The Historical Jesus: A Survey of PositionsRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Jesus Christ -- Historicity; Jesus Christ -- Rationalistic interpretations
By Dr. Schweitzer's account, the great mass of the German specialists
for a century past have been unable to see contradictions and
incompatibilities in the Gospels which leap to the eyes; to himself,
Wrede's statement of some of them appears to be a revelation. It would
seem that the simple old "Secularist" method of exposing these had
covered ground which for the specialists was wholly unexplored. Thus
it comes about that the myth theory, addressed to men who had never
realized the character of their own perpetually conned documents,
fared as it might have done if addressed to the Council of Trent.
Of no myth-theories save those of Bruno Bauer and Pastor Kalthoff,
which alike ignore the clues of mythology and anthropology, does
Dr. Schweitzer seem to have any knowledge. He is capable of giving
a senseless account of a book he has not seen, and, it may be,
of one he has seen. Of Christianity and Mythology he alleges that
"according to that work the Christ-myth is merely a form of the
Krishna-myth"--a proposition which tells only of absolute ignorance
concerning the book. If, as I suspect, he has no better ground for
his account of Hennell's Inquiry as "nothing more than Venturini's
'Non-miraculous History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth' tricked
out with a fantastic paraphernalia of learning," [214] it speaks
ill for the regular functioning of his critical conscience. But
where he has to deal with concrete arguments he is straightforward,
alert, and readily appreciative; and his survey as a whole leads
up to a complete dismissal of the whole work of the liberal school
so-called. In his summing-up, the only critical choice left is between
"complete scepticism" and "complete eschatology"--that is, between
the avowal that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus, and the
conviction that the historical Jesus was purely and simply a Jewish
"hero and dreamer," whose entire doctrine was the advent of the
kingdom of God, the ending of the old order, in which consummation
he secretly believed he was to figure as the Messiah.
The bare statement of the proposition hardly reveals its
significance. Dr. Schweitzer's "dreamer" is not M. Loisy's, who is
conceived as having had something to teach to his disciples, and even
to the multitude. Dr. Schweitzer's Jesus has, indeed, disciples for
no assignable reason, but he is expressly declared to be no Teacher,
even as Wrede's Teacher is expressly declared to be no Messiah. The
joint result is to leave the ground tolerably clear for the scientific
myth theory, of which Dr. Schweitzer has not come within sight,
having omitted to inquire about it. As he sums up:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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