Arthur Drews

“ We have, therefore, wandered from the way of wisdom, and the light of justice has not illumined us, and the sun has not shone upon us.......But the just live in eternity, and their reward is with the Lord, and the care of them is with the most high. Therefore will they receive the kingdom of glory and the crown of beauty from the hand of the Lord. ”

“ But at the same time we see Jesus before us, as, surrounded by his disciples, he speaks to the people in the market-place and the streets, disputes with the Pharisees and Scribes, and silences them, strides through life helping, working miracles, consoling, healing, and encouraging, and is blessed by the crowd and by the lost and the saved. ”

“ If Isaiah's servant of God was a saviour, a lord over natural forces chosen by God, like the pagan saviour-gods, he must, like them, have above all a dominion over the dread world of spirits and demons, by which the men of the time saw themselves surrounded and threatened everywhere, in whom they recognised the causes of disease, and for protection against whom they took refuge in the magical realm of the mysteries. [3] It would, therefore, be childish to take the miracles of Jesus at their face value, and seek to extract from the gospel narratives which describe them an “historical nucleus.” ”

“ Have we not rather a product of the unrestrained imagination of some religious sect or conventicle, to whom Jesus was from the start, not a man, but a supernatural, divine being, and in whose ecstatic visions mythical and prophetic elements grew into the frenzied figures which we have in Revelation? ”

“ Did the prophet who spoke of the sufferings, death, resurrection, and exaltation of the servant of God give any indications of this character? Bead the forty-second chapter:—
Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him; he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench; he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth ”

“ In Isaiah xlv, 15, Jahveh is called a “hidden God,” a “Saviour,” just as the servant of God and Saviour was supposed to grow up in obscurity, and the just to expiate sins by his death without attracting much attention or the real significance of his death being recognised. What if, after the manner of Isaiah, the belief in Jahveh were to coalesce with the belief in Jesus in the mind of the sect, and Jesus become the form in which Jahveh was worshipped as healer, expiator, and redeemer in the mystic and esoteric cults? ”

“ According to the words of the prophet, the servant of God was to be a healer of spiritual and corporal ills, a supporter of the poor and oppressed. Miracles of extraordinary kinds were to reveal his future Messianic significance, yet he was not to be understood by his own people and was to succumb to the attacks of his enemies. And who could these enemies be but the Pharisees and scribes, who had been more and more hostile to the Jewish sects after the destruction of Jerusalem? ”

“ Jahveh's vengeance on the Gentiles is transformed in the gospels into the contrary act of the self-oblation of Jesus; and whereas in Isaiah it is the wine of anger and vengeance that flows from the press, here it is the oil of healing and salvation that pours from the press (gath) over the peoples.
Like Gethsemane, Golgotha, “the place of skulls,” is another place that we cannot verify. It is possible that the name is connected with the pillars (golgoi) of the western-Asiatic mother of the gods, and points to an ancient Jebusitic centre of the cult of Adonis under the name Golgos. ”

“ It is further said in the book of Wisdom:—
The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment can touch them. Only according to the folly of the unwise do they seem to be dead, and their going in is counted a misfortune, and their going forth from us for a destruction; but they are at peace. For if they have been punished in the eyes of men, their hope was full of the faith in immortality. And after they have borne a brief torture, they will receive great rewards ”

“ Many writers have insisted that the relation of Jesus to the scribes and Pharisees affords a proof of his historicity. Yet almost the very same charges which Jesus makes against the Pharisees are brought by Isaiah against the heads of the people. “Your hands are full of blood,” the prophet says (i, 15; see also lix, 3) ; “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil. Learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” ”

“ Deissman also believes that the name was subsequently interpolated by a pagan, since neither a Christian nor a Jew would call Jesus the God of the Hebrews. But what if Jesus was originally the name of a god? What if there were a pre-Christian Judaeo-Gnostic Jesus-god? Is it possible that Deissman has himself fallen here into the error of the “destroyers of names” whom he so much despises—those who think “nothing genuine that is not trivial,” and who strike out “a great name” wherever they find it? ”

“ And even if we reject the idea of a pre-Christian cult of Jesus, those who believe in his historical character gain nothing. It is not true at all that, as is constantly said in pamphlets, lectures, and journals, The Christ Myth stands or falls with the existence of a pre-Christian Jesus. The mythical nature of the Christian saviour is sufficiently proved by the character of the gospels themselves and the lack of independent evidence; it is entirely independent of the question whether Jesus had or had not been previously worshipped. ”

“ It is in itself very improbable that Jesus would curse a place because it was not converted by his miracles to faith in him, as his own relatives and nearest disciples are represented as at times not believing in him; and here again the Evangelists seem to have had in mind the prophet Isaiah, who is never tired of calling his woes upon the heathen cities and predicting their destruction, and whose threatening words are unmistakably echoed in the words of Jesus. ”

“ Then the particular motive of the death was furnished by the passage in Wisdom and the idea of Plato. He died as a victim of the unjust, the godless, who say:—
Let us overpower the poor just man.......Let us set snares for the just, because he is a burden to us, and opposes our deeds, and represents to us the commands of the law. He boasts that he has a true knowledge of God, and calls himself the servant of God. He has become unto us a living reproach, on account of our desires. ”

“ It is very probable that the Jesus-sect consisted mainly from the start of the lowest sections of the people, such as had nothing to lose and nothing to hope for in life, and whose whole thoughts and feelings were bound up so much the more intimately with the promise of a happy future in the world beyond, which was connected with the coming of the Messiah. ”

“ The “rod” of the passage is represented mainly in the character of an upright judge, of whom it is said that he will “judge the poor with righteousness, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins” (xi, 4 and 5) .
Thus the whole story of the appearance of John and the baptism of Jesus is built on the prophet Isaiah. ”

“ Isaiah also complains to “the Lord” that his people approaches him only with its lips, but its heart is far from him; that its fear of God is only learned from the precept of men (xxix, 13) , and it does not honour him in the right way. “For...your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness. None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth; they trust in vanity and speak lies; they conceive mischief and bring forth iniquity” (lix, 3 and 4) . Jesus calls the Pharisees “serpents and generation of vipers,” as John is supposed to have done (Matthew xxiii, 33) . ”

“ Not only is there no opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees on this point, but even the fact that he is supposed to have openly proclaimed himself the Messiah was not calculated to turn them against him. Not only the children of Israel, but even individual men, are called “sons of God,” and the priests and rabbis themselves have at times called a man the Messiah and supported him with their respect; consider Zerubbabel, and the relation of the rabbi Akiba to Bar-Kochba. ”

“ Luke iii, 17) . In Isaiah Jahveh says to Israel: “Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument, having teeth; thou shalt thresh the mountains and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them” (xli, 15) . And in xlvii, 14, it is said of the Gentiles: “Behold, they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them; they shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame.” ”

“ Like gold in the crucible has he tried them, and like the gift of a whole offering has he accepted them. And at the time of their home-coming they will shine bright, and will pass like sparks in the reed. They shall judge the heathen and rule over the peoples, and the Lord shall be their king for ever. ”

“ The belief in an earlier cult would merely throw a welcome light on the origin of Christianity and its connection with the surrounding Jewish and pagan world. One may venture to say that theologians have found so much in their documents, when it suited their purpose, that they will certainly be able to discover a pre-Christian Jesus whenever their theory requires one, and they are no longer prevented by their dependence on the Church from studying the subject impartially. ”

“ On this view Galilee of the Gentiles (Galil-ha-goim) coincides with the lower half, the “water-region,” of the zodiac, in which are found the aquatic signs of the southern fish, Aquarius, the Fishes, the Whale, and Eridanus. [34] We thus understand why “Galilee, the way to the sea, the land by the Jordan,” plays so great a part in the story of Jesus; it was bound to be recognised in a Messianic age. Hence this “watery region” of the sky is the chief theatre of the Saviour's life; hence in the gospels the “Sea of Galilee,” the Sea of Genesareth, and the many names of places in the district. ”

“ Is this Jesus of the “Teaching,” who is supposed to have made known to his followers the “holy vine of David,” the same as the Jesus of the gospels? This Jesus who reveals life and knowledge, and in this way communicates immortality to his followers, has a suspicious resemblance to the Jesus of the ancient Gnostics, in whose case also the knowledge (gnosis) revealed by him was the essential mark and condition of eternal life. ”

“ The general belief is that there is here question of the sufferings of Israel in the interest of the whole of mankind. According to Gunkel and Gressmann, however, the idea of the suffering just man is joined to an allusion to the god who expiates the sins of men by his voluntary death. Certainly we detect in it all the essential features of the suffering Christ, sacrificing himself for mankind and expiating their sins. ”

“ As Joshua, as successor of Moses in the leadership, was believed to have conducted the Israelites from the bondage of Egypt into the “promised land,” the land of their “fathers,” their ancestral home, so they expected of the saviour of Israel that he would gather together the dispersed Jews and lead them into the coveted land of their “fathers”—that is to say, of souls; to their heavenly home, whence the souls had originally come, and whither they return after death. He was therefore regarded as a second Joshua, and it was natural to give him the same name. ”

“ As we have seen, Isaiah and Wisdom are the germ-cell of the figure of Jesus in the gospels and the Christian theory of redemption. But a third element has been at work—the figure of Job.
The canonical book of Job depicts for us a just man who, just like the prophet's servant of God, is tried by a conflict with Satan, by intolerable suffering and humiliation, and is afterwards raised again to his former condition. There is much in the book that directly reminds us of Isaiah liii and Psalm xxii ”

“ It is a language of repentance and warning that the evangelist puts in the mouth of the Baptist: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” The last judgment approaches. The expected Messiah is near. So in the prophet also Jahveh appears as a kind of judge who summons the nations before his chair, to prove to them the nothingness of their deities in comparison with the hero whom he has raised for the redemption of his people. “Bring forth the people that is blind, though it hath eyes, and they that are deaf, although they have ears. ”

“ It is admitted that the origin of Jesus from Nazareth is in contradiction to the belief that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem as a shoot from David. But it is not a contradiction between the Messianic dogma and a “hard fact of history,” as Weiss says (p. 22) ; it is due simply to the fact that the man of the race of David is called by the prophet a “branch” (nazar) ; and, when men began to make an historical person of Jesus, they found the agreement of the word with Nazareth a very welcome opportunity to conceal the real origin of Jesus in Isaiah. ”