Arthur Drews

“ It is only the complete inability to put themselves in the frame of mind of a man who is convinced that God's son, the second God, wandered on earth in human form and died on the cross—only the complete obsession of theologians in the ancient way of thinking, which will not permit them to see the wood for the trees, and suffers them to say that such a man had no interest in the earthly life of the God. ”

“ We must, therefore, regard the effort of theologians to disprove any statement that Jesus Christ is not an historical personality in Paul as a complete failure. Any attempt to find proof of the historical existence of Jesus in the Pauline Epistles is futile from the mere fact that the gospels are used to check the contents of the Epistles, although they are supposed to have been written after the Epistles. A proof could be found in the Epistles only if they unequivocally pointed to the Jesus of the gospels. ”

“ We should like to have it explained how a man who has the authority of “the Lord” on his side in a heated conflict with his opponents (on the question of the law, for instance) , and for whom the mere mention of it would suffice to silence his opponents, instead of doing so, uses the most complicated arguments from the Scriptures and the most determined dialectic, when he might have acted so much more simply. ”