Max Beer

“ We owe them to inductive logic and applied science. The ancient and mediaeval historians, with very rare exceptions, did not see reality; still less the masses of people. Lack of understanding, the legendary and romantic bent, admiration and hatred, have woven round all the heroes of history a whole wreath of fantastic details ”

“ This was good Pharisaic teaching. But the Jewish law, with its multitudinous and minute interpretations, proved not a guide, but a tyrannical taskmaster, bent on making man sinful. Paul was not the first or the last Jew who went through the same mental experience and agonies. He finally despaired of the ability of man to enter into communication with God through the gate of legalism. And yet what is man without the help of God? What is man to do to be saved? ”

“ And the people to whom Jesus preached were illiterate, uncritical, and with a strong will to believe. The hope for a messiah was universal in Palestine, and a messiah sent by God, must needs have been a miracle worker. Besides, there is probably not a single great man in history whose life has been handed down to us in an exact manner. The art of seeing things and persons as they are, the search for exact truth, are quite modern acquisitions. ”

“ Communistic experiments and the writing of Utopias are always symptoms of an age of revolution, of the breaking up of the old and the germination of the new. And the age of the rise and spread of Christianity was in Palestine a period of revolution and insurrection. ”

“ The Jewish proletarians produced a Jesus and a James, men of high moral courage and clearness of vision, full of prophetic teaching, opposed to the rich and the legalists, and therefore revolutionary in their activities. ”

“ He did not abandon Judaism from the same motives as Jesus, and did not follow him from the same motives as James. In Jesus and James we see the proletarian opposition to the Pharisaic class. With St. Paul it was different. He felt no class antagonism. As the son of middle-class people he had no proletarian feeling which made rich and wicked convertible terms. He came to Jesus because of spiritual anguish. Idealistic, fiery, longing for salvation, he strove with might and main to fulfil the law. Man was naturally bad and wicked ”

“ Agricultural nations produce no inventors. Every healthy nation with a healthy development begets, from time to time, men of great abilities and energies. With what ideas and motives those men are filled, and on what material they work, depends upon the conditions in which they are brought up and live. ”

“ Their chief occupation was agriculture. The soil, the tools, the cattle were common property, likewise the buildings and houses, even their clothing belonged to the community as a whole, so that their production, distribution and consumption were put on a communistic basis. Their purely religious conceptions were Pharisaic ”