Arthur Drews

“ Imagine the ideal man Jesus knowing that one of his disciples is about to betray him and thus forfeit his eternal salvation, yet doing nothing to restrain the miserable man, but rather confirming him in it! Imagine a Judas demanding money from the high-priest for the betrayal of a man who walks the streets of Jerusalem daily, and whose sojourn at night could assuredly be discovered without any treachery! ”

“ None but a theological historian would venture to use such an argument, and it is lamentable that he should find any support on the side of profane historians. As if one could settle a priori the limits of the human faculty of invention! As if the figure of Jesus in the gospels stood really apart from comparison with any others! If religious-historical inquiry has told us anything, it has shown that this is the reverse of the truth. The Saviour of the gospels is paralleled by other redeeming divinities, whom he resembles so closely at times as to be identical with them. ”

“ Christianity recognises only one redemption through Christ; it makes the possibility of redemption dependent on belief in the reality and truth of the historical god-man. The religion of the future will either be a belief in the divine nature of the self, or will be nothing. And if there is no other redemption of man than redemption by himself, by the spiritual and divine nature of the self, no Christ is needed for it, and there is no ground for concern that religion may perish with the denial of the historicity of Jesus. ”

“ If we look only at details, we imagine that Jesus has exhausted all the possibilities of ethics; if we regard the whole, we see that he skims the surface and thinks he can hold all things, because he can penetrate none. It is only children that can unite everything. Thus Jesus is not the highest and freest personality of history, but only the highest in ancient Judaism, restricted and not free in comparison with the greatest Greek thinkers. If, in spite of this, he had succeeded to their heritage with his ethic, he owes this to his reactionary character. ”

“ Would theologians ask us to believe that they approach the problem impartially? Must we be dubbed unscientific because we take no interest in their historical Jesus? Let us avoid pretence, and have respect for truth. To science as such it is wholly immaterial whether there ever was a Jesus or no. It has no advantage in approaching the question of his historicity either from the positive or the negative standpoint. It is theology alone that has an interest in regarding the positive standpoint as necessary, and in coming to an affirmative solution of the problem. ”

“ How I shall admire, how I shall laugh and be delighted, when I hear so many proud Caesars, whom men had turned into gods, whining in the deepest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates, who persecuted the name of the Lord, melting in a more furious fire than any they had lit for the Christians; so many wise philosophers, who taught their pupils that God cared about nothing, burning in the glowing flames ”

“ Thou who teachest us to know truth from falsehood, ghostly leader with the sweetest voice, whose spirit is calm, whose passions are controlled, whose heart is perfectly at rest, who teachest what should be taught, who bringest about the union of gods and men: I greet thee, Sakhyamuni, as the greatest of men, as the wonder of the three thousand worlds, who deservest honour and homage in heaven and on earth, from Gods and men! ”

“ Those who cling to an historical Jesus on religious grounds merely show that they have never understood the real nature of religion, or what “faith” really means in the religious sense of the word. They see only the interest of their Church, which assuredly profits by a confusion of true religious faith, of a trustful surrender to the God within us with the intellectual acceptance of certain facts of either a dogmatic or an historical character; they only deceive themselves and others when they imagine that they are promoting the interest of religion. ”

“ Here, again, it is to Isaiah, not to Jesus, that we must trace the sympathy with the poor, who unites pity and goodwill to the enslaved with anger against the rich and the oppressor, and has thus provided the basis of the philosophy of Christianity. When Wisdom describes the opponents of the Saviour and servant of God as being especially the wicked and unjust, it is merely developing the lesson of Isaiah, and declaring that they are the enemies of the poor and weak, the oppressors of the lower people, a proud, hypocritical, and self-righteous class ”

“ Christ, and died in the belief, though a more enlightened age has shown that the belief was a mythological illusion, and our liberal theologians have succeeded it with their human Jesus? Our confidence in historical reason will be shaken if there never was such a person as Jesus! But must not this confidence in reason be shaken if it should be true that a man has been made a god, and for centuries has been honoured as Jesus was in Christianity? One defends, so to say, the honour of human reason, when one shows it the error of what liberal theology calls history and the origin of Christianity. ”