Arthur Drews

“ 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. ”

“ The romanticists of Hellenism, sated with the rational, were impressed by the irrationality, the paradox, the authoritative and primitive, the sentimental-social element in his teaching; romanticists easily become Catholics. ”

“ Thus we can sufficiently understand the “mighty, life-controlling impression” which the gospel figure of Jesus has made on millions of people. “Some magic or power must have gone forth from him,” says Weiss, and he points to the fact that art has at all times gone to the gospels for material. “The true artist has a sure feeling for the sincere and living; he is for us an impartial witness that”—Jesus was an historical personality? ”