this
history is studied according to the same principles
and methods as every other. Only the presupposi
tion common to all historical research is permissible
in this case; we, too, can work only from the
analogy of human experience, the similarity of
human nature in the past and in the present, from
the causal connection of all external happenings and
24

Introduction
inner psychical experience; in short, from the law-
abiding order of the universe which ever conditioned
all human experience. Would you call that " a
presupposition"? I will not dispute your answer,
but remember, it is the presupposition, without
which there can be no such thing as scientific knowl
edge : we may justly reckon it as one of the axioms,
not to be accepted by one or the other at his own
will, but one of the fundamental conditions and
forms of all normal activity of the human spirit.

as

Book I
PREPARATION AND
FOUNDATION OF
CHRISTIANITY

PREPARATION OF CHRISTIANITY
IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY

PREPARATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN
GREEK PHILOSOPHY
In order to understand the origin of Christianity
as a historical development, the preparation in the
ante-Christian world demands first consideration.
The old apologists and church-fathers were aware
of the fact that this preparation was to be found
not only in the Jewish religion, but to an equal
extent in Greek philosophy. For example, Justin
the Martyr says of Heraclitus and Socrates, the
philosophers, that they were Christians even though
they were commonly considered Atheists; accord
ing to Clemens of Alexandria the philosophy of the
Greeks was for them an education to Christ, just as
the Mosaic law was for the Hebrews. Inasmuch as
Greek philosophy influenced the Judaism of the last
few centuries before Christ, it seems better suited to
our purpose to make that the starting-point.
As early as five hundred years before Christ, the
Ionian philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes had,
subjected the mythical folk-faith of the Greeks to
destructive criticism. Foolish it is, so they said,
to conceive the deity after the image of man;
blasphemous to ascribe human shortcomings and
wickedness to it; useless to worship it with bloody
animal-sacrifice. Over against a multiplicity of
3J

Christian Origins
gods they set up one god ; neither in figure nor in
thought like the mortal, he is the vitalizing spirit and
the governing reason which underlies all the change
of phenomena. Soon Anaxagoras, the friend of the
Athenian statesman Pericles, rose superior to this
nature-pantheism and achieved the thought of the
supermundane spirit, the cause of order in the uni
verse. But it was Socrates who called into being the
decisive movement of a moral world-view which
resulted in the suppression of heathen naturalism;
of him it is said correctly that he brought phi
losophy down from heaven to earth.
Socrates held it to be his God-given mission to
teach the recognition not of external nature, but of
man as a moral being, and by the development of
his insight to educate him to virtue. In him, for the
first time, the great thought of "autonomous"
(self-lawgiving) personality found powerful expres
sion. Not the opinion and the wish of the masses
constituted authority for him, but he hearkened to
the inner vbice of his reason and his conscience
("daemonion" he called it). Of his scholars he
demanded self-knowledge, independent testing of
traditional opinions, action based on personal insight
and belief in the good. Therewith he set himself
in opposition to the principle of the authority of
custom, society and tradition of the state, on which
ancient society rested. This deep-rooted contradic
tion was the reason why the Athenian judges con
demned him to death ; he died the first blood-witness
32

Preparation of Christianity in Greek Philosophy
of " philosophy," that is, the individual spirit
awakening to the consciousness of its own peculiar
rights. In Plato's portrayal of this witness to truth
who was loyal unto death to his profession, to his
divine mission, of the moral education of men, who
met his end with pious submission and joyous calm,
we stand face to face with a greatness and moral
spirit rising far above his teachings ; it is the spirit
of a new epoch in history, which reveals itself in the
person of Socrates by his inner self -certainty and
pious loyalty to conviction. Thus we may well look
upon him as a forerunner and a prophet of Chris
tianity. Among the pupils of Socrates, who developed the
teachings of their master in various directions, there
was no thinker so independent and so bold as Plato.
The Socratic contradiction of the two kinds of
knowledge (the untrue opinion and the true con
ceptual knowing) ramified into two worlds in the
vision of the poet-philosopher Plato. The one
became the world of the sensual and the ever-chang
ing phenomena which are akin to ephemeral shadow-
pictures without truth or substance; and the other
became the world of eternal prototypes or " ideas,"
which the senses cannot perceive and the thinking
reason alone grasps and knows to be the true reality
behind the illusion-world of the senses. The super-
sensual world of ideas, originating in a concept-
poem, crystallized into the sum-total of all ideal
values for Plato; in them our spiritual life would,
find its true content and its eternal home.
33

Christian Origins
Thereupon, it was the psychical doctrine of the
ancient Orphic poets and seers which Plato was able
to bring into fruitful alliance with his teaching of
ideas. Souls, so he taught, originate in the super-
sensual world of ideas, with which they are related ;
theirs is a portion of the idea of life, therefore they
are being, self-moved, unbegotten and necessarily
immortal. Their descent to this world of earth and
their union with the earthly body, these are the con
sequences of an intellectual Fall, the sin consisting
of an excess of the ignoble instinct dragging them
down to the sensual, over that reasoning part which
strives to look upward at divine truth and beauty.
Hence, according to Plato, man's task is to free him
self from the hindrance of the body and elevate him
self to the world of the ideal good whence he came.
Being full of evil, man must attempt to fly this
world of the senses as rapidly as possible and go
thither ; but this flight consists in the achievement of
the closest likeness to God, and this is done by being
righteous and pious with insight.
When a soul persists in cleanliness from the body
as behooves its divine nature, and prepares itself for
death by perpetual striving after wisdom, then it
may hope to go later to its like, the invisible and
eternal and divine, where a happy state awaits it,
a life of bliss with the gods, free from error and
passion and all other mortal ills. But those souls
which cling to the sensual and hate the spiritual, are
held to the earth by their low instinct and are

Preparation of Christianity in Greek Philosophy
dragged after death into new bodies, animal or
human, each after its own kind. Only those souls
attain repose in the gods which have withstood the
desires of the body, sought salvation and purification
through philosophy and nourished themselves by a
continued vision of the true and the divine. Thus
Plato converts the Orphic teaching of the soul into
an ethical idealism, which in its youthful exuberance
threatens to go far beyond the world or even to
forsake it entirely, but which in truth merely gives
the spirit its power to break the chain of crude nature
and become master of the world.
Plato's teaching of God shows the same rising
above nature to the moral spirit. He takes up the
world-regulating spirit taught by Anaxagoras, but
finds it inadequate because the thought of a teleolog-
ical world-government is not seriously employed. In
order to supply this defect, Plato makes the divine
spirit one with the " idea of the good," which he
fixes as the highest purpose-cause of the world and
describes as the creative reason of being as well as
of knowledge, just as the sun in the physical world
causes the sight of things as well as their growth.
Thus conceived, the ideas appear as the purpose-
thoughts of the creative spirit of deity, which became
real in the actual world, just so far as space and
time permitted. The reason which constrained the
prime mover of all to create the world, Plato assigns
to his goodness; because he is good, hence free
from envy, he wished that all should be as like to
him as possible. Therefore, he created the world in
35

Christian Origins
his own image, — the most beautiful, perfect creature,
his only-begotten son, who became a visible God.
The presupposition is that the world is a living
being, an organism possessed of a soul; and, inas
much as that all-permeating soul, the world soul, is
the most immediate image and emanation of the
deity, Plato could describe the world as the second
god and only begotten Son of the Father and prime
mover of the universe, — a thought, in which we may
recognize one of the germs of the subsequent doc
trine of the Trinity.
That, however, is but one aspect of the Platonic
view of the world, struggling with the other, that
the world is only an imperfect, distorted image of
the divine world of ideas divided in time and spaced
— obscuring real being more than revealing it, more
shadow than reality. This latter aspect corresponds
to the world-shunning, ascetic side of Plato's ethics,
while the former harmonizes with the world-shaping
practical-social side. Although the old Hellenic joy
of the world is disturbed by this earnest recognition
of the chasm between idea and reality, yet the pious
confidence in a wise and benevolent providence
ever preserves this idealistic thinker from pessimistic
grovelling and gloom ; providence guides all so that
it must co-operate for the welfare of the whole; it
has placed each in that position which will enable
him to contribute most to the triumph of the good,
insofar as he himself wishes the good. For it is
Plato's conviction that freedom and responsibility
36

Preparation of Christianity in Greek Philosophy
for individual volition and action are not excluded
by divine providence, but are presupposed thereby.
He emphasizes this particularly by pointing out that
a divine judgment will come upon the sinner, if not
in the world here, with greater certainty in the
world beyond.
On the basis of this religious world-view, the
ethics of Plato rests ; it is essentially different from
the ancient Greek utilitarian ethics in its strong
emphasis of the absolute value of the good. True
morality, according to Plato, is not the " slave-
ethics " which restrains from mere desire, which
seeks to change pleasure for pleasure like coins, with
out knowing the proper coin, for which everything
ought to be exchanged. That coin is virtue founded
on reason, which loves the good for its own inner
value and remains loyal to it under all circumstances.
If one were to ask whether righteousness is more
useful to men than unrighteousness, then the ques
tion were equally as unreasonable as to ask whether
it is more useful to be healthy than to be sick, or to
possess a capable better than a corrupted soul. The
upright man must be looked upon as the happy man,
even though gods and men fail in proper esteem,
though shame and misery be his lot; the wicked
must be looked upon as unhappy, even though his
sin remains hidden from all the world. For this
reason, Plato rejects as immoral the popular principle
that good should be done for friends and evil to
enemies. It can never be the intention of the right-
37

Christian Origins
eous to do any one an injury, an enemy as little as
a friend. How near the wise Greek approaches
Gospel ethics in these thoughts.
Yet Plato stands on ancient Greek ground again
when he seeks to find the ideal of righteousness
realized not in the life of the individual, but in the
social, aggregate life of the State. His famous ideal
state is the logical elaboration of the genuine Greek
thought of the aristocracy of spirit, culture and
science ; at the same time, it is the practical counter
part of the theoretical dualism in Plato's philosophy.
As idea and phenomenon, the supersensual and the
sensual are set up one against the other, so the Pla
tonic state divides into two strongly differentiated
classes: the upper class consists of the rulers and
guardians of the state, who alone have charge of
public affairs and are prepared for their profession
by a thorough education in all the arts and sciences ;
in their strict service of the idea, they must sacrifice
all private interests, even those of property and
family, and have a community of possessions and
wives, regulated by the state. The lower class must
rest satisfied with the acquisition and possession of
material goods, but are excluded from ideal interests
of spiritual culture and political life. This intel
lectual state, in which philosophers are the kings,
belongs, after all, to the few who are cultured and
rich in spirit; it leaves the others to their own
resources. The Gospels, on the contrary, proclaim
the coming kingdom of God, in which all will be
38

Preparation of Christianity in Greek Philosophy
blessed, even the poor and the ignorant, the weary
and the heavy-laden. Similar as they may be in
all other respects, at this point behold the vast differ
ence between Platonism and Christianity !
Next to Platonic philosophy, Stoicism (founded
by Zeno and Chrysippos in the third century B. C.)
was the most important preparation for Christianity
in the Graeco-Roman world. In opposition to Plato's
dualism, the Stoics returned to the Pantheism of
Heraclitus, and united with it the rigid individualism
of the Cynics and their proud spirit of freedom.
They held the task of philosophy to be essentially
practical; it should lead man to virtue and thus
to happiness, by teaching him a proper insight into
the value or valuelessness of things and thereby
free him from the outer world and the unreason
ing feelings which make him dependent upon it.
Virtue is not merely a part or a condition of the
highest good, but it is the highest good itself; for
it is the practical wisdom of living, which guarantees
inner freedom to men and equanimity in all the
circumstances of life. With enthusiastic exaggera
tion the Stoics proclaimed their ideal of " the wise
man" ; he alone is free, happy, rich, beautiful, a true
king, poet and prophet, friend of the gods, and
their peer in perfection and happiness. On the
other hand, the fool is bad and miserable throughout,
a slave, yes, a man insane.
Since virtue is one and indivisible and ought to
be present in its entirety or not at all, the strict
39

Christian Origins
adherence to their theory would divide men into two
classes, those who are perfectly wise and those com
pletely foolish. Naturally, this abstraction could
not be carried into practice; the inevitable limita
tions of the principle were accompanied by a sus
picious uncertainty in practical morals. Besides,
these practical morals were burdened with the irre
concilable contradiction of the unbounded striving
for freedom on the part of the individual and the
recognition of social obligations binding the indi
vidual to society, its weal and woe.
Among the older Stoics, the former took preced
ence; this was shown by a self-satisfied pride of
virtue and a rigid sternness which smothered all
the milder tendencies of the spirit. The later Stoics
of the Roman Imperial period, however (Seneca,
Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), show a change in the
manner of feeling and thinking, easily explained by
the circumstances of that age: the feeling of the
solidarity of mankind grows stronger and sympathy
for their weakness outweighs the proud condemna
tion; a more modest, partially pessimistic judg
ment of the human power of knowledge and will
strengthens the religious moods of humility, of sub
mission, of trust in divine aid and providence.
In Seneca this change was peculiarly favored by
the influence of Plato's philosophy. Entirely in
agreement with Plato, he regards the body as the
cause of the evils from which humanity suffers ; the
body is the galling iron under which the divinely-re-
40

Preparation of Christianity in Greek Philosophy
lated soul chafes in darkness. Against the burden
some flesh and its downward tug, the soul is ever
struggling, ever striving toward the source, whence
it was sent, where eternal rest awaits it. This passing
life is but the prologue of that better and longer life.
Hence, our earthly possessions are to be looked upon
as the furnishings of an inn, from which we must
journey on; we can carry out no more than we
have brought in. We ought have no fear of death ;
it is the birthday of the eternal which releases us
from the thralldom of earth. It is the task of
philosophy to prepare us for this end. Philosophy
teaches us to know our weakness, awakens us from
the deep sleep of error, demands betterment of the
will and thus produces an inner conversion, which
is but the initiation of a continuous improvement.
In order to win the prize of freedom, we must take
up the unceasing struggle against our desires and
sins; we must throw off that which gnaws at the
heart, even though the heart itself be torn from its
roots. But this work of self-emancipation and puri
fication must be accompanied by kindness toward
others and active love of humankind. We must feel
ourselves to be members of one great body. Nature
has made us all out of the same matter and created
us for the same ends ; she has implanted the love for
one another, social instincts, propriety and justice.
Nature's order makes the doing of ill worse than the
suffering of injury. Consequently, we ought to
practice humanity toward all, toward the divinely-
4»

Christian Origins
related soul of the slave as well as that of the
foreign comrade, the fellow-citizen of the greater
Fatherland which compasses the world, — these
souls ought to be respected ; for, we are born in one
kingdom of God, and obedience to Him is freedom.
This milder, humane ethics of later Stoicism corre
sponds to a deep-seated religious tendency : God is
no longer considered merely an energy at work
throughout the universe, but it is the wise and
benevolent Providence, to whom we may humbly
submit with perfect confidence in his guidance — as
the holy spirit of the good, making its presence
known within us. Seneca says that God assumes a
paternal attitude toward the good and loves them
manfully; amid pain and labor, he suffers them to
gather true strength. Therefore the pious should
say: I am compelled to nothing, I suffer nothing
contrary to my will, I do not serve God slavishly,
but I am in accord with him, I follow him with
all my heart and there is no compulsion. The
proper worship of God consists in the recognition
of the divine rulership of the world and in the
imitation of divine goodness; following His
example, we ought to give even to the ingrate, for
the sun rises upon the godless, the sea spreads its
bosom for the pirate, the wind blows favorably not
only for the good, and the rain falls on the fields of
the blasphemer. Not temples and not images are
needed for the adoration of God, for God is near
thee ; he is with thee, he is within thee. For, in us
42

Preparation of Christianity in Greek Philosophy
there dwells the holy Spirit as the observant guard
ian of our good and evil; as we treat him, so he
treats us. Without God, no one is a good man;
else how could he rise superior to fate without God's
help? God alone gives us great and noble inten
tions ; God dwells in each good man. Divine seeds
are strewn in the human bodies; where they find
tender care, there they take root and grow to a
likeness of their prototypes. In the vision of great
human models lies the means of developing these
divine seeds; hence Seneca demands of us that we
" attract " the spirit of a great man, cast a look into
the soul of a good man and see in him the picture of
sublimest virtue, radiant with nobility and peace;
before such a picture we would stand in awe and
consuming love. If our eyes were cleansed, we
would even discover the picture of virtue under the
shell of the body; under the stress of poverty,
degradation and shame, we would recognize it and
the vision of its loveliness would delight us though
clad in ugliest garb.
It is not surprising that such expressions gave
many the impression that Seneca must have known
Jesus Christ and because of the sight of him, spoken
in such enthusiastic terms of the power of the moral
ideals exhibited by one personality. But, without
doubt, such is not the case ; such expressions on the
part of the Stoic philosopher have greater value for
the historian, just because they are not dependent on
the Christian Gospels; they are of greater impor-
43

Christian Origins
tance as witnesses of a widespread moral-religious
manner of thought and tendency in the Graeco-
Roman world of those days, — closely related to the
Christian and preparing heathen soil for the Gospels.
This was an ethics which led men to look within and
freed them from the allurements and the terrors of
the world ; it purified man's soul by demanding con
trol of the passions, particularly sensuality ; it taught
man to recognize in inner freedom and purity the
dignity of the human personality, and it gave full
force to the respect for man as such ; in the divinely-
related, reasoning nature of man, finally, it found
the common bond of brotherhood of all men, irre
spective of rank or nationality and from this con
viction evolved the motive for a new and crowning
virtue, love of human brothers, humanity. (In
this sense, the word humanitas was first used by the
Stoics. )
This system of ethics was built up on a religious
world-view, in which there was spiritualization and
moralization just as there had been in heathen
Naturalism. The popular gods of polytheism lost
their meaning ; some became symbols for powers of
nature, others became subordinate deities (similar
in nature to the angels of the Bible), who no longer
hindered the uniform world-rule of the one highest
God, prime-mover and governor of the world. All
the naturalistic traits and human passions which
mythical tradition had attributed to the gods, were
not to be found in the nature of this world-governing
44

Preparation of Christianity in Greek Philosophy
God; He was thought as perfect reason and good
ness; his government as a wise providence, pater
nally caring for us and in his educative wisdom
regulating even evil as a means for the best. As a
reasoning being, man feels himself intimately related
to this world-governing reason ; in himself, he feels
the presence of God as a holy Spirit, as a warning
and wakeful conscience, as a power making for good
and for elevation beyond the world. Finally, this
religious experience serves as a guarantee for the
hope that the divinely-related soul after separation
from its earthly body will find in the celestial world
of light that highest freedom, as well as peace and
quiet, which could only be striven for here below.
The Stoic philosophy of the Imperial period had
taken this worldly hope from the philosophy of Plato
and the wisdom of the Orphic mysteries. In this
ethical hero-worship to a certain degree, Seneca
rationalized the belief (customary in the rites of the
Orphic-Pythagorean and other mysteries) in revela
tion-authorities and salvation-mediators. In gen
eral, that idealistic view of the world, found most
among the later Stoics, may be designated as the first
attempt to combine the rapture of religious mysti
cism with the ideals of a rational ethics ; therewith, a
step was taken toward the unification and purifica
tion of religion and ethics, which Christianity
achieved. This was beyond the power of Stoicism,
because its ethical idealism was too abstract to con
struct a religion and because its religion was not
45

Christian Origins
wholly free from the popular polytheism and
naturalistic pantheism.
Stoicism grasped with remarkable clearness the
fundamental religious problem of the connection of
the moral freedom of man and his dependence on
God ; but it did not solve the problem, and it could
not have done so, because the freedom of man was
taken in the negative sense of the withdrawal from
the external world into his own soul, and not in the
positive sense of the self-submission of man to the
absolute divine purpose of the world. The Stoic
teaching of purpose confined itself to nature and
either lost itself in trifles or stood helpless and re
signed before the great evils of the world. The tele-
ological consideration of history from the viewpoint
of a divine education of the race for the purpose of
realizing the moral ideal in each and every human
being — that was entirely foreign to the individualis
tic, unhistorical mode of Stoic thinking. Therefore
its pious submission lacked the moral enthusiasm of
that love, which at once loses and finds itself while
striving for God's highest purpose and the common
good of all. This true synthesis of moral freedom
and religious dependence did not appear before
Christianity brought it. In more than one way,
Stoicism prepared the way for it, but had nothing to
take its place; rather, by concession to the popular
belief and worship of the gods, Stoicism sank to the
former level of Nature-religion and ended in a slav
ish superstitious belief in demons, oracles and prodi
gies. 46

THE JEWISH-GREEK
PHILOSOPHY OF PHILO

THE JEWISH-GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF
PHILO
Of greatest importance for the preparation of
Christianity was the combination of Greek phi
losophy and Jewish religion, which happened among
Hellenic cultured Jews of Alexandria under the
rulership of the Ptolemys in the two centuries imme
diately preceding Christ. In the writings of the
philosopher and theologian Philo, an Alexandrian
Jew (born 20 B. C, died 54 A. D.), the ripest fruit
of this combination has been preserved for us.
Equally versed in Rabbinic learning and in Greek
philosophy, particularly Plato and the Stoics, he
strove to interpret the latter into the Old Testament
writings ; for this purpose, he employed the method
of allegorical explanation, not original with him, but
for the first time applied with such boldness and
thoroughness. In this fashion, a uniform system of thought
could not be built up ; at every point the differences
in the artificially fitted thought-series was apparent.
Above all is this true of his teaching of God, in
which philosophic exclusiveness stands in unme-
diated contradiction to religious belief in revelations.
According to Philo, God is elevated beyond the
world throughout, and incomparable with any finite
49

Christian Origins
being; so that there can be no imperfection, nay
more, no particular attribute can be predicated of
God. He is better than the good and the beautiful,
purer than the one; man cannot know what he is
or that he is not; he is neither in time nor space,
knows neither change nor needs; he is absolute
being. Such Agnosticism cannot be a halting-place for
the religious thinker, and he adds positive predicates,
arising from the relation of God to the world ; God
is the effective cause of all and the reason in all,
comparable to light and the human soul, but differing
from every finite thing in that it is always active and
never passive. To this Stoic attribute of the all-
producing power of God, Philo adds the Platonic
attribute of his goodness and grace ; therein lay the
cause of the creation of the world, that preserves the
harmony of the universe, that manifests itself in the
inexhaustible abundance of kindness which God
showers upon all creation and above all -upon man.
Everything that is good in the physical and moral
world is God's gift and only good can>come directly
from him; evils are the punishments imposed by
the subordinate spirits, but at the command of God.
That grace goes before righteousness with God and
that He stretches forth the saving hand even to
sinners, was an important conviction to Philo; the
Platonic teaching of God's goodness without envy
may have contributed thereto, equally as well as
the God-idea of such Prophets as Jeremiah and
50

The Jewish-Greek Philosophy of Philo
Hosea. However, this religious conviction of the
unenvying goodness of God is opposed to the dualis-
tic world-view, which Philo shared with all the
men of his period; according to that view, the
material world is far too bad for God to act upon it
without mediation. Philo believed that he had
found the solution of this difficulty by mediation of
the divine activity through supersensual mediatory
beings; these he designated partly as incorporeal
powers (Stoics), partly as ideas (Plato), and partly
as angels (Old Testament). At times he selects
two from among them, Power and Goodness, as the
highest; then again he says, there are six highest
(the number of the Persian Amschaspans or Arch
angels), and among them the Logos is first.
This Logos-conception, the pivotal point of Philo' s
system, combines the Jewish idea of the creative
word of revelation with the Stoic thought of the
active, divine reason in the world. As for the
Stoics, so for Philo, the Logos is the world-forming
and world-sustaining principle which acts by separat
ing and uniting opposites, hence its names, the bond,
the law, the necessity of all, or all-permeating, the
all-ordering and all-guiding. But the Philonic
Logos differs from the Stoic, in that he does not
identify it with God or the world substance, but
makes it something intermediate between them ; his
name is first-born son of God, oldest Angel, image
and plainly-spoken, a " second God " ; since the crea
tion, he has been the mediator of divine revelation,
51

Christian Origins
the model for all matter, and at the same time the
power by which matter was shaped into the world.
In the history of man, especially in the history of the
people of Israel, he was from the beginning the
mediator of all divine revelation ; at once, high priest
and advocate (paraclete) of men before God. In
general, he is not only the model, but the continuous
source of the good and the true in man; those
souls in which he dwells, to which he imparts himself
as the real bread from heaven, and they alone, can
be saved from the universal sinfulness and find the
homeward path from the foreign land of earth to the
heavenly hearth of souls.
In such fashion, the Philonic Logos combines the
philosophic thought of divine reason which dwells
in the world and in men with the theological ideas
of a personal mediator of revelation and messenger
of God, like Hermes, the mythical messenger of the
gods, whom Stoic theologians regarded as the per
sonified Logos. Such mediary beings, half philo
sophical and half mythical, were favorite subjects of
speculation in that period and met the need for
something wherewith to fill in the great gap between
God and the world.
Philo's teaching about man combined Platonic and
Stoic thought with biblical tradition. Philo agreed
with Plato in looking upon the earthly body as a
prison for the soul descended from above; it was
the root and seat of evil, error and wickedness. He
sought to harmonize this theory with the biblical
52

The Jewish-Greek Philosophy of Philo
story of creation, by finding in the two narratives
(Genesis I and 2) a twofold creation: First, an
incorporeal, celestial, ideal man, and then the man of
earth, a mixture of angel and animal, resulting from
the combination of a higher part with matter of
earth. The salvation of man from the thrall of
sensuality and his elevation to the divine model, —
these are impossible to man's unaided powers, but
can be achieved by the aid of divine powers ; particu
larly, by aid of the Logos, descending into souls and
sanctifying them as temples of God. Man's part
is but a passive reception of the divine power ; hence,
Philo praises faith as the royal virtue uniting us to
God, as the most beautiful sacrifice which the pious
can offer, as the only possession which does not
deceive, the staunch consolation of life, the abun
dance of hope, the heritage of bliss. Love belongs
with faith, as " the twin sister of piety." But the
highest object, to which knowledge and activity are
but leading steps and means, is, according to Philo,
the mystical seeing of God, which is the portion of
the perfect in their moments of ecstatic rapture when
the human light sets before the rising light of the
divine. For, he says, our understanding departs
when the divine spirit arrives, and it returns after
the latter has departed, because the mortal and the
immortal cannot dwell together.
At this, its sublimest height, the peculiar character
of this religion reveals itself in its strength and in
its weakness : a sincere piety, a deep feeling of de-
53

Christian Origins
pendence on God, an active longing for elevation
above everything finite to a community with the
eternal God,— in short, a mysticism of the pious soul
rising far above the limitations of the national
religion, the earthly-eudaimonistic dreams of the
Messiah and the legal formalism of Judaism, a
mysticism with but one purpose, to find God and be
blessed in Him. But is this ardent longing for
salvation and union of man with God, which Philo
voices, really fulfilled ? Could it be fulfilled, in view
of the presupposition of that crass dualism of God
and World which Philo had taken over from Plato
and exaggerated ? The union can take place only in
the condition of unconscious ecstasy, in which all
reasonable thought and volition are submerged,
because it is Philo's opinion that the human spirit
cannot dwell with the divine.
Despite all mediation, the antithesis of God and
man remains insurmountable for Philo; he cannot
grasp the thought that the highest revelation of the
divine spirit is man's spiritual life with its reason
able content of the true and the good. Therefore,
though Philo approaches the theology of John, he
stands outside the threshold of Christianity; he
knows nothing of an " incarnation of the logos," a
historical and permanent realization of the divine
principle in the personal and communal life of God's
children. But Philo was a preparation for Chris
tianity, in that he demanded of the hellenistic
Judaism of the Dispersion the spirit of individualis-
54

The Jewish-Greek Philosophy of Philo
tic, inward-turned piety and a universally broadened
morality ; therewith he blazed the way for an ethical-
spiritual religion, based on monotheism, but freed
from the limitations of Judaism.

55

PREPARATION OF CHRISTIANITY
IN JUDAISM

PREPARATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN
JUDAISM
The development of Palestinian Judaism from the
second century before Christ had been in the reverse
direction; there, the spirit of legal and narrow
national religion implanted by the lawgiver Ezra
triumphed increasingly over the piety of the
Prophets and the Psalmists, which survived in the
hearts of a few. This opposition had existed pre
viously in the Jewish congregation, founded by
Ezra; but it had been latent under the Persian and
Greek rule. It did not become acute until the na
tional-religious reaction consequent upon the threat
ened Hellenization of Judaism under Antiochus
Epiphanes, the Syrian monarch; the Maccabean
heroes led the reaction to victory and ever after the
Pharisees were its powerful support. This caused
the Jewish Law to become the dividing barrier
which prevented Jewish participation in Grecian cul
ture, and the narrowing yoke which was felt more
keenly by the conscientious (recall Saul-Paul !) . But
this later development of Judaism must not cause us
to forget that it had not always been so. In the
Judaism of the fourth and third centuries B. C. there
still lived that deep and honest piety, classically
expressed in the Psalms; there were thinkers who
59

Christian Origins
had kept in contact with Greek culture, and regard
less of national and legal limitations solved the
riddles of the universe according to their own ideas
— these were the authors of the so-called " wisdom-
books." While Pharisaic legalism is a negative
preparation, we recognize the wisdom-books and the
Psalms as a positive preparation of Christianity in
Judaism. The individualization of the religious conscious
ness is common to the wisdom-books and the Psalms.
Previously religion had been a common possession
of the people of Israel, each one being part owner
by virtue of birth ; now, it became the personal atti
tude of the individual. Pious is he who fears God
and trusts in Him, who holds Him ever in his sight
and in his heart, who is pure of heart and upright
in action, who even in misfortune clings hopefully
and trustingly to God. This is the ideal of right
eousness as found in the Psalms, in the Proverbs and
in Sirach. It was, as ethical-religious ideal, inde
pendent of the ceremonial law (which the pious man
respected as the unquestioned basis of the religion of
his people). He did not feel the Law a burden,
for habit had made familiar custom of it; but he
did not recognize it as an adequate standard of meas
ure for moral self- judgment, because he had uncon
sciously grown beyond it. Hence, the pious con
sidered that only those who shared the pious attitude
belonged to God's congregation ; he looked upon the
children of the world and the indifferent as godless
60

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
people on the same plane as heathens, even though
they were Jews by birth and to all outward appear
ances observed the Law. He felt divided from them
by a deep chasm, and hated them passionately ; the
more their power and social standing enabled them
to rise above the pious poor and oppress them, the
greater his hatred.
If Jewish blood-ties and social position ceased to
have weight in religious estimation, it was natural
that national limitations from the outside world
ceased to have any religious importance; univer-
salistic enlargement was the inevitable complement
of the individualization of the religious conscious
ness. At bottom, this was the logical outcome of
monotheistic belief in God : the more intensely the
thought of the moral world-rule of one God was
taken up, so much the less possible was its limita
tion to the Jewish nation alone. Therefore, the
great prophet of the Exile, usually called the Baby
lonian Isaiah, designated the Jewish people as the
chosen servant of God in the sense that it is their
mission to become a teacher of the heathen, a light
for the nations dwelling in darkness, a mediator
between God and man. The last Prophet, Malachi,
says that God's name is great everywhere among the
nations of the East and West and that clean offer
ings are sacrificed to him everywhere ; meaning that
throughout the human world there are those who
acknowledge and serve the one true God. In this
sense, the author of Job makes a non- Jew the repre-
61

Christian Origins
sentative of a purer belief in God as against the
Jewish law of retribution. And as in Job, so in the
other wisdom-books of that period, the specifically
Jewish name of God, Jahve, gives way to the more
general names such as Elohim and El, Adonai and
Eljon, names in use among the heathen. No
longer is the God of Israel spoken of, but the God
of Heaven, later simply ' Heaven.' All of which
shows plainly that Universalism ruled not only the
Jews of the Dispersion but even those of Palestine,
and that, in principle, they were international despite
their adherence to the old customs.
This individualization of religion gave rise to new
religious problems, which were a source of doubt
and unbelief for many, while for others they gave
an impulse to the deepening of faith. It was axio
matic in the religion of the Prophets, that divine
righteousness manifests itself by giving the revyard
or punishment merited by human action; but they
thought of this as applying only to the deserts and
fate of the nation as a whole, and conceived thus
the belief involved no serious difficulties. When,
however, the pious individual began to compare his
own and other individual happiness or misery with
the guilt or the innocence of each, the serious ques
tion could be suppressed no longer : Is the frequent
experience of the happiness of the godless and the
misery of the pious compatible with divine right
eousness? The answer to this question was the
more difficult, because neither the Judaism of that
62

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
day nor that of the Prophets pointed to a resolution
of the earthly disharmony in the retribution of the
world to come. They sought the reward for right
eousness in earthly happiness alone, especially in
long life, children and prosperity; misery on earth,
particularly sickness and horrible death, poverty and
shame, these were signs of God's disfavor toward
sinners. The world to come had not yet become
their hope ; for the Prophets, as for the Psalm and
Proverb writers, an eternal future awaited the nation
of God, not the pious individual; for from Hades
("Sheol"), the land of shadow or darkness, of
oblivion or silence, there is no return, all suffer a like
fate there and none can praise God more.
With these presuppositions it was indeed no easy
task to harmonize the belief in a just, divine retribu
tion with the experience of the misery of the pious.
The more remarkable is the courage of certain reli
gious thinkers, especially the author of Job, who
strove to solve these dark riddles. The author
of Job makes the friends of that patient man repre
sent this Jewish theory of retribution ; presupposing
that every pain is righteous return for some corre
sponding sin of the sufferer, they conclude that Job's
great sufferings must grow out of heavy and secret
guilt. Possessing a clear conscience, Job defends
himself by reference to his lack of any conscious
guilt; he appeals from the God of tradition, the
supposed wrathful retributor of secret guilt, to the
true God of his belief, the honest witness and judge
63

Christian Origins
of hearts, who does not work for man to see, bi
who speaks clearly and undoubtedly in man's coi
science. The certainty of his own clear conscienci
the consciousness of community with God, which n
misfortune can shake — these are the certain guai
antee that, notwithstanding all contrary appearances
God is in truth with him and for him, that even i
it be not until after his death, God will certain!
appear as a witness for him and preserve nis hono
before all the world. In fact the poet makes Goi
appear to uphold the pious sufferer against the sus
picions of his orthodox friends; God's mouth con
demns the friends' method of defending Him at th
price of truth and righteousness. So the traditiona
Jewish doctrine of retribution, which makes externa
welfare the measure of man's moral worth, i
refuted; the judgment of moral conscience come
into its rights, and the inner peace of religious con
sciousness is made independent of all externa
accidents of fate ; the moral belief in God is remove<
beyond reach of all the complexities of outer experi
ence by being anchored safe in the individual con
science. By this deep thought, the heart of the book, tb
Jewish teacher puts himself on the same grouni
with Plato. He, too, visualized the absolute valu
of moral goodness in his picture of the uprigh
sufferer, who rests certain of his inner happines
despite persecution and misinterpretation, and trust
fully believes that God cannot desert the righteous
64

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
On this high plane of a world-conquering certainty
of faith stands the author of the seventy-third
Psalm, who takes refuge in God from the darkness
of the world-order : " Nevertheless, I am continually
with thee; Thou hast holden my right hand. Thou
shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward
receive me to glory. Whom have I in Heaven but
thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire
beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth : but
God is the strength of my heart and my portion
forever." Wherever it appears, in Palestine, in Greece or any
where else, such an attitude commands recognition
as Christianity before Christ. However, these are
isolated peaks, high above the average of the popular
religion. The Jews, generally, maintained the
standpoint of Job's friends, whose doctrine of
retribution is one at bottom with crude religious
utilitarianism. The inevitable conflict between this
belief and the facts of experience drove many, like
the author of the " Wisdom of Solomon," to doubt
and unbelief, and their final word is " All is vanity."
This skeptical mode of thinking was widespread
among the upper classes of the Jewish people at the
beginning of the second century B. C, it had been
favored by their acquaintance with Greek culture,
which under such circumstances acted as a disinte
grating power, undermining the faith and the cus
toms of the fathers. Things came to such a pass
that the worldy-minded, priestly aristocracy at
65

Christian Origins
Jerusalem (the Sadducees) offered to aid King
Antiochus in the Hellenization of Judaism. But the
forcible attempt to carry out this plan resulted in
a reaction of the national and religious spirit of the
people; the Maccabeans who shook off the yoke of
foreign authority and the Asideans (the predeces
sors of the Pharisees) made common cause for
the maintenance of the Jewish Law. The vic
torious reaction against the deserters led to a
strengthening and stiffening of the legal spirit of
Judaism. As a protection against heathenism,
accurate observance of the Law in all its ceremonial
externals was insisted upon. The letter of the
written law (" Thora ") was not all, but the net work
of regulations was continually enlarged; the circle
of things permitted was gradually made smaller
by things commanded ; and the greatest stress was
laid upon the elaborations added by the scribes,
and their interpretations of the letter, which were
called old traditions. Particularly the commands
concerning Sabbath observances, cleansings and
purifications were developed most minutely and strict
conformity was commanded. Moral actions were
subordinated, while deeds of holiness (fasts, prayers
and almsgiving) were regarded as most im
portant. In the Pharisaic sense, the ideal of right
eousness was no longer the attitude of the Psalms
nor the moral guidance of the Proverbs, but legal
correctness according to the rules of scribes;
everything depended on formal exactness of omis-
66

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
sion and commission, — Judaism became a religion of
service by deeds and a set of legal axioms ecclesias
tic and civil. The claims of reward and the reckon
ing with God took on a new aspect. The attitude
of the soul was not of weight, but individual deeds
were counted ; according to Pharisaic theology, the
meritorious deeds were set over against the trans
gressions, and the balance sheet drawn in heaven
showed at every moment how the spiritual account
stood. Since, by their extraordinary, meritorious
services (to which martyrdom especially belonged),
certain holy men heaped up a superabundant treas
ure of credits, the excess might be transferred to
the needy sinner for the mitigation of his indebted
ness and make up for his lack of meritorious acts :
thus we find in this Jewish theology the doctrine
of the abundance of grace and the atoning merit
and expiation through saints.
Accurate performance of all the ordinances and
commands of the written and unwritten law re
quired more than the ability of the average man;
simply to know them all, a special training was
needed. In the circle of the Pharisee the thought
ran : " The unlearned cannot preserve himself from
sirt and the layman cannot really be pious ;" religion
was their study and their art, hence they looked
down with pride upon the mass of poor and un
learned men, who neither knew the minute rules of
law, nor had the means or the leisure to obey them.
A strong line was thus drawn between the tech-
67

Christian Origins
nically trained virtuosos -of piety and the unlearned
mass (" am-haarez "), who learned no religion in
school, who were avoided by these proud and right
eous for fear of contaminating contact, and who
were left to shift for themselves in things spiritual
and temporal. The Law, at one time the joy and the
glory of the pious, became an oppressive yoke and
life-destroying letter, benumbing Jewish life. Phar
isaism not only spoiled morality by subordinating
service to one's neighbor, to the practice of piety, but
it took the soul out of religion by barring the ap
proach to God through an idolatry of the Law,
which elevated it even above God. The Rabbis
opined that God himself devotes his leisure hours
on Sabbath to the study of the Thora !
However much the scribes clung to the traditional
limitations of Judaism, they were unable to suppress
every movement. While the dike of the Law and
tradition was being built higher and higher to guard
against the rationalism of Hellenic culture, the flood
gates were opened to the turbid waters of Oriental
wisdom. Speculations concerning the realm of the
spirits, concerning angels and demons, concern
ing resurrection, last judgment and places of retribu
tion in the world to come poured in. Attributes of
God, such as wisdom, word, spirit and glory, which
before had been personified occasionally in poetic
language, were now made independent, personal
beings, like the Amschaspans or archangels, mediat
ing between God and the world. The old notion of
68

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
divine messengers (angels) was dogmatically de
veloped: various classes were differentiated, the
highest were named and commissioned to do speci
fied work in governing the world. Protecting
angels were apportioned to peoples and persons;
natural phenomena even were made subject to
angels, restoring the heathen nature-gods under new
labels. As in the Persian religion, the army of the
good, spirits was opposed by an army of evil ones ;
so in Judaism, the demons, which had formerly been
unimportant shadowy beings, achieved the new dis
tinction of fallen angels ; under their greatest leader,
Satan, they formed a kingdom inimical to God.
But now Satan became the opponent of God, the
prince of all the realms in open enmity to the king
dom of God. In the book of Job, Satan was reck
oned among the heavenly host of God, and heavenly
attorney or accuser of men before God. Now, it
was Satan who tempted our first parents, and
through him sin and death found entrance into God's
good creation ; sickness was recognized as the work
ing of demons who had taken possession of men;
opposing heathen nations were looked upon as tools
of Satan, who was employing them to persecute
God's kingdom of the Jews. Both Jew and Persian
nourished the hope that Satan's rule in the present
world-period has its limit fixed in God's council.
According to the Persian religion, the war between
the good and the bad God is the content of the
world's history, which falls into four periods of
69

Christian Origins
three thousand years each; at the end of that time
the world will be judged, the realm of inimical
spirits destroyed, the Savior will appear and cause
the resurrection of men and the creation of a new
world purified of all evil. These thoughts now
forced their way into Judaism and became dominant
in those new pictures of the future collectively called
" apocalypses." The first work belonging to this category is the
Book of Daniel, which contains a philosophy of his
tory from the Jewish theocratic standpoint in the
form of a vision put into the mouth of a mythical
saint of the time of Nebukadnezzar. Following
Jeremiah's prophecy of seventy years of trial, the
author of Daniel recasts it into seventy yearJweeks
and fixes the turning point of the salvation that is to
be in his own period, the time of the Maccabean
wars. In the fall of the Macedonian monarchy he
espies the coming end of the last of the four heathen
world empires, after which there will begin the
eternal rule of the " saints ' (that is, the Jews) and
the world's history will come to a close. Thus
the prophetic expectation of a future " messianic "
period of glory for the Jewish people, which had
been lost to sight during the Hellenic rule, was once
more moved into the foreground, at the same time
achieving an important and decided shift toward the
supernatural, the post-mundane and the miraculous.
The natural opposition of the Jews to the other
peoples becomes the absolute opposition of the king-
7°

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
dom of God whose origin is in heaven and the de
monic realms whose origin is in the depths. No
longer the natural succession of the political events
guided by God brings about the decision, but a sud
den and miraculous catastrophe annihilates the op
position to God and brings about the dominion of
the kingdom of the saints, symbolized by a human
figure which appears before God on a heavenly
cloud. Based on the pessimistic view of the times,
and resting on the background of Persian dualism,
this expectation of the sudden coming of God's do
minion through the agency of a miraculous catas
trophe which would end present world conditions
and initiate a new one, dominated the mood and
thought of Judaism in the last century before Christ.
In harmony with this supernatural origin of
the kingdom of God, they thought of its constitu
tion : though it was to be realized on earth, yet the
pious of old were to be sharers in its happiness and
would be resurrected for that purpose; while the
godless would rise to horror eternal. Probably Per
sian influence caused the popularity of this hope of
resurrection, expressed for the first time in the Book
of Daniel. In the later apocalypses, such as Henoch,
there was added the notion of places of retribution
in the world to come — Gehenna or Hell for the souls
of the godless, and Paradise for the pious. This
idea of the immortality of disembodied souls in the
future world was entirely strange to the old Israel-
itish religion; alongside the belief in resurrection,
71

Christian Origins
it had long been current in the Persian religion, and
formed the meeting-point of Platonic, Alexandrian
and New-Pythagorean philosophy, as well as the
various mystery-sects. The hope of a blissful fate
for the pious in the world to come was the consola
tion of the world-weary souls of that age. Small
wonder that the growing desperation of the nation
caused the Jews to take up this belief in individual
immortality, without, however, giving up the old
prophetic hope of a future period of earthly salvation
for the entire Jewish nation.
These two thought-series, the spiritualistic belief
in immortality and the national hope of a Messiah on
earth, existed side by side unrelated ; or an attempt
was made to arrange a compromise between them,
so that the brief earthly messianic period of salvation
(the so-called "millennial kingdom") should pre
cede the eternity of perfect conditions destined to
follow. This double picture of the future corresponded to
the variation in the idea of the person of the " Mes
siah." According to the apocalypse of Henoch, the
Messiah is a supermundane, semi-divine person, the
mysterious " son of man," who was hidden with God
before creation and will descend from above at a
specified time in order to judge the world and save
the Jewish nation. In the " Psalms of Solomon,"
which originated in Pharisaic circles about the mid
dle of the last century before Christ, the Messiah is
described in the manner of the ancient prophetic
72

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
ideal — a man of the earth, of the seed of David, who
will conquer his enemies with divine help and will
rule the Jewish people with a mighty and righteous
government. How far these differing apocalyptic ideas had
taken hold in the popular religion of the time of
Jesus, it is difficult to say with certainty. We must
not forget that Judaism did not have a dogmatic
doctrinal law, as did the Christian Church later, — a
law which all were in duty bound to believe. The
Law regulated only what was to be done and what
was forbidden, while the belief in one God and His
Revelation was naturally presupposed; as to the
rest, each had greatest liberty of belief and of hopes.
Had not that been the case how could the Sadd.ur,rves,
the priestly aristocracy at the head of the religious
life of the community, have rejected all apocalyptic
ideas of angels, resurrection and world-to-come, con
fining themselves to the written Law. The Pilaris
sees, supported by the laity, were the bearers of the
national messianic hope and the new apocalyptic.
ideas, the belief in angels, resurrection, judgment
and retribution in the world to come; national-
messianic fanaticism involved them in the political
affairs of the world and made them the democratic
rivals of the aristocratic Sadducees.
In contradistinction to both parties, the Essenes
were a purely religious brotherhood, caring not at
all about politics, and leading the quiet life of work
and ascetic self-training of monastic seclusion.

Christian Origins
Strict as they were in the performance of Sabbath
regulations and rites of purification (outdoing the
Pharisees therein), yet they differed from the rest
of the Jews by peculiar traits. They rejected bloody
sacrifices because they regarded their daily baths in
cold water and their common meal, with its prayer
of sanctification, as a purer worship of God. They
rejected slavery as a form of unrighteousness, con
trary to nature. The majority of them scorned
marriage, because the charm of a wife and the care
for children robbed a man of freedom and made him
selfish. They rejected the idea of property, and held
all things absolutely in common ; upon his initiation
into the brotherhood, each one placed all his pos
sessions in the common treasury of the Order, and
the wages of the members went into the general
fund. These moneys were used to pay for the neces
saries of life for the members of the Order and for
the performance of deeds of charity.
The Essene brotherhood had a hierarchical organ
ization and strict discipline; grades of holiness di
vided them into four ranks, and all the members
were pledged to strict obedience to superiors. A
novitiate of three years preceded admission into the
Order; misdemeanors and expulsion were passed
upon by a court of at least one hundred members.
Frankness and truthfulness of the brethren to one
another and secrecy in regard to traditions and sa
cred writings were strictly commanded by law. The
brothers lived a simple life, strictly regulated ; each
74

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
one had to do his own kind of work during the week,
looking after the fields, the garden, the cattle or
working at some manual labor to satisfy the simplest
needs of life; trade was prohibited as well as any
service abetting war and luxury. Those who had
the ability to act as soothsayers and wonderhealers
were permitted to go to the people who desired their
help or their counsel; the medical and prophetic
powers of the Essenes are often praised. On Sab
bath, the brothers assembled, and for the edification
of all, the sacred writings (secret writings of the
Order, apocryphal and apocalyptic in nature, as well
as the Old Testament) were read and interpreted by
those best versed in such matters. Philo says the
object of their instructions was to educate to piety,
purity, righteousness and knowledge of duties, along
three lines — love of God, of virtue, and of man.
The love of God demanded the purity of the whole
of life, including the physical ; also freedom from all
deception. The Essenes considered an oath as bad
as perjury or falsehood. The love of God demanded
especially the belief in the beneficent providence of
God as the cause of all good and nothing evil. Love
of virtue was to be made manifest by self-control,
moderation, freedom from greed and ambition for
glory; love of men by benevolence, decency, sym
pathy, readiness to aid the sick and incapacitated,
and reverence of the aged. The Essenes not only
lived for these moral principles, but many died for
the faith in the Jewish wars. This power of world-
75

Christian Origins
abnegation came from their belief in the immortality
of the soul, which had descended from above and
striven for freedom from the bodily fetters, and
from the belief in future retribution, when the good
will walk in the fields of the blessed beyond the
ocean, and the wicked will go down into the dark
depths of Hades.
The similarity of this doctrine with the New-
Pythagorean and Orphic teaching of the soul and the
future world would suffice to show the close histor
ical connection between the Essenes and these Hel
lenistic sects; but the other Essene peculiarities
mentioned point to the same fact. Whether this
Hellenistic influence (noticeable in the Jewish-
Alexandrian brotherhood of Therapeutes also) was
accompanied by other Oriental influences — Persian,
Syrian, or even Buddhistic — that is a question
which may be passed over the more readily, in
asmuch as New-Pythagoreanism itself probably
depends upon Oriental Gnosticism.
So close a connection between Essenism and
Christianity was not seldom accepted in former days
that Jesus himself was looked upon as an Essene.
Certainly, that view was erroneous, and it is gener
ally conceded to-day that it was an error; the dis
tressing fear of the stain of impurity caused by fam
ily and social life, the misanthropical seclusion of
the monastic order, the slavish subjection to the dis
cipline of the Order which (according to Josephus'
description) made them appear like irresponsible
76

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
youths under the rod of the teacher — all of this, on
the face of it, is very different from the gospel-
picture of Jesus. On the other hand, it would be
equally one-sided to deny that Essenism was of im
portance as a preparation for Christianity. Not
alone the rites of purification were emphasized by
the Essenes; of more importance to them was the
heart free from selfishness and sensuality. If they
were indifferent to the political fate of the nation as
a whole, they were intense in their sympathies, ample
in their generosity toward the destitute, lonely and
lowly, caring for the needs of the lower classes, the
impoverished and the ailing. To practice benevo
lence and to be pure, these were the fundamental
commands of Essenism long before they became
fundamental commands of Christianity. I know of
no instance in the ancient world, heathen or Jewish,
which approaches Christianity herein more nearly
than Essenism.
When we recall that the Essenes had settlements
and monasteries in every town and village, that the
narrow circle of the Order was widened by the
greater circle of the married lay brothers associated
with them, that they devoted themselves to the edu
cation of other peoples' children, that in their capac
ity as soothsayers and physicians they came in con
tact with all conditions and classes of people, — then
we will conceive readily that the Essene spirit was
influential far beyond the narrow limits of the Order
itself. We will find it more than likely that retiring
77

Christian Origins
men, who were repelled by the officious and shallov
Pharisaic commerce with piety, would have a sym
pathetic understanding of the more serious and soul
ful piety of the Essenes, and that for such men thi
thought was not remote, the preparation for thi
coming of God's dominion, the salvation of Hi
people lies in an inner conversion and in a purifica
tion of hearts.
Such a man, related to Essenism and yet not be
longing to that Order, was John the Baptist; as ;
preacher of repentance he appeared in the wildernes:
of Juda, in which most of the Essene settlement!
were located. He was not a forerunner in the sensi
that he recognized Jesus as the Messiah, and pointec
to him as his greater successor; this was the lata
interpretation which the Christian congregation ap
plied to the relation between them. But John wai
a forerunner of Jesus in the sense that his was th<
first announcement to the masses of the near ap
proach of the kingdom of heaven as a call to re
pentance; thus he created that strong movemen
which prepared the soil for the life-work of Jesus
With the old Prophets, John the Baptist was con
vinced that the decisive " day of the Lord " woulc
bring salvation only to those who prepared them
selves in worthy fashion by an honest change o
spirit ; for the others, though their trust in the kin
ship with Abraham be ever so great, it would be ;
day of judgment and of terror. Baptism, or th
immersion in flowing water, was to be the sign o
78

Preparation of Christianity in Judaism
the repentant, and at the same time the mystical
medium of cleansing from sin and guilt, a means
toward the forgiveness of sin. As daily baths were
considered by the Essenes the symbol and means of
religious purification and holiness for the members
of the Order, so the baptism of John was to be ef
fective for all who sought salvation ; by baptism all
would be sanctified into one holy congregation of the
people worthy of God's kingdom. The Essene ideal
of personal purity of heart and of life was elevated
by John ; he made it the duty of all. According to
the fulfillment of that duty the approaching catas
trophe of the kingdom of God would bring salvation
or misery to each individual. The idea of the mes
sianic nation was the background and driving power
of this popular religious movement ; that it was the
true cause of the imprisonment and execution of the
Baptist may be gleaned from the reference of Jo-
sephus, which is certainly historical.

79

JESUS

JESUS
One of the host which came to John to be bap
tized by him was Jesus of Nazareth, the son of
Joseph, the carpenter, and Mary; they had four
other sons and several daughters. We have no his
torical knowledge of the childhood and youth of
Jesus, for the narratives in Matthew and Luke are
religious legends of no historical value; we will
explain their origin in a later connection. In Mark,
the oldest Gospel, Jesus appears for the first time at
the baptism by John. Therewith, the Gospels asso
ciate the miraculous event of the messianic sanctifica-
tion of Jesus by a celestial voice and the descent of
the spirit in the shape of a dove; since this, too, is
self-evidently not history but legend — later we will
recognize it as one of the first steps in the develop
ment of the Christ-speculations of the Christian
congregation — the question has been raised whether
there is any historical remainder to the story of the
baptism, after the miraculous part has been sub
tracted? Though there is no certain knowledge
possible, yet it may be considered probable that
Jesus was baptized by John; if that had not been
a settled fact in the memory of the congregation,
they would scarcely have told the story that John
baptized Jesus and thereby make it appear that the
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latter was subordinate to the Baptist; the evident
attempt of the Evangelists to weaken this natural
suspicion speaks for the correctness of the tradition
of the baptism of Jesus by John.
From the fact that, after the imprisonment of the
Baptist, Jesus appears with the same cry : " Repent
ye, for the kingdom of heaven (that is God) is at
hand," we conclude that John's preaching concern
ing the immediate dawn of the dominion of God
and the great judgment day made a deep and last
ing impression on Jesus. It sounds as though he
simply meant to continue the Baptist's work. Yet
it was another spirit which spoke through him, a
new power it was, that vitalized his activity. John
had been a preacher of repentance who wished to
terrify and humble the sinful masses and their over
weening leaders in Judaea ; his stern ascetic appear
ance and the habitation in the wilderness har
monized with his task. But an ascetic is no enthu
siast, and a penitential sermon does not beget inspira
tion; hence, it is easy to see why there are no
stories of miraculous deeds performed by John, and
why his personality did not become the centre of
any miraculous legends such as usually express the
enthusiastic admiration whenever a powerful per
sonality wins the hearts and inflames the imagina
tion of the masses.
Jesus was such a personality. He inspired others
because he himself was inspired by a faith, more
elevating than humiliating, bringing bliss more than

Jesus
terror. He won the hearts of many, because he
brought them a great heart, rich in love and in
mercy. His sermon was not the old, dry-as-dust
wisdom of the scribes, not the elaboration of lean,
intricate questions of Law, nor was it the threaten
ing or damning sermon of judgment. It was the
immediate expression of his own heart, firm in
faith and warm with love, and therefore his words
became the joyous message of salvation for all the
enslaved and oppressed, the weary and the heavy-
laden. Whoever heard and saw him, got the
impression that something new had appeared, a
teacher different from the law-learned, a teacher by
the grace of God, in whom a higher power was at
work, — a divine spirit so the faithful felt ; a demonic
spirit, blasphemed their opponents — in any event, a
power wonderful in capturing hearts, banishing
demons and healing diseased bodies.
The mystery of such personality can never be
revealed entirely ; in this case no more than in that
of any other hero of human kind; but in some
measure it may be possible to attempt to explain
their peculiarity by the conditions of the time and
the environment. The teachings of the Baptist had
weakened the conviction in Jesus that the great,
long-prophesied day of the Lord was at hand ; the
Baptist had announced to the Judaeans who were
harping on the kinship of Abraham and to their
self-lauding, hypocritical guardians of Zion that
it would be pre-eminently a day of judgment; such
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teachings were pertinent in Judaea and conceivable
in the mouth of John, the priest's son, who had been
a constant eyewitness to the hierarchical confusion.
But Jesus was a child of the people and had been
born in Galilee where the population was freer from
Jewish national pride and Pharisaical deification of
the Law than in Judaea, and where men felt more
inconsolable over the distress of the times: — the
tyranny of the Idumaean princes nominated and
supported by the Romans, the fearful pressure of
taxes, the wilfulness of the aristocracy, the poor
man's lack of rights, the economical disintegration
and the religious disorder of the masses. Such
was the state of social distress at home that met
Jesus' eye on his return to Galilee from the wilder
ness of Judaea, and on his lips were sermons of the
approaching kingdom of God. How could he bear
to use the threatening language of the judgment
sermon toward these poorest of men? The Gospel
of Matthew tells (9, 36) : " But when he saw the
multitudes he was moved with compassion for them,
because they were distressed and scattered as sheep
not having a shepherd." With the eye of compas
sionate love, he saw in this maltreated and leader-
less mass the glowing spark of pious hope and the
longing for salvation, consolation, help and guid
ance. In his soul, he felt the words of the old
Prophet : " Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people !"
He felt that the prophetic spirit had taken hold of
him and that the Lord had anointed him "to
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Jesus
preach good tidings unto the poor," and sent him
" to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty
to the captives and the opening of the prison to
them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable
year of the Lord." (Isaiah 40, 1 ; 61, 1. Cp. Luke
4, 17 seq.) In his sympathizing heart, the distress
of the people became a call of God, a certain proof
of his mission to preach good tidings to the poor.
This mission called for a new method of work;
he could not separate himself proudly like the
Pharisee from the unclean and sinful populace; nor
could he retire into the wilderness as John did,
waiting for the people to come to him. No, he
sought men everywhere. He looked for them in
the schools on Sabbath and at their work on the
week days ; he entered the houses of those who
admitted him; he sat by the bedside of the sick
desirous of his help and sat at the same hospitable
table with notorious publicans. This love which
approached its object, seeking the lost and saving
them, was something new ; not among the haughty
models of piety, the Pharisees, nor among the
shrinking ascetics of the Essene Order could this
love be found, nor had John the bitter preacher of
repentance possessed it. It was a revival of the best
spirit of the Prophets Hosea, Jeremiah and the
second Isaiah; yet, differing from their spirit,
because another period furnished the background,
a period of feverish tension in which the despair
of the old and the expectation of an all-subversive
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catastrophe had reached its climax and shaken the
people to their depths. The glowing hope of the
early appearance of God's miraculous deeds of sal
vation was allied in Jesus' soul with the merciful
love of the lowly, the miserable and the sinful, and
thereupon rested the charm of his personality, the
enthusiastic and the heroic as well as the delicate
and the mild elements of his appearance and ac
tivity, his irresistible power over the masses as well
as his power to attract and hold individual souls;
thereupon, too, the collision with the ruling powers
of his nation and the world: in short, thereupon
rested the success of his life — and its tragedy.
That cry with which Jesus' sermon begins accord
ing to the Evangelist: " Repent ye; for the king
dom of heaven is at hand," that cry is at the same
time the essence of all his teaching. The prophetic
proclamation of the nearness of God's kingdom is
the dominant note from beginning to end, the
motive of the demand for moral transformation.
What did Jesus mean by God's kingdom, the
"kingdom of heaven"? The customary opinion is
that he understood it to be something entirely new
and different from what his countrymen thought,
whether their idea was a kingdom in heaven above,
a future bliss of souls, or even a spiritual constitu
tion of men, their true piety and righteousness.
But if Jesus had actually united such a new thought
with the old term, would we not be justified in ex
pecting him to express himself clearly and decidedly
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Jesus
concerning it from the beginning, that he would ex
plain his meaning accurately and prevent misunder
standing? But we find no such report ; as the Baptist
before him had done, he took it for granted that
every man knew what he meant by the kingdom
whose near approach he offered as a prospect. Did
he not mean, then, just what was meant by all the
Jews of his period, namely, that wonderful exertion
of God's ruling power* hoped for by all the pious
since Daniel, whereby present miserable conditions
would be swept away and yield to a new and better
order of things on earth, especially in the Jewish
nation ?
In fact this suspicion is confirmed by an unbiassed
consideration of Jesus' expressions on the subject.
Above all, the beatitudes in their original form as
handed down in Luke (6, 20 seq.) must be con
sidered : " Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the
kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now ;
for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep
now, for ye shall laugh. But woe unto you that
are rich! for ye have received your consolation.
Woe unto you, ye that are full now! for ye shall
hunger. Woe unto you, ye that laugh now ! for ye
shall mourn and weep." It is clearly declared here
that the approaching kingdom of God means a new
arrangement of social conditions favorable to the
poor and unfavorable to the rich ; at the same time,
* The Greek word basileia means royal rule, government of God,
and the connotation includes the state of happiness produced for the
pious as the result and appearance of the divine dominion.
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this presupposes that the poor are the pious whose
hope is in God, and the rich are the godless and out
rageous worldings, thus using the words in the
same sense as in Psalms.
This clear meaning of the original beatitudes in
Luke was made unclear by Matthew (5, 3 seq.)
under the viewpoint of later historical circum
stances ; the poor, in the literal sense, became " the
poor in spirit," and the physically hungry became
those " hungering for righteousness," thus crowd
ing the original contrast between the present and
the future condition out of sight to bring out the
opposition of external condition and internal value;
though even in this case the prophecy that the meek
shall inherit the earth betrays clearly enough the
original sense of an expected rearrangement of
earthly conditions in the future. Is it possible to
miss that meaning in Jesus' consolatory word to his
friends : " Fear not, little flock, for it is your
Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom ? "
(Luke 12, 32.) The same prophecy is repeated
more fully at the Last Supper thus : " And I appoint
unto you a kingdom, even as my Father appointed
unto me, that ye may eat and drink at my table in my
kingdom; and ye shall sit on thrones, judging the
twelve tribes of Israel." (Luke 22, 29; Matthew
19, 28.) There, too, is the noteworthy saying:
" I will not drink from henceforth of the fruit of
the vine until the kingdom of God shall come," or
" until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom
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Jesus
of God." (Luke 22, 18; Mark 14, 25.)' With'
difficulty could such expressions lead one to think
of aught else but a new condition of the Jewish
people brought about by divine omnipotence in
favor of Jesus and his followers, but the new
epoch was not to be thought of as so different from
the present that there would be no eating and drink
ing : to read future heavenly bliss into these words
would be violence forbidden by historical methods.
Let us add the request of the Lord's Prayer,
" Thy kingdom come !" and ask, not what we mean
by it, but what thought did these words cause in
the minds of the disciples of Jesus? In the Acts
of the Apostles (1, 6) there is an undoubted guide
to the answer, for there the disciples are made to
ask the departing Master : " Dost thou at this time
restore the kingdom to Israel?" The realization
of the prophesied messianic kingdom in the Jewish
people was the pivotal point of the hopes and the
questionings of the earliest Christian congregation;
would that have been possible, if Jesus himself had
not taught something of that kind or something
opposed to it?
The proof adduced from these expressions with
out ambiguity cannot be eliminated by the semblance
of opposition through other passages liable to
various interpretations. In the parables of the
sower and the seed, an attempt has been made to
find the thought that the kingdom of God is present
in the moral attitude of the faithful and develops
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by reason of their own activity; but they mean
rather that the coming of the kingdom may be pre
pared by the preaching of the Word, but its actual
appearance cannot be hastened or brought about by
any human action ; it must be awaited with patience
until it comes into being of itself according to
God's will. The parables of the treasure in the
field and the priceless pearl simply mean that for
the superabundant good of participation in God's
kingdom, one must be ready to give up all other
good*; but they do not tell us that the highest good
is a present spiritual possession; clearly, it is de
scribed as the rich reward to be hoped for in some
future epoch, and the manifold recompense for pres
ent sacrifices. (Matt. 19, 29.) The only pas
sage which seems to indicate the spiritual presence
of the kingdom is that of Luke (17, 20 seq.) : " The
kingdom of God cometh not with observation:
Neither shall they say, Lo, here ! or There ! for lo,
the kingdom of God is within you." But how un
certain, aye, impossible is this traditional interpreta
tion, as soon as the whole connection is considered:
could Jesus have said to the Pharisees, the kingdom
of God is within them ? and could he have said that
it will come without disturbance, when the descrip
tion immediately following makes its coming a
sudden and universally recognizable catastrophe,
comparing it to the lightning which fills the heavens
with sudden flame or to the flood which swept sud
denly over the secure contemporaries of Noah, or
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Jesus
to the downpour of fire and brimstone which
destroyed Sodom and Gomorrha? Inasmuch as
this view appears in other Gospel passages, and
corresponds exactly to the apocalyptic expectations
of contemporary Judaism, we are certainly justified
in holding it to be the actual opinion of Jesus.*
Jesus thought of the coming of God's kingdom
not only as a sudden but an impending catastrophe;
before his generation had died or even before the
completion of the missionary work in the cities of
Israel, the great event was to take place according
to Mark 9, 1 ; Matthew 16, 28 ; 10, 23. In those
last days at Jerusalem, Jesus seems to have expected
the decisive turn of events in the immediate future.
Whoever is able to think historically, will not find
fault with the fact that he was mistaken. Like all
heroes, Jesus was a child of his nation and his era
and shared their messianic expectations ; it was this
which made him able to do the reformatory work
of his time. The firm faith in the proximity of
the decisive turn was the impulse and telling power
of his activity ; inasmuch as the highest ideal filling
* Luke's saying (17, 20 seq.) is taken by that Evangelist from the
Pauline spiritualization of the kingdom idea (Romans 14, 17) and
put into the mouth of Jesus in this passage so as to limit or correct
the catastrophic notion of the miraculous dawn of the kingdom as
given in the oldest tradition. In the same way the Evangelist has
inserted the traditional word about the validity of the Law (Luke
16, 17) between two other sayings which are of such nature as
to break its force. This method of adding new interpretations to
the tradition which render the latter harmless, was usual in early
Christianity, where tradition had not yet crystallized into a canon
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his soul was an impending, immediate reality, it
lifted him above the petty cares and interests of
earthly life and caused him to recognize the uncon
ditional surrender of the whole heart and life to
the will of the only good God as the true destiny
of man. This kernel of his faith remains the model
for all time ; it preserves a truth for us, even though
history itself has led us to differentiate between the
permanent kernel and the temporary form, to recog
nize the realization of the divine will, no longer in
miraculous catastrophes, but in the continuous
education of humanity through the natural evolu
tion of social life. Nevertheless, the acknowledg
ment of the absolute value of the kingdom of God
always preserves its force, the absolute duty of each
individual to surrender himself to this eternal object
of the universe, rises superior to all finite and par
ticular objects, and there remains the grave respon
sibility of each one for his own conduct in respect
to this highest purpose of life.
The teachings of Jesus foreshadow this ethical
individualistic turn of the ideas of messianic king
dom and judgment. For, despite his close adher
ence to the prevailing Jewish pictures of the future,
he did depart from them at one important point.
In the words of Jesus, there is no mention of the
victory of the Jewish nation over the heathen and
the revenge on these enemies, which had been for
the others, especially the Pharisees, the most im
portant matter in the messianic period of salvation,
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Jesus
Whenever he speaks of judgment to come, he never
treats of the punishment of the heathen nations,
but always of the verdict concerning the fate of the
individual. The moral earning of each individual
life is then to appear: the quiet piety of the
secluded chamber and the quiet unostentatious bene
factions the Father in Heaven will reward in
public; the loyal servant will enter into the joy of
the master; but the proud and certain sinners, the
merciless who cannot forgive and say ' Lord, Lord,'
but did not do God's will — they will be excluded
from the community of the blessed and consigned
to extremest darkness or hell. The judgment will
separate the wheat from the tares, good from foul
fish, by according to each the fate which he
deserves. With this thought of judgment, the idea of
reward is inextricably bound up. It is often em
ployed as a motive for sacrifice and benevolence or
a consolation for the suffering and persecuted. The
sayings about the recompense for fasts and prayers
(Matthew 6, 4; 6, 18) especially are so close to the
Jewish notion of the merit of that kind of " good
works," that one might feel tempted to dispute their
authenticity. So much the more noteworthy that
while the idea of reward has been preserved, yet it
has been ennobled by elevating it beyond the legal to
the moral judgment of actions. According to the
parable of the laborers in the vineyard, wherein all
receive like wages irrespective of the amount of
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Christian Origins
work, wages can no longer be considered legal rec
ompense, but recompense becomes a free gift of
grace granted to all who follow the divine call.
Luke (17, 7 seq.) gives man no more legal claim
to reward before God than the servant who has
simply done his duty. At the same time, a rich
reward is promised to the loyal servant : The Lord
himself will serve him (Luke 12, ^y) or he will be
set over many (Matthew 25, 21), which means that
the field of his activity will be broadened according
to the measure of thoroughness displayed. This
thought, that social standing depends on the extent
of accomplishment, contains an incontestable truth.
In principle, this puts an end to the motive of
reward in the sense of mere utilitarian ethics, for
the highest norm of morality is recognized in the
perfect goodness of God as the father and the high
est motive in the love of God and fellowmen.
The old notion that the designation of God as
" father " was entirely new with Jesus and was
based on miraculous revelation, is not entirely cor
rect. For the historical mind, this absolute miracle
resolves itself into an evolution, which may be
comprehended psychologically. In the earliest
stages of religion, the deity is named father, in the
physical sense; thus Homer calls Zeus the father
of the gods and men. In a higher sense, Plato
calls God the Father of the universe, who in his
unenvying goodness desired that all should be as
much like him as possible; hence, it is man's task
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Jesus
to become most like God through righteousness
and piety. Seneca, too, spoke of God's fatherly
attitude, by which he educated men to virtue; he
called the unlimited benevolence which made evil-
doing on their part impossible, the nature of the
gods, and said that true worship consisted in imita
ting them ; " would you imitate the gods, give to
the ingrate, for the sun rises upon the godless and
the rain falls on the fields." In the Israelitish
religion, God was the father of Israel from of old;
the Israelites were his sons and the relation of
father and son in the post-exilic wisdom-books is
applied not only to the nation as a whole, but also
to each pious individual. Sirach calls God " Father
and Lord of my life " ; in the Wisdom of Solomon
and in the Psalms of Solomon, the pious are " God's
sons," and Philo speaks of the " Heavenly Father "
who sends the divine powers down into the soul as
into his temple, to purify and to sanctify it. From
the Rabbinic writings, we gather that, at the time
of Jesus, the expression " Heavenly Father," " our
Father in Heaven," had become a popular substitute
for the old name of God which had fallen into dis
use. It cannot be said that Jesus taught a new
God as though he had set up God the loving father
as against the righteous God of the Jews : the
Jews, too, knew the merciful God and the father in
Heaven. Again, for Jesus, too, the fundamental
conviction remains that the almighty and holy God,
the Lord of Heaven and Earth, the only good God,
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was infinitely removed beyond all bodily weakness
and human sin, that he is the King who demands a
reckoning of his servants, that he is the Judge, more
to be feared than men because he has the power not
only to kill the body, but to destroy both body and
soul in hell. But we must not forget that in reli
gions dogmatic thoughts are not exhaustive, but
there are emotions and powers of instinct which
they conjure up in the soul, and these differ with
the peculiarity of individual natures: the various
ways in which the idea of God reacts on the indi
vidual's emotions naturally act again on the idea
of God, in such manner that the side to which the
emotions respond most markedly, moves into the
foreground and predominates over the other aspects.
Hence the well-known saying, " As the man, so
his God." This universal experience will lead us
to a psychological conception of the peculiarity of
Jesus' consciousness of God, without resorting to
miracles. Though the father-title of God was not strange
to the Jews of Jesus' time, yet the trust in God's
paternal attitude could never be of all-pervading
and regulating importance, because, to the great
majority, God was still pre-eminently the heavenly
king of the Jewish nation; that is, the religious
consciousness was still nationally and legally bound,
governed by the slave spirit of fear and disturbed
by the hatred of the heathen as well as of the unclean
compatriot. In Jesus' soul, however, there was
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Jesus
neither fear nor hatred, but merciful love suffused it,
that love, which was drawn most strongly to those
who needed help, and therefore did not shrink with
pride from the direct misery of sin and guilt, but
sought to heal it and dared to conquer it. Because
Jesus felt this merciful love as the strongest and best
within himself, he could not do other than think it
the highest in God, the fundamental quality of the
divine Being to which his power and his righteous
ness were subordinate. Thus God became for him
omnipotence of love, — a father in whom benevolence
is not only a quality alongside of others, but is his
innermost nature, whose goodness is inexhaustible
in giving and ceaseless in forgiving, whose sun
shines upon the wicked as upon the good, and whose
rain descends alike upon the righteous and the
unrighteous. In nature, Jesus sees the revelation
of the providential power and goodness of the
Creator : against his will, no sparrow falls from the
house-top, no hair from our head; he clothes the
lilies of the field and feeds the birds of the air.
How much the more may man depend on his provi
dential care, — that man, whose soul has greater value
than all the rest of the world, who is not only God's
creature, but his child, whose destiny it is to become
his image in moral perfection, in purity of heart and
compassion. Thus the divine and the human ideals
become allied for Jesus : willing the good which he
felt to be the highest and the strongest in himself
becomes the summit of all reality, the world-govern-
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ing power and therewith the prototype, the binding
Law and the greatest good for all men.
With this ideal estimate of men, however, Jesus
combines the sober view and keen judgment of actual
experience. Men are to become God's children by
their increasing moral likeness to God; by nature
they are not really that which they are destined to be,
having little resemblance to their model. " No one
is good save God alone," and all men must pray
" forgive our sins !" The verdict upon all of them
(Luke n, 13) is that they are " evil," for (Mark
7, 21 seq.) in the hearts of all of them lurk "evil
thoughts " of sensual and selfish desires expressing
themselves through words and deeds, which make
man unclean. Jesus did not see evil only in action
contrary to law as the Jews did, and not as the
Greeks in material corporeity, conditioning our
existence on earth, but in the unclean and selfish
inclinations of the heart which conflict with our
ideal being, and destroy body and soul. Hence the
command : remove the eye and the hand which
would tempt thee to evil, so that thy whole body be
not thrown into hell ! This destructive power of evil
appears to Jesus in the idea of the devil and his
demonic host; he did not, as is often said, merely
accommodate himself to a popular notion, but he
shared it in all seriousness; it is one of the pieces
of his world-picture which shows him to be a child
of his period, bui which has no authority for us.
The devil as the personified existence of evil belongs

Jesus
to Oriental dualism which cannot harmonize logi
cally with ethical monotheism, the rulership of one
good God. That Jesus held theoretically to this con
tradiction must not surprise us in a prophet who did
not reflect philosophically concerning God and the
world; but what is more important and necessary
for religion, he surmounted the obstacle practically,
for he dissipated the fear of devils, which rested
heavily upon men then by the power of his trust in
God and his love of men. In this connection, his
cure of the sick assumes an importance not to be
underestimated. We will be less inclined to doubt
that they have a historical basis when we recall that
similar events happen still; certain sicknesses, par
ticularly those caused by disturbances of the nervous
system, such as paralysis, are temporarily and even
permanently cured by the spiritual influence of sug
gestion on the soul life of the patient. Similarly,
we will have to think that through the suggestive
influence of Jesus' personality, faith was wakened
and new life-powers released in those patients whom
they considered " possessed" ; such miraculous suc
cesses seemed to Jesus as well as those around him
the victory of a superior spirit over the demonic
spirits in the patients, as they actually were the vic
tory of his faith and his love over the misery and
sin of men. They were, therefore, tangible proof to
him that Satan's power was broken and the kingdom
of God come. (Matthew 12, 28.) With that same
confidence of a trusting love which enabled him to
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Christian Origins
heal sick bodies, he knew that he was justified in
lifting guilt-laden, repentant souls by the consolatory
word of the forgiveness of sins. (Mark 2, 10 seq.)
Though his condemnation of sin was severe, yet was
his sympathy equally strong for such sinners who
were suffering under their guilt and were sighing
for relief from their bonds, longing for a new and
purer life.
In such suffering of repentance and longing for
rescue, he spied the glimmering spark of the good
beneath the ashes of a lost life ; by unloving hardness,
he knew that the spark would be extinguished, while
a sympathetic human love, arousing the trust in
God's forgiving and renewing grace, would fan it
into flame. In the parable of the lost son, Jesus tells
of sin and salvation in most straightforward fashion;
how sin bears its punishment within itself, by render
ing man most unhappy; how this feeling of misery
engenders the longing for salvation, the homesick
ness for the lost paternal roof, and finally the deci
sion to turn about and return home ; how the love of
the father goes out to the repentant who returns and
freely forgives all guilt without demanding repent
ance or satisfaction and admits the sinner into a new
life close to his own. These are the essential truths
of the religion of salvation, which Jesus believed
and preached, because his own merciful love of the
sinful and the suffering was the guarantee of a simi
lar attitude of his heavenly father.
Since the natural inclination of all men, even

Jesus
though they have not given themselves to the life
of crude sin, is not as good and as pure as that of a
child of God and a subject of God's kingdom ought
to be, therefore the demand is addressed to all
without exception : " Repent ye ! " Instead of self-
love expressing itself in impure and selfish desires of
every kind there should appear the love of God with
the whole heart and the love of neighbors as our
selves. (Mark 12, 28 seq.) According to Deu
teronomy (6, 5), love of God with the whole heart
is a fundamental demand of the monotheistic belief
in God, and Leviticus (19, 18) commands the love
of compatriots as ourselves. Hillel, the Pharisaic
teacher, had broadened this command to include the
love of all men and considered that command the
essence of the Law. Here, too, it must be said that
the content of this double command was not actually
new with Jesus, but the manner with which he
applied it seriously to practice was. In Judaism, this
view of Hillel could not force its way because the
teachers themselves, much less the others, could not
free themselves of the fundamental error of legal
religion and ethics, — the breaking up of the divine
will into a number of positive commands and par
ticularly prohibitions (the Pharisees counted 613
such), all of equal force because supposedly com
manded by God ; and among these, the ritual regula
tions were at least equally as important, in fact,
more important than the moral commands. For this
reason, religion and morality in Judaism had degen-
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Christian Origins
erated to that rigidity and externalization which had
begun in Phariseeism and culminated in Talmudism.
Jesus broke this bond by tracing morality back to the
inner attitude of the heart and taught a proper
understanding of the free employment of the one
fundamental instinct, the love of God and of man.
The slavish obedience to an external was thus super
seded and the freedom of the moral personality
placed in its stead; that freedom is not egoistic
license, for it feels itself bound to God's divine will,
not by slavish fear, but by childlike love. There
with the moral was recognized, not only in its essen
tial unity as the self-activity and development of the
good will, but ethics and religion were united into an
irreducible unity. Just as everything moral should
be rooted in the love of God, so should all reli
gion find employment in the love of man. A new
estimate of ceremonial activity was thus created ; no
longer as in the ancient heathen and Jewish world
is it a service to be performed for God by which
some credit with God is won, or God's favor bought,
but it is a natural expression of the pious attitude
and has only so much value as the external corre
sponds with the internal: where the inner attitude
is missing, there all fasts and prayers are a sem
blance without value, empty hypocrisy. (Matthew
6, i seq. ) From this viewpoint, the Sabbath observ
ance is no longer a service which must be performed
because God once commanded it, but it is a gift
of God for the welfare of men (Mark 2, 28) ; hence
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Jesus
the observance most worthy of such a day is service
for the benefit of our fellowmen (Mark 3, 4; Luke
6, 9). For this reason, ceremonial performances
must never be accounted greater than the perform
ance of plain moral duties. Jesus says with Hosea :
" Mercy and not sacrifice, I ask !" and he condemns
most sternly the Pharisaic practice which valued a
pious charity more highly than the performance of
filial duties and employed public prayer as a means
of satisfying vanity and greed ; on the contrary, he
would even have the sacrificial rite interrupted so as
not to delay the conciliation of an angry brother.
(Matthew 5, 23.)
Much as Jesus was conscious that this internaliza
tion of the moral was the teaching of a " better
righteousness " than that of the scribes and the Phar
isees, yet he was far removed from the declaration
that the Jewish Law zvas done away with. Accord
ing to several sayings, the authenticity of which we
are scarcely justified in doubting, he taught the abso
lute, continuous validity of the Law in all its parts
down to the last jot and tittle, and he urged his dis
ciples to follow, not the works but the teachings of
the scribes, though they were not to set the moral
aside for the sake of the ritual in the Law, yet they
were to perform the latter and not omit the former.
(Matthew 5, 17 seq.; 23, 3; 23, 23; Luke 16, 17.)
With all the piety of a pious Jew, Jesus felt himself
subservient and attached to the Law, without con
sciousness of the fact that in principle his interprie-
'°5

Christian Origins
tation of morality actually had moved beyond the
standpoint of the Law. He did not mean to abro
gate the Law, but to fulfill it, and to bring its true
meaning into force by opposing the distorted inter
pretation of the Jewish school tenets. But in this
struggle, he was made to utter occasional expres
sions, whose real extent, unconsciously perhaps, not
only included the negation of the mere school tenets
but of the Law itself. Thus, when asked why his
disciples did not fast, he spoke the important word
about the undressed cloth which was of no use for
an old garment and the new wine which would burst
the old wine-skins (Mark 2, 21); in effect, these
utterances tell of the impossibility of harmonizing
the new form of piety with the old life under the
Law. Or when he says (Mark 2, 28) that the
Sabbath is here for the sake of man and the Son of
man (meaning man generally) is lord even of the
Sabbath, then the relativity of the Sabbath law as
against the moral purpose of man himself is uttered
in such form that the absolute validity of the ritual
law seems seriously questioned. During the dispute
about washings, the principle is set up that " there
is nothing from without the man, that going into
him can defile him," only the wicked thoughts which
go out from his heart are defiling (Mark 7, 8
seq.); wherewith the Mosaic laws concerning
cleansing and food are robbed of all value. Jesus
bases his absolute rejection of divorce on the original
intention of the Creator, and declares the opposing
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Jesus
statute of Mosaic Law to be the lawmaker's conces
sion to the weakness and hard-heartedness of men.
If the passage about the destruction of " the temple
that is made with hands " and the construction of
another made without hands was actually spoken
by Jesus (according to Mark 14, 58; 15, 29, it was
ascribed to him by " false witnesses "), then it could
mean scarcely anything else than the hope of the
near end of the legal temple service and in its stead
the inauguration of a more spiritual service of God.
When we compare these passages, which are beyond
and contrary to the Law, with those explanations of
a conservative tendency, it seems to me that we get
the impression that Jesus was freer from the Mosaic
law within himself than he was conscious of being,
and that he did not sense the contradiction between
inner freedom and external hold, because the moral
was of such great importance that the mere cere
monial might remain alongside as an undisturbed
•subsidiary. Only in such cases, where the moral
was endangered by the ceremonial, did he oppose it
so freely that it gives us a glimpse of a possible
future abrogation of the Law. From this stand
point to that of a conscious breach with the Law
was a long step which Jesus himself never made.
This is one of the points where it is especially notice
able, that the germ of the new religion was present
in the attitude of Jesus, but enveloped in the tradi
tional forms of his nation and his day ; the release
of this germ and the realization of its independence
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Christian Origins
was a development which remained for the apostolic
congregation. A consideration of the ascetic side of Jesus' ethics,
its rigorous demand for the abandonment of the
present world and its social benefits, gives us a
similar impression of bias resulting from environ
ment. This ascetic side to an ethics of love has
always been found paradoxical, and attempts have
been made to weaken it by rationalization or to
explain it away by allegorization. Sometimes it has
been romantically lauded as heroic idealism; ele
vated so far beyond human weakness that we can
only admire and never attain it ; this interpretation,
logically followed out, must needs lead to the Catho
lic dogma of a double morality. Our purely his
torical method needs neither rationalistic nor
romantic fictions, inasmuch as it sees in the ascetic
rigorism of the ethics of Jesus the inevitable
practical complement and consequence of his
apocalyptic expectation of the impending catas
trophe, ending the present and ushering in the
new world. The characteristic individuality of the
actual Jesus of history cannot be understood, if this
condition imposed by the history of the time on his
entire mode of thinking, including its moral side, is
disregarded. While it must be conceded that
ascetic rigorism is closely related to ethical idealism,
yet they differ in this : ideal requirements do not
contradict given conditions of human society ; despite
their sublimity, they are capable of fulfillment; but
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Jesus
ascetic, rigoristic demands include a radical negation
of the historical life of human society. If Jesus
commands that we should love our enemies, that is,
not revengefully requiting evil by evil, but conciliat
ing and conquering the evil by good, we will be com
pelled to regard this command (taught, too, by other
wise men, as Plato, Buddha, Seneca, Epictetus) as
a sublime duty, difficult but not impossible of fulfill
ment because it does not run counter in any way to
the order of human society. But when Jesus adds :
"Resist not him that is evil : but whosoever smiteth
thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if any man would go to law with thee, and take
away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also" (Matthew
5, 39; Luke 6, 29), one cannot honestly deny that
such a command cannot be carried out in any society
because it abrogates all law and gives an easy victory
to brute force. Only the temper of the times fur
nishes the explanation, — times when the world was
about to crumble and all social values were doomed
to destruction in the great judgment conflagration;
only under such circumstances did it seem fitting
to secure the glory of the coming world by complete
abnegation of personal rights and by total indiffer
ence to honor and shame in the disintegrating world.
The same holds of all the sayings of Jesus in
which he requires of his disciples a complete separa
tion from all that binds them to this world, above all
from property, and even from family ties. The
story of the rich young man is well known ; he asks
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Christian Origins
what to do in order to participate in the eternal life,
and the answer is a command to sell all his posses
sions and give the proceeds to the poor ; by obedience
he will have acquired a treasure in heaven. That
this was not an exceptional case, but was intended
to stand for a general principle, is clearly indicated
by the remark which Jesus adds : it is a greater im
possibility for a rich man to enter into heaven than
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle — such
an impossibility that a miracle alone could accom
plish it. Apparently Jesus judged wealth in itself
to be pernicious, — the greatest insuperable danger
for the soul of its owner, an idol ("Mammon")
which holds man so completely in his service that
he cannot possibly serve God at the same time ; hence
the universal nature of the requirement that this
soul-destroying ballast be thrown overboard so that
the safe harbor of God's kingdom be made in the
company of the poor. " Sell that ye have and give
alms ; make for yourself purses which wax not old,
a treasure in the heavens that faileth not. So there
fore whosoever be of you that renounceth not all
that he hath, he cannot be my disciple!" (Luke
12, 33; 14, 33.) It is customary to interpret these
and similar passages spiritually, in the sense that
one should not be greedy or selfish and cling to
wealth with the whole heart, but as for the rest,
wealth is permitted and should be employed for
good and reasonable purposes; that is the way in
which we, the cultured of to-day, think, because

Jesus
we consider wealth like all other earthly things a
means to moral activity and because we would con
sider surrender of private property, the surrender
of the inalienable possession of personal independ
ence of the individual in society. But Jesus thought
like a child of his time in this matter and those
thoughts differ radically from ours: wealth was
solely a means of buying pleasures and the wealthy
were the easy-going worldlings who oppressed the
poor and despised the kingdom of God, so he
thought; and, above all, he was convinced that he
was about to face the miraculous catastrophe which
should put an end to all existing things and make
all things new. Would it have been worth while
making rules for the further maintenance of so
ciety? This viewpoint explains those harsh words
in which Jesus demands the ruthless sundering of
family ties : " Leave the dead to bury their own
dead ; but go thou and publish abroad the kingdom
of God." " If any man cometh unto me and hateth
not his own father and mother, and wife and chil
dren, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life
also, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 9, 60; 14,
26.) How strange such words sound in the mouth
of a teacher who had made love the cardinal virtue,
who regarded the sanctity of marriage so highly that
he rejected all possibility of separation, who had
ranked filial duties above ceremonial works in divine
service, who had frequently evinced his own warm
love of children! But we must never forget, that

Christian Origins
two souls dwelt in his breast : beside the hearty and
heart-winning love for the individuals who trust
fully approached him, there glowed in him the en
thusiasm of the prophet of God's kingdom. As such
prophet, his present world was ripe for destruction,
and therefore whatever bound man to the world,
family no less than wealth and property, was but a
hindrance, heroically to be surmounted for the sake
of participation in the life of the coming world.
This alone explains why Jesus gave no instructions
concerning the social duties of husband and wife,
parents and children, work in the profession, and
life in the state. The well-known passage (Mark
12, 17) " Render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's,"
does not mean that political duties are to be based
on religion but rather intends to separate political
matters from religion so completely that they be
come as indifferent to the pious as all other earthly
cares. This complete disregard of all that goes to
make up the content of social ethics cannot be ex
plained, as some think, by saying that Jesus desired
to submit the arrangement of these things to the
natural development of the congregation ; such rea
soning forgets that Jesus saw no prospect of
" natural development " but expected a supernatural
and sudden catastrophe making all things new at
once. Since history itself has swept away this expecta
tion for us, it is clear that the ascetic rigorous de-

Jesus
mands of Jesus' ethics which rested upon it, cannot ||
be valid for us in the original literal sense. I hold
that it is far more expedient to concede this without
reserve than to torture those bold expressions with
the doubtful arts of interpretation or to edge away
from them with a bad conscience. The more clearly
we define for ourselves the difference between the
ethics of Jesus conditioned by his time and environ
ment and modern social ethics, the more decidedly
must we bring to light the permanent kernel of
truth hidden in that temporary shell. This kernel
may be found in two sayings of Jesus which sum it
up : " For whosoever would save his life shall lose
it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake
shall find it. For what shall a man be profited, if
he shall gain the whole world and forfeit his soul ? "
(Matthew 16, 25 seq.) and " But whosoever would
become great among you shall be your minister;
and whosoever would be first among you, shall be
servant of all." (Mark 10, 43.) The first means
that true salvation, the fulfillment of the life-purpose
of the individual, depends upon a self-denying, un
reserved surrender to the highest purpose of all, the
realization of the divine will, of which Jesus knew
himself to be the tool. The other means that the
social value of each depends upon the measure of his
service to the whole of society. Both reject that
egoism which seeks its own object and in the selfish
gain of temporal possessions loses its eternal object ;
both promise the richest life-content and permanent
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Christian Origins
satisfaction to that self-forgetting love which seeks
the fulfillment of God's will in the service of human
society. " Die and become ! " — this is indeed an
ethical truth for all time ; a new order of society was
formed in the Christian congregation for all time by
this principle, and according to its norm it ought
to and will become purer as time goes on. In the
end, the difference is merely this : for us, the divine
will no longer reveals itself in supernatural catas
trophes but in the natural development of human
society, hence our surrender to the divine will urges
us, not to a breach with society but to the positive,
moral employment and refinement of its historical
life conditions.
We have reviewed the teachings of Jesus — his
joyous message of the coming kingdom of God, of
the fatherhood of God, and of the true righteous
ness of man as God's child. The question remains :
what did Jesus think about himself, his mission and
his position in God's kingdom? The historical an
swer to this question is made peculiarly difficult be
cause throughout the Gospels the transformed ideas
of Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God, which
either arose later in the faith of the congregation
or were colored by that faith, were transferred back
into the earthly life of Jesus and the corresponding
sayings were put into his mouth ; naturally, this did
not take place without manifold contradictions with
their own traditional recollections of the actual his
torical course of events. 114

Jesus
According to the fourth Gospel, Jesus is the in
carnate appearance of the Logos or the Son of God,
who was with God from the beginning, who was
himself a God, and the disciples beheld his divine
glory even under the earthly cloak of the person
Jesus. (John I, 14.) According to Luke and Mat
thew, Jesus is the supernaturally-begotten Son of
God, who was hailed as the world redemeer by divine
spirits at birth; and even Mark, though he knows
nothing about the supernatural birth, has a celestial
voice proclaim at his baptism that Jesus is the Son
of God and the chosen object of His love, or its
equivalent, the Messiah ; then the demons of the pos
sessed acknowledge him as such, and many miracles,
chiefly the transfiguration, confirm it. All of this
belongs to the realm of pious legend; later on, its
origin in the belief of the congregation will be ex
plained. From a purely historical standpoint, so
much is certain that Jesus was not conscious of any
superhuman origin or nature. He appeared as a
prophet, just as the Baptist had before him; he
worked as a teacher and healer among his own peo
ple, like other predecessors and contemporaries. His
power over sick souls and bodies, miraculous as it
might seem, was not an absolute, divine omnipo
tence, but conditioned by the faith of the sick, as
appears in the report of Mark (6, 5), which says
that he could " do no mighty work " in Nazareth
because of the unbelief of his townsmen. Neither
was his prophetic knowledge unlimited; the son
"5

Christian Origins
knows not that hour when the promised time of sal
vation shall begin, the father alone knows (Mark
13, 32). In noble humility, Jesus even refuses to
consider himself morally perfect; when one ad
dressed him " good Master," he answered : " Why
callest thou me good? none is good save one, even
God." (Mark 10, 18.) Therewith he placed him
self in a category with other men ; he prayed to God
as to a father, just as he had taught the disciples
to pray, " our father" ; he felt himself to be the Son
of God in no other than the moral-religious sense,
according to which he called upon us to become sons
of God by making ourselves like our heavenly father ;
he termed the peaceable, " Sons of God," and all who
do God's will, his brothers and sisters. (Mark 3,
35.) Even in such passages where the name " Son
of God " is applied to Jesus in a unique sense, as by
the celestial voice at the baptism and the transfigura
tion, by the devil at the temptation, by the high priest
at the trial, there the words in the older Gospels are
but another way of saying " Messiah " and do not
include any transcendental or metaphysical meaning.
On the strength of the older Gospels, the truly
human self-consciousness of Jesus may be declared
without doubt an established historical fact. It is
far more difficult to answer the question whether
Jesus assumed the messianic dignity and if so, how ?
In any event, that he did not do so from the begin
ning, may be concluded with great probability from
the report testified to by the first three Gospels that
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Jesus
at the close of his activity in Galilee on a journey in
the neighborhood of Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked
his disciples: "Who do men say that I am?"
Whereupon they answered: the (resurrected) John
the Baptist, or Elijah or some other prophet. Then
Jesus asked them : " But who say ye that I am ?"
Whereupon Peter is made to answer : " Thou art
the Christ." (Mark 8, 29 ; in Luke " God's Christ" ;
in Matthew " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
living God.") Here the reader of the Gospels who
thinks historically faces this alternative: either the
many messianic expressions of Jesus and avowals
of those about him reported earlier in the Gospels
are historical, which makes the scene on the road to
Caesarea scarcely possible, or the scene is historical
and the descriptions of the Evangelists, who intro
duce Jesus as the Messiah from the beginning, do
not rest on historical recollection but rest on the
transference of the later belief of the congregation
back to the beginning of the life of Jesus or to the
period of his public activities. But this circum
stance, that the scene of Caesarea contradicts the
other presupposition of the Gospels so crassly, is a
strong proof in favor of the historic character of
Peter's answer; the distinct statement of time and
place is also in its favor. To be sure the continua
tion of the narrative brings new difficulties, even if
we confine ourselves to Mark and disregard the glori
fication of Peter as the rock upon which the Church
should be founded (an expression which is certainly
"7

Christian Origins
unhistorical and reported only by Matthew). On
the strength of Peter's declaration, Mark reports that
Jesus charged the disciples to tell no man of him, that
is of what they had just heard concerning his Mes-
siahship ; and that Jesus began to teach them the ne
cessity for the suffering of the son of man, the rejec
tion by the Jewish hierarchy, as well as that he
would be killed and rise from the dead after three
days ; thereupon Peter warned him strongly against
this fate, but Jesus rebuked the anxious disciple as
a Satan whose thoughts were human and not divine.
Immediately the question arises: Why did Jesus
forbid the disciples to speak of his Messiahship? If
he believed himself to be the Messiah, or more ex
actly speaking, if he believed himself chosen for that
honor, must he not have wished that the people
should hear his faith and that of his disciples ? Must
he not have wished the greatest number possible to
share that faith? In fact, a Messiah who would
wish to be a Messiah only in secret is something so
difficult to comprehend, that we readily understand
how some recent critics have arrived at the idea that
Jesus himself did not wish to be considered the
Messiah, but that the belief of the congregation had
first ascribed this honor to the resurrected Jesus and
not to the Jesus of earth. Others have attempted
to solve this difficulty by assuming that Jesus pre
vented the publication of his Messiahship by reason
of pedagogic wisdom and foresight, because he
feared that the people would take him for a political
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Jesus
Messiah, whereas he himself desired to be only a
spiritual Messiah, or, by his death and resurrection,
a heavenly Messiah. But a number of serious ob
jections combat that hypothesis. It is a fair question
to ask : Would it not have been the simplest way of
avoiding any such misunderstanding, for Jesus to
declare plainly and openly that he did wish to come
as the Messiah, not in the traditional Jewish sense,
but in some new spiritual or heavenly sense ? There
is no trace anywhere that he wished to give the tradi
tional Jewish messianic idea any such new interpreta
tion, just as little as in the case of the traditional
idea of the kingdom of God. Yet both would have
been urgently needed, not only for the people, but
even for his disciples; for the Gospels often reveal
the extent to which the latter shared the traditional
and popular notion of the Messiah and his kingdom.
For example when the sons of Zebedee ask for the
places of honor at the right and left hand of the
Messiah in his glory (Mark 10, 37) or when the
festal procession, of which the disciples were a part,
is doing messianic honors, greeting Jesus as the
" Son of David," upon his entry into Jerusalem, and
rejoicing in the " kingdom that cometh, the kingdom
of our father David." (Mark 11, 9 seq.) Assum
ing that the pedagogic wisdom and foresight of
Jesus had caused him to suppress all messianic an
nouncements, we must expect that on such occasion
Jesus would not have let the opportunity pass of
telling his disciples and friends that these expecta-
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Christian Origins
tions were error and of enlightening them as to the
true sense of his messianic ideas. He does this no
where; he did not disabuse the minds of the sons of
Zebedee about the places of honor in his kingdom,
but simply explained that God, and not he, would
assign them; silently, he accepted Peter's acknowl
edgment of his Messiahship and the honors of the
festal procession; at the cleansing of the temple, he
appears the powerful reformer of existing cult-cus
toms, and in the parable of the faithless husband
men, he declares to the hierarchs with little conceal
ment the nearing end of their dominion. It seems
to me that all of this is not calculated to give the
impression that Jesus rejected the popular notion of
the Messiah as the king of God's people and substi
tuted for it the new notion of a spiritual Messiah.
The notion of a purely spiritual Messiah, acting only
as an educator of the attitude of men, but lacking
all external power and honor, was entirely strange,
not only to the faith of the Jews, but even to the
early-Christian congregation ; the latter were con
vinced that by resurrecting their master, Jesus, God
had seated him at his right hand and thereby " made
him Lord and Christ," that is, God had conferred
upon him that royal dignity and governing power
which was inseparably bound up with the idea of
the Messiah. How thoroughly must the disciples
have misunderstood their master to the end, if his
thoughts had not been of that nature, but had been
occupied entirely with a spiritual Messiah! This
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Jesus
idea like that of the spiritual kingdom of God is
mainly a product of theological reflection, far re
moved from the naive, realistic conceptions both of
Judaism and early-Christianity.
If the hypothesis of a " spiritual Messiah " is con
sequently to be eliminated from a historical consid
eration, the open question remains whether there is
any advantage in the hypothesis of a " heavenly
Messiah," — the assumption that Jesus believed as did
the early congregation after his death, that although
Jesus had not been the Messiah while on earth, yet
by his death and resurrection he had been chosen
and elevated to the heavenly kingship of God's peo
ple, as such he would reveal himself powerfully on
his return from heaven and set up his kingdom on
earth? This hypothesis seems to find support in
those Gospel passages, according to which Jesus is
said to have predicted accurately concerning his pas
sion and death, his resurrection and return in the
clouds of heaven. But close scrutiny to discover
whether Jesus really could have uttered these say
ings causes strongest doubts. The threefold repeti
tion of the prophecy itself, with its increasing elab
oration of details (Mark 8, 31 ; 9, 31 ; 10, 33 seq.)
leads us to suppose that it is the Evangelist who has
transformed the knowledge and hopes of the congre
gation into a wonderful foreknowledge and foretell
ing of Jesus. Had Jesus actually foretold it, the
fact would be incomprehensible that no one in the
closer or larger circle of his disciples had a premoni-

Christian Origins
tion of his approaching death and subsequent resur
rection; the catastrophe came so unexpectedly and,
for the moment, destroyed their hopes so utterly that
they lost control and courage and scattered to their
homes. Besides, the Evangelists themselves say that
the prophecies of the passion and resurrection of
Jesus, free from ambiguity as they were supposed
to be, were not understood by the disciples at any
time; plainly, by this, they betray the fact that in
the circle of the disciples nothing was known of the
Supposedly-prophesied fate of Jesus before its actual
occurrence; in short, that the prophecy could not
Have been uttered. We will see later that the con
duct of Jesus during the last days at Jerusalem does
not give the impression that he regarded the prospect
of his death as an absolute necessity and divinely-
decreed fate. Thus the hypothesis that Jesus ex
pected a heavenly Messiahship plainly becomes un
tenable. If neither the spiritual nor the heavenly Messiah
can be adhered to, there seems no other alternative
than this : either Jesus did not wish to be the Messiah
at all or he wished to be or become the Messiah in the
traditional, popular sense. There is a third possibil
ity thinkable, a mediatory hypothesis, which is per
haps best calculated to explain the historical course
of events. In any event, it is certain that Jesus did
not appear with a messianic claim from the begin
ning, but did appear simply as the prophet of the
approaching kingdom of God ; to prepare its coming

Jesus
by his utterances, he regarded as his immediate di
vine mission. For this he could disregard the ques
tion whether God would be the only and immediate
king in that new order of things which His divine
omnipotence would bring to pass (as was expected,
for example, in the apocryphal " Assumtio Mosis ")
or whether he would employ a human tool and make
a man the messianic king; also, the question who
that man would be. The thought that he himself
might be the divinely selected one, may have been
remote from the beginning; hence his rebuff of the
messianic greetings which the sick are supposed to
have spoken early in his career (if the Gospel re
ports are trustworthy).
When, however, the masses were inspired by the
power of his instructive and healing utterances, and
gathered about him, when the growing enmity of
the scribes and Pharisees made it apparent at the
same time that rescue of the starving and scattered
flock was not to be expected from that quarter, then
the thought may have haunted him more and more
that he himself had been called to inaugurate the
redeeming kingdom of God by a religious-social
reformation. When the Baptist's question " Art
thou he (the Messiah) who is to come?" was put
to him, Jesus referred to his successes in healing sick
bodies and souls and his preaching of a gospel for
the poor. Surely he had no wish to be a Messiah
such as the Pharisees dreamed of, who would help
the Jewish nation to victory over the heathen and to
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Christian Origins
release from the Roman rule, but a Messiah of the
poor, the miserable and heavy-laden, the pious suf
ferer and the secluded — that small and powerless
flock to whom the heavenly father intended to give
the kingdom (Luke 12, 32). For the accomplish
ment of this task, his previous activity in Galilee no
longer sufficed; in the capitol city of Jerusalem, at
the heart of the hierarchy, the decision must be
brought about. The acknowledgment of Peter seems
to have ripened this decision to make a final move;
from that on, everything points to a great determina
tion, a bold undertaking, a decided purpose. Jesus
did notmove on to Jerusalem in order to be executed,
nor did he go there to celebrate the feast; but he
went there to win a victory over the hierarchy and
realize the prophetic ideal of God's kingdom in the
regenerated nation. Naturally, he was not unmind
ful of the difficulties and dangers involved, and
therefore he requires of his disciples such determina
tion as disregards all considerations and is prepared
to make any sacrifice. At that period he may have
said : " I came to cast fire upon the earth ; and what
will I, if it is already kindled? But I have a bap
tism to be baptized with ; and how am I straightened
till it be accomplished ! Think ye that I am come to
give peace in the earth ? I tell you, Nay ; but rather
division." (Luke 12, 49 seq.) That is the sincere
language of a hero who is moving toward a hard
and decisive battle, one who is prepared to lose all,
even his life, in God's cause; but because he is not
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Jesus
blind to the possibility of his own annihilation, he is
still far removed from thinking it inevitable. Jesus
was convinced that he was doing God's work ; he be
lieved in the wonder-working and omnipotent God,
who could, if need be, aid him with more than twelve
legions of angels : Why should he not be certain of
the victory of his cause, despite such anxieties of the
human mind, as Peter had expressed? In fact the
reports of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem and his do
ings there, indicate no elegiac, resigned mood, but on
the contrary they display the heroic trait of daring
endeavor, courageous struggle and joyous hope.
As the host of his enthusiastic friends grew on
the way to Jerusalem, as through Jericho and from
there to Jerusalem, the entire journey became one
triumphal procession culminating in that enthusiasm
of the pious pilgrim host which found vent in the
outburst of messianic cries of joy, Jesus withstood
no longer ; when his opponents called his attention to
the suspicious nature of these cries, he is said to have
answered : " If these shall hold their peace, the
stones will cry out." (Luke 19, 40.) He considered
the enthusiasm of the masses to be an elemental
force, which no human violence could check. On the
next day, he visited the temple; when he saw the
busy activity of the dealers in sacrificial animals and
Jewish coins overrunning the outer court, he drove
them out with their wares. This business was con
nected with the sacrificial service and therefore
Jesus' reformatory action seemed to be an attack
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Christian Origins
on the sacrificial service itself, and indirectly on the
hierarchs, who derived their income from and based
their social position of power on the sacrificial ser
vice. After opening the battle thus, Jesus continued
it during the following days in addresses to the peo
ple. With fiery words, he reads the register of their
sins to the scribes and the Pharisees, — hypocritical
commerce with religion, ambition and greed, agita-
torial proselytizing which only makes men more
wicked, lying casuistry, straining out gnats and swal
lowing camels, mania for outward cleansing and in
ward hypocrisy and iniquity, worship of the prophets'
sepulchres and hatred of their spirit. In the parable
of the faithless husbandman (Mark 12, 12 seq.) the
hierarchs perceived that he set the prospect of the
approaching judgment before them, in that God
would take his vineyard, the stewardship of his peo
ple, and give it to " others," which meant, naturally,
to Jesus and his friends whom God had appointed
for the kingdom. (Cp. Luke 12, 32 ; 22, 29.) From
that time on, the hierarchs sought to remove the un
comfortable reformer, but fearing the people who
were much attached to him, they dared not attack
him openly. (Mark 12, 12-37.) They thought it
safer to seize him in the dead of night and deliver
him over to the Roman governor as a messianic pre
tender and public agitator ; in which case, they well
knew, the governor would make short work of
him. Jesus knew the deadly enmity of the hierarchs
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Jesus
and prepared himself for the worst; but he never
thought of a criminal trial before his Roman su
periors. He was conscious of his innocence in that
direction because he had commanded the separation
of politics and religion and the recognition of the
Imperial authority. (Mark 12, 17.) One refer
ence in the Gospel of Luke leads to the highly prob
able conclusion that he scented danger from an
other quarter; in the Life-of-Jesus romances, this
reference is regularly overlooked, but it is of great
importance to the historian. While Jesus was cele
brating the Passover meal with his disciples on the
evening of the day before his death, he commanded
them urgently to procure swords at any price, even
if they had to sell their cloaks to do so, and when
they answered that there were two swords at hand,
he said : it is enough (Luke 22, 36-38) . Such words
cannot be interpreted allegorically without doing
them great violence ; literally accepted, they can mean
only one thing, that Jesus considered weapons ur
gently needed for defense in case of murderous at
tack by hired assassins. What thought could be
closer than that the hierarchs would seek to remove
him silently by assassination, inasmuch as criminal
cases were no longer in their jurisdiction since the
Roman occupation? Jesus wanted to be ready for
such an attack and two swords sufficed for the pur
pose. When, later, in the garden of Gethsemane, he
saw himself surrounded by a host of the servitors of
the authorities and not by assassins, he forbade all
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Christian Origins
further opposition on the part of the disciples (Luke
22, 50). Luke's reference to the purchase of the
swords is so much the more to be considered a sure
historical recollection because it stands in the most
glaring contrast to that later church-view of Jesus'
death, which colors the other gospel descriptions.
If Jesus feared assassination on the last evening of
his life and prepared to meet it with arms, he could
never have known or predicted his death on the
cross; these predictions could only have been put
into his mouth subsequently.
The same holds good of the Gospel passage by
which Jesus is supposed to have made bread and
wine at the last supper, the symbols of his dead body
and his flowing blood. Later on, we will see that
these words originated in the Apostle Paul's mystical
teaching of the sacrificial death of Christ and its
sacramental celebration in the Communion — a teach
ing unknown to the oldest congregation and there
fore not heard by them from Jesus' lips. The words
spoken at the Last Supper, which actually belonged
to the original tradition, do not breathe the mood
of separation or premonition of death; on the con
trary, they are full of joyous hope of victory. Thus,
the words about drinking wine in the kingdom of
the father after it had come, and the promise to the
disciples that under the kingship of Jesus they will
sit at his table and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.
(Luke 22, 18 ; 22, 28 seq.) It is easily possible that
this joyous mood could give way to more sombre
is8

Jesus
thoughts at this critical juncture; if the text of the
prayer which Jesus uttered in the solitude of the
garden of Gethsemane is correctly handed down to
us, then it shows that in that hour Jesus' soul was
suffused with an anxious premonition ; yet his sway
ing between fear and hope is another sign that the
thought of his death as an absolute necessity was
still remote. We may well assume that his trust in
that God, who can save his own by miracles and
angels, was his mainstay even during the disgrace
arid maltreatment of the last day : not until he was
on the cross did the dying man lose hope ; not until
life was ebbing, did he break forth in the lament :
" My God, why hast thou forsaken me ? "
To this heartrending tragedy as his life's close,
one thought alone can reconcile us — that it was the
inevitable, providential means of entrance into a
higher life. The grain of wheat must fall to earth
and die in order to bring forth rich fruit ; the Jewish
Messiah, the reformer of his people, had to disap
pear so that " the Christ after the spirit " could live
in the faith of his congregation to be — to make way
for him who was in truth to become the world re
deemer and the king of the realm. His limitations
of age and nation, the messianic-apocalyptic form of
his thought and activity, they had to succumb in the
unequal struggle with the powers of the earth; but
the universal, spiritual kernel of his life work, the
ideal of the kingdom of that God who is the good
will and redeeming love in the hearts of his children
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Christian Origins
and in the life of his realm — that remained and
marched triumphantly across the world, so that even
to-day it is the saving and educating force which
gives eternal content and value to human life in the
individual and the race.

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THE MESSIANIC CONGREGATION
The death of Jesus seems to have destroyed all
the hopes which the disciples had centred in him.
The blow had struck them so unexpectedly that they
fled precipitately after his arrest and Peter dis
claimed him in cowardly fashion. Not one of them
was present at the cross ; only a few of the faithful
women at a distance watched the sad end. Some
time later the disciples, who had been discouraged
shortly before, appeared publicly before the people
as inspired witnesses of the resurrection and the
elevation of Jesus to heavenly Messiahhood. What
had brought about this great revulsion? What had
they experienced in the meantime, strong enough
to lift their drooping spirits, to fan into flame their
disappearing hopes, so strong that they believed in
Jesus as the Messiah more confidently than ever and
gave public testimony to their belief? At this de
cisive point, the historical method has least right to
withdraw from a critical examination of the tradi
tional stories and must bring to light the probable
sequence of events on the strength of the few but
certain facts. In such case, more cannot be expected
of historical research, than such an explanation of
the procedure as comports with the analogy of other
human experience and is therefore thinkable and
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Christian Origins
Every careful reader of the Gospels must see that
the stories of the disciples' Easter experiences are so
contradictory that they afford no decided, clear no
tion. No man can gain any idea of a resurrected
body which is both entirely material, tangible like
any earthly body and can eat, and then again seems
to be of such an unearthly nature that it can go
through locked doors, suddenly appear and then dis
appear and then be lifted up to heaven. Equally
contradictory are the Gospel stories about the locality
in which it appeared ; in Mark, the disciples are di
rected to Galilee in order to see the resurrected one
there : so, too, in Matthew, where the story of the
appearance on the mountain in Galilee is actually
narrated, but not until after a similar story had been
reported about the appearance to the two Marys on
the home-journey from the tomb to the city. Luke,
however, only tells of appearances on the Emmaus
road near Jerusalem and then to the assembled dis
ciples at Jerusalem ; not only that he knows nothing
of a Galilean appearance, but he precluded its pos
sibility, by having the disciples directed to wait at
Jerusalem until the pouring out of the holy spirit
on Pentecost. John agrees with Luke in telling of
appearances at Jerusalem and with Matthew in tell
ing of one before Mary at the grave ; finally, in the
supplementary chapter, he tells of an appearance to
some of the disciples at the sea of Genesareth, no
where else reported. Paul knows nothing of the
women's discovery of an empty grave and the ap-
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The Messianic Congregation
pearance of an angel or of Christ, which the Evan
gelists make much of ; but he makes out a series of
appearances to Kephas, the twelve and more than
five hundred brothers, to Jacobus, the entire group
of Apostles and finally to Paul himself. Such is the
oldest report, but it does not tally with any of the
later evangelical reports. This suffices to show how
little the oldest congregation knew about the mat
ter; the traditions handed down to us are discon
nected and inharmonious legends, created by poetic
imagination and apologetic reflection. Will we suc
ceed in working through these superimposed layers
of legend to the historical foundation of actual facts ?
Perhaps we may hope to do so by noting certain
suggestions given by the oldest witnesses, Paul and
Mark, independently of one another and yet in agree
ment. Mark makes Jesus prophesy ( 14, 2"j) : " All
ye shall be offended : for it is written, I will smite
the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered abroad.
Howbeit, after I am raised up, I will go before you
into Galilee." To this, then, he makes the angel at
the grave refer in his direction to the women ; they
should go and tell his disciples and especially Peter
that Jesus goeth before them into Galilee, there shall
they see him, as he had said previously to them (16,
7). This prophecy subsequently attributed to Jesus
leads to a certain conclusion regarding the actual
course of events, immediately after Jesus' death.
The disciples had become confused in their faith,
they were scattered and returned to their Galilean
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Christian Origins
homes ; there they saw the crucified Jesus again for
the first time as a living man, and among them Peter
saw him first. Granted that we find this to be the
oldest historical tradition, then it follows that all the
stories about the appearances of the resurrected Jesus
at or near Jerusalem on Easter Sunday are to be
considered later legends, lacking all historical basis;
with them goes the story of the finding of the empty
grave and, therewith, the bodily emergence of Jesus
from the grave. Another reflection, suggested by
Paul, leads to the same conclusion. When he places
the Christ appearance of his own experience (I Cor.
15, 8) on a level with all the other appearances, he
naturally presupposes the similarity of these appear
ances and justifies us in judging the previous ones
to have been similar in nature to his own. Now,
it is certain that that which Paul was convinced
that he had seen on the way to Damascus was not
Christ in the flesh but Christ in the spirit — a celestial
being of spirit or light, similar in nature to their
thought of angels. Such a supernatural being can
not be the object of sense perception, but of an
inner seeing, the vision or hallucination of a state
of ecstasy, which is not conjured up by any present,
perceivable object, but is the externalized mirroring
of an inner state of the soul, an " objectivation " of
its own consciousness. This agrees with Paul's say
ing,, that God revealed his Son in him, that the light
shone in his heart, "to give the light of the knowl
edge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ "
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The Messianic Congregation
(Gal. i, 16; II Cor. 4, 6) and with Paul's glorying
in " the visions and the revelations " wherein he
had heard the inexpressible without the mediation
of the physical senses (II Cor. 12, 1, seq.). There
fore, we will have to regard the first appear
ance of Christ which Peter experienced in the same
way as that of Paul who saw the celestial light-ap
pearance of Christ in a sudden ecstatic vision on the
way to Damascus — a physical experience, in no
wise an incomprehensible miracle, but psychologic
ally conceivable according to many analogous ex
periences in all ages.
In the legends of saints and martyrs it is a regu
larly-recurring feature that the saint, shortly after
his death, reappears in dreams and in waking hours
(ecstasies) and bids his people be of good cheer,
adding words of consolation and instruction: The
longing love loses itself completely in memories and
the precious image of the departed presents itself so
vividly, that, in the supreme moment of ecstatic
enthusiasm, faith believes itself face to face with the
living. When we consider Peter's nature, a lively
temperament, easily swayed by sudden and momen
tary impulses of emotion, it becomes easy to con
ceive that he should be the first to go through this
experience. Following other analogies, it is also
easy to understand that this experience of inspired
vision did not confine itself to Peter, but repeated
itself soon for the other disciples and, finally, for
assemblages of believers. It is a well-known fact
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Christian Origins
of experience that there is a contagion in the condi
tion of high grades of excited psychical life, especi
ally of religious enthusiasm and ecstasy and that
such conditions overpower entire assemblages with
an elemental force. Many succumb to the sugges
tion of individuals to such an extent that they
actually repeat the experience ; others, less suscepti
ble, imagine, at least, that they see and hear the
thing suggested ; dull and sober participants are so
carried away by the enthusiasm of the mass that
faith furnishes what their own vision fails to supply.
The historical basis of the disciples' belief in the
resurrection we find in the ecstatic visionary ex
periences emanating from an individual and soon
convincing all; in these experiences they be
lieved that they saw the crucified master alive and
raised to heavenly glory. At home in the world of
the miraculous, the imagination wove the garment
to clothe that which was moving and suffusing the
soul. At bottom, the moving force of the resurrec
tion of Jesus in their faith was nothing more than
the ineffaceable impression which one person had
made upon them ; their love and their confidence in
him were stronger than death. This miracle of love
and not a miracle of omnipotence was the founda
tion of the resurrection-belief in the early-congre
gation. Therefore it did not stop at passing emotions,
but the newly-awakened, inspired belief compelled
action; the disciples recognized their life-task.
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The Messianic Congregation
They were to proclaim to their compatriots that
Jesus of Nazareth, whom they had delivered up to
their enemies, was the Messiah ; that God had shown
it the more by the resurrection of Jesus and his as
cension to heaven and that Jesus would soon return
to take up his messianic government of earth. In a
certain sense, their teachings were the continuation
of Jesus' announcement of the kingdom, but with
the important difference, that the belief in the eleva
tion of Jesus to the heavenly Messiahship was their
point of departure and mainstay; the teaching that
Jesus, the man, was resurrected and would return
took precedence over the teaching of the coming
kingdom, and the miraculous character of the mes
sianic king expected from heaven, lifted the idea of
his kingdom to a higher level ; therewith, the broad
ening of the national limitation and the spiritualiza-
tion of the earthly character of the kingdom was at
least prepared at the outset of the apostolic teaching,
even if, as is natural, it was not at once completed.
Now that the teaching of the Jesus who had been
resurrected and had become the heavenly Messiah,
was the appeal made to the people, and they could
not prove anything of the life of the crucified one of
their own knowledge, other proofs had to be sought.
They were found in the passages of the Old Testa
ment which spoke of the rescue of the righteous
from the pangs of death, whereby the protection
from death (which was really meant) could easily
be constructed to mean redemption from death
i39

Christian Origins
through resurrection, and then these could be inter
preted as prophecy of the Messiah Jesus (so Ps.
16, 10; 86, 13; Cp. Acts 2, 27; 13, 35). Particu
larly favorable for the apologetic purpose of the
apostolic teaching was that passage in the second
Isaiah which describes the patient suffering of the
servant of God, who is carried off, not because of
his own guilt, but by reason of the wickedness of his
people ; after laying down his own life as a sacrifice,
he will see his offspring, live long and lead God's
cause to victory. (Isaiah 53.) The application of
this passage to the martyrdom and the renewed life
of Jesus was apparent to the apostles and offered
them a splendid means of using prophetic revelation
as a support of the thought, previously unknown to
Judaism, of a Messiah who had been elevated to
heaven through death and resurrection. That this
resurrected Jesus was enthroned by the side of God
in heaven until his return, could be proven by the
one hundred and tenth Psalm in which God says tc
his anointed : " Sit thou at my right hand until I
make thine enemies thy footstool." The expecta
tion of the early return of Jesus from heaven could
be based on the prophecy of Daniel that a son of
man would come before God on the cloud of heaven
and would be appointed to rule over the kingdom
of the holy. (Daniel 7, 13.) This passage was
especially important to the early-congregation,
because they looked upon it as containing in sub
stance the entire programme of their new trans-
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The Messianic Congregation
cendental, messianic belief and their hope of the
return. Hence, such expressions were soon attrib
uted to Jesus himself; at the hearing before the
High-priest (at which certainly none of his follow
ers could have been present to serve as a trustworthy
ear witness) Jesus is supposed to have said : " and
ye shall see the son of man sitting on the right
hand of power and coming with the clouds of
heaven." (Mark 14, 62.) After it had become
usual to designate Jesus, the Messiah who was to
return from heaven, by the apocalyptical name " the
son of man," the expression was employed in those
passages where the Jesus of earth is made to
prophesy his approaching passion and resurrection
(Mark 8, 31, etc.) ; finally, this expression ac
quired the meaning of the standing messianic self-
designation of Jesus, which is attributed to him
regularly in the Gospels from the beginning, without
reference to his resurrection or return; this corre
sponds to the (naturally unhistorical) presupposi
tion that he announced himself from the beginning
as the Messiah.
Altogether the religious reflection of the early-
Christian congregation moved entirely in the direc
tion of interpreting and arranging the preceding
earth-life of Jesus in the new light of the newly-
won belief in the heavenly Messiahship of Jesus.
In that life they sought signs and guarantees of his
future appearance in messianic glory. Whatever
was contradictory to this in the past, such as passion,
¦I 141 ,H

Christian Origins
disgrace and death, that was subjected to a con
ciliatory and satisfying interpretation from the
standpoint of the belief in his return. This passion
was not to be regarded as an unexpected fate,
destroying the messianic hopes, but as something
known of Jesus long before, something foretold
as far back as the prophets and the Psalmists.
Throughout the Old Testament they sought and
found exemplars and prophecies of the happenings
to the Messiah, Jesus. The story of his passion, in
particular, was worked over from this viewpoint;
for each feature, some prophetic example was sought
in the fate of some righteous sufferer; again, on
the strength of these supposed prophecies, new fea
tures would be added to the story, so as to make
it plastic and edificatory. The legend-making
power of the religious imagination was actively en
gaged on other stories beside that of the passion.
The expected miracle of the appearance of the
heavenly Messiah Jesus gave a reflex glory to the
life of the prophet Jesus and filled the gaps of
historical knowledge with the pictures of pious
poetry. One presupposition set the standard : the
Messiah had performed and surpassed in perform
ance all the wonderful deeds and experiences which
the Old Testament narrated of Moses and Elijah
and its great men of God. Not alone sober reflec
tion, but prophetic inspiration, also, reading the Old
Testament in the light of its fulfillment by the Mes
siah Jesus, created these new legends, modeling them
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The Messianic Congregation
after the old ones. At the same time, apologetic
motives influenced the Gospel tradition. Faith
sought to see in the earth-life of Jesus the model
and guarantee of that which the ennobled Christ
was to mean in the present and in the future: he
who was to return as king and judge, faith pre
supposed, must have proven himself by miraculous
deeds to be lord over nature during his sojourn on
earth, he must have been the conqueror of demons
and the lawgiver of the new people of God; by
divine proclamations, he must have established the
fact that he was the son of God, gifted with the
miraculous power of spirit. So the story of the
transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain (accord
ing to its original sense, clearly recognizable in
Mark) is a symbolic presentation of the glorification
of Jesus through his resurrection and at the same
time an imitation of the experience of Moses on
the mountain where the Law was given ; as Moses'
countenance shone with the reflected light of God,
so Jesus, at the transfiguration, was changed into
a figure of light, which was his permanently after
the resurrection; in the presence of Moses and
Elijah, the representatives of Law and Prophecy, the
divine voice of Heaven declared Jesus to be the
beloved Son to whom all were to hearken thence
forward. This displays the oldest form of the
faith in Christ, according to which the resurrection
and the ascension to the heavenly world of light
"made both Lord and Christ this Jesus whom ye
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Christian Origins
crucified." (Acts 2, 36.) Soon came the desire to
see the Son of God and the Messiah not only in the
ascended but even in the Jesus of earth ; for, it was
thought, how could such great miracles be wrought
if it had not been that " God anointed him with
the Holy Ghost and with power"? (Acts 10, 38.)
Then the question, when could that have happened?
Was it not before he took up his public work?
Thus the baptism by John seemed most fitting for
the equipment of Jesus with the messianic spirit.
But how did that happen ? Once, so ran the sacred
legend, the spirit rested, brooding upon the waters
of chaos before creation, " like a dove " the Rabbis
said : thus, at the creation of the new world, the
spirit is made to descend again on Jesus in the shape
of a dove, thenceforth to dwell in him as the all-
regenerating principle. A legend preserved in an
extra-canonical gospel tells of a fiery appearance in
the Jordan, similar to the fiery appearance at the
outpouring of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost. Ac
companying this descent of the spirit was a heavenly
voice which originally in all probability (according
to an old version) uttered the words of the second
Psalm : " Thou art my son, this day have I
begotten thee !" — wherewith the miraculous baptism
is explained as the solemn initiation of Jesus as the
Son of God and the spirit-laden Messiah.
For a long period, this was the prevailing idea,
until it was superseded by the later legend of the
supernatural birth of Jesus, according to which he
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The Messianic Congregation
did not become the son of God during the course
of his life on earth, but is said to have been born
so, in the actual, physical sense. We will return
later to this latest form of the early-Christian belief
in Christ, and show the heathen models which in
fluenced its construction.
Thus the seeds of future Christ-belief of the
church were sown in the early-congregation; of
course, they were not dogmatic doctrines but legends
full of meaning, children of faith, of prophetic intui
tion and poetizing imagination. In form and con
tent, these poems were still closely related to the
popular idea of the Jewish messianic expectation.
The Jews themselves hoped for the coming of a
Messiah who was to regenerate God's people; and
in the Jewish apocalypses the Messiah was set forth,
sometimes at least, as a supermundane being de
scended from the heavenly heights. At first, the
believers in Jesus differed from the other Jews only
in this, that they regarded their master, whom the
national leaders had rejected and the Roman authori
ties had crucified, as the Messiah awaited from
Heaven. Herein, however, lay the beginning of a
very important distinction. By combining the
messianic idea with the person of the crucified
Jesus, that idea acquired a new content ; its national-
Jewish nature gave way to the human ethical char
acter of the merciful friend of the weary and the
heavy laden, the innocent, persecuted sufferer whose
passion led to his glory. The thought of a " suffer-
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Christian Origins
ing Messiah," unknown until then in Judaism,
brought an entirely new tone into the religious mood
and mode of thinking. Besides, the time of the
Messiah's arrival into glory, for which the resurrec
tion seemed to be the prologue and the guarantee,
was made the immediate future and became an
object of most ardent hopes; the rejection of the
present, disintegrating world and the yearning ex
pectation of the coming new world which was to
bring release from all present oppression in its train
— to far greater extent than ever, this became the
fundamental note of pious faith.
If we ask, whether there was Christianity in this
old circle of disciples, the answer may be both Yes
and No. It was present insofar as the congregation
felt itself bound by the belief in Jesus as the Lord
and Christ, the coming judge and redeemer, who
would bring to pass the promised kingdom of God
in his regenerated people and insofar as they strove
to imitate the moral example of the master in their
fraternal, communal life. On the other hand, it
must not be overlooked, that this brotherhood of
Jesus was far removed from a separation from
Judaism as a new and peculiar religious community,
and did not think of securing heathen followers.
They desired, rather, to be nothing more than the
Messiah-believing nucleus of the Jewish people;
they hoped to convert the whole nation to whom the
promise belonged and they felt themselves bound by
the Mosaic Law as the basis of the Jewish religion.
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The Messianic Congregation
According to the description in the Acts, undoubt
edly correct, the early-congregation moved entirely
in the forms of Jewish piety, from which they felt
that neither the words nor the example of Jesus
released them. The comrades of the messianic
brotherhood visited the Temple, kept the hours of
prayer, the festivals and fast days, the ritual laws,
the customary oaths — all of this with a conscien
tiousness, which placed their ceremonial piety be
yond doubt even in the eyes of the Jewish people.
Jacobus, the brother of the master, who was espe
cially observant and survived in the congregation
under the name of " the righteous " called the
Jewish-Christians " zealous of the law " (Acts 21,
20), which means Jews most strict in their observ
ance. They had learned from Jesus to put the
moral above the ceremonial, but from that point to
an insight into the lack of religious meaning of the
Jewish ceremonial Law and even to the practical
departure from it, was a long journey which Jesus
never had induced the disciples to undertake. There
was no idea of ecclesiastical organization in the
messianic congregation: how could there be any
thought of creating the machinery of a church for
the short period until the return of the master?
Baptism and communion were not by any means acts
of worship and signs of differentiation in the con
gregation believing in Christ, in the sense which
they later assumed. Baptism was a symbolical act
of purification and dedication which differed from
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Christian Origins
the baptism of John's disciples only by the acknowl
edgment of Jesus ; there was nothing in it which
loosened the tie to Judaism. The early Christian
love-feast differed from those of the Essenes and
similar religious associations only by the fact, that
they felt fraternally bound by the faith in Jesus and
the imitation of his love.
The most peculiar feature of the early-congrega
tion, their so-called common ownership of property
reminds one of the Essenes; it was not so rigidly
carried out as in the latter Order, for, according to
the Acts, no one was in duty bound to turn over
all his possessions to the congregation ; probably, it
extended so far as to care for the regular support of
the poorer brethren out of a common treasury and
especially for the common meal of the brothers.
However, this solidarity of a brotherly service of
love and this religiously-inspired socialism of the
early-congregation were of greatest importance: to
a certain extent, it was the beginning of the practi
cal realization of the ideal of the redeeming king
dom of God, which the naive faith expected would
appear fully in the miraculous appearance of the Son
of Man on the clouds of Heaven.
In the small and quiet circle of the brotherhood,
gathered about the name of Jesus, there were, in
deed, present the living seeds of a religious andmoral
world regeneration. In order to develop freely and
powerfully, they had to be released from the national
and legal fetters of Judaism. For this accomplish
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The Messianic Congregation
ment, the seeds needed to be transplanted out of
the rigid Jewish soil of Palestine into the wide
world of heathen religions and of Greek culture;
in both of these the elements were waiting and
ready, by the acquisition of which the new spirit
was to broaden out into a world religion and crystal
lize into the Christian Church.

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Book II
THE EVOLUTION OF
EARLY-CHRISTIANITY INTO THE CHURCH

THE APOSTLE PAUL

THE APOSTLE PAUL
We have seen that the faith of the early-congre
gation at Jerusalem differed so slightly from Juda
ism that it presents the appearance of a sect be
lieving in the Messiah, rather than a new religious
community. Had this conservative attitude of the
first disciples been maintained, there never would
have been a Christian church, but in all probability
the reform movement inaugurated by Jesus would
have been destroyed with the Jewish state. The
work of Jesus escaped this danger through Paul,
who had been converted from a passionate persecu
tor into a follower of the faith in Christ ; he recog
nized what was new and peculiar in this faith more
clearly than the first disciples, and, more energetic
than they, he separated it from the Jewish religion
of the Law and elevated it to the plane of an inde
pendent religion for humanity. According to his
own words, he knew himself to be chosen and called
before birth by God's grace, to perform this world-
historical deed. Innate natural tendencies, external
circumstances and life-conduct united in equipping
him for his great life mission.
Paulus (according to the Jewish name Saulus)
was born of Jewish parents in Tarsus, a Greek city
in Cilicia. His education in the Jewish household
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Christian Origins
of his parents early wakened his religious sense, —
the pious feeling of absolute dependence on God and
the duty of serving Him. In the school of Gamaliel
he was trained to become a strict Pharisaic teacher
of the Law. It was his earnest endeavor to appear
upright before God, by the strictest fulfillment of
the Law's demands. Naturally, this statute-service
was unable to set his conscience at ease; his later
utterances about the conflict between the divine laws
in the soul and the sinful instincts of the members,
about the dependence, the weakness, the misery of
man tortured by the slavish service to the Law —
these were the outgrowth of his personal experience.
This inner dissatisfaction of Sa'jilus, the earnest
Pharisee for the Law, in a certain sense, contained
the seed of the later apostolic teaching of the free
dom of God's children.
No less important was the fact that Paul hailed
from Tarsus, the Greek city, which, after Alex
andria, was the main seat of Hellenic culture, especi
ally of the Stoic school. Several of its teachers,
whose names we know, came from Tarsus ; among
others, there was that Athenodorus, the teacher of
Cicero and Augustus, whom his grateful fellow
citizens made a hero upon his death and celebrated
annually with a memorial feast. Young Paul cer
tainly must have known of such a celebrity in his
native town and learned something of his doings
and his teachings. Besides, it was hardly necessary
for him to attend the lectures of the Stoic teachers
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The Apostle Paul
in order to become acquainted with their main ideas ;
in their popular form, as we have them in the writings
of Seneca and Epictetus, these ideas were enunciated
daily on the streets and in the market-places by
public speakers, who called themselves philosophers,
soul doctors or messengers of truth. How could
they remain unknown, under such circumstances, to
a bright Jewish lad, such as we must picture Paul
to have been? The epistles of Paul are the best
proof that he did know these ideas, for they contain
such remarkable coincidences of thought and speech
with the Stoic philosopher Seneca, that some have
held that Seneca was the teacher of Paul while
others maintain that Seneca was Paul's pupil.
While both suppositions are impossible, the fact of
these parallel passages points to a common source
which is to be found in the culture of that period
saturated with Stoic . thought ; it was a strong
influence, even upon the Jewish dispersion in Asia
Minor, in Syria and in Egypt.
Not only Greek philosophy but the heathen reli
gions scarcely could be learned better anywhere than
in Tarsus, for at that time, the mystery-cults were
spreading from the Orient through the West. As
early as Pompey's time, Tarsus was a seat of the
Mithra religion which had come from Persia and
mingled with the cults worshipping the sun-god in
Hither-Asia — especially in Phrygia, where it had
taken over certain customs of the orgiastic religion
of Attis and Cybele. In a Mithra liturgy still
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Christian Origins
extant, the initiatory service, by which proselytes
were admitted into the Mithra religion, is repre
sented as a mystical dying and rebirth, by which the
guilt of the old life is cleansed and extirpated and
a new, immortal life is created through the spirit;
hence the initiated spoke of themselves as " reborn
for eternity." So striking is the connection of these
ideas with Paul's teaching of Christian baptism as
a community of death and resurrection with Christ
(Romans 6) that the thought of historical relation
between the :\iO cannot be evaded. The Mithra-
sacraments also included a sacred meal, at which
the sanctified bread and a cup of water or even wine
served as mystic symbols of the distribution of the
divine life to the Mithra-believers. At such cele
brations, the latter appeared in animal-masks indicat
ing by these representations attributes of their
god Mithra ; the celebrants had " put on " their god,
which meant that they had entered into a com
munity of life with him. This, too, is paralleled
closely by Paul's teaching of the Lord's Supper as a
" communion of the blood and of the body of
Christ" (I Cor. 10, 16), which he who had been
baptized, has " put on " (Gal. 3, 27).
When it is remembered that the mystical teaching
of both sacraments, the baptism and the Lord's Sup
per, is peculiar to the Apostle Paul and finds no
explanation in the older tradition of the congrega
tion, the supposition is natural, that it is based on
a combination of Christian ideas with the ideas and
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The Apostle Paul
rites of the Mithra religion, as Paul might have
known them from his home in Tarsus. Not that
Saul, the Pharisee, ever felt any sympathy for these
heathen rites; yet all his Jewish rigorism could not
hide from his ken the longing for salvation, purifica
tion and guarantee of life revealed by these mys
teries, yea, his interest must have been the more
intense, the stronger the vibration of the related
chord in his own bosom. Oft the question may
have forced itself upon him : whether the heathen
world seeking for God with such intense longing
would ever achieve truth and peace? If so, how
much of it ? Was it to come through Moses' Law ?
But this Law did not give the earnest Jew inner
satisfaction, how much less could it serve as the
common highway of the nations to God! Saul
learned the answer to this question in the decisive
hour of his life, which transformed the man-eager-
for-the-Law into Paul, the Apostle of Christ.
Historically, Paul appears first in connection with
the martyrdom of Stephen, the Hellenist, who seems
to have drawn most far-reaching, reformatory con
clusions from the faith in the Messiah Jesus, con
clusions far beyond any of the other disciples.
Stephen was accused of saying that Jesus would
destroy the Temple and change the customs deliv
ered by Moses (Acts 6, 14). When Paul, the
Pharisee rabbi, heard such utterances of the adher
ents to the faith in the Messiah Jesus, and heard
public defense of them in the synagogue, it is con-
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Christian Origins
ceivable that they aroused his greatest indignation.
His Pharisaic presuppositions sufficed to rob the
belief in a crucified Messiah of all sense, but the
subversive conclusions of a Stephen made it a crim
inal attack on the most sacred traditions of the
fathers. Therefore, Paul played the part of chief
witness at the execution of Stephen and developed
such eagerness in the further persecution of the
congregation, that the hierarchs bestowed upon him
full power to undertake the painful trial of those
members of the messianic congregation who had
sought refuge in the Jewish colony at Damascus.
But the persecutor was to arrive at Damascus — a
convert. There are three reports of Paul's conversion in
The Acts, in chapters 9, 22 and 26. The details of
this thrice-told story cannot lay claim to considera
tion as accurate history ; one reason and a sufficient
one being the many contradictions they contain.
The words which one report puts into the mouth
of the appearing Christ, another makes Ananias
say at Damascus; in one version, the companions
of Paul fall to the ground with him, in another
they remain standing ; in one, they hear a voice but
see nothing, while in another they see a light but
hear nothing. Deducting these minor features, for
which the narrator is responsible, this substance
remains : on the way to Damascus, Paul suddenly
saw a light-appearance descending from heaven and
heard a voice which he believed to be that of Jesus.
j 60

The Apostle Paul
Paul's own expressions in the epistles harmonize
therewith in the essentials, inasmuch as, without ex
ception, they refer to the revelation of Christ trans
figured by the heavenly flood of light as the decisive
experience, by which he was called not only to join
the faithful disciples, but also to become Christ's
apostle to the gentiles. For instance, when Paul
asks (I Cor. 9, 1), "Have I not seen Jesus, our
Lord ? " this seeing taken with the context, can only
refer to his conversion, the experience upon which
his apostleship is based. Or in I Cor. 15, 9, after
he has recited the previous appearances of Christ
to other disciples, he continues : " And last of all,
as unto one born out of due time, he appeared to
me also. For I am the least of the apostles, that
am not meet to be called an apostle, because I per
secuted the church of God. But by the grace of
God, I am what I am." It is clear, that here, too,
he traces his call to apostleship back to an appear
ance of Christ, which, being essentially similar in
nature to the previous appearances of Christ, he puts
in the same series with them.
Certain as was his conviction of the objective
truth of this Christ-appearance, other utterances
point to the fact that he did not hold his experience
to have been the sense-perception of a body of
earthly matter, but the vision of a supersensual
being, seen with the inner eye of the spirit. For
he says (Gal. 1, 16) : "it was the pleasure of God
to reveal his Son in Me," and (II Cor. 4, 6) God
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Christian Origins
sent light 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 Christ."
In complete agreement is his description (i Cor.
15, 45 seq.) of Christ as the heavenly man, whose
image we will bear at the resurrection and whose
body has nothing in common with flesh and blood
but is a spiritual or heavenly light-body, similar in
nature to that which is attributed to heavenly beings.
Such a spiritual or celestial body cannot be the imme
diate object of sense-perception by the eyes; the
eyes can only see a glow of light, to which the inner
sense or consciousness of the beholder ascribes the
particular interpretation of an appearance of Christ.
Thus, this belongs to the kind of inner visionary
appearances and bears close relation to those other
" revelations and visions " which are mentioned fre
quently in the life of the Apostle. In this connec
tion, II Cor. 12, 1 seq. is particularly characteristic;
the subjective, ecstatic state of consciousness is made
clear by the addition, which says, that he does not
know whether he was in the body or out of the
body during the ecstasy when he believed himself
caught up to the third heaven. When he speaks
of peculiar bodily pains and states of weakness in
connection with these ecstatic experiences, there is
undoubtedly evidence of a state of nervous shock
as the physical basis of the ecstatic experience.
Hence, we may conclude that Paul's physical con
stitution was predisposed favorably to experiences
of that nature. 162

The Apostle Paul
Other cases give an insight into the more positive
psychological conditions preceding the approach of
" revelations." If the decision to extend the mis
sionary activity into Europe was brought about by
a nocturnal vision (as related in Acts 16, 9 seq.) or
if the decisive journey to the meeting of the Apostles
at Jerusalem was the result of a revelation (as re
lated in Gal. 2, 1), then it is clear that in such cases
the " vision " or the " revelation " was the form
of consciousness, in which Paul's spirit struggled
through doubt to clarity, through inner uncertainty
to firm decision. These visionary experiences never
appeared without motive but always had their con
ditioning causes in the anterior soul-state, from
which they are psychologically to be explained.
The task thus put upon historical research is to
make clear Paul's experience on the way to Da
mascus, after the analogy of other experiences, by
attempting to throw light upon those psychological
preceding conditions and motives which might be
presupposed with probability to produce such a sit
uation. A noteworthy suggestion thereto is to be found in
the narrative of Acts, where the words which Jesus
says, when he appears, are made to read : " Saul,
Saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee
to kick against the goad." (26, 14.) In his soul
the persecutor of the congregation felt a goad
which he strove vainly to oppose. What else could
that goad have been but the grave doubt of his own
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Christian Origins
right to persecute the congregation of Jesus, the
doubt whether, after all, truth was on his side or
on the side of the persecuted ? How might such a
doubt have come to the fanatical Pharisee? The
first occasion was the impression which the deeds
and the words of the persecuted must have produced
upon him. Their joyous courage of confession
suggested the question to him, whether a faith, so
strong in suffering and in death, could be but an
empty delusion or a godless deception? If, there
upon, he investigated the content of that faith more
fully and considered the texts corroborative of its
truth, it must have been the more difficult from the
Pharisaic viewpoint, to deny its truth absolutely.
The seers of the apocalypses of Henoch and Esra
had spoken of a heavenly Messiah who would be hid
den with God until he revealed himself in his time
from heaven, whereas the usual conception of the
Messiah was that of a man sprung from the Jewish
nation, and therefore an earthly ruler. Might not
this contradiction in the Jewish messianic expecta
tions find its simplest solution in the Christian faith
in the resurrected Jesus who ascended to heaven and
would soon return as the heavenly Messiah ? Natu
rally the crucifixion of Jesus was a vexation to Jew
ish thought, difficult to overcome; for the Law said
that a curse rested upon those who died upon the
scaffold. But now, supposing the Christians pointed
to the suffering servant of God in the book of the
Prophet Isaiah and considered the fate of their mas-
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The Apostle Paul
ter as the fufillment of that prophecy : what could the
Pharisee interpose, he who had been taught in his
own school, to consider the innocent martyrdom of
the righteous (for example, the Maccabean blood
witnesses) as a means of atonement to make good
the sins of their nation ? Yes, the thought of a suf
fering and dying Messiah which might seem para
doxical to the Pharisee from one side, might be
looked upon in another aspect as relief from a diffi
culty of the Pharisaic faith. They expected the early
arrival of the Messiah who would save his oppressed
people; at the same time it was one of their immov
able presuppositions that only a righteous nation
would see the day of the Messiah. Where was there
such a righteous people, fully conforming to God's
will and showing itself worthy to receive the Mes
siah ? Had the strenuous exertion of the Pharisees
to educate the nation to righteousness, accomplished
any noticeable success ? Did they not rather condemn
and despise bitterly " the mass, which knows not the
Law" ? Must not every conscientious Pharisee, and
Paul was such a one, have confessed that he himself
was far removed from his ideal of righteousness?
Was he not conscious that his eagerness for right
eousness could not destroy the sinful tendencies, but
rather aggravated and increased them? When he
compared this dissatisfaction in his own heart, full
of eagerness for the Law, with the joy produced by
the faith in Christ in the disciples of Jesus, must
not the question have forced itself upon him : may
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Christian Origins
not this faith be the true salvation from the unfor
tunate slavery of the Law ? May it not be the road
to such a righteousness as never could be reached
through the Law, a righteousness which was not a
condition of the coming of the Messiah, but the
effect of his having come, — the fruit of his death
and resurrection?
We may suppose that such thoughts moved Paul's
soul on the way to Damascus; the doubt of the
correctness of his previous activity and of the truth
of his previous faith entered like a fiery goad into
his heart and produced the most terrible excitement
of body and soul. If we add thereto the need for
a quick decision, forced by the rapid approach to
Damascus, the silence of solitude and the burning
heat of the desert, we will be justified in our judg
ment, that the appearance of a vision, under the
circumstances, was in no wise outside the category
of similar experiences. Whatever moves the soul
powerfully in such moments, imagination trans
forms into an object apparently seen and heard by
the senses ; while the exciting cause does not lie, as
usual, in an external object but in an inner state of
the soul. The picture of the heavenly Messiah,
which occupied his thoughts, appeared before his
eyes as a figure of light shining from heaven, and
the denunciatory voice of his own conscience
changed into Christ's cry from above : " Saul, why
persecutest thou me? " Such appearances and such
voices of heavenly beings occur frequently in the
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The Apostle Paul
religious history of the East and of the West; if
the psychological explanation is conceded and gen
erally accounted correct in other cases, such as that
of Mohammed, no one can deny the right of his
torical research to apply the same method of ex
planation to similar appearances in Biblical history.
The essence of Paul's experience was a victory of
the superior Christian truth over the prejudices and
narrowness of his Jewish consciousness; consider
ing the presuppositions of the ancient world-view
and his individual predisposition, it was both natural
and it is easily comprehended that this inner con
vulsion of spirit should have taken on the form of
an external miracle in his consciousness.
The consequences of this ecstatic-visionary experi
ence were more far-reaching for Paul than had been
the similar experiences for the older disciples. By
the conviction that the crucified Jesus had been
resurrected by God and taken to heaven, their faith
in the master — a faith which had been won but
weakened at times — was restored and, to a certain
degree, elevated to a higher plane; but in other
respects, no break with their Jewish consciousness
had been caused. For Paul, however, the experi
ence near Damascus was the beginning of a com
plete change in his entire religious consciousness;
it seemed to him as though he had become a " new
creature," who died with Christ for the world and
for the Law, as though his old ego lived no longer
while Christ only lived in him ; the spirit of the Son
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Christian Origins
of God had taken possession of his members and
his powers, to use them henceforth as tools in his
cause (Gal. 2, 19 seq.; 6, 14 seq.; II Cor. 5, 14
seq.). From the beginning, he had discerned clearly,
with the sharp eye of an enemy, the irreconcilable
opposition of the national- Jewish worship of Law
and messianic belief on the other hand and the new
faith in the Messiah Jesus whom the Jews had
rejected on the other; hence, after his conversion,
it was not so easily possible for him, as it had been
for the older disciples, to unite the old a*nd the new.
In the light of the resurrection and the heavenly
Messiahship, the crucifixion of Jesus, which had been
the source of annoyance and opposition, became the
basis of a new religious world-view in which the
Mosaic Law was abrogated by a new and higher
principle. What was the nature of this new prin
ciple? What might be the object and the meaning
of the death and resurrection of the Messiah Jesus
in the divine intention? In what way was a new
road to salvation disclosed by this divine arrange
ment, — a way independent of the Jewish Law, de
signed for all men without distinction of birth, open
to all who hearken to the message of salvation in
the proclamation of Christ? These are the ques
tions which moved Paul's soul after his conversion
and his reflections upon them resulted in what is
usually called " Pauline Theology " — the systematic
expression of his personal belief in Christ.
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The Apostle Paul
From the beginning, Christians have been divided
in their judgment on the teaching of the Apostle
Paul ; for some, it was the supreme truth and norma
tive authority of the Christian faith , while for
others, it was a perversion and falsification of the
true gospel of Jesus, an arbitrary product of rabbinic
speculation and dialectics. This strife is still being
waged and it almost seems as though the antipathy
to Paul is in the ascendant. As a reaction against
the over-estimation of Pauline forms of dogma by
the Church, this is comprehensible; for the Church
tried to make of those forms binding, dogmatic
laws for all time, regardless of the time, age and
circumstances conditioning them. It is remarkable,
at the same time, in our period which boasts of its
historical culture and which, with psychological
understanding, is so well able to enter into past
modes of thought. I think that if we were to ap
ply the method ordinarily employed, in the case
of Paul, the religious teacher,* we would be equally
protected from an overestimation of the ephemeral
in his teachings and from a failure to recognize their
historical importance and ideal truth.
Let us recollect it was a difficult task for the
Apostle, who had to become a Greek for the Greeks
and a Jew for the Jews in order to win them both
for Christ, to give varied expression to the new
* Most reprehensible would be the suppression of his theology,
while constantly speaking of his personal piety. The two cannot be
separated, and Paul's historical achievement certainly does not rest
upon his pious emotions but upon his theological thoughts.
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Christian Origins
religion of salvation and the way he experienced it
personally as a power for bliss, employing many
forms of thought taken from the heathen and Jewish
notions. There were the words of revelation in
the Law and the prophets interpreted after the alle
gorical method of rabbinical exegesis; then, the
legal categories of the Jewish school-theology, the
legends and the apocalyptic pictures of Jewish
pietism; his Jewish thinking had mastered these;
but now he had to explain his new faith by them and
as far as possible to reconcile it with them.
In the heathen countries, there was added the
mystery-language of Oriental cults and the wisdom
teachings of Greek popular philosophy ; from these,
also, the apostle to the heathen had to choose points
of contact and forms of expression for his preach
ing of Christ. It is not surprising that such hetero
geneous elements did not merge into a unity without
contradictions; but what arouses wonder is the
creative power and originality of the religious genius
who could subordinate all of these elements of a
chaotic, fermenting era to the one new spirit of the
Christ-religion and who could transform them into
vessels and symbols of the Christian idea.
In order to understand the great historical im
portance of this founder of Christian theology, it
is not sufficient to count up the series of teachings
and know the superficial criticism of them; but
rather, one must enter into his period and his soul,
and attempt to feel as he did during the religious
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The Apostle Paul
experiences, to think over again his succession of
thoughts. Only in that way can justice be done to
him and only in that way is the fact of his tre
mendous historical influence to be understood. As
far as this is possible in a condensed review, I will
attempt to do so in what follows.
The peculiar novelty in the Pauline teaching is
the conception of the man Jesus as the Christ. Paul
agreed with the early-congregation in the belief that
Jesus was a lineal descendant of the house of David
" after the flesh," which means, according to his
earthly mode of appearance ; but, in his conception,
that is not the real nature of Christ, it is merely a
human form, taken on from time to time, embodying
a heavenly spirit-being. Paul taught that, according
to his real nature, Christ is a supermundane and
preworldly being ; characterized not directly as God,
but as God's own, first-born son and image; to
him is ascribed a mediatory participation in the
work of creation. From heaven to earth, God sent
his " Son " in the unique sense, the heavenly man,
to take on a human body, to save a sinful humanity
by his death, to conquer death by his resurrection
and to be the mediator of life as well as monarch
of a redeemed humanity. Paul took no further
consideration of Jesus' life on earth; the one pur
pose of the incarnation of the heavenly Son of God
was to suffer the death of a man (on the cross, the
peculiar form of death, despised and accursed of
the Law) ; by this bloody sacrifice of repentance,
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Christian Origins
he was to do away with the guilt of sin, to break the
curse of the Law and the power of death at the same
time, and to guarantee the hope of immortality to all
of those who, by faith and baptism, enter into the
community of the son of God.
If we stop at this point in order to ask how Paul
arrived at this peculiar method, he furnishes the
answer that it was not by human traditions handed
down from the oldest apostles, but an immediate
revelation of Christ (Gal. i, 12) ; speaking psycho
logically, it was the product of an intuition which
involuntarily forced itself upon his spirit. But even
among creative spirits, such intuitions are attached
to certain notions, which have found their way from
somewhere into consciousness, and gathering there,
furnish the material for new combinations. In the
case of this intuition of Paul, this will have to be
presupposed so much the more, because it is not
difficult to prove the fact of parallels to his doctrines
of Christ and redemption in both Jewish and
heathen quarters. The idea of Christ as a super
mundane, spirit-being, a heavenly man superior to
the angels and primordial son of God, — this was
known to Paul through the Jewish apocalyptic
writings.* * Daniel (7, 13) is generally credited as the source, but perhaps it
lies still further back ; we cannot make a positive assertion yet, but
there is food for thought in the fact that as early as the Indian leg
end, the heavenly spirit-being which appears in Buddha and other
redemptory personages is designated as "the great man," while cer
tain Jewish-Christian Gnostics have it that the redeemer-spirit which
appeared in Jesus is the same as the one incarnated first in Adam.
It may be that this has some bearing on the spiritual ideal-man which
Philo found in I Mos. 1. 172

The Apostle Paul
It was easier for Paul to carry this conception
over to Jesus making him the earthly incarnation,
the heavenly Son of God, who appeared period
ically, because Paul had not personally known the
historical Jesus and because his visionary sight had
had only the light-figure of the heavenly Messiah
Jesus as its object. In fact, Paul was much inclined
to identify this Messiah with those ancient heavenly
men of the apocalypses, and thus, to regard Jesus,
the man of earth, as the episodic appearance of a
supermundane spirit-being in human shape. Equally
simple is the explanation of the Pauline doctrine of
redemption by the presuppositions involved in the
heathen and Jewish mode of thought in that time.
In Judaism, the primitive popular idea of the vicari
ous, expiatory sacrifice (which is the real basis of
the well known description of the suffering servant
of God in Isaiah 53) had developed into the theory
accepted by the Pharisaic school, that the martyr
dom of the righteous has the effect of wiping away
all guilt and atoning for the sins of the whole nation,
an effect equal to that of the Atonement Day : thus,
in the fourth book of Maccabees, the blood of the
pious martyrs is called the expiatory sacrifice by
which God saves Israel. The martyrdom of Jesus
was a fact which Christians were called upon to
interpret and to justify in their religion. How
natural it seems to apply that theory to this special
case and thus do away with the reproach of the
cross! One question is entirely disregarded: why
173

Christian Origins
was any atoning sacrifice of blood absolutely neces
sary in order to make the forgiveness of sins pos
sible ? The fact to be explained and the explanatory
theory were given presuppositions ; they were sim
ply accepted and combined. It is possible that this
combination dates from the early-congregation and
that Paul took over from it the general thought
" how that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures" (I Cor. 15, 3). In any event, the
thought had no such bearing in the early-congrega
tion as Paul gave to it; Christ's death is the end
of the Law, according to him, and the founding of
a new alliance, a new religion for all of those who,
by faith and baptism, enter into community with
Christ, his death and his resurrection — at once, the
death of the old man in themselves and the birth of
the new man. " That one died for all, therefore all
died. Wherefore, if any man is in Christ, he is a
new creature: the old things are passed away;
behold, they are become new." (II Cor. 5, 14, 17.)
This mystical idea of the death of Christ, which
includes and justifies the death and rebirth of Chris
tians in mysterious fashion, was entirely strange to
the early-congregation and cannot be deduced as a
simple consequence of the conception of the atoning
sacrifice. Where is the explanation to be found?
It has been held that Paul's experience of inner
change through his Christian faith is explanatory;
but it is open to debate whether for that theory the
subjective experience is an adequate explanatory
motive. 174

The Apostle Paul
Perhaps Paul was influenced by the popular idea
of the god who dies and returns to life, dominant at
that time in the Adonis, Attis and Osiris cults of
Hither Asia (with various names and customs,
everywhere much alike). At Antioch, the Syrian
capital, in which Paul had been active for a consid
erable period, the main celebration of the Adonis-
feast took place in the spring-time ; on the first day,
the death of Adonis, " the Lord," was celebrated,
while on the following day, amid the wild songs of
lamentations sung by the women, the burial of his
corpse (represented by an image) was enacted; on
the next day,* proclamation was made that the God
lives and he (his image) was made to rise in air.f
During the joyous feast of the resurrection of the
god in the closely-related Attis celebration, the
priest anointed the mouths of the mourners with oil
and repeated the formula :
" Good cheer, ye pious ! As our god is saved,
So shall we, too, be saved in our distress."
The rescue of the god from death is the guarantee
of a like rescue for the adherents to his cult ; in the
mysteries of Attis, Isis and Mithra, the fact that the
worshippers partook of the god's life by the mystical
participation in his death, was visualized by such
rites, which employed symbols showing the death of
* In the Osiris celebration, it was the third day after the death ;
while in the Attis celebration, it was the fourth day.
t Lucian, de dea Syria, 6. It is noteworthy that the Greek church
has preserved a similar ceremony in its Easter celebration down to
our own day. 175

Christian Origins
the initiate, his descent into Hades and his return.
Hence, this ceremony was called the " rebirth to a
career of new salvation," a " holy birthday." In
one Mithra liturgy, the newly initiated pray : " Lord,
reborn I depart; in that I am lifted up and because
I have been lifted up, I die; borne by that birth
which produces life, I will be saved in death and go
the way which thou hast established, according to
thy law and the sacrament which thou hast
created."* The relation of these ideas and customs to Paul's
mystical theory of the death and resurrection of
Christ and the participation of the baptized therein
is too striking to avert the thought of influence
exerted by the former on the latter. Though Jew
ish and heathen ideas may have been taken up
in Paul's doctrine of salvation, they were trans
formed into something new, — into forms of expres
sion of the ethical-religious spirit of Christ. In
stead of heathen nature-gods, he sets up the one Lord
who is the Spirit, the original son of God or ideal
man, who atoned for the sin of Adam's descendants
by obedience and love and opened up a new human-
divine life for our race; his death is not a phe
nomenon of nature, but is a moral act, the self-
sacrifice of sacred love (Gal. 2, 20; II Cor. 5, 15;
Phil. 2, 8) yielding its own life in the service of
the brothers ; thus, he engenders in the faithful, not
only the hope of a future life, but a present moral,
* A. Dieterich, " Eine Mithrasliturgie," page iob.
176

The Apostle Paul
new life, inspired and borne by the holy spirit of
love, of peace and of joy. This combination of
mystical enthusiasm with the ethical-social spirit of
the Prophets and Jesus — this was the genial inspira
tion, which made Paul the founder of Christian
theology and Church.
A further review of the main points of Paul's doc
trines confirms the foregoing. The double viewpoint
under which he considered the salvation through
Christ — juristically, as the vicarious, atoning sacri
fice, and mystically as the conquest of death and
creation of life — is seen again in his description of
the condition of the saved. The gospel of Christ,
the son of God and the redeemer, is an object of
faith and awakens the faith of those who acknowl
edge its saving power and trustfully accept it. The
believer is " justified," which means that he is
judged by God to be one who has been atoned for
in the death of Christ, and stands no longer under
the damning Law, but under pardoning grace. He
is " adopted as a son of God," which means that
he may feel himself to be an object of God's fatherly
love, a free son and heir of the prophecies, one who
needs no longer to tremble before the curse of the
Law and bow slavishly before its correcting rod.
But how? asked the adherents of the Law, does
not such a teaching destroy morality and discipline,
does it not give free rein to the sinful pleasures and
degrade Christ to the level of one who furthers sin?
Not at all, answered Paul, the faith of Christ which
177

Christian Origins
releases from the Law of the letter, does at the same
time bind to a new law, which has the advantage of
regenerating and the power to move both will and
energy, it is the law of Christ's spirit. At this point,
the new mystical-enthusiastic method of treatment
enters into play. Before Paul's time, it had been
known that believers in the Messiah were receptacles
of the spirit; this had been evidenced by the ever-
recurring miraculous appearances, the ecstasies, the
tongue-speaking, the prophecies, the wonder-cures, —
phenomena which the animistic metaphysics of the
masses of that period interpreted as the influence and
inherence of a supernatural spirit being. Paul, too,
made these enthusiastic phenomena and their popular
interpretation his starting point, but, later, he gave
them the deeper ethical bent. The spirit dwelling in
a Christian is not only the cause of temporary
miraculous effects, but is also preferably the power
creating a permanent new life of the whole person
ality, — the power of true knowledge, of good voli
tion and action. As Paul felt himself to be a new
man from the time of his conversion, one in whom,
instead of the old carnal and sinful I, there lived
Christ, the Son of God (Gal. 2, 20), so he believed
that Christ's spirit produced a new religious-moral
character in every Christian. Therewith, Paul
transformed the early-Christian enthusiasm, whose
ecstatic expressions were so closely related to the
orgiastic features of the heathen mysteries, into the
principle of a new ethics, which employed the pathos
178

The Apostle Paul
and the power of that enthusiasm in the service of
the moral ideals of the life of the congregation; at
one and the same time, he conquered the naturalism
of the heathen mystery-cults, and the legalism of
Jewish ethics, in that he infused an ethical content
into religious mysticism and quickened morals by
religious enthusiasm. Both are summed up in the
characteristic passage : " Now the Lord is the spirit
and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
(II Cor. 3, 17.) In the place of a variety of unclean
spirits and deities of heathen worship, there appears
the one master-spirit whose nature is " holiness "
(Rom. 1, 4), meaning moral purity and love, and
in the place of the commanding and condemning
letter of the Law appears the spirit of the child-
relation which is freedom because it is moral quick
ening. From this central point of his theology, Paul's
teachings on morals and mysteries are to be under
stood and appreciated. His is an idealistic ethics,
closely related to the Stoic, but more strongly based
on religion. The Stoic and Pauline ethics agree on
the three main points : freedom from the world,
conquest of sensuality and brotherly love. In de
tail, the parallelism is often most astonishing, par
ticularly in the sayings about the struggle between
the flesh and the spirit, about the vanity of earthly
life contrasted with the glory of the life beyond, and
about the weakness and sinfulness of all men which,
179

Christian Origins
serving as a dark background, throws into glorious
light the ideal of the Christian ( for which the Stoics
put " the wise man " ) .* But while that pessimistic
presupposition rendered the realization of their ideal
problematical for the Stoics, causing it to lose in
motive-power, Paul saw in the Christ, who became
our brother and model in Jesus, the ideal of the good
completely realized ; as the ideal of the good coming
into realization, he regarded the consecrated con
gregation of believers, who, filled with the Christ
spirit, felt their one task to be the increasing growth
of their living and doing toward the realization of
that which they are in their religious consciousness,
spirit-beings, children of God, saints.
The fundamental in this new ethics is : " Become,
what you are !" In Paul's words : " If we live by
the spirit, by the spirit let us also walk " (Gal. 5,26).
For this reason, the congregation of believers is
called " the body of Christ" ; they form a social
organism with the Christ-spirit as its soul. In a
certain sense, they are the enlarged and historically-
enduring appearance of that heavenly ideal-man,
who made his initial appearance in the individual
form in Jesus. If the congregation is the mystical
body of Christ, the connection of its members can
only be established by mystical acts. By baptism,
the immersion of the baptized in water not only
* Seneca, too, speaks (in Epist. 41) of a "holy spirit" living
within us as a guardian of the good, of a divine power moving the
souls of the good, residing in heaven, but sent down to us so that we
may recognize the divine. 180

The Apostle Paul
symbolizes the death of the former man with Christ,
the emergence from the water not only symbolizes
the resurrection of the new man in community with
the resurrected Christ, but the symbolical picture
does become a mystical reality. (Rom. 6, i seq.)
Hence the baptised man has " put on Christ " (Gal.
3, 27) ; henceforward he lives " in Christ " as
Christ in him, or as the spirit of Christ or of God
lives in him — all of these expressions have essentially
the same meaning (cp. Rom. 8, 9), viz.: the new
state of the saved man lifted beyond his mere natural
self, feeling himself united with God; formally
analogous to the states of religious rapture in which
the heathen participants in orgiastic cults felt them
selves being in God or filled with God.* Paul con
nected the Lord's Supper with baptism and was the
first to give it the meaning of a sacramental act of
worship ; in the earlier congregation, it had not been
that, but it had been a love-feast, the expression and
means of fraternal community. According to Paul,
the Lord's Supper is partly a service in remembrance
of the martyrdom of Christ as the means of estab
lishing the new covenant, and by participation in
this act, they confessed themselves to membership
(I Cor. 11, 23-27); partly, it is a mystical com
munity of the blood and body of Christ, mediated by
the drinking of the sacramental cup and eating of
the sacramental bread, whereby the participants
* The word enthusiasm comes from the " being in God " ; there
fore, it was originally a technical term of religious mysticism.
181

Christian Origins
achieve and strengthen alliance with their master
and with one other, just as the heathens enter into
community with their demons by the sacrificial meal
(I Cor. 10, 16-22).
This analogy to heathen acts of worship, which
Paul himself drew, is an analogy which holds
throughout the Pauline teachings of the sacraments ;
and the analogy is not mere chance but rests on a
more or less direct influence. In the mysteries of
Eleusis, Isis, and Mithra, an immersion in water was
employed as the means of purification from sin and
as the " picture of resurrection." One Mithra
liturgy uses this act of consecration as a picture of
death and renascence, exactly as Paul did in Romans
6. In the Attis mysteries, there was eating and
drinking as a sacrament, whereby the consecrated
was thought to enter into community with the god
and his life after the resurrection from death, and
thus to acquire for himself the guarantee of im
mortal life. A sacred meal was part of the Mithra
mystery also, and there bread as well as a cup of
water were presented with prayers of consecration.*
The old Christian apologists found these analogies so
striking that they believed them explicable- only as
imitation or prophetic anticipation of the Christian
sacraments through demonic agency. The histor
ical viewpoint finds a simple explanation: Paul, and
perhaps the heathen Christians of Antioch before
him, sought new forms of worship in order to sepa-
* Cp. page 158 and my " Christusbild," pages 79 to 90.
182

The Apostle Paul
rate their Christian faith from Judaism, and involun
tarily they incorporated somewhat of the rites and
ideas of their heathen surroundings. That the
magical idea of the material mediation of spiritual
activities slipped in, was inevitable where the ani
mistic world-view was so general and so predomi
nant; and it is not surprising that Paul's thought
shows traces of it,* while the post-apostolic Church
takes it up more largely. But it remains ever true,
that Paul made these traditional forms the expres
sion of deep and genuinely Christian thoughts : the
baptism was a symbol of that fundamental of Chris
tian ethics, " Die and become ! " the Lord's Supper
a service of remembrance of the death of Jesus and
a pledge of divine-human love, uniting the members
with the head and with one another, — how far above
all heathen mysteries do these stand! The spirits
of the demons, the wildness of the orgies, the nat
uralistic licentiousness, blind superstition — these dis
appeared before the spirit of the Master, who is
freedom and love.
More important than the heathen were the Jewish
influences on the theology of Paul. We met them
before in the juristic theory of the vicarious atone
ment of Christ and justification on that ground.
But they have a particularly strong influence over
Paul's view of the beginning, course and end of
* Such is the custom of the Corinthians (not reproved by Paul), of
performing baptism in favor of the dead (I Cor. 15, 29) ; also, the
idea of the physical harmfulness, even deadly effect of unworthy par
ticipation in the Lord's Supper (I Cor. 11, 29 seq.).
183

Christian Origins
human history. Jewish theology before Paul had
taught that by Adam's fall, sin and death had come
into the world and caused the subjugation of the
whole human race to these demonic powers. Paul
agrees with the author of the " Wisdom of Solo
mon " in judging heathenism as childish ignorance,
inexcusable desertion from a recognized God whose
wrathful judgment will punish the heathen. Abra
ham was justified on account of his faith and became
the father of all believers, that is, not only of the Jews
but — Paul added — of faithful heathen (Christians).
Through the mediation of angels, the Law was given
to Moses — a Jewish legend from which Paul draws
the conclusion that the Law is of less importance
than the prophecies. Although the Law in itself
was sacred and had been given as a means to life,
yet in reality it had proven to be no more than a
death-dealing letter, incapable of overcoming sin and
tending to increase it. Here the Pharisaic deifica
tion of the Law turns in Paul into the extreme oppo
site judgment. Pie does not regard the Law as a
means of moral education, but as a despotic jailer
and disciplinarian, who is to hold men in the misery
of sin until the hour of release when Christ appears.
Christ is the end of the Law and the fulfillment of
the prophecy.
Those Jews who will not acknowledge this but
seek their righteousness as before in the paths of
the Law, they show themselves by that disobedience
to the saving will of God to be such as He has

The Apostle Paul
blinded and hardened in order to reject them and
substitute the heathens in their stead as the heirs
to the prophecies. By applying the doctrine of pre
destination (taught in the Pharisaic schools) against
the Jews instead of against the heathens as was cus
tomary, Paul interprets the experience of his time
as an effect of the providential plan of God, who by
free choice shows mercy to one (the heathen) and
rejects the other (the Jew). Yet he consoles him
self with the hope that this rejection of his people
is not final, but that after the heathen have entered
into the realm of Christ, the Jews will some time
follow their example. Then the end of time will
have come : Christ and all his saints will be seen
descending from heaven, the sleeping Christians will
rise from the dead, the survivors will be moved
toward him into space and then will follow the great
Judgment Day. Christ and God himself will be the
judges, the Christians will be the witnesses, the
world and the angels will be judged. The manner
of procedure at the judgment is in harmony with
Jewish tradition: the judicial retribution of reward
and punishment according to the measure of the
works of each. One question remains unanswered :
How does the judicial verdict stand toward the jus
tifying verdict of grace on believers?
Alongside this Jewish-Pharisaic doctrine of the
end of all things, we find in Paul the Hellenic hope
(not unknown to the apocalyptic writings) of a
blessed life of pious souls immediately after death,
185

Christian Origins
independent of the resurrection; this thought grew
in importance for him when bitter experiences made
it doubtful whether he would live to see the realiza
tion of his former hope of the return of Christ. It
is not clear how this bliss of the individual pious
souls beyond harmonizes with the resurrection of
bodies which is to follow the end of the world and
the Judgment Day. Equally uncertain are the an
swers to the questions : whether Paul expected a
series of resurrections ; after the Christians had been
resurrected, was there to be a resurrection of all
men ? Whether there was to be an earthly kingdom
of Christ between Christ's return and the end of the
world (the " chiliastic kingdom " of the Apocalypse
of John) ? Again, how he thought concerning the
subordination of Christ to the Father after all the
powers inimical to God had been overcome ? Finally,
whether the last goal, that " God is all in all " pre
supposed the conversion of the godless (" universal
return ") or their utter destruction? whether, along
side the bliss of the elect, the destruction of the re
jected will continue as eternal misery? This ob
scurity of the end of all things is involved in the
nature of the problem, and it is to the Apostle's
honor that he did not enter into such detail in his
forecast of the beyond as did the Orphic and Jewish
apocalyptic writers, but, satisfied not to know, he
found peace in the pious hope : " What no eye hath
seen and no ear hath heard, what ne'er hath entered
into human heart, that hath God in store for those
who love Him." 186

The Apostle Paul
It is self-understood that a theology made up of
so many and such varied elements as that of Paul,
was not fully developed at once in the soul of the
originator; from the beginning, his view of Christ
may have been fixed at the time of his conversion,
but the further developments were, without doubt,
conditioned by the needs of his missionary activity
as they arose, partly in his controversies with Jew
ish opponents, partly in consideration of the religious
ideas and ceremonial customs of the heathen, who
became converted to Christ. It is doubtful whether,
after his conversion, Paul immediately undertook
the missionary work among the heathen; his ques
tion (Gal. 5, n) "if I still preach circumcision,
why am I still persecuted ? " seems to point to the
fact that for a time he did his missionary work
along the Jewish lines of the older Apostles. This
would be the simplest explanation why his fourteen
years of missionary activity in Syria and Cilicia were
not frowned upon by the Jewish congregations of
Palestine, but, on the contrary, occasioned joy and
thanks to God, as he testifies in Gal. i, 21 seq.
In any event, so much is certain, that not Paul,
but several unknown men from Cyprus and Cyrene
converted the first heathen-Christians at Antioch
(Acts 11, 20). Barnabas induced Paul, who was
at his home in Tarsus, to come to Antioch, and the
united activity of the two produced such good re
sults that a great number of heathens joined the
congregation during the year. In this mixed con-
187

Christian Origins
gregation the fact was manifest for the first time,
that Christianity is a religion with distinguish
ing characteristics, differentiating it from Judaism;
then, for the first time, the new name " Christians "
was used to designate the believers in Jesus. (Acts
n, 25 seq.) This report deserves more considera
tion than it has received hitherto ; it is the more re
liable, because it is probably original in the diary
of Luke's journeys;* and because the latter was a
native of Antioch, probably one of the heathen-Chris
tian converts made by Paul. The use of the Chris
tian name in Antioch is indubitable testimony that
the thing itself, viz. : Christianity as a new religion
differing from Judaism as well as from heathenism,
came into being for the first time at Antioch as the
fruit of Paul's activity there. As a religious com
munity, the Christian congregation could only be
distinguished if it ceased to maintain the Jewish
customs and supplanted them by new and distin
guishing qnes. But religious ceremonies cannot be
created from nothing, they always follow something
already existing: where else could the mixed con
gregation take their peculiar non- Jewish ceremonies,
which would distinguish them as the new religious
community of " Christians," if not from their
heathen environment? Here, for the first time,
those mystical rites were taken into the customary
* Their characteristic form of narration in the first person plural
is found first in an old text in the course of that report about the con
gregation at Antioch (Acts 11, 28). 188

The Apostle Paul
divine worship of Christianity, and Paul brought
them into inner connection with the Christian faith
by his theological interpretation (see pp. 175, 181).
seq.). Here, for the first time, it is likely that the
belief in the resurrection of Christ was cast in its
final mould as the evangelical Easter legend; par
ticularly, the dating of the resurrection " on the
third day" (or "after three days") which Paul
found there (I Cor. 15, 4) and which he could not
have heard from the early Apostles,* finds simplest
explanation : the heathen-Christians of Antioch con
tinued their popular celebration of the resurrection
of Adonis ("the master") as an old habit, but
transferred the worship to the new master, Christ, f
Granted that these are only suppositions which
cannot be proven strictly because the sources are
scanty, yet for those accustomed to judge these
things from a religious-historical viewpoint, they
have great probability in their favor. So much is
* Inasmuch as the first Christ visions occurred in Galilee, they could
not possibly have taken place so soon after the death of Jesus ; the
Evangelical form of the Easter legend can not therefore be based
on the testimony of the early Apostles, but must have some other
origin, whether the one given above or any other be presupposed.
f The existence of the closely-related cults of Adonis, Osiris and
Attis alongside one another caused the variation in the Syrian resur
rection celebration between the second, third and fourth day after
the death of the god (page 175). Perhaps this contains the histor
ical explanation for the variations of the Christian Easter legend , be
tween " on the third day" and " after three days." The part played
by the women in the Gospel narratives of Easter (a part unknown to
Paul) may find its explanation in the Syrian Adonis-celebration, in
which the women played the leading roles.
189

Christian Origins
certain: Christianity, as a new religion presenting
itself in church forms of a nature characteristic to
it alone, did not have its origin in Jerusalem, but in
the Syrian capital, Antioch.
How did the mother-congregation stand toward
the new turn of affairs at Antioch? Serious sus
picions arose against a Christianity without the Jew
ish Law and against the reception of Christ-believ
ing heathens in the fraternity of the Jewish Messiah
Jesus. Several members of the congregation from
Judaea, men who had been Pharisees and therefore
still eager for the Law, believed that they could not
permit the continuance of such activity as that of
the Apostle to the heathen and betook themselves
to Antioch, to watch these rising free customs and
to suppress them. The agitation of these " false
brethren privily brought in," as Paul calls them (Gal.
2, 4), caused no little excitement in the mixed con
gregation of Antioch, particularly as these people
stood for the dignity of the mother-church. Had
the Law-party succeeded in obtaining their demand
that the Messiah-believing heathen must submit to
the Jewish law of circumcision, and had it been con
firmed that the mother-church and the early Apos
tles were on their side, then a successful outcome
of the mission to the heathen masses was not to be
thought of ; the Jewish ceremonial Law would have
become an insuperable barrier for the conversion of
the heathen to the Christian faith. If the demands
of the Judaizers had been ignored without the
190

The Apostle Paul
achievement of a peaceable understanding with the
early Apostles, the tie between Heathen Christianity
and Jewish Christianity would have been torn and
the former would have been lowered into a sect, dis
sociated from the historical origin of the messianic
movement and scarcely able to survive. In this
difficult situation, Paul decided to break the crisis
in the most direct and most risky way, by a personal
discussion of the case with the mother-congregation
and her leaders. We have a twofold report of this
memorable apostolic meeting (which ought not be
titled "apostolic council") : Paul's own report in
Galatians 2 and the other in Acts 15. The latter
differs in part and is less reliable, but both agree on
the main point.
, . When Paul made the report of his missionary
activity and his success in the heathen world to the
assembled congregation at Jerusalem, the party to
which the agitators and "the false brothers" who
had privily entered Antioch belonged, demanded
that the converted heathens should be made Jews by
circumcision. In order to establish a precedent, they
insisted on the immediate circumcision of Titus, the
heathen who accompanied Paul. Lively disputes
resulted, for the eager ones had a number of com
rades in the congregation who could not reconcile
themselves to the thought that in future they would
have to acknowledge lawless heathens as brothers in
the Christian faith, men upon whom they had hith
erto looked down as sinners and unclean. But
191

Christian Origins
Jacobus, Peter and John, the three leaders of the
congregation who were considered its " pillars,"
could not escape the imposing impression made upon
them by the reports of the success of the heathen
missions; they regarded it as the sanctioning judg
ment of God on Paul's work, which none should
dare to oppose. - They accepted the proffered hand
of fellowship and agreed to a peace with Paul and
Barnabas, by which Paul was to continue his work
among the heathen, while Peter and the other early
apostles should turn to the Jews. Paul's promise
to make collections in the heathen congregations for
the poor of Judaea may have done something toward
mitigating the scruples of Jewish conservatism.
Thus Paul happily attained his immediate object,
the apostolic recognition of a Heathen Christianity,
free from the Law, and that was without doubt a
priceless gain for the continuance of his missionary
work. Naturally, this agreement had been reached
by evading the question of principle involved,
namely, the relation of the Christian faith to the
Jewish Law. The treaty of peace was no more than
a compromise, giving each party the right to his own
opinion, but agreeing that each party should not dis
turb the other in its particular field. A real harmony
of Heathen Christianity free from the Law and
Jewish Christianity loyal to the Law had not been
achieved thereby; so long as the Jewish Law re
mained in force for the Jewish Christians — and the
congregation had not the slightest notion of depart-
192

The Apostle Paul
ing therefrom — it remained a wall of separation be
tween them and the heathen-Christians, making a
peaceful congregational life impossible in mixed con
gregations and leading ever to new troubles.
Shortly afterward, this became apparent. When
Paul and Barnabas returned from their missionary
journey* through Cyprus and South Galatia ( Pisidia
and Lycaonia) to Antioch, they found the congre
gation wrought up by new excitement. Peter had
come to visit Antioch, and, in the beginning, he took
part in the freer customs prevalent among the Jew
ish-Christians ; but when several partisans of Ja
cobus, who was for strict legality, arrived, he per
mitted himself to be so intimidated that he withdrew
from fraternal intercourse and table-companionship
with the heathen-Christians. The other Jewish-
Christians followed his example, and the retrograde
movement to Jewish unfreedom soon took on such
proportions that the moral pressure threatened the
continuance of the newly-acquired freedom of the
heathen-Christians. The extent of the danger at
this critical moment is evident, for even Barnabas,
the friend and co-worker of Paul in the missions,
was carried away by the general pusillanimous mood
and reactionary tendency and forsook his former free
way of thinking. Then Paul could be silent no
* Acts 13 and 14 reports it before the Apostle-day at Jerusalem
(Chap. 15). Probably it did not take place until after, and this
changing about is to be explained by the same pragmatical motives
of the author as are involved in Jesus' sermon at Nazareth, Luke 4,
16 seq. = Mark 6, 1 seq. 193

Christian Origins
longer; publicly he appeared against Peter and re
proached him, saying that his attitude was hypo
critical, in contradiction with the truth of the Gos
pel, in fact, that it was a denial of the Christian be
lief, " for if righteousness is through the law, then
Christ died for nought." (Gal. 2, 21.)
With this rejection on principle of such a Chris
tianity as would like to remain legal Judaism, Paul
broke with the Jewish-Christians of Palestine; it
was a breach which never was healed and never
could be healed, because the two contradictory prin
ciples were unharmonizable. Paul's opponents made
answer; they actually carried on a counter-mission
in Paul's congregations with the avowed purpose of
inducing them to desert the Apostle to the Heathen
and win them over to the Law-abiding Christianity
of the early Apostles. The extent of the confusion
which the Judaistic agitation caused in several of
the congregations, the tribulations of Paul which
resulted from their work, this is shown by the Epis
tles of Paul to the Galatians and the second to the
Corinthians. His manner of defense against his
opponents reveals clearly the methods of the latter.
Above all they sought to undermine Paul's apostolic
authority, by pointing out that he was not a direct
pupil of Jesus and that therefore Paul's knowledge
of his life and teachings could have been acquired
solely from the traditions of the early Apostles and
hence he was bound to their authority; since the
early Apostles, following the example of Jesus, held
194

The Apostle Paul
fast to the Law of Moses, Paul's doctrine teaching
the contrary could not be true. When Paul cited
his vision of Christ, his opponents declared this to
be the imagining of a conceited man, whose word
could not be trusted, who was looking for personal
glory and shaped his speech to please his hearer.
At Corinth, his opponents went so far in their per
sonal hatred as to question Paul's honesty in the
matter of collections.
They also introduced positive reasons against
Paul's doctrines, basing them on the Jewish-legal
viewpoint: to the seed of Abraham alone had the
messianic prophecies been made, for them the ful
fillment of the Law of Moses. In order to weaken
this objection, Paul employed all the art of his rab
binical dialectics ; for example, that " the seed " of
Abraham being used in the singular meant Christ,
hence the prophecy applied from the beginning to
him and his congregation; again, because the Law
was handed down centuries later than the prophecy
and then not directly by God, but through mediating
angels, its position was subordinate and it could not
be a limiting condition of participation in the messi
anic salvation. It is easy to think that such argu
ments (Gal. 3) carried little weight with his Jewish
opponents ; but we must credit them to the difficult
situation in which the Apostle was placed, for out
of the Law which he considered a divine revelation
as much as his opponents did, he was forced to prove
the abrogation of the Law through Christ.
195

Christian Origins
The Judaistic party also urged the moral objec
tion, that with the abrogation of the positive Law all
the reins of decency and order would be cut, the flesh
would be free to revel in sin, and in the end, Christ
would be degraded as the instigator of sin. Added
weight was given to this reproach by the fact that
the moral life of the heathen-Christians was far
from what it should have been. In all of his epis
tles, Paul took pains to emphasize especially the
ethical complement to his doctrine of freedom from
the Law : that the followers of Christ have crucified
their flesh with its passions and desires (in the bap
tism), and therefore they must consider themselves
as such who are dead to sin, and may live no longer
for sin, actually as such who live in the spirit and
are in duty bound to walk in and after the spirit,
to give evidence of their spiritual possessions by
morally good fruit. (Gal. 5, 13-25; Rom. 6.) In
this respect, thanks are due to the Judaistic party
inasmuch as their attacks on the Apostle were the
means of bringing to light, in varied and new forms,
the higher truth and regenerating force of the spir
itual law as against the mere law of the letter. We
owe to this struggle, also, the knowledge of the deeps
of the Apostle's soul ; we see a passionate tempera
ment often running over in an anger not always
free from bitterness and injustice toward his oppo
nent; but such human frailties are far outweighed
by the heroic greatness of the man, whose whole life
is wrapped up in the sublime work, to which God
196

The Apostle Paul
had called him; the man, who feels himself free
from the ties of mortal needs and yet sympathizes so
heartily and feels so keenly with all of those whose
salvation rests as a burden upon his soul, the man
whose enthusiastic courage dares to set the highest
goals and yet chooses his means of attaining them
with such deliberation and wisdom, who knows how
to treat men and sees the difficulties of every situa
tion. Let us accompany Paul for a little on that great
missionary journey which he undertook soon after
the conflict at Antioch. He hurried through the
scenes of his preceding journey, but "the spirit"
gives him rest nowhere. An irresistible force which,
in view of the European shores, takes on the form
of a welcoming dream-vision, drives him out to the
far West, to the cities of the Greeks, where he might
hope that the ill-sounding voices of the narrow world
of Palestine could not possibly be heard. The Eu
ropean journey followed the great commercial and
military highroad, along the shore through Philippi,
Thessalonica, Berea, Athens to Corinth, where the
Apostle remained for a year and a half ; from there,
he moved to Ephesus, where he was active for two
years ; then he returned to Corinth for a stay of six
months, until he left to carry his collection for the
poor of Judaea to Jerusalem (probably in the year
59 or 60) ; his arrest there by the Romans put an
end to his missionary journeys. According to the
'97

Christian Origins
account in the Acts, he used to preach in the syna
gogue of every town in which there was a Jewish
colony, and not until the Jews turned a deaf ear to
him, did he make appeal to the heathen; this inter
pretation, according to which the mission to the
heathen was not the main object of the Apostle to
the heathen, but which makes circumstances force
that mission upon him, accords less with reality than
with the author's peculiar anti- Jewish, pragmatical
view of history. Aside from the incorrectness of
the motive given, the fact itself is not to be con
troverted, that Paul always allied his missionary ac
tivity to the synagogues of the Jewish Dispersion;
there he found the heathen- Jewish co-religionists
together, and by them his sermon was most readily
taken up.
The suitability of this method of procedure is so
apparent, that we would consider it the most prob
able, even if there were no report in the Acts. The
most favorable soil for Paul's missionary teaching
was not among the pure Jews, to whom the idea of
a crucified Messiah was revolting, nor among the
pure heathens to whom such an idea was foolish
ness, something incomprehensible, because all the
presuppositions for an understanding thereof were
lacking; the most favorable soil was among the
Heathen- Jewish comrades ( " the worshippers of
God") who had acquired a certain knowledge of
the Old Testament belief in God and Israel's messi
anic hopes through their participation in the syna-
198

The Apostle Paul
gogal service, and yet were not biased by national
and legal prejudices of Judaism. At his home in
Tarsus, Paul had learned to know this class; he
knew their serious religious attitude, their longing
for a morally pure religion, their strong sympathy
with the Psalmists' and Prophets' belief in God and
providence, but he knew, too, their antipathy against
Jewish national pride and the poor formalism of the
rabbinic worship of the Law. How to overcome
this limitation, how to save this mass of salvation-
seeking heathens and win them for God? This
question may have occupied him often as a Jew of
Tarsus, but he had the answer as an Apostle of
Christ, in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek,
but a new creation. Now he might become a Greek
for the Greeks without interruption of his inter
course with them through Jewish legal scruples, and
he could be a Greek to them because he was ac
quainted with their method of thinking and under
stood their language.
Concerning the manner of the mission-sermon of
the Apostle, we can offer only suppositions based
on conclusions drawn from his epistles, for the
speeches attributed to him in the Acts cannot lay
any claim to authenticity; they are as certainly the
composition of the historian as those speeches which
the writers of profane history in ancient times at
tributed to their heroes on fitting occasions — a fact
which is well-known and generally conceded. Even
the conclusions drawn from the epistles must be at-
199

Christian Origins
tempted with care; for, in the nature of the case,
the fundamental proclamation to non-Jews must
have treated matters more fully than was necessary
in letters to congregations of believers; thus, above
all, the belief in one good God and Judge of the
world in opposition to the many nature-gods, which
is recalled particularly by I Thess. i, 9 seq. On
the other hand, such theological argumentation as
is to be found in the epistles to the Galatians and
the Romans, occasioned by the polemics against Jew
ish-Christianity, would have been purposeless in a
missionary sermon to the heathen.
In general, it must be conceded that the apostolic
missionary sermon contained both more and less
than is to be found in the epistles. It is cer
tainly an error to say, as has recently been said so
frequently, that Paul did not preach his dogmatic
doctrine of salvation in his missionary sermon — an
error probably based on the anti-dogmatic tendency
of the present day rather than a historical under
standing of first-century conditions. The " word of
the cross " was not only a theological doctrine for
Paul, but the central point of his religion, and as
such it is natural that he proclaimed it everywhere ;
so he reminds the Galatians that Jesus Christ was
painted before their eyes as the crucified one (Gal.
3, 1) and writes to the Corinthians (I, 1, 23 seq.) :
" But we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stum
bling-block and unto Gentiles a foolishness, but unto
them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ

&

The Apostle Paul
the power of God and the wisdom of God." And
we should not forget that in that period of mystery-
cults and Oriental religious mixtures, it was just
such a mystical teaching of the death and resurrec
tion of the Son of God which must have exerted the
greatest magnetic power over many. Just in the
circle of humble folk (I Cor. i, 26 seq.) who sought
less enlightenment and ethics than rescue from this
wicked world and a guarantee of happiness in the
future world, the preaching of Paul concerning sal
vation achieved its greatest success — a success which
overshadowed the results of all Jewish and Jewish-
Christian propaganda. Hence the jealousy and en
mity which characterized the attitude of the Judaism
of the Dispersion toward Paul despite its compara
tive freedom of thought; the preacher of ethical
monotheism might have been agreeable to them, but
the word of the cross must have been the more
a stumbling-block when they found by experience
that it undermined their own propaganda.
Beside the message of salvation in the death and
resurrection of Christ, the announcement of his early
return to save his own, to raise the dead and judge
the world was the vital point in Paul's missionary
sermon and it was the most effective motive both
for religious consolation and hope as for ethical ad
monition and warning. In many variations all of
the Apostle's letters furnish proof of this. Because
the reappearance of the Lord is nigh, Christians
should have no fear of the suffering and persecu-
201

Christian Origins
tion which they now must bear, but should walk in
a manner worthy of the Lord, remembering that
they will have to appear before his judgment-seat
and that those who persist in the service of sin
will not be permitted to enter his kingdom. How
strongly this message of the end of all things oc
cupied the minds of the young congregation, we see
by the detailed discussion which Paul devotes to it
in the two oldest epistles (I Thess. and I Cor.).
The religious tendency of the times was favorable
to this message regarding resurrection and judg
ment; the mystery-cults everywhere hinged on the
acquisition of a trustworthy hope of eternal life
hereafter; that this hope was bound up with moral
contingencies, particularly the demand for personal
purity and subjugation of the senses was accepted
as a current conviction by the more serious religious
minds among the heathens of that day. In the Apos
tle's sermon, it received the strongest sanction by
joining the hope and the demand to the message of
the death and resurrection of Christ ; in this funda
mental revelation of the higher world, the future
life of bliss seemed to appear in some measure as a
reality and therein seemed to furnish both the motive
of and the power for a new moral life.
The immediate success of the mission must not
be overestimated as far as numbers are concerned;
for their meetings, a private house sufficed, such as
that of the proselyte Titius Justus at Corinth, or a
schoolroom, such as that of the philosopher Tyran-
202

The Apostle Paul
nus at Ephesus. The small congregations were
mainly made up of people of the lowest classes :
" How that not many wise after the flesh, not many
mighty, not many noble are called : but God chose
the foolish things of the world, that he might put to
shame them that are wise ; and God chose the weak
things of the world, that he might put to shame the
things that are strong." (I Cor. i, 26-28.) This
does not mean to say that there were not several
well-to-do and some of higher social standing among
them; in Corinth, Crispus, the leader of the syna
gogue, and Erastus, the city-chamberlain, belonged
to the congregation-union.
Some have compared the young Christian congre
gations with the Jewish synagogue, others again,
with the various heathen worshipping-societies; in
fact, in common with the synagogue, there was the
meeting for worship without sacrificial rites, simply
prayer, scriptural reading and edificatory addresses ;
in common with the latter societies, they performed
the consecrating service of the sacraments and the
religious fraternal meals. But what differentiated
them essentially from both was the absence of any
external organization; there were no regulations,
no leader with official prerogatives, no common
treasury, no obligation on the part of the members
to contribute fixed dues and no other communal
duties according to regulation. Though the Acts
tell that Paul and Barnabas installed a " presbyter "
as the regular leader of the newly-founded congre
ss

Christian Origins
gations; yet by this the writer has transferred an
institution of the post-apostolic period back into the
days of the Apostle, according to whose letters no
such things existed. In the heathen-Christian con
gregations of the Pauline mission, the self-govern
ment of the single congregations is so palpable, that
it excludes any government by professionals and
particularly any office of a guiding teacher — for
there was no other teaching in the congregation than
that which depended on individual talent and the
free impulse of the believers.
The hypothesis of a governing office contradicts
all references in the source-books. Paul always
writes to the entire congregation; even where he
calls upon them for united measures, he does not
employ the mediation of any congregation-official.
No governing office is as yet required in order to
achieve the unification of the congregation ; the bind
ing tie is the meeting for general edification and for
the Lord's Supper. When disorders or mistakes oc
cur in the congregation, the Apostle turns to the
entire congregation with his demand that they em
ploy gentle or sterner correctives, according to the
circumstances (Gal. 6, i); or in the case of the
grievous sinner who gave offense, he asked exclu
sion from the brotherhood by all gathered together
(I Cor. 5, 3). He demands that difficulties among
the members concerning property be referred to fra
ternal tribunals. If there is to be a collection for
the poor of Judaea, each member voluntarily gives
?o4

The Apostle Paul
what he thinks proper, and delegates, elected by the
entire congregation, are deputed to bear it to its des
tination. It is true that Paul often speaks of " those
over you," who are active for the congregation and
who are to be held in love for the sake of their en
deavors ; but it is clearly recognizable that no legally
settled office but a voluntary performance of service
is meant here, a labor which one, generally the first
convert, as Stephanas in Corinth, had taken upon
himself for the care of their common affairs; the
Apostle urges that these services, voluntarily per
formed, entitle the volunteers to the frank and grate
ful recognition and subordination of the others.*
As yet, everything is imbued with the spirit of
freedom and of love, on the basis of mutual fra
ternal assistance and admonition. Because the en
thusiasm of faith and of love inspired all, there
seemed to be no need of external forms of authority.
There was no thought of preparing regulations for
the future, because the return of Christ to regenerate
the world was momentarily expected; hence, there
was no such consideration as the historical develop
ment of the Church.
The first epistle to the Corinthians affords a very
vivid picture of the fresh and rich life created by the
new spirit in the heathen-Christian congregations,
as well as of the various dangers which naturally
accompanied the unbounded enthusiasm. At the
meetings for the purpose of worship, absolute free-
* I Thess. 5, 12 seq.; Rom. 12, 8; I Cor. 16, 15 seq.
205 ,

Christian Origins
dom of speech prevailed and every one contributed
to the edification of the congregation according to
the gift with which the spirit graced him : one in
toned a psalm or hymn, another poured forth an
instructive address relating either to some passage
of the Old Testament, which had been read or ex
planatory of some traditional saying of the Master;
a third, inspired to prophecy, would proclaim the
revelation which had come to him concerning the
secrets of God's plans, the affairs of the future or
the soul of man, and while such an one was speak
ing, another such prophet would feel himself com
pelled to utter his revelation ; or another, " speaking
with tongues," would launch forth a torrent of in
comprehensible words and sounds in his ecstasy, so
that a stranger might get the impression that he was
mad. Women crowded forward to pray and proph
esy, emphasizing their Christian freedom by throw
ing off the veil which custom demanded. Thus, the
meetings were so tumultuous that the freedom
threatened to degenerate into disorder.
Though the Apostle did not wish to dampen ardor
or to lessen freedom, yet he reminded his Corinthians
that God was a God of order and that the spirits of
the prophets were subject to the prophets; hence,
many should not speak at once but one should follow
the other and the " tongue-speaker " should reserve
his ecstatic monologue until he or his neighbor could
add thereto a sensible edificatory explanation. As
tQ the women, when they appear before the assem-

The Apostle Paul
blage for prayer or prophecy, they should don their
veils as a sign of modesty ; unusual as it was in the
Greek world of that time, Paul did not forbid the
public speaking of women. The passage to the
contrary (I Cor. 14, 34 seq.) was probably inserted
by a later writer.
The disorders at the communion celebration had
to be condemned more earnestly than these exuber
ances of enthusiasm. It had not yet become a mere
act in the liturgy, but was an actual meal like the
" bread-breaking " of the early-congregation and
like the common meal of the Greek societies, except
that these were paid for out of a common treasury
or provided by an individual member, whereas the
Christian fraternal meal was made up of contribu
tions from every one. It happened at Corinth, that
the rich did not wait for their poorer brethren and
divide with them, but they ate their rich food in ad
vance and drank heavily while the poorer ones were
hungry and ashamed. The Apostle deems it an un
worthy eating and drinking, a sin against the body
and blood of Christ which causes the report that
disease and death have visited some members of the
congregation as a result. He admonishes them to
test themselves and consider the meaning of the
Lord's Supper as contrasted with a common meal ;
further, the eating which is to satisfy the cravings
of hunger should be done at home, before they start
for the meeting of the congregation. This advice
is the beginning gf the division between the actual
so?

Christian Origins
meal and a sacramental act; besides, the connection
between the two grew more and more purposeless
with the growth of the congregation.
The moral life of these young heathen-Christian
congregations showed many a lack, partly the after
effect of old heathen customs, partly eccentric ex
pressions of the new spirit. Some thought they
might participate in heathen sacrificial meals with
out fear because they knew the truth about heathen
gods; others were so fearful lest they might stain
themselves by unconsciously eating meat which had
come from such an idolatrous sacrifice, that they for
bore all meat-eating. In the Roman congregation,
too, there were ascetics ( Paul calls them " the
weak") who, by reason of religious scruples, ab
stained from meat and wine, holding them to be un
clean things, dangerously related to the world of
demons. Especially marked in the realm of sexual
life were the contrasts between riotous freedom and
ascetic unfreedom. Some desired to continue the
customary Greek laxity in sexual matters even after
they had become Christians and based their conduct
on the Apostle's doctrine of Christian freedom, in
terpreting it in the sense that " everything is per
mitted," even licentiousness. Others thought that
sexual intercourse was, in itself, unclean and un
worthy of a Christian ; hence, Christians should not
marry and those already married should cease from
marital intercourse.
The Apostle began by taking a bold stand against
208

The Apostle Paul
the lax and demanded the severance of all fraternal
ties with the licentious; he admonished the Corin
thian Christian regarding the dignity of a Chris
tian personality, whose body is a temple of the holy
spirit, not to be defiled by licentiousness. Though
personally favoring it, he rejected the opinion of
the ascetics that celibacy should be made the gen
eral rule, but rather recommended marriage to those
who did not possess his gift of abstinence; he
rejected the dissolution of marriages with non-Chris
tians, where the latter did not dissolve them; in
which case, the Christian was no longer bound. In
such wise, Christian custom was so regulated that
the purity of family life differentiated the congre
gation advantageously from the immorality of its
heathen environment. In the question of eating
sacrificial meats, the Apostle took a similar middle
position between extremes : he agreed with the ascet
ics in their conviction that nothing was unclean in
itself, and eating or abstaining did not constitute a
Christian; but he rejected the idea of Christian
participation in heathen sacrificial meals, and ad
monished the more liberal-minded not to put aside
the considerations of brotherly love in the protec
tion of the weak consciences, when they employed
the freedom to which they were entitled.
A serious menace to budding Christianity was the
fanatical radicalism, which was inclined to conclude
that the ideal of God's kingdom of universal brother
hood meant the rejection of all existing social order.
209

Christian Origins
In opposition thereto, the Apostle admonishes Chris
tians (Rom. 13) to obey existing political superiors
as a divine government; for, since God instituted
such governments in order to protect the good and
punish the wicked, the Christian should be subject,
not through fear but for the sake of conscience ; he
should show respect, pay taxes and act as a peaceable
citizen. The Roman government is not a demonic
phenomenon and an object of fanatical hatred for
Paul as it had been for the Jewish and Christian
apocalypse writers, but it represented a stage in the
moral world-government and as such became an
object of conscientious regard.
Naturally, such high esteem of the legal proce
dure of the state accords but little with the word
forbidding Christians to appeal to earthly courts (I
Cor. 6, 1 seq.), on the ground that it is beneath the
dignity of those who are to judge the world and the
angels, to look for judgment to heathens ; either, they
should suffer injury in silence or litigate before a
tribunal of their own brethren. As Christians, Paul
advises them to recognize slavery as an existing po
litical institution, a worldly relation of the occupa
tion, which is not changeable even by divine election
to the congregation ; the consciousness that the slave
is a freedman of the Lord and that the free man
is a slave of Christ, should be so elevating as to
make the social relation of service a matter of indif
ference (I Cor. 7, 20 seq.) ; as to the rest, masters
should be human and brotherly in their treatment of

The Apostle Paul
slaves, act justly and properly toward them, remem
bering that they, too, have a master in heaven (Phile
mon 16, Col. 3, 22). This attitude toward slavery
was similar to that assumed by the Stoics — a recog
nition of the existing legal institution, making mild
its severity from the viewpoint of the ideal equality
of human rights — naturally, this contradiction be
tween idea and reality was demanded by the circum
stances of the age, but it could not endure.
Paul rejected emphatically the communistic fanat
icism related to the early-Christian tendency to
world-abnegation; he was opposed consistently to
the underestimation of labor and property, and the
overestimation of poverty and charity. He com
manded the Thessalonians (I, 4, 11 seq.) to work
in peace and eat their own bread, which means the
bread they earned and did not get by begging, so
that they would not need the bread of others but
could give of their own. Paul was so far removed
from the ideal of common property maintained by
the messianic congregation at Jerusalem, that his
epistles, throughout, presuppose private property ac
quired in business, and regard business not only as
permitted but required as a means toward honorable
independence of personality and charitable assistance
to the needy. Naturally, labor did not thereby ac
quire a moral dignity on principle; the Protestant
idea that labor in and of itself belongs to the moral
ideal as the employment of personal power for the
achievement of public welfare, this was as strange to

Christian Origins
Paul as to the rest of antiquity; herein, as in his
judgment of marriage as a necessary evil, he was
prejudiced by the dualistic view of his times which
underestimated the physical as unclean and evil,
hemming the spiritual. This remained the funda
mental church-view and attitude, characteristically
expressed by the monastic system; Protestantism
first led the way above and beyond it.
Two great achievements for Christianity must be
credited to Paul : he freed it from the Mosaic law,
making it accessible to the heathen and raising it to
a world-religion, and through him the early-Chris
tian enthusiasm was subdued and ennobled. The
revolutionary tendency, feverishly tense for the ap
proaching world-destruction and radically negative
toward existing social institutions, he overcame and
thereby established the possibility of the historical
existence and inner development of the new religion.
Without losing sight of the apocalyptic perspective
of the return of Christ for the establishment of his
kingdom, he transferred the centre of gravity of the
redeeming faith from the future into the present,
into that new life, which was not to begin with the
end of the world, but which existed in the hearts of
the faithful, who had the child spirit and hence peace
with God, freedom from the world and brotherly
love. By his doctrine of the Christ-spirit and its in-
working in Christians as the members of Christ's
body, he anticipated the future, catastrophic world-
regeneration and spiritualized the Jewish-messianic

The Apostle Paul
kingdom of the early-congregation, into an ethical-
religious kingdom, now existing in righteousness,
peace and joy of the holy Spirit. (Rom. 4, 17.)
He relegated the unhealthy dreams of the future
which comported ill with the tasks of reality, back
of the "reasonable service" (Rom. 12, 1), which
shows itself pleasing to God and worthy of men by
service to neighbors and the fulfillment of social
duties. He restored government, marriage, property
and labor to their own and obstructed the commu
nistic tendencies, the idleness and the beggary of
the oldest messianic-congregations. In short, he led
Christianity through the critical years of enthusias
tic childhood into the path of an ordered church-
existence, saving its historical future, making pos
sible its ecclesiastical development.
But the price which had to be paid for this im
mense profit and progress was the differentiation
between the super-temporal Christ-spirit and the his
torical person Jesus, as well as the envelopment of
that ideal principle in the mythical form of a spirit-
being, descended from heaven to earth and made
human. This was the initial step on the path to
the Gnostic speculations on spirits and gods beyond,
which threatened, by their very abundance in the
second century, to dissolve Christianity into a myth
ical dream-picture and cause the evaporation of its
historical-moral character. Pauline theology, with
its slight tendencies to Gnosticism and almost abso
lute independence of the life and teachings of Jesus,
213

Christian Origins
was not an adequate defense against this menace
to Christianity. This lack on the historical side
necessitated a complement. Though written in the
post-Pauline period and partially composed under
the influence of Pauline thoughts, the three older
Gospels performed this service, for they had the
traditions of the early-congregation concerning the
life and teaching of Jesus as a basis. The fusion
of this comparatively historical memory-picture of
Jesus with the Pauline speculation on the heavenly
Christ-spirit, resulted in John's conception of Christ,
which contained in nuce the church-doctrine of the
incarnation and the double nature of the God-man.

214

THE THREE OLDER GOSPELS

THE THREE OLDER GOSPELS
It may be accepted to-day as a certain result of
the industrious Gospel-research of the last century,
that Mark is the oldest of the canonical Gospels and
is the ground-work for Luke and Matthew; also,
that aside from Mark, there did exist a source-book
written in Aramaic, which was part of the ground
work of the other Gospels. Did this Aramaic
source contain merely a collection of the sayings
of Jesus or were there narratives also in it, so that
it might be termed " the earliest Gospel ? " Was
this one of Mark's sources aside from oral tradi
tion? On these questions, opinions differ. For
various reasons, I am inclined to accept the latter
theory as the more probable.
The early origin of Mark is indicated not only by
the relatively greater naturalness and historical
probability of the order of the Gospel story in gen
eral, but especially by certain peculiar features of
the presentation of the person of Jesus. Little as
it can be denied, that the apologetic motives of the
general Gospel tradition and Pauline views of faith
in particular are dominant, yet a comparison with
the other Gospels reveals that Mark represents an
earlier stage of apologetic authorship and hence a
comparatively clearer and more naive presentation
of tradition. 217

Christian Origins
According to Mark (as in the speeches of the
Acts), Jesus is the Son of God by virtue of the gift
of the spirit at the baptism, with which this Gospel
begins; it knows nothing of a supernatural birth or
childhood story. His mother and family have no
premonition of his higher mission, let alone higher
descent. (Mark 3, 20-31.) His miraculous power
is not yet without limit, but conditioned by the be
lief of his environment (6, 5 seq.); also partially
employing natural means and successively engaged
(7, 32 seq.; 8, 23 seq.), he is not entirely re
moved from the category of the wonder-workers of
his time. His knowledge, too, is not unconditioned
(13, 32). Often human emotions, such as indigna
tion, anger and impatience at the misunderstanding
of the people and of his disciples are ascribed to
Jesus; while the milder features which Luke em
phasizes in his picture of the merciful savior of the
sinful, are rare. As Mark describes him, Christ is
above all the heroic reformer, who from the begin
ning does not avoid the struggle with the ruling
Jewish authorities but rather provokes it, who reso
lutely breaks with his own family, who appears at
Jerusalem with the public deed of cleansing the Tem
ple and openly announces their destruction to the
Hierarchs, who preserves the silence of heroic resig
nation in the face of the accusation of his enemies
and breathes his last on the cross with a cry of com
plaint at the abandonment by God — all of which is
told simply, without softening the harshnesses, or
218,

The Three Older Gospels
weakening the soul-stirring tragedy by the emotional
features which Luke loves; thus, this oldest Evan
gelist furnishes the truest impression which Jesus
made on his environment, — here he actually lives
and works.
On the other hand, it must not be overlooked,
that even this oldest Gospel-writer is guided by a
decided apologetic purpose in the selection and ma
nipulation of his material. He wrote for Heathen-
Christians and wished to awaken or confirm the
conviction that despite the rejection by the Jews,
Jesus of Nazareth was proven to be the Christ and
the son of God by wonders and signs of every kind,
especially by the wonders of baptism, transfigura
tion and resurrection, that his victorious struggle
against the Jewish priestly and liturgical service
erected a new Temple beyond the senses in the con
gregation of Christ-believers in the place of the old
one of the senses, and that by the blood which he
had shed for many, he established a new covenant
to take the place of old covenant of the Law. It
is the fundamental thought of the Pauline Gospel
of Christ as the son of God, "according to the
spirit of holiness" (Rom. i, 4), who became the
end of the Law and the mediator of the new cove
nant by the sacrificial death and resurrection in
glory — this great theme of Paul's missionary teach
ing is the theme of the Evangelist Mark, and he
sought to illustrate it by a judicious selection of the
deeds and sayings of Jesus. For this purposet the
S»9

Christian Origins
selection is well made. The surprising number of
miracle-stories serves well for the needs and wishes
of heathen readers, who saw in just such concrete
miracles the confirmatory signs of the mission and
dignity of the Lord Jesus. Those sayings of Jesus
are preferred which refer to the struggle with the
Hierarchs and scribes, while those which refer to the
inner life of the congregation are not so much con
sidered, and those which have a conservative atti
tude toward the Jewish law and life (as Matthew 5,
17 seq.; 10, 5 seq.) are entirely suppressed.
The pupil of Paul is most evident in the speeches,
which the Evangelist did not find in his source-book
or in the Palestinian tradition, but created inde
pendently and for the first time fitted into the tradi
tional material as the leading religious motives for
the judgment of the history of Jesus. First of all,
the passion-prophecies belong in this category; they
are scattered about from the beginning (2, 20) and
repeat themselves from Peter's confession on, with
increasing vehemence ; they are not intended merely
to do away with the stumbling-block of the cross,
by presenting it as a God-ordained fate foreknown
of Jesus — in the early-congregation, that had been
done, — but they are calculated to lead the reader to
the conviction that in the passion, death and resur
rection of the son of man lies the real, final purpose
of his earth-life, the climax of the story and the
central point of his gospel. In two passages, the
Evangelist makes Jesus himself utter Paul's inter-
220

The Three Older Gospels
pretation of the death of Jesus : " For, verily the
Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister, and to give his life a ransom for many "
(10, 45) and at the last supper : " This is my blood
of the covenant which is shed for many " (14, 24),
which means that Jesus terms his death a vicarious
atonement for the establishment of the new covenant
— a thought entirely strange to Jesus himself,*
hence, taken from the Pauline doctrine of salvation
and for the first time inserted into the gospel-tradi
tion by Mark, the pupil of Paul. Probably the story
of the transfiguration of Jesus is original with Mark
and serves as an illustration of Paul's words about
the greater glow* of light of the spiritual covenant
when compared with that of the covenant of the Law
(II Cor. 3, 7 seq.). Particularly, the remarkable
and entirely unhistorical motivation of the parables
of Jesus, as though their purpose had been to veil the
truth and confuse the auditors, finds explanation
in Paul's doctrine of predestination, according to
which the lack of faith and immovability of the Jews
is made to appear as something predetermined in
God's plans. (Cp. Mark 4, 12 with Rom. 11, 7
seq. ) It is seen that those important points in Mark
which are peculiar and historically impossible, are
to be attributed to the doctrines taught by Paul.
* Cp. page 128. The passage (Mark 10, 45) is probably the
Pauline transformation of Luke 22, 27, where the original form is
preserved : " I am in the midst of you as he that serveth," referring
to the service of love in the life of Jesus and not to his redeeming
death. 221

Christian Origins
Nothing can be urged against the church tradition
that this gospel was written by John Mark. This
man was at home in Jerusalem, related to Barnabas,
in close touch with Peter and the early-congrega
tion; he entered into personal relations with Paul
at an early date, accompanied him on his first mis
sionary journey and later became his assistant again
during the Roman imprisonment.* Such a man
might well have been the author of the Gospel which
unites the Jesus of the Palestinian tradition, the
energetic hero of a Jewish reform movement with
the Christ of the Pauline theology, the suffering
hero of a mystical world-salvation, and thus paved
the way which was finished two generations later in
the Gospel of John. It is believed that the Gospel
of Mark was written at Rome shortly after the
destruction of Jerusalem (70 A. D.).
The author of the Gospel of Luke makes clear
in the preface to his book that many have written
the gospel story before him and that they were no
more eye-witnesses than he was, but that he hoped
to surpass his predecessors by attempting greater
completeness, accuracy and proper arrangement of
the narratives, in order to confirm the faith of his
reader, Theophilus. For the edification of heathen-
Christian readers and in order to place Christianity
in a favorable light before the Graeco-Roman world
* Acts 12, 12-25; Col. 4. 10; Philem. 24; II Tim. 4, n
(I Pet. 5, 13?). 222

The Three Older Gospels
in general (which Theophilus represents as we take
it), in order to prove the good religious right of
Christianity as a revealed religion in harmony with
that of the Old Testament and at the same time to
show its civic lawfulness and loyalty by its history —
this was the purpose of the author in writing this
Gospel as well as the Acts. For his purpose, he
gathered the largest possible amount of material
from many sources; he took great liberties in the
use and arrangement of his material, guided at all
times by the apologetic purpose of edifying and
convincing his readers. Throughout, evidences of
great skill in authorship are apparent, the trans
formation of given material and the poetic gift of
enriching and adorning it by new features of rare
beauty; he created the artistic form for the new
religion, the pregnant, noble picture-language which
alone makes the gospel-truth comprehensible in the
garb of poetry and still holds captive the heart and
the imagination of Christian peoples by its magic.
This is pre-eminently true of the stories with
which at the beginning and at the end he enriched the
gospel-narrative of Mark, his main source. While
Mark begins his narrative with the baptism of Jesus
by John, without any report of the origin of either
one, without giving any account of the relation they
bore to another which might satisfy the Christian
consciousness, Luke attempted to satisfy this need
by preluding his narrative with an account of the
birth of the Baptist and of Jesus, calculated to show
223

Christian Origins
by their origins the interweaving of their fates and
the higher meaning and dignity of Jesus.
Probably employing a mythical tradition of John's
disciples by which they glorified their master, Luke
made out John to be a sort of wonder-child; for,
as the birth of God's men of old, Samson and
Samuel, so his birth was announced by the angel
Gabriel in answer to the prayer of his aged and
childless parents; at the same time, the higher
destiny of their son as the consecrated prophet and
his preparatory work for the redemption of his peo
ple were foretold. This half-miracle of the birth of
John is immediately surpassed by the entirely
miraculous birth of Jesus, which the Evangelist
makes the angel Gabriel announce to the virgin
Mary with these words : " The Holy Ghost shall
come upon thee and the power of the Most High
shall overshadow thee; wherefore also that which
is to be born shall be called holy, the Son of God."
According to the older legend, Jesus' messianic
sonship of God was based on the descent of the spirit
upon him at the baptism ; but that did not seem to
make his superiority to John certain, — the less cer
tain inasmuch as John, according to the belief of
his disciples, was " filled with the Holy Ghost even
from his mother's womb" (i, 15). There was
only one way of surpassing this : namely, that the
Holy Ghost alone, without a human father should
cause the life of Jesus in the virgin Mary — an
idea, congenial to the Heathen-Christians because
224

The Three Older Gospels
of its exact analogy to the numerous sons of the
gods in the mythical stories of heroes as well as
the contemporaneous legends. For not alone of the
heroes of antiquity, but of the celebrated men who
lived in the full light of history and made a power
ful impression upon their contemporaries and suc
cessors in any walk of life, it was thought necessary
to presuppose supernatural origin and divine beget
ting; for example, the funeral oration of Plato's
nephew Speusippus mentions the legend current
during the great philosopher's life that Periktione,
his mother, bore him not as the child of her husband,
but of the god Apollo ; thus Alexander of Macedon
and Scipio Africanus are sons of Zeus, and Augus
tus, a son of Apollo; the new-Pythagorean saint
and wonder-worker Apollonius of Tyana was
looked upon by his countrymen as a son of Zeus.
Origen gave happy expression to the motive un
derlying such legends : " The simple incentive which
induced men to imagine such a thing of Plato was
this: it was believed that a man equipped with
greater wisdom and power than the average must
have sprung physically from higher and divine
seed." Origen permitted his readers to draw for
themselves the conclusion that the same holds good
of the Christian legends.
While the Jews were accustomed to think of the
concept " Son of God " merely as a messiariic-
theocratic dignity (in this sense, the passage of the
second Psalm is intended and was therefore so trans-
225

Christian Origins
:rred to Jesus by the Jewish-Christians, as the
riginal form .of tJie baptismal utterance shows)
;t for the Greek-Christians, who were unacquainted
ith this broader and not actual conception of son-
lip, it was easier to think of actual begetting;
hereby the heathen-mythical notion of a sexual act,
:ing too strongly anthropomorphic, was supplanted
f the sublimer idea that the creative power of the
>irit of God, which once brooded over chaos before
reation, called into being the sacred life of Jesus,
le son of God, in the pure body of the virgin.
fterward, the necessity of Old Testament proof for
ds became apparent and it was thought that this
)n-Jewish notion, so far removed from the idea
i God in the Old Testament, could be based on
le passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah (7,
\), which tells of the child to be expected by a
>ung woman, and his name shall be Immanuel,
rmbolizing the nearness of God's help. Though
le prophet thought neither of a miraculous birth
)r of a future Messiah, the name Immanuel might
isily suggest application to the Messiah Jesus (it
entirely foreign to Jewish theology) ; then, some
hristian who was not entirely familiar with the
"ebrew might understand the Hebrew word almah,
hich means " a young woman " in the text of
aiah, to mean " a virgin " (which it may but not
:cessarily must mean), and thus find in that pas-
ge a prophecy of the miraculous birth of the
[essiah Jesus. Such a bold interpretation could
226

The Three Older Gospels
have been possible only for such as had other reasons
for believing in the supernatural birth of Jesus.
The original cause of this belief is not to be found
in the passage of the prophet's book, altogether not
in Jewish-Christian, but in heathen-Christian circles,
where it had originated possibly before Luke's
Gospel and whence the Evangelist probably took it
and wove it into his meaningful prelude as a wel
come aid in establishing the superior dignity of
Jesus against the disciples of John. At least, this
motive partially influenced the Evangelist; that is
evident from the whole arrangement of the story and
particularly from the fact that after the announce
ment of the approaching miraculous birth, he brings
the two future mothers, Elizabeth and Mary, to
gether, so that by the mouth of the former, the
future forerunner John makes formal utterance of
praise of his superior and master, the Messiah Jesus.
With consummate art, the Evangelist knows how
to stage the birth of Jesus in a fashion worthy of
the great miracle ; varied motives from profane his
tory and pious legends of distant origin, he weaves
into a garland of lovely pictures. First he wished
to show how it came about that Jesus, the Nazarene,
was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, which
seemed to be an indispensable presupposition for the
Messiah as a son of David. As the motive for
Mary's journey to Bethlehem, he uses the census
which Publius Quirinius, the Roman governor, had
decreed in Palestine when the country was converted
227

Christian Origins
into a Roman province. This event really took
place six or ten years after the birth of Jesus and
the Roman custom of estimating the population
occurred at the town in which they resided, so that
the census of Quirinius, even if the dates agreed,
could not have been a valid motive for the journey
of Joseph, not to speak of Mary, to Bethlehem;
these historical obstacles weighed little in the mind
of the poet-evangelist against the weighty thought
of establishing some sort of connection between the
birth of the world-savior and the politics of the
Roman empire.
The birth-story itself is a bit of transparent sym
bolism : the poverty of the stall and the manger and
the glow of light from heaven upon it, the greeting
of the newborn savior by angelic hosts of heaven
and by poor shepherds, — these symbolize the con
trast between the heavenly sublimity and earthly
lowliness and point out beforehand that the message
of salvation is destined especially for the poor and
the lowly of earth. At the presentation in the
Temple, the pious seer, Simeon, greets the child as
the bearer of salvation and of light for all peoples
and indicates his future struggles and pains. The
prelude closes with me story of the twelve-year-old
Jesus in the Temple.
It is the more certain that historical traditions
were not employed in the shaping of these prelude-
stories, because the most striking parallels are to be
found in other myth-cycles, especially among the
228

The Three Older Gospels
Buddha legends.* The Indian savior Gautama
Sakyamuni was miraculously borne of the virgin
queen Maja, into whose body the spirit-being Bud
dha (" the great man " as he is called on account
of his heavenly origin) enters unstained and un-
staining. At his birth, also, a supermundane light
irradiates the place, celestial hosts of spirits appear
and intone a song of praise of the child, who brings
salvation to the world, joy and peace to all creation,
and will reconcile the enmity between deity and
humanity. Here, too, a pious seer appears who, by
miraculous signs, recognizes the child as the future
savior from all evil and the teacher of perfect wis
dom. Examples of early wisdom are also told of
the growing Gautama; among other stories, it is
told that, during a festival of his people, the boy was
lost and, after an eager search, he was found by his
father in a circle of holy men lost in pious reflection,
whereupon he admonished the marvelling father to
seek after higher things.
These parallels to the childhood stories of Luke
are too striking to be classed as mere chance ; some
kind of historical connection must be postulated, and
since the Buddhistic legend is older than the gospel
of Luke (" Lalita vistara " was translated into Chi
nese as early as 65 A. D.), the dependence is on the
side of the Christian Evangelist; how to regard
* The main source is " Lalita vistara," the Buddha-biography which
Foucaux translated into French. Extracts are to be found in my
" Christusbild in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung."
229

Christian Origins
this dependence, whether direct or indirect, and by
what intermediate agencies, these are questions
which cannot as yet be answered. It would contrib
ute greatly to the impartiality of this and similar
investigations, if it were clearly understood that it
makes but little difference in the end, whether the
Evangelist absorbed more or less suggestion from
foreign legend-cycles; for, in any event it is cer
tain that he transmuted the foreign motives in the
genuine Christian spirit and made of them a precious
treasure, which has edified generations of Christians
and will continue so to do.
Similar to these prelude-stories of the first two
chapters of Luke, the epilog-stories of his last chap
ter are to be considered. As is to be seen clearly
by the agreement of the end of Mark and the Gospel
of Peter, the oldest traditions knew nothing of
appearances of the resurrected one on Easter Sunday
in and about Jerusalem; neither did the finding of
the empty grave and the appearance of the angel
to the women belong to the oldest tradition, for Paul
knows nothing of it and Mark indicates the novelty
of the report (which he probably shaped after Syrian
Easter customs) by his remark that fear kept the
women from telling of it. It was palpably in the
interest of early-Christian apologetics, to base the
faith in the resurrection of Jesus not only upon the
appearances experienced by the disciples in Galilee
(for the objectivity remained ever problematical
owing to the subjective character of the experience,
230

The Three Older Gospels
"vision"), but upon tangible, concrete proofs.
This was the purpose which Mark's story of the
empty grave and the message of the angel intended
to serve. But this was not enough to answer the
natural question: why did not the resurrected one
show himself at once to his disciples at the place of
his death and convince them of his bodily life ? The
next logical step of the apologists is taken in Luke,
according to whom the disciples are not first re
ferred to Galilee as the place of the reappearance
of their crucified master, but on the day of the resur
rection they themselves see him, speak to him, even
touch him ; they see him eat and are thus convinced
of the reality of his bodily life. For the sake of
this popular need of concrete proofs, the narrator
did not avoid the contradiction that the resurrected
body displayed its earthly materiality by the touch
ing and the eating, while, on the other hand, his
sudden appearance, disappearance and ascension to
heaven proved its supermundane, ethereal nature
(after the fashion of a light-body as Paul thought
it). For historical investigators, such contradic
tions are unerring signs, that they are dealing not
with tradition based on any kind of recollection, not
with naive legend, but with a secondary form of
legend, influenced by apologetic considerations.
Besides, in his free composition of the Easter stories,
the Evangelist has not concealed the art of the
epic poet; the story of the disciples at Emmaus is
one of the most precious pearls of religious poetry
231

Christian Origins
of all times, which the pious always will enjoy and
enjoy most fully, when the childish question as to its
literal truth no longer hinders the joy in its religious
poetry as such, the beautiful garb of an ideal truth.
It was to be expected that the higher view of the
person of Jesus as the son of God in the peculiar
and unique sense which was placed at the head of
the birth-story, should appear in other parts of Luke
by omissions, additions and alterations. Above all,
the genealogy belongs in this category (3, 23-28),
tracing back, not only to Abraham as in Matthew,
but to Adam : thereby, Christ is designated as " the
second Adam" (in the .cense of Paul, I Cor. 15,
45 ) . Christ is not only the Messiah of the Jews but
belongs to all men and is destined to become the
beginning of a new humanity. He did become that
by revealing to his own the previously-hidden true
knowledge of God, the Father, which he, the unique
" Son," possessed. The passage 10, 22 : " All
things have been delivered unto me of my Father:
and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the
Father: and who the Father is save the Son, and
he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him,"
certainly does not belong to the oldest tradition, but
was only possible on the basis of the higher Christ
idea of Paul, which had received its popular expres
sion in the heathen-Christian legend of the super
natural conception of Jesus. The carrying-back of
this dogmatic idea of a unique metaphysical relation
of the son to the father into the self-consciousness
232

The Three Older Gospels
of the historical Jesus whereby neoplatonic-Augus-
tinian mysticism is attributed to this hero of a re
formatory action (" God and the soul, the soul and
its God") — historically this is unthinkable; the
artful, rhythmic form of this hymn to Christ betrays
it as a product of ecclesiastical consciousness, which
originated as little with the historical Jesus, as the
song of praise of Mary was actually spoken by his
mother (Luke i, 46 seq.). The way in which Luke
weakens the story of Mark concerning the visit of
Jesus' mother and brother is characteristic (3, 21, 31
seq.) : Luke (8, 19) suppresses the purpose of the
relatives, which Mark naively tells, that the rela
tives came to take care of him because they thought
he had lost his senses ; it is suppressed because the
contradiction to the birth-story is too striking, but
at the same the point of Jesus' brusque denial is
blunted. Luke sometimes weakens and sometimes
omits the conflicts between Jesus and the hierarchs
and the disputes about Jewish ordinances; but as
compensation, the struggles. of the son of God take
place in the higher regions of the world of spirits :
the detailed temptation story of Luke represents him
in the struggle with Satan's tempting wiles. Again
Buddhistic legend affords the most striking parallel.
When the seventy disciples return from their mis
sionary journey and report that even the demons are
subject to him in Jesus' name, Jesus says (10, 18) :
" I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven,"
anticipating to some extent, in that moment, the
233

Christian Origins
final success of his labors, the definite fall of Satanic'
world-dominion. But the struggle is still on: it
was Satan, who employed Judas Iscariot as his tool
for the destruction of Jesus (22, 3), and who seeks
to mislead the disciples to faithlessness (22, 31);
and when the enemies lay hold of him at Geth
semane, Jesus recognizes it as the (foreordained)
hour and the power of darkness, that is, the last
decisive struggle with the Satanic power, which he
was destined to fight as the mundane path to celestial
glory (24,51; 9,51).
As Christ's struggle is not limited to the Jewish
authorities according to Luke, but is made to apply
to all the powers of evil spirits, so his work of
salvation is not confined to the Jewish people, but is
extended to the salvation of the world; both are
connected insofar that the heathen world was re
garded as the realm of the demons and the conquest
of the latter meant the salvation of their realm.
While, according to the oldest traditions, not only
Jesus himself avoided the Samaritan territory but
even forbade the disciples from entering a Samaritan
town or going upon the heathen street (Matthew
10, 5), because he had only been sent to the lost
sheep of Israel (10, 6; 15, 24; Mark 7, 27),
Luke suppresses such passages and makes Jesus
himself undertake the journey to Jerusalem through
Samaria, and has him send seventy disciples as his
messengers to the Samaritan cities and towns. (Luke
10, 1 seq.) This mission of seventy to Samaria is
234

The Three Older Gospels
therefore not history but a symbolic anticipation of
Paul's mission to the heathen, which is sanctioned
beforehand in this way by Jesus; Paul's practically
completed and theoretically based progress from the
Jewish Messiah to the world-savior is thus carried
back by the Pauline evangelist into the Gospel his
tory, as the necessary consequence of his higher
view of Jesus as the supernatural son of God and
second Adam. How much greater he estimated
the importance of the heathen-mission represented
by the seventy than the Jewish mission of twelve,
he shows clearly by the strong emphasis on their
far greater success in conquering the demons and
the dominion of Satan (10, 17 seq.). In other in
stances, the half-heathen Samaritans are preferred to
the Jews in the Gospel of Luke : recall the parable
of the good Samaritan and the grateful Samaritan
among the ten lepers.
The obverse of this friendship for the heathen is
the Jew-hatred of this heathen-Christian Evangelist.
At the very beginning of the public life of Jesus,
this hatred finds marked expression in the speech
which he has him deliver in his native city of
Nazareth (4, 16 seq.), a speech which must be re
garded as a free composition of the author, like the
speeches in his Acts. The historically traditional
lack of faith of the near neighbors of Jesus (Mark
6, 3) is used by Luke as a pretext, to have Jesus
express from the beginning his rejection of the
Jewish people in favor of the faithful heathen,
235

Christian Origins
whereupon the irate inhabitants of Nazareth are said
to have attempted to kill him. Aside from the
silence of the other Gospels, this is historically im
possible and explicable only as a premature state
ment of the actual course of later events and as due
to Paul's opinion of Judaism and Heathenism in
Romans 9 to 11.
After deducting as much as may have to be
charged to the apologetic and polemic purposes of
Luke, the author, his gospel has great historical
value for our knowledge of the actual person and
teachings of Jesus. We must thank him for a num
ber of most valuable sayings and parables, which the
author carefully compiled from sources at his com
mand (1, 1), and which, like the gospel of Mark,
were translations and elaborations of the Aramaic
earliest-gospel. From these sayings of Jesus, some
of which Luke alone has and others which he has
preserved in most trustworthy form, we gain a new
picture of Christ, making an essentially valuable
complement to that afforded by the gospel of Mark :
the struggling, reformatory hero recedes and the
merciful friend of the poor and the sinful is brought
into brightest light. Naturally, one does not nega
tive the other, but we have every reason to believe
that on the actual combination of these two equally
well-attested traits of character, the heroic fighter
against the Jewish powers and the merciful friend of
the lowly and despised masses, the tremendous suc
cess of the historical activity of Jesus rested. With-
236

The Three Older Gospels
out doubt, the latter side was the more important
because in it the human power of salvation through
a serving and saving love, everywhere and always
equally effective, appeared most directly. The
parables of the lost son and the tribute-money, of
the Pharisee and the tax-gatherer, of the two
debtors, — the stories of the sinful woman who was
forgiven much because she had loved much, of
Zaccheus, the tax-gatherer, of the repentant thief
on the cross — all of these will serve humanity as a
fountain of edification and admonition, of reproof
and elevation.
We must not overlook the fact that in Luke's
picture of Christ, the forgiving and saving love for
sinners is closely related to the love of the poor and
the lowly, and the aversion toward the proud, the
overfed rich and the worldlings. When first he
appears Jesus declares his mission to be the enuncia
tion of a joyous message to the poor; in Luke's
field-sermon, the poor and the hungry (not the
spiritually poor, not the hungering for righteousness,
as Matthew altered it) are praised as the blessed
who will find consolation and satisfaction in the
coming kingdom of God. Poor shepherds are they
to whom the birth of the savior is first announced.
Poor Lazarus will rest in the lap of Abraham and
the rich man will go to hell. The supper of the
parable is despised first by the proud guests and the
lowly gathered up from the streets enjoy it. Riches
is " the unrighteous Mammon," whom it is well to
237

Christian Origins
shake off in favor of the poor. Refusal of earthly
possessions and the sundering of worldly ties is the
general duty of disciples. These traits of a reli
gious socialism, somewhat strange to our eyes and
seemingly exaggerated, Luke invented as little as
he did the friendship of Jesus for sinners; but he
did preserve them out of the oldest tradition and
especially emphasize them, because they accorded
with his own mood. Certain as was the right of
the Church to limit this tendency, as evidenced by
Matthew, so certain is Luke's preservation of the
social trait of great value for our historical under
standing of Jesus' work.
The Gospel of Luke was probably written at the
beginning of the second century by an unknown
heathen-Christian, who was conversant with the
literary culture of his time and particularly versed
in the works of the Jewish historian Josephus. Be
cause he made use of the memoirs of the journey of
Luke, the pupil of Paul, in his " Acts of the
Apostles," church-tradition used the name Luke to
designate the author of the Gospel and the Acts.
Of the four Gospels, Matthew is the least uni
form in character. On the one hand, it contains the
most emphatic expressions concerning the con
tinued force of the Mosaic Law and the authority
of its teachers (5, 17 seq. ; 23, 3 ; 23), as well as the
narrowing of the mission to the Jewish people alone
(10, 5 seq. ; 15, 24; 16, 28) ; on the other hand, its
238

The Three Older Gospels
expressions are no less forcible in teaching the
rejection of Israel and the transference of salvation
to the heathen (8, 12; 21,43; 23> 3&> 24> x4)-
Christ appears as the son of David, who fulfilled the
Law and the Prophets, whose life from birth to
death proved the fulfillment of Old Testament
prophecies and models and whose messianic kingdom
includes no more than the people of the twelve
tribes (19, 28). Alongside and at the same time,
Christ is the supernaturally begotten son of God,
whose destined dominion over the whole world was
symbolically pointed out in advance by the adora
tion of the oriental Magi and afterward was con
firmed by the final command to baptize all peoples;
from the beginning, he appears as the new lawgiver
for all men and in the picture of the world-judg
ment, he appears as the judge of all the peoples,
who metes out his fate to each according to his
attitude toward Christ and the congregation.
This view of the person of Christ, going beyond
even that of Luke, is particularly evident in the
alteration of the traditional saying : " Why callest
thou me good ? none is good, save one, even God "
(Mark 10, 18; Luke 18, 19), for which Matthew
says less decidedly : "Why askest thou me concern
ing that which is good? One there is who is
good" (19, 17), whereby the direct refusal of the
predicate good on the part of Jesus is avoided. The
limitation of miraculous power, which Mark indi
cates by the remark (6, 5) that Jesus could not
339

Christian Origins
perform many miracles in Nazareth, Matthew avoids
by saying: " And he did not many mighty works
there because of their unbelief" (13, 58), which
changes the lack of ability into a lack of desire to
do them. This harmonizes with the increased
power to perform miracles which Matthew attributes
to Jesus throughout; where Mark says he healed
many of the sick, Matthew has him heal all the sick,
brought to him from far and near (4, 23 seq.) ; he
has the daughter of Jairus dead before Jesus' help
is called; immediately after the curse of Jesus,
he makes the barren fig tree rot; he heightens the
miracles accompanying the death of Jesus and at
the resurrection he causes a great earthquake mak
ing the watchers to become as dead men ; later the
same guards are bribed by the chief priests to say
that his disciples came and stole the body of Jesus.
Apologetic intention led to awkward construc
tion of the legend. In the story of Jesus' birth
and childhood, Matthew has lost the poetic flavor
which gives Luke its charm; in the place of naive
story-telling, there is a stiff, apologetic method.*
* Note the monotony of the motives in his story : five times the
advice of an oracle in a dream and five times the fulfillment of
ancient prophecy in the course of Matthew's second chapter ! Con
cerning the last of these prophecies (2, 23) : " that he should be called
a Nazoraean," it must be remarked that it is not to be found in the
Old Testament and that the word Nazoraean is not derived from
either Nasiraean or Nazareth. That ' ' Nazoraeans " was the oldest
name for Christians and that it became the name of a later sect is
known ; but its origin is dark. A recent hypothesis says that it was
originally the name of an ante-Christian Jewish sect and passed over
from that sect to the Christians. 240

The Three Older Gospels
This confused character of the gospel of Matthew
is to be explained thus : the most varied elements of
Jewish- and Heathen-Christian tradition, the young
est and the oldest, the narrow-Jewish and the uni
versal-church, all were fused into one gospel-har
mony which is the classic expression of the con
sciousness of a universal world-church while in the
making. In more or less sharp outlines, this
ecclesiastical gospel has sketched the dogmas, ethics
and church-constitution of the crescent universal
church. The proximity of the son of David to the
son of God is suggestive of the dogma of the double
nature of the man-God. In the trinitarian formula
of baptism (28, 19), which appears nowhere else
before Justin, is the seed of the articles of faith and
of the " apostolic symbolum." With special em
phasis, the theme of the sermon on the Mount placed
at the beginning reads: Christ, the lawgiver, de
scended from God, proclaims a new law, which is
the fulfillment of the imperfect Jewish law, takes
its place and must be regarded henceforth as the
true revelation of God's will to all men; active
obedience of the new law is the condition of salva
tion. That corresponds accurately with the Church
view of the second century, according to which
Christianity was " the new Law " and the Church
was the institution founded by Christ for the educa
tion of all nations. The idea of "the Church"
as an organized body, which is strange to the older
gospels, is found twice in Matthew (16, 18 and 18,
241

Christian Origins
17) and begins to take the place of the thought of
the kingdom of God, as in the parables of the weeds
and of the fishes. The beginnings of an ecclesias
tically-regulated penitential discipline are to be seen
in 18, 15 seq. There the Apostles as the instru
ments of church action are equipped with the power
of " binding and loosening," which is equivalent to
making and administering church-law. This power
is conferred especially upon Peter (16, 18) ; he is
praised as the foundation rock, upon which Christ
builds his church, and he will therefore be the first
to get the keys to the heavenly kingdom. This say
ing, palpably a historical impossibility in the mouth
of Jesus, contains the germ of " the primacy of
Peter " and the claim of dominance on the part
of the Roman Church which was deduced there
from. How far removed is this from the thought of
Paul, that Christ is the only foundation upon which
the Apostles as the co-workers of God should base
their work, each in his own way ! (I Cor. 3, 9 seq.)
The gospel of Matthew clearly displays the
church-ethics with its opportunistic mediation be
tween the ideal and the real. Fasts, prayers and
almsgiving are estimated as services pleasing to
God, which may reckon upon especial divine reward
(6, 1 seq.) ; an ascetic life of voluntary poverty and
celibacy is recommended as a higher " perfection "
to those who are able to lead it (19, 21; 12);
the blessing of the poor and the hungry is trans
ferred to the spiritually poor and the hungry for
242

The Three Older Gospels
righteousness, while Luke's four " woes " (Luke 6,
24 seq.) against the rich are suppressed and their
place is taken by blessing of the benevolent, the
pure in heart and the peace-loving ; Luke's designa
tion of riches as the " unrighteous Mammon " and
the command to abandon that idol are omitted ; so
are the stories of the widow's mite and the judge's
refusal to act in the division of the inheritance.
(Luke 12, 13 seq.) — These are signs of advanced
church-consciousness, where church policy consid
ered the enthusiastic socialism of the early-congre
gation unfit and did no longer despise the possession
of worldly means and the power of judgment in
temporal affairs. As to the former, the church
Evangelist agrees with Paul's principles, though the
theology of Paul is uncongenial to him. Add the
remarkable coolness toward the early-Christian ex
pectation of the visible return of Christ to establish
his kingdom on earth, in place of which we find
the closing word of Matthew (sounds almost like
John) telling of the constant, invisible presence of
Christ in his congregation : here we have, feature by
feature, the picture of the life and faith of the
Church in the first half of the second century.
Self-evident it is that the author of this Gospel
could not have been the Apostle Matthew. We do
not know who it was ; altogether, it is scarcely the
work of a single author, but the work of various
hands, yes, generations of early-Christianity worked
at it; it grew with and out of the Church. There-
243

Christian Origins
fore it soon became the favorite Gospel of the
Church, the catechism of practical-ecclesiastical
Christianity. In historical value for our knowledge of the life
and work of Jesus, it stands far behind Mark and
Luke. But it is the more important as a document
of the growing universal Church of the second cen
tury, in which the opposition of the apostolic period,
the struggle between national-legal Jewish-Chris
tianity and the law-free, universalistic Heathen-
Christianity had been waged. The aggressive
role of the former without doubt ceased with the
destruction of Jerusalem and of the Jewish state, by
which it lost its national reserve-strength. Hence
the editor of the Church-gospel could incorporate
conservative-legal sayings from the oldest traditions,
without having to fear that Judaistic partisans in
the Church would gain any advantage; for, in his
time, the principle was immovable that the Old
Testament was Law not in its national-Jewish form
(as ceremonial law), but only through its revealed
" fulfillment " by Christ, that is, its human-ethical
content had permanent authority over Christianity.
Just this faith in the divine revelation of the " new
law " and the retributive world- judgment by Christ
were the essentials of the church-Christianity repre
sented by Matthew ; it was closely related to the Hel
lenistic Judaism of the Diaspora,* and it was not far
* The ethics of Matthew touch most closely those of the Jacobus
Epistle and the Apostolic doctrine, two writings of Hellenistic Jewish.
844

The Three Older Gospels
removed from the Graeco-Roman popular phi
losophy, for both of these agreed in striving for a
purely human ethics applicable to all men, looking
to purity and goodness of spirit, and sanctioned in
some way by divine revelation. The Gospel
brought that sanction in the revelation of Jesus
Christ, the son of God, who taught not only the true
fulfillment of the old Law, but who furnished the
personal model in his earthly life and who, upon his
return as judge of the world, will mete out to each
his deserts. The early-Christian enthusiasm' with
its dreams of an earthly messianic kingdom was re
pressed by this Church of the new law led by
" Peter," i. e., Rome; the mysticism of Paul's doc
trines of salvation and grace (with the exception
of a few traces originating in Mark, — Matthew 20,
28; 26, 28) was repressed. But these could not
be permanently lost to the universal church, for
they answered to the mystical trend of Oriental-
Hellenistic religiosity, as did " the new law " to
the rational, ethical feature of the then Hellenistic
culture. In the course of the second century the
Pauline-mystical tendency received a new and grow
ing impetus, which soon threatened to culminate in
a dangerous one-sidedness — that impetus was the
Gnostic movement.
Christian origin. It is indisputable that among the factors of the
growing universal Church, the Hellenistic (not the Palestinian !) Juda
ism or Jewish-Christianity takes precedence ; Baur's school always
maintained this, and unbiassed historical-research scholars, Christian
and Jewish, are conceding the point more and more generally,
845

THE GNOSTIC MOVEMENT

THE GNOSTIC MOVEMENT
Gnosticism did not arise originally either from
Christianity or from Greek philosophy, but it was
a religious movement growing out of an Oriental
heathen- Jewish mixture of religions. Its last mo
tive was not so much the desire for a knowl
edge of the world, knowledge for the sake of
knowledge, but rather the practical religious hun
ger for the salvation of the soul from the
powers of death, for the assurance of a blissful
life in the world beyond; in the end, all gnostic
speculation and mystic ceremonial was related to
this one purpose. In order to prove the possibility
of future life for the soul, a relationship to the divine
life was attributed to the soul, either that the soul
descended to earth from the world above or that the
divine being had implanted at least a seed or spark
of life. Hence, in the earth-world, the soul feels
itself to be in a prison or in a strange country far
from its higher home; the body appears to be im
peding ballast or fetter from which release is de
sired. But the death of the body in no way assures
salvation to the life of bliss, for the souls departing
from the bodies are threatened by the. gravest
dangers on the part of the hostile spirit-powers
which seek to devour them or thrust them down into
the abyss of hell. 249

Christian Origins
The esoteric teachings of the wise and the secret
ceremonies of the sanctified were to serve as protec
tion against the dangers besetting the soul's journey
to heaven. Hence there was a return to primitive
myths about divine and semi-divine beings, who had
descended into the regions of the dead and tasted
the horrors of hell but had remained victorious over
death by their own strength or through divine aid,
and returned happily to the earth above. The
speculations of the mysteries concerning the world
beyond attached themselves to these old myths, by
making the return of the mythical conqueror of
death, the prototype and the guarantee of victory
to all those to whom the secrets of the world beyond
had been revealed and to those who by sacred cere
monies had connected themselves with the Lord of
life, the "god of salvation," by an alliance effec
tive even after the death of the body. It was the
object of the mysteries of Mithra, Sabazio, Attis,
Isis and Demeter to obtain part of the life of their
deity for the initiated, by virtue of which the sectary
felt certain of " rebirth for eternity," a happy life
in the world beyond.
Though Gnosticism was from the beginning a
belief in other-worldly salvation on the basis of
mythical traditions and mystical rites, yet there was
such a similarity to the Pauline teaching of salva
tion that there could not fail to be a reciprocal influ
ence. The latter, too, taught that a savior and son
of God had descended from heaven, but one who
250

The Gnostic Movement
had offered the reconciling sacrifice of death, not in
the gloom of a mythical past, but in the light of
history scarce completed, one who had conquered
death and Hades by his resurrection, and had be
come the Lord and Savior of the living and the
dead on his return to heaven. It was natural, that
Oriental Gnosticism soon appropriated this figure of
a Christian savior, and transferred to him all that
they had previously said of their mythical redeeming
deities. Thus was the Messiah Jesus of the early-
congregation and Paul's divine man and son of God,
first changed by the Gnostics into a divine being,
the subject of their exuberant speculation and the
centre of their mystical rites.
This Christianization of Gnosticism, originally
heathen-Jewish, could not fail to have a counter
action on the faith of the Christian congregation.
For, how could they permit the Gnostics to go a step
beyond them in the worship of Christ ? As soon as
the Gnostics had converted the Jesus-phenomenon
into a divine being, there was no choice left to the
Church, but to follow their example in apotheosizing
the Master; this difference there ~was, however,
that, along with the divine, they did wish to hold
fast to the human side of the Savior, which the
Gnostics declared to be a mere semblance. The
paradoxical fact, that the conflict of the Church
teachers with the gnostic heretics did not involve the
divinity of Christ, both being agreed there, but did
concern his true manhood, is explained by the cir-
251

Christian Origins '
cumstance, that the doctrine of the divinity of the
redeemer-spirit was a gnostic presupposition, sub
sequently brought into such an artificial connection
with the Jesus of gospel tradition, that the reality
of the man Jesus was lost, or at least became prob
lematical. The Church teachers, with clear vision,
recognized that such a loss must not be permitted;
but now that they had accepted the presupposition
of the divinity of the Savior themselves, a grave
question confronted them : how could the person of
Christ, at one and the same time, be both divine
and human?
The gnostic lack of concern in the human Christ
was logically related to their general disdain of the
physical world, which they held to be opposed to the
spiritual without exception and the source of all evil.
This Platonic doctrine of the opposition of two
worlds, the lower visible and the upper invisible,
had been emphasized among the Jews, so that, aided
by Persian influence, it developed into that opposi
tion, predominating in the apocalyptic writings, the
present world ruled by Satan, and the future world
governed by God. Thus both religion and philos
ophy formulated a dualistic world-view which did
not harmonize easily with the monotheism of the
Old Testament ; the thought that these two opposed
kinds of being must have different sources is so
natural that it is not remarkable that some of the
Jews of the Oriental Diaspora drew the conclusion
and attributed the creation of the material to
252

The Gnostic Movement
another creator than the highest, purely spiritual
God. The mythology of Babylon, the theology of Juda
ism, the philosophy of Greece afforded the various
elements, which the Gnostics combined in their fan
tastic speculations concerning spirits and gods and
their relation to the first deity, to the world and to
man. With sure tact the Church recognized that
these gnostic speculations were not merely harmless
fantasies, but that they embodied a serious menace
to monotheism, the foundation of biblical Christian
ity; and the Church declared the identity of God,
the creator and the evangelical God, the father of
Jesus Christ, to be a cardinal article of faith. On
the other hand, after having accepted the divinity
of the Savior from the Gnostics, the Church could
not avoid following them so far as to place the God-
Father alongside the Son and the Ghost as other
divine beings ; thus, the Church " trinity " resulted
as the simplified companion-piece to the gnostic
doctrine of the " abundance of deity."
The Church took a similar middle position with
reference to the spiritualism (related to the dualism)
of gnostic ethics and eschatology. True, the Church
teachers were in a difficult situation in so far as all
Christians at bottom shared this dualistic-spiritual-
istic manner of thought ; because they presented the
extreme ideal of world-disdain and asceticism, the
edifying novels of the Gnostics also exercised their
charm on Church-Christians. Yet the Church teach-
253

Christian Origins
ers were shrewd enough to ward off at least the ex
treme consequences of that line of thought. How
ever high their regard for asceticism in general and
sexual abstinence in particular, they frowned upon
the rejection of married life advocated by the Gnos
tics, and held fast to Paul's teaching, that marriage
was permitted and advisable for Christians in gen
eral, while celibacy was the superiority, the special
grace of a few.
While the gnostic disdain of things of the body
expressed itself in a denial of the resurrection of
the body, a spiritual resurrection in the knowledge
of the truth being placed in its stead, the Church,
with all its contempt of the life of the body on earth,
desired to part with the hope of a coming resurrec
tion of the body as little as with the faith in the
bodily resurrection of Christ ; the impassioned oppo
sition to the spiritualism of the Gnostics led the ma
jority of Church teachers to the opposite material
istic extreme, elevating (in contradiction of Paul's
words, I Cor. 15, 50) the resurrection of the
" flesh " to the dignity of an article of faith.
On the other hand, concerning the doctrine of the
end of all things, the Church learned enough from
gnostic idealism to shake off the childish dream of
an earthly Messianic kingdom, rank with sensual
happiness, and, in the forefront, placed the eternal
life begun on earth in the faith as the spiritual sal
vation from the fetters of the world and of death.
Future bliss will then prove to be the continua-
254

The Gnostic Movement
tion and completion of the true life. Of course, the
Jewish apocalyptic hopes of the early congregation
still maintained some force; herein, as before, the
conflicting thought-series were permitted to remain
undisturbed alongside one another, in justice to the
various tendencies and needs within the Church.
Another point of dispute, concerning which the
Church took a similar middle position between Gnos
ticism and Church-belief, was the attitude toward
the Old Testament. Inasmuch as Gnosticism began
as a Jewish-heathen religious mixture, it goes with
out saying that a more or less radical criticism of
the Old Testament characterized it from the begin
ning; in particular, the Gnostics rejected the ritual
laws as the dictation of inferior spiritual powers.
At this point comes the closest touch of Gnosticism
with Pauline heathen-Christianity. While Jewish-
Christianity, loyal to the Law, took such great of
fense . at Paul's opposition, that they classed him
with Simon, the Magian, the supposed founder of
the gnostic heresy, yet the greater number of the
Gnostics were attracted sympathetically to the teach -
ings of the Apostle to the heathen, and his religion
of salvation, freed from the Law. In the same fash
ion as they infused heathen mythology into his teach
ing of Christ, so they exaggerated his opposition to
the Law to the extreme declaration of the entire
invalidity of the Old Testament. The Church could
not assent to that, for it held the Old Testament to
be divine revelation and the basis of its own faith, as
255

Christian Origins
Paul had always regarded it. At the same time, the
consciousness of the difference between the Mosaic
and Christian religions was so stimulated by Gnos
ticism, that there could be no longer any thought of
upholding the Old Testament entire as a deciding
authority. Again it was a compromise expedient
which the Church chose; it recognized the Old
Testament as a preparatory revelation which had
emanated from an ante-earthly spirit of Christ, a
revelation to be judged and made use of from the
standpoint of its evangelical fulfillment. Whatever
harmonized with the Gospels, retained its force as
revealed truth; part of the balance was dropped,
and the remainder adapted to Church comprehen
sion and purposes by allegorical interpretation.
Wherever it threatened to destroy the Church-
faith built on evangelical tradition, the Church
fought Gnosticism ; but at the same time the Church
appropriated so much of Gnosticism that the con
sciousness of the newness and unqualified sublimity
of the Christian religion as against all former re
ligions was deepened and clarified; its horizon was
widened and its ability to overcome the heathen
world and culture strengthened. Therefore, it
would be erroneous to regard Gnosticism solely as
an element inimical to and destructive of the essence
of Christianity; it was, rather, the most effective
ferment of the evolution of Christianity whereby
there was brought about the development of the
new principles to a comprehensive world-view, rich
256

The Gnostic Movement
in thoughts and motives of most varied nature;
therewith its crystallization into a world-Church
was made possible.
It is apparent on the face of it that the fusion of
such variegated elements as the primitive Christian
messianic belief, Paulinism, the Oriental-Gnostic
mixed religion and the Hellenistic popular philos
ophy could not succeed at once in combining the old,
the new, the Jewish, the Oriental and the Hellenic
into a harmonious unity without remainder and con
tradictions. Various tendencies were working sim
ultaneously in the Church, particularly the mystic-
speculative religion of salvation balanced the com
plementary practical-ecclesiastical religion of the
Law ; the former preponderated in the East and the
latter in the West. The former tendency took classic
form in the gospel of John, while the latter deter
mined the forms of ecclesiastical authority by the
establishment of the bishop, the articles of faith and
the canon. After a survey of these two authorita
tive, second-century achievements establishing theo
logical and ecclesiastical Christianity our task will
have been performed.

257

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN
In the form of a gospel story, this book teaches
theology; its object is to implant in the reader the
belief in Jesus, the unique Son of God (20, 29).
In order to give his readers the right key to the
understanding of his historical presentation, the au
thor begins, like Luke and Matthew, with the early
history of the life of Jesus. He does not begin with
the story of miraculous birth as they do, but he
goes further back to the very first super-earthly man
ner of Christ's existence as a divine being in unison
with God, his father.
These words are his starting-point. " In the be
ginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God." Then he describes the
general relation to the world : that, from the begin
ning, he was the mediator of the world-creation, life
and light of man, but not apprehended by the dark
ness of the world. Thereupon he causes this eternal
divine being to appear as a phenomenon of history;
" and the Word became flesh " ; it appeared as a
human being in Jesus, who is the " only-begotten
Son of God," because he was the human appearance
of the eternal, divine Logos.
The older gospel-tradition knew nothing of this
divine being and prehistoric existence of Jesus.
261

Christian Origins
Paul had taught the celestial descent of Christ, but
by designating him as " the heavenly man " and
" first born of many brothers," he ranks him still
among men as against God. How did the fourth
Evangelist come to his apotheosis of Christ under
the name of "Logos" and " only begotten Son " ?
Evidently not by any historical tradition of the
words of Jesus which tend thereto, for such words
are not to be found in the older sources ; neither was
it mere reflection upon the impression which the
historical character Jesus made upon him — incom
parably more correct is that impression given by
Mark and Luke than this Christ-picture of John, the
farthest removed from historical recollection. The
explanation is to be found in the fact that the fourth
Evangelist was influenced by the Hellenistic-Gnostic
thought prevailing in his time and environment, and
his attempt to ally that thought to the older evan
gelical tradition.
Let us not forget that Philo, the Alexandrian
philosopher of religion, tried to bridge the chasm be
tween God and the world by divine powers, and fore
most among these, he named the Logos, the first
born Son of God, the second God. The divine mes
senger Hermes, the mediator of the revealed word
of the deity, served in the same manner exactly for
some of the Stoics who had personified the divine
reason, which they thought of as the metaphysical
principle forming and ruling the world.
In the Persian religion, also, divine powers in the
262

The Gospel of John
form of angel-like beings, ranged between the high
est God Ahuramazda and the world; first among
them appeared the personification of God's highest
messenger the "good thought" (Vohumano). In
the Babylonian religion, Nabu, the son of Marduk,
has a like importance as the mediator of revelation,
and in the Egyptian religion the same holds of
Thot, the Son of Ra. It is clear that the idea of a
personal revelatory word or mediator between the
deity and its worshippers was a common possession
of all Hither-Asiatic and Hellenistic religion and
speculation of that age.
The Philonic Logos, the mythical personification
of a metaphysical, divine principle, here found its
origin; as did the "Aeons," or spiritual beings of
the Jewish and Christian Gnostics, the Ophites, the
Basilides, Valentinus and Kerinthos. To these di
vine, intermediate beings of gnostic speculation be
longed the "only begotten" (monogenes*) and
the Logos, differentiated as father and son, but both
subordinated to one original deity, out of which they
came as emanations from its abundance (pleroma).
Not only the general idea of intermediate divine
beings, but even the specific designations, only-be
gotten son and Logos, had appeared in the specula
tion of that day and could be taken for granted by
the church-evangelist as recognized conceptions,
which he might take up as presuppositions of his
* This conception is traceable to Plato, who designated the World
as the only begotten son of the Father of AU (compare page 34).
263

Christian Origins
Christ-teaching without the necessity of a closer ex
planation. What was it then, which was peculiarly
new, differentiating the Christian evangelist from
those predecessors ? Pre-eminently in the reduction
of the many intermediate beings of gnostic specula
tion to the one mediatory figure of the Logos, which
no longer differed from the only-begotten son, but
coincided with him in one and the same being.
Again, in making the eternal divine being through
¦incarnation become the historical redeemer, Jesus
Christ, the subject of evangelical history.
Philo knew nothing of an incarnation of the
Logos ; in his strongly-dualistic view of the world
such an idea had no place. Though the Christian
Gnostics had brought the divine intermediate being
into closer relation to evangelical history, they had
no thought of human incarnation; some of them
maintained the appearance of Jesus to be a mere
semblance, destroying the actuality of evangelical
history; others granted an external and periodic
connection between the divine being and the man
Jesus. Both ways the divine was preponderant, en
tering so little into the human, that the historical
Jesus seemed to lose all importance for the faith of
the congregation. The Church-teachers recognized
from the beginning what a grave danger to the
Church was involved. With great emphasis, Igna
tius and Polykarp, the Bishops of Antioch and
Smyrna, urged that the Son of God had appeared
in the flesh, actually had been born, had suffered
264

The Gospel of John
and died, that God had revealed himself in human
form in Jesus, and other formulas of like tenor.
These formulas set but did not solve the problem
of connecting the two interpretations of the person
of the Savior, existing side by side in the Christian
ity of that time ; how did the idealistic-gnostic per
son emanating from the divine being above and the
realistic-historic person growing out of the evan
gelical tradition of the mortal become an inner unity
for belief in the God-man? This was the problem
which the author of the fourth Gospel did attempt
to solve. The claim of the Church-teachers that
God had revealed himself in human form through
Jesus, he wished to establish ; by making the thesis
of the incarnation of the divine Logos in Jesus the
theme of historical presentation, he wished to show
in detail, that the glory of the only-begotten son of
God and the divine Logos actually did reside in the
Jesus of evangelical history and had become the
object of the pious view and actual experience of
the faithful congregation.
In all seriousness, he wished to narrate history
and not dilate, like the Gnostics, on abstract theories
and phantastic myths about the spirit-realm; nat
urally the historical narrative was to serve through
out as support of a theological thesis precedent, the
incarnation of the Logos in Jesus. From most varied
material, oral and written, church and apocryphal
tradition, he took whatever suited and worked it
over in the manner best adapted to his purpose. This
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Christian Origins
style of narrative for religious edification had long
been customary in the Jewish Haggada (Legend) :
that sovereign freedom and indifference to the actual
facts which makes it so strange to us, was unques
tioned in an age whose sense of the actual was as
weak as its enthusiasm for the faith and speculation
was strong. While the idealization of history in
the apologetic interest of faith in the Messiahship
of Jesus had begun in the older gospels, yet it went
only so far that the historical background is still
perceivable. However, in the fourth Gospel, the his
tory is so completely subordinated to the theological
presupposition of the incarnation of the divine Logos
in Jesus, that it becomes a purely didactic poem ris
ing so boldly above the solid ground of reality, that
it furnishes no data for a historical picture of the
life of Jesus.
A few of the most noticeable divergencies and
peculiarities of the fourth Gospel will suffice here.
According to the older tradition, the place of Jesus'
activity is Galilee, and only during the last days be
fore his death is it transferred to Jerusalem ; while,
according to the fourth Gospel, it is mainly Judaea
and Jerusalem, and only a few episodes of the first
part transpire in Galilee. In the former, the period
of his activity is one year at most, while the latter
speaks of three Passover feasts, that is two to three
years. In various instances they differ as to dates :
The cleansing of the Temple is transferred from the
end to the beginning of his activity, whereby it loses
266

The Gospel of John
its decisive importance for the historical issue; the
anointment in Bethany takes place six days, and
not two, before Easter ; the Last Supper and the day
of his death are each put back one day, so that Jesus
died, according to John, on the day on which the
other Gospels record that he ate the Passover meal
with the Apostles.
John chose his stories with a set purpose. The
miracles are limited to the holy number seven;
among those entirely missing are the healings of
the possessed ; while four new miracles are narrated,
outstripping any told in the older tradition and rec
ognizable at the first glance as ideal motives cast
in allegorical form. The miracle by which the water
was changed into wine at the wedding at Cana
(John 2, 1-12) symbolizes the thought that Jesus
substituted the joyous and powerful spirit of the
Gospel (Wine) for the powerless and tasteless cere
monial of Judaism (the water in the vessels for puri
fication) so that all destitution disappeared before the
abundance of grace ; therewith coinciding with what
Philo had said of the Logos, that as the celestial dis
penser of food it gave wine instead of water and
makes the soul drunk with a divine drunkenness.
The healing of the man who had been thirty-eight
years in his infirmity at the pool of Bethesda (5,
1- 18), symbolizes the thought that the true source
of grace, which the sick Jewish nation had sought in
the religion of the Law and the Temple ceremonial,
is to be found in the redeeming words of Christ.
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Christian Origins
The healing of the one born blind (Chap. 9) exhib
its the truth that the appearance of the divine light
in Christ has a twofold effect illuminating for some
so that they recover from their natural blindness
and see, and consigning others who, in their sham
wisdom, claim to see, to the punishment of their
own persistent delusion. Finally, the chief miracle
of the resurrection of Lazarus reveals the double
truth, parallel to the foregoing; namely, that Christ
as the embodiment of divine life is, for the faithful,
source and guarantee of a higher life, which no
death can touch (11, 25 on); while for the Jews,
the greatest miracle is but an incentive to further
obstinacy in their unbelief and provokes their dead
liest hatred ; this last is a confirmation of the words
which Luke makes Father Abraham say in the para
ble of poor Lazarus, that the faithless brothers of
the rich man (the Jews) who did not hearken to
Moses and the Prophets, would not believe, even if
one were to rise up from the dead (Luke 16, 27).
This parable of Luke, wherein the resurrection of
Lazarus is desired but not granted, and Luke's nar
rative of Mary and Martha, furnished the motives
out of which the fourth evangelist, with thought-
laden art, composed his wonderful story of the resur
rection of Lazarus, a story entirely unknown to the
older tradition.
In the same way, the other stories peculiar to John
should be regarded as allegorical poems almost
without any historical basis. The Samaritan woman
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The Gospel of John
with whom Jesus holds the important conversation
reported in the Evangelist's fourth chapter, is the
allegorical representative of the Samaritan religion,
a mixture of heathenism and Judaism. Her five
husbands symbolize the heathen cult of five local
deities formerly predominant in Samaria, and her
present unlawful husband is the symbol of her pres
ent unlawful (according to the Jewish opinion)
adoration of the God of the Old Testament. Fur
thermore, the half-heathen Samaritan religion stands
for John, as it had stood for Luke, as the actual
heathenism; hence, the question of the proper place
for the worship of God includes the other concern
ing the preference of the heathen or the Jewish re
ligion and gives Jesus the opportunity to say that
the worship of the Father in the spirit and in the
truth would take the place of both and had done so —
a saying as far removed from Matthew (5, 17 on,
and 10, 5 on) as it is near to the Pauline saying of
the Lord, who is the spirit and in whom Jew and
Greek are one. There, too, the Evangelist has Jesu6
suggest beforehand the great successes of the mis
sion to the heathen, and (in 12, 20) he brings on sev
eral Greeks, representing the heathen eager for sal
vation — an anticipation of the mission to the heathen
similar to the story of the sending of the seventy
disciples which we found in Luke (page 235).
Many are the divergencies of John in the story of
the Passion. The institution of the Last Supper
at the last meal is missing, but the lack is supplied
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Christian Origins
by the washing of the feet, in which Luke's figure of
speech about the master whose slaves serve him
(Luke 22, 27), is transformed into the actual pic
ture. The soul struggle in Gethsemane is missing;
this expression of human weakness no longer har
monizes with the Logos-Christ; hence, the sign of
divine sublimity (at the word of Jesus, the cohort
of his enemy fall to the ground) takes its place.
Jesus' confession of Messiahship before the High-
priest Kaiphas is missing, and in its stead there is
the, declaration of his kingship over truth, made
before the heathen judge. The old tradition that
Simon of Kyrene bore the cross of Jesus on the way
to the Crucifixion, is suppressed, probably in view of
the gnostic fable, which has this cross-bearer cruci
fied in place of Jesus. The older tradition is unani
mous in saying that none of the disciples was pres
ent at the cross of Jesus and that only a few of the
female disciples (the mother of Jesus not being
among them) looked on from a distance. The
fourth Evangelist, however, says that the mother
of Jesus, two other Marys, and the favorite dis
ciple, meaning John, were present at the cross. He
tells that the dying Jesus left the care of his mother
as a heritage to John. This is unmixed allegory;
as in the narrative of the wedding at Cana, the
mother of Jesus here stands for the Christian con
gregation, and the favorite disciple is the ideal apos
tle in the sense of the fourth Evangelist; he is de
clared to be the true spiritual brother of the Lord
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The Gospel of John
and the proper guiding head of the Congregation,
probably in opposition to Jacobus, the physical
brother of Jesus, the head of the early-congregation
at Jerusalem, whom our Evangelist did not choose
to recognize as a spiritual relative of Jesus.
It is a dogmatic allegory which is told in the re
port peculiar to the fourth Evangelist, that the legs
of the body of Jesus were not broken, but that his
side was pierced by a lance and that blood and water
flowed from the wound, as is testified to by the
actual eye-witness (the same favorite disciple John).
Tradition knows no such piercing by a lance, but
the Evangelist took it from a figure of speech used
by the prophet Zechariah (" They will regard him
whom they have pierced ") and applied to Christ by
John, the writer of the Apocalypse (1,7); this figure
of speech the Evangelist converted into a fact, im
portant in various ways : first, as a proof to the
senses of the actual death of Jesus denied by the
Gnostics, and then as a symbol of the thought that
from the death of Christ the mystical saving powers
of the Christian mysteries (baptism, water; and sup
per, blood) pour forth.
The Easter story is also peculiar to John. While
Luke has Peter alone (none of the disciples accord
ing to Mark and Matthew) hurrying to the grave
at the women's announcement, the fourth Evangelist
makes the favorite disciple accompany Peter, so that
John gets precedence both on the way to the grave
and again in the anticipatory faith in the resurrec-
271

Christian Origins
tion of Jesus — all of which is transparent allegoriz
ing of the thought that the spiritual Christianity of
John deserves precedence over the Christianity of
the older tradition of the congregation, represented
by Peter. This rivalry between the two disciples,
as the typical representatives of two forms of faith,
threads its way through the entire fourth Gospel;
in the supplemental (21) chapter, it finds marked
expression : while Peter, the practical, is to exercise
the office of Shepherd of the Congregation, he is
also to suffer martyrdom, but the favorite disciple
is to remain until Christ comes.
The peculiarity of the fourth Gospel may be
marked in the stories, but it is still more apparent in
the speeches. The speeches of the older tradition
contained popular sayings and parables about the
kingdom of God, about true righteousness and man's
attitude and manner of action in various life-rela
tions which please God. Inspired by natural occur
rences, these sayings are adapted to the needs and
understanding of the audience and create the impres
sion of truth to life. The speeches of John, how
ever, move constantly in the higher regions of theo
logical dialectics and apologetics, far above the un
derstanding of the audience; in the whole Gospel
there is not a single parable in the well-known, older
manner, but in their stead, allegories such as we
have been discussing or metaphors set up as the
themes for long explanations, such as, Christ is the
light, the life, the true vine, the good shepherd, the
272

The Gospel of John
right door. The content of John's speeches is al
ways the person of Christ himself, his heavenly or
igin, his unique relation to God, his mission in the
world, his reception by the congregation of faithful
disciples and rejection by the world of unbelievers.
In the room of the apocalyptic expectation of the
parousia, there appears partly the coming of Christ
in the spirit, which, as his other I, continues his work
in the congregation, partly as the promise of many
mansions in his father's house, where Christ pre
pares a resting place for his own when they depart.
Thus, religious mysticism and immortality beyond
supplant the early-Christian hope of the coming of
an earthly messianic kingdom. It is noteworthy
that the ideas are constantly the same in form and
content whether uttered by Christ, the Baptist or
the Evangelist himself — a proof that these speeches
of John did not originate in tradition, but are solely
th« theological reflection of the Evangelist.
The central cause of the departures of the Gospel
of John from the others is the difference in interpre
tation of the person of Christ. According to Luke
and Mark, despite all his extraordinary gift of spirit,
Jesus is essentially a man, with a human history,
growing and maturing through the interaction with
his environment and becoming conscious of his mis
sion. According to John, Jesus is the complete Son
of God from the beginning, the divine Logos incar
nate, clearly conscious of his descent from above
and of the glory which was his in the celestial life
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Christian Origins
antecedent with the Father. Hence human growth
and education are strange to him; from the begin
ning, he knows all, prophesies all and works with
omnipotent power. Just as he is, so are the men of
his environment, rigid personifications of abstract
ideas and types of universal species : believers who
are of God, and unbelievers, of the devil. John the
Baptist is the type of all true witnesses of Christ
and all honest teachers of the church-faith in the Son
of God, and the Lamb which bears the world's sin;
Nicodemus is the type of the narrow and fearsome
Jewish teacher; the Samaritan woman is the type
of heathenism eager for salvation ; Nathanael is the
type of the true Israelite, receptive of the Gospel.
In the interviews between Jesus and the Jews, as
reported by John, he shows nothing of the pedagogic
wisdom of the folk-teacher, but with brusqueness
he drives off the Jews, making then appear obdurate
and represents himself as constantly misunderstood
by them. Toward the disciples alone does the mild
and winning side of the Savior's personality mani
fest itself, particularly in the farewell sayings ( Chap.
13-17) where the mystical religion of the spiritual
gospel finds its classic expression. Where there had
been the early-Christian expectation of the visible
return of Christ to set up the mundane messianic
kingdom, we find the coming of Christ in the spirit
and the lodgment of himself and his father in the
hearts of those who love him and keep his command
ments. In this ethical mysticism, the Pauline op-
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The Gospel of John
position of faith and works is resolved in a higher
unity; the Christ-mysticism of Paul is reconciled
with the practical Christianity of Peter (Matthew)
and an ideal of religion formulated which allies the
mystic union of the individual soul to God and the
moral union of man in a brotherhood of love, ia
a manner scarcely equalled in all religious literature.
Certainly this pearl of an eternal religion was not
too dearly bought at the price of the idealization
of historical tradition.
Naturally all these divergencies of John's presen
tation do not rest on a tradition historically more
correct, but upon the subordination of the old tradi
tional matter to the new dogmatic thought that
Christ is the divine Logos become man. The under
taking which the fourth Gospel-writer set for him
self was to mediate between the Pauline-Gnostic
idea of Christ and the historic Christ-image of the
tradition of the congregation. The historical judg
ment will be forced to acknowledge that this was a
necessary undertaking and that the performance was
the best possible under the given presuppositions.
The Christ of the Church-faith was freed from the
limitations of Jewish Messianism and elevated to
the height of a spiritual principle of universal valid
ity, to the ideal of a Son of God, in whom divine
revelation and human religion are to be seen in their
perfection. Under the presuppositions of that period, such an
ideal principle could only be presented in the myth-
275

Christian Origins
ical form of a divine person descended from heaven.
Herein lay the danger (in Paul's writings it had ap
peared) of the passing off of historical Christianity
in the thin air of abstract idea-poetry and the ethic
ally valueless fantasies, such as were usual in the
Gnostic schools. Only by the closest union of the
supertemporal ideal with the historical appearance
of Jesus, could this danger be averted. The Gospel
of John wished to bring about this union by making
the whole of the life of Jesus a pure phenomenon
and continuous revelation of the divine principle in
him, in such manner that to the view of the believer
both sides present the unity of a divine-human life.
However justifiable and valuable this purpose, it
cannot be denied that it succeeded imperfectly, as
was natural under the presupposition that the ideal
principle was conceived in the mythical form of a
divine person descended from heaven ; to harmonize
the thought of such a being with an actual mortal
person always has been and ever will be an abso
lutely impossible demand. Hence, the undeniable
fact that the Christ of John throughout plays be
tween sublime truth and phantomlike unnaturalness ;
it is the former in so far as he presents the ideal of
the Son of God, or the religion of humanity, freed
from the accidents and limitations of individuality
and nationality, of time and space, and the latter in
so far as he presents a god wandering about the
earth in the mythical garb of a human figure.
It is the task of the present to discard this garb
276

The Gospel of John
without disturbing the ideal in its universal spiritual
truth and without burdening it with the hemming
fetters of the Messiah image of the early-Christians.
Concerning the composition of the fourth Gospel,
this much may be said with certainty, that an eye
witness of the life of Jesus did not write it, hence
it was not written by the Apostle John. The Gospel-
writer nowhere pretends to be the Apostle John, but
he refers (19, 35) to the testimony of an eye- wit
ness as a third person, who is not himself, but who
is his source, namely the favorite disciple (John).
How came he to this mysterious figure of the fa
vorite disciple, whose name he never mentions di
rectly? The apocryphal records of John, a Gnostic
novel, give the answer ; therein John is portrayed as
the disciple whom Jesus had made his confidant, be
cause of his virgin purity, and to him he confided
the higher (esoteric) knowledge of his divine being.
Thus, we may suppose with probability, that in
gnostic circles the prophet and the ascetic John, who
had become an authority of the Church in Asia
Minor through his authorship of the Apocalypse,
was identified with the Apostle of the same name;
so that, under the authority of this honored name,
they might spread their gnostic teachings of the
Christ as a secret tradition emanating from Jesus
himself. In order to overcome this error of the
Gnostics, the Gospel-writer wrested the authority of
their Apostle and prophet John from them, by mak
ing the latter vouch for his own teaching. As op-
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Christian Origins
posed to the heretical Gnosis, he set up his true
church-knowledge, but at the same time he wished
to contrast it with the early-Christian Peter-tradition
as the higher revelation, transmitted by the spiritual
disciple. This explains the rivalry between Peter and his
superior, the favorite disciple John, throughout the
Gospel ; it is the rivalry between the new semi-gnos
tic form of faith as against the old tradition. This
middle position of our Gospel between Church and
Gnosis explains the contradiction involved in the
Church- judgments concerning it handed down to
us from the second century: that it was written by
Kerinthos, the Gnostic, and that it was written
against him ; apparently, it was noticed from the be
ginning, that this Gospel stands in a close, half-posi
tive, half-negative relation to Gnosticism. There
with the period of its origin is decided; inasmuch
as the Gnosis of Kerinthos did not come up before
130-40, this approximating and opposing Gospel
could not have been written before that date; prob
ably it did not originate before the fourth decade,
the time of the second Jewish war under Hadrian.

278

ESTABLISHMENT OF CHURCH
AUTHORITY

ESTABLISHMENT OF CHURCH AU
THORITY
Against the growing danger, threatened by the
gnostic movement, the Church preserved her uni
form existence and historical continuity by the es
tablishment of a threefold authority — the bishop's
office, the articles of faith and the New Testament
Canon. Toward the close of the second century,
this threefold authority was settled in essentials and
thereby the existence of the Christian Church made
certain. In the description of the Pauline congregations,
we have seen that they were originally simple fra
ternities of pious faith and life, whose members
knew the equality of all as spiritual men and saints
(connections of God) and brothers one to another.
There were no offices with peculiar privileges, only
the voluntary services, which established a moral
demand for grateful recognition and subordination
of the others. In the post-apostolic congregations*
* The report in " Acts of the Apostles " (14-23) that the apostles
had appointed " presbyters" for the newly- founded congregations is
not confirmed by the genuine Pauline epistles (to which the ones ad
dressed to Timothy and Titus do not belong), for Presbyters are
never mentioned in them. Hence the origin of this class is dark.
Perhaps it is based on an imitation of the government of the Jewish
synagogue, in which there was a council of the oldest ; or it may be
that its prototype is to be found in the senate of municipal govern-
28X

Christian Origins
we find " Presbyters " or " Elders " as a class of
superior members, who, as survivors of the first gen
eration, were the natural bearers of tradition and the
representatives of the congregation in all communal
affairs. From among these Elders, and even with
the assent of the entire congregation, the " over
seers " or Bishops were elected ; at first, these were
nothing more than a committee of the class of elders
and therefor not distinguished from them. The
Clergy (the select, the persons of rank) con
sisted of the overseers and the presbyters, from
whose number they had been taken, and the dea
cons who performed lower forms of service, such
as caring for the poor ; but their duties had not yet
been fixed by law, nor had their number been fixed.
One congregation might have a number of overseers.
Mention is made of prophets and teachers alongside
of the bishops and shepherds (both designations
¦applying to the superior). In the post-apostolic
congregations it was possible for any one whom the
spirit moved or who possessed the power of teaching,
to address the congregation.
In so far, during the first century, the congrega
tion, with its freely-elected officials, rested on a basis
of democratic equality and freedom. Such a condi
ments of the Roman provinces. In any event, the Presbyters con
stituted an order of notables, highly respected for the sake of their
ripe experience or other rare qualities, and yet not necessarily all of
them invested with official functions. For this purpose, peculiarly
gifted individuals were selected from among them ; in so far all
Bishops were Presbyters, but not vice versa.
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Establishment of Church Authority
tion could not be permanently satisfactory, because
there was no protection against disorders and dis
ruptions, occasioned by ambition of individuals or
desire for innovation. Such evils, as had appeared
in the Corinthian congregation at the turn of the
first and second centuries, gave the Roman Clemens
the occasion for a letter of warning ; therein, he de
fended the authority of the office expressly against
the innovators, maintaining that it was a life-tenure,
and, in characteristic manner, he cited both the
Priesthood of the Old Testament as the prototype
and the analogy to military discipline.
When, soon after the beginning of the second
century, the gnostic teachers confused the minds of
the congregation by their errors, the need of firmer
organization became apparent ; and this could be ac
complished only by the elevation of one bishop as
monarchical head of the presbyter-aristocracy and
the concentration of authority on doctrine and
morals in his person.
This situation is revealed to us by the letter of
Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, urgently warning every
congregation to subordinate itself to its Bishop. The
letter to the congregation at Smyrna is an example :
" Obey the Bishop as Jesus Christ the Father, and
the Presbyters as the Apostles, but honor the Dea
cons as the law of the Lord ! No one should do any
thing relating to the Church without the Bishop.
Only that eucharist (celebration of the supper) shall
be considered the right one which the Bishop or his
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Christian Origins
appointee administers. Wherever the Bishop ap
pears, let the many (the congregation) be, as the
church is there, where Jesus Christ is. Baptism
without the Bishop is not allowed, nor may the love-
feast be partaken of; only what he sanctions is
pleasing to God, so whatever happens will be safe
and firm (beyond dispute). Whoever honors the
Bishop is honored of God ; whoever does aught be
hind the Bishop's back, serves the devil."
For Ignatius, the Bishop represents the unity and
order of the single congregation; his authority is
based on the practical necessity of a strong organiza
tion, in order to avert disintegration, consequent
upon heresy or schism. But there had not yet been
set up a dogmatic theory of the principle of the
bishop's authority, nor had he the priestly character
and exclusive hierarchical rank of office ; but he was
to preside over the college of presbyters; these, his
" synhedrin " or " spiritual wreath," are compared
to the Apostles, just as the Bishop is compared with
Christ or God who is called " the Bishop of all." At
this stage, the Bishop is the monarchical head of
each individual congregation, and not the organ of
a wider church-organization (which Ignatius had
not yet in mind). When the necessity therefore be
came more and more urgent by reason of the grow
ing diffusion of the gnostic heresy, the idea that the
Bishops were the successors of the Apostles took
shape, and that, as such, they were the bearers of
the apostolic tradition, in exclusive possession of the
" certain charisma of ecclesiastical truth."
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Establishment of Church Authority
The possession of the Christian spirit of truth,
which Paul had still attributed to all Christians as
" filled with the spirit " and which had been
acknowledged pre-eminently of prophets and teach
ers until then, was now (since Irenseus and Tertul-
!ian, at the close of the second century) limited to
those performing the Bishop's offices ; they were the
successors of the Apostles and possessors of all the
Apostolic authority, having its origin in Christ and
God. Of itself, authority of exclusive teaching
brought to the bishop the equipment of all other
apostolic privileges, particularly that of " binding
and loosening," the exercise of the church powers
of punishing or forgiving sins. Thus, from the
successors of the Apostles, the Bishops soon became
also " the Judges in Christ's stead," possessors of
the ecclesiastical power of the key, upon whose
judgment depended the salvation of souls.
The hierarchical superiority of the clergy (the
bishops and the presbyters) over the lay-congrega
tions was completed by investing them with the ante-
Christian priesthood; that which had been meant
as a mere figure of speech, e. g., by the Roman
Clemens (after Tertullian and Cyprian particularly,
middle of the third century), crystallized into a
serious dogmatic theory: The bishops and presby
ters are priests and vicars of Christ, in so far as they
alone, representing the congregation before God,
were empowered to bring the altar-sacrifice of the
eucharist, and in so far as they, representing God
285

Christian Origins
before the congregation, could dispense divine mercy
or withhold it.
Thus, at the price of evangelical freedom of faith
and conscience of the individual, the unity and order
of the Church as a hierarchically-governed social
organism was founded. Under the stress of
circumstance, in order to maintain itself against
enemies within and without in the struggle for exist
ence, Christianity (since the third century) adopted
the form of hierarchical churchhood as a protecting
cover, beneath which its true principle of religious
immediacy and ethical freedom was naturally hidden
and repressed, but not killed; it was preserved as
a latent seed-power, until, after many long centuries,
it developed into powerful life again in Protestant
ism. Besides, voices of opposition to the authority of
church-offices are not wanting at the beginning.
That same Tertullian, who regarded the Bishops as
the successors of the Apostles and bearers of the
apostolic-Catholic tradition of doctrine, enunciated
at the same time genuine Protestant principles as a
defense of montanistic prophecy ; for example, " The
Church is the spirit, not the number of bishops.
We Christians have been called as priests, by Christ,
the high priest. Where three are gathered, even
though they be laymen, there is the church. Neither
length of time, rank of person nor privilege of
locality has any power against the truth. Our Lord
Jesus called himself Truth and not Habit. Not
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Establishment of Church Authority
only novelty, but truth also disproves heresies.
Whatever is thought contrary to Truth is heresy,
be it never so old a habit. How could it be possible
that the devil should be ever at work, while God's
work should be at a standstill and cease to progress ?
For this, the Lord sent the Paraclete (Spirit) that,
because human weakness could not grasp all at once,
discipline should be ordered gradually, Scripture
explained, knowledge corrected and progress made
toward the better. As everything in nature grad
ually develops to its maturity, so righteousness was
in the beginning Nature (religion) ; it progressed
through the Law and the Prophets to childhood,
through the Gospels it acquired the strength of
youth and through the Paraclete comes the develop
ment to maturity." Clement of Alexandria, the
contemporary of Tertullian, declared, not the
Bishop, but the genuine ecclesiastical Gnostic who
added philosophic knowledge to his faith, to be the
true successor of the apostles, the true presbyter
and servant of the divine will.
Thus we see that at the threshold of the incipient
church-authority the protesting voices are raised in
favor of the real free and progressive prophetic
spirit and scientific thinking, — naturally, powerless
at first against the dominant tendency of the times
which needed authority, yet worthy of consideration
as witnesses to Christian individualism, which never
had suffered extinction and prophecies of the future
strengthening of the Protestant spirit of immediate
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Christian Origins
religious feeling and of autonomous religious think
ing. From the close of the second century, the
" Articles of Faith " were regarded as the content
of the apostolic-catholic teaching, which the Bishops
handed down as the successors of the Apostles.
Probably, it took shape in the Roman congregation,
about the middle of the second century, for the bap
tismal confession to Father, Son and Ghost (Mat
thew 28, 19) was enlarged by the addition of
formulae explanatory of and opposed to gnostic
errors. This Roman baptismal confession, origi
nating in the church-need for a protective against
heretics, is similar in the main to the " apostolic
symbolum." Naturally, neither its trinitarian root-
form nor the formula of the second article (" only
son, received of the Holy Ghost, and borne of the
Virgin Mary, descended into Hades and ascended
into Heaven") originated with the Apostles, nor
had an apostolic origin, for it can be proven that the
myths mentioned crystallized in the Congregation
of the post-apostolic period. That this Roman
baptismal formula, which originated in the middle of
the second century as a church weapon against the
heretics, should have been given out as " apostolic "
is in consonance with the prevailing second-century
notion that everything which is believed to be the
truth by the universal Church is based on apostolic
tradition. This in turn was supported by the pre-
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Establishment of Church Authority
supposition of the apostolic succession of the
Bishops. These two fictions of the apostolic origin
of the Bishop's office and of the apostolic tradition
of the articles of faith are to be judged as the
mutually supporting dogmatic presuppositions of the
church-consciousness of the second century, which
demanded authority.
Besides, it is remarkable that though Tertullian
designated the articles of faith as the law set up
by Christ and the criterion for every doctrine,
nevertheless, three passages, wherein he speaks of
them, give three decidedly different versions ; two of
them contain theological elaborations from his
dogmatics, going far beyond the formula of the
Roman baptismal symbol ; thus, the latter could not
have been fixed by the church authority at the time
in a specified set of words. Clement, the Alex
andrian, does not know the articles of faith at all,
but seeks to confuse the heretics by this theological
gnosis, attached in loose fashion to the general con
gregational tradition. Not until the third century
did the articles of faith become a generally recog
nized confession. Therewith the Catholic Church
had erected a protecting wall, which divided it
sharply from heretical parties. At the same time,
however, the Christian faith was weighted thereby
with the fatal demand of belief in mythical tradi
tions, — with the demand to sacrifice the intellect.
From that time, all theological efforts to reconcile
faith and knowledge were wrecked by this im-
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Christian Origins
movable presupposition. Greek philosophy is not
so much to blame for the inadequacy of dogmas
which arose out of the theology of the Greek
fathers; but rather, the mythology fixed by the
articles of faith in the belief of the early-Christian
congregation nullified all theological effort. To
reconcile them with reason was not possible and
never will be.
By their procedure, the Gnostics gave the impetus
to the origin of the New Testament Canon. Mar
cion, the Gnostic, who taught in Rome from 140,
gathered together a new Christian Canon to take
the place of the Old Testament which he had re
jected; for his community of followers, spread all
over the empire, he took the Gospel according to
Luke and nine of the letters of Paul. At that time,
the Church had nothing of a similar nature to set
up in opposition, — no collection of Christian writ
ings on a plane with the Old Testament, serviceable
as an inspired and infallible authority. In Justin's
time the " Memorabilia of the Apostles," i. e., the
three first Gospels, pre-eminent by virtue of the
master's words, were read in congregation meetings
with the Old Testament. In many congregations,
the letters of Paul were also highly esteemed, and
so were other edificatory writings, particularly those
with apocalyptic contents. But none of these writ
ings had attained canonical recognition by the middle
of the second century. Even by the year 160, the
number of our Gospels had not been finally fixed at
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Establishment of Church Authority
four ; the Alogi of Asia Minor rejected the Gospel
of John and many congregations of the Orient pre
ferred to use the Hebrew or Egyptian Gospel ; out
side of gnostic circles, no one spoke of apostolic
letters as sacred authoritative writings.
Then it was that Marcion compelled the Church
to oppose his one-sided Pauline Canon by a Canon
more comprehensive, giving expression to the com
mon property of the Church : the three Gospels were
joined with Luke's Gospel, while the specifically
church-gospel of Matthew was put at the beginning
as being the highest authority. Naturally, it was
not possible to omit the epistles of Paul, but proper
care was taken that their suspicious opposition to
the Law was rendered harmless by adding the
Epistles of Timothy and Titus with their church-
weakened Paulinism; then, too, the Acts of the
Apostles, wherein Paul appears in peaceful harmony
with Peter and all of the Apostles, was put at the
beginning, and finally, the group of " Catholic "
Epistles was added, giving the other Apostolic
authorities, John, Peter, Judas, and Jacobus, a chance
to be heard. From 180, this church canon appears
as a closed collection (in the list of the so-called
Muratorian Fragments and in the books of Irenaeus
and Tertullian). It is not known who collected
them ; with great probability it may be assumed that
their recognition as authority emanated from the
Roman congregation.
As the " New Testament," this collection was
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Christian Origins
placed alongside the Old; it was declared to be
equally inspired as the latter which long had been
considered by the Church as the inspired Word of
God. For a long time, the Church was undecided
as to the place of certain writings in the Canon;
as late as the fourth century, seven pieces (Epistles
to the Hebrews, Apocalypse of John, and five Catho
lic Epistles) were not acknowledged as canonical
by some of the congregations, while in other places,
the congregation conceded equal value and inspira
tion to the Shepherd of Hermes, the Apocalypse of
Peter, the first Epistle of Clemens, the Epistle of
Barnabas and the Pauline records. The criterion
for acceptance in the Canon was partly the tradition
of the apostolic origin of the writing, partly agree
ment with the general church-consciousness as set
down in the articles of faith. This last character
istic was actually the deciding test, for writings
circulated as apostolic yet contradicting the arti
cles of faith, were rejected as spurious ; such were
some apocrypha of Peter and the apocryphal rec
ords of the Apostles. On the other hand, the equation,
Catholic = apostolic = divinely-inspired, was so
firmly maintained that an apostolic origin, direct or
indirect at least (as in the case of the Gospels of
Mark and Luke) , was believed to be a necessary pre
supposition for all those writings accepted in the
Canon for the sake of their recognized value to the
Church. This dogmatic presupposition of the Church ex-
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Establishment of Church Authority
plains why the Church-tradition traces back to apos
tolic authors even those New Testament writings
which without doubt originated in post-apostolic
times; such are the Gospels of Matthew and John,
the Epistles to the Hebrews and to the Ephesians,
the Pastoral Epistles, all of the Catholic Epistles
and the Apocalypses. For historical judgment,
there can be no essential difference therein that some
of these post-apostolic writings claim to be apostolic
by their content, while others have been ascribed to
an Apostle without such inner reason; in the first
case pseudonymity is explained by the same motive
which held for the Church tradition in the latter,
namely, the desire to put under the asgis of strong
apostolic authority everything that is recognized as
true by the Church. It was the same need for a
solid historical support for Church authority which
led to the claim of the Apostolic creation of the
Bishop's office, the Apostolic handing-down of the
articles of faith (the "Apostolic symbolum") and
the apostolic authorship of the New Testament writ
ings. Inasmuch as Protestant theology has recog
nized the lack of historical basis for the first two
claims, there is no actual reason* why historical
criticism should halt or hesitate at the third claim,
which has exactly the same basis and value as the
other two.
* That is, no logical reason— the other reasons for bowing to this
tradition are easy to understand from a psychological point of view,
but have no bearing whatever on science (see page 23).
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Christian Origins
By setting up a collection of early-Christian
writings with normative dignity, the Church erected
a barrier against the unbounded license of fantastic
notions and enthusiastic conceits; it preserved the
possibility of a continuous historical development in
direct relation with its origin. But by elevating
these writings to the plane of supernatural, inspired
oracles, so as to give them unconditional authority,
superior to all the disputes of the present, the Church
has made a natural historical understanding of them
impossible ; it has wiped out the conditions imposed
by the history of their period and the peculiar va
riety of each, and drawing the veil of myth over the
actual origins of the Christian religion, it has bowed
all sensible thinking beneath the yoke of a sanctified
letter. It is due to the irrepressible and constant efficiency
of such genial teachers as Origen, Augustin and the
like, who were nurtured by the wisdom of Greek
antiquity, who enriched and fertilized Church-tradi
tion with new thoughts and knew how to harmonize
them with the sacred letter of the Biblical writings
by the use of allegory — to these men, whom no
barriers or authorities could suppress, it is due that
the Church religion did not become rigid book-reli
gion after the manner of Islam. When the Church
authority had fulfilled its pedagogic mission for the
peoples of the Middle Ages, and had become an
unbearable yoke for the awakening spirit of German
Christianity, the New Testament became the arsenal
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Establishment of Church Authority
from which the Church of the Reformation took the
weapons against the Priest-church of Rome. In its
turn, the inspired Bible-letter soon became her new
fetters. To tear loose from them and struggle
through to the real freedom of a conscience bound to
God only, that has been the problem of modern
Protestantism since Lessing, and the solution of that
problem engages our attention to-day.

295