




                    The Quest of the Historical Jesus

         A Critical Study of its Progress From Reimarus to Wrede

                                    By

                            Albert Schweitzer

  Privatdocent in New Testament Studies in the University of Strassburg

                              Translated By

                        W. Montgomery, B.A., B.D.

                            With a Preface by

                        F. C. Burkitt, M.A., D.D.

      Norrisian Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge

                          Second English Edition

                                  London

                          Adam and Charles Black

                                   1911





CONTENTS


Preface
I. The Problem
II. Hermann Samuel Reimarus
III. The Lives Of Jesus Of The Earlier Rationalism
IV. The Earliest Fictitious Lives Of Jesus
V. Fully Developed Rationalism--Paulus
VI. The Last Phase Of Rationalism--Hase And Schleiermacher
VII. David Friedrich Strauss--The Man And His Fate
VIII. Strauss's First "Life Of Jesus"
IX. Strauss's Opponents And Supporters
X. The Marcan Hypothesis
XI. Bruno Bauer. The First Sceptical Life Of Jesus
XII. Further Imaginative Lives Of Jesus
XIII. Renan
XIV. The "Liberal" Lives Of Jesus
XV. The Eschatological Question
XVI. The Struggle Against Eschatology
XVII. Questions Regarding The Aramaic Language, Rabbinic Parallels, And
Buddhistic Influence
XVIII. The Position Of The Subject At The Close Of The Nineteenth Century
XIX. Thoroughgoing Scepticism And Thoroughgoing Eschatology
XX. Results
Index Of Authors And Works
Footnotes






                               [Cover Art]





_First Edition published March 1910_





PREFACE


_The book here translated is offered to the English-speaking public in the
belief that it sets before them, as no other book has ever done, the
history of the struggle which the best-equipped intellects of the modern
world have gone through in endeavouring to realise for themselves the
historical personality of our Lord._

_Every one nowadays is aware that traditional Christian doctrine about
Jesus Christ is encompassed with difficulties, and that many of the
statements in the Gospels appear incredible in the light of modern views
of history and nature. But when the alternative of __"__Jesus or
Christ__"__ is put forward, as it has been in a recent publication, or
when we are bidden to choose between the Jesus of history and the Christ
of dogma, few except professed students know what a protean and
kaleidoscopic figure the __"__Jesus of history__"__ is. Like the Christ in
the Apocryphal Acts of John, He has appeared in different forms to
different minds. __"__We know Him right well,__"__ says Professor
Weinel._(_1_)_ What a claim!_

_Among the many bold paradoxes enunciated in this history of the Quest,
there is one that meets us at the outset, about which a few words may be
said here, if only to encourage those to persevere to the end who might
otherwise be repelled halfway--the paradox that the greatest attempts to
write a Life of Jesus have been written with hate._(_2_)_ It is in full
accordance with this faith that Dr. Schweitzer gives, in paragraph after
paragraph, the undiluted expression of the views of men who agree only in
their unflinching desire to attain historical truth. We are not accustomed
to be so ruthless in England. We sometimes tend to forget that the Gospel
has moved the world, and we think our faith and devotion to it so tender
and delicate a thing that it will break, if it be not handled with the
utmost circumspection. So we become dominated __ by phrases and afraid of
them. Dr. Schweitzer is not afraid of phrases, if only they have been
beaten out by real contact with facts. And those who read to the end will
see that the crude sarcasm of Reimarus and the unflinching scepticism of
Bruno Bauer are not introduced merely to shock and by way of contrast.
Each in his own way made a real contribution to our understanding of the
greatest historical problem in the history of our race. We see now that
the object of attack was not the historical Jesus after all, but a
temporary idea of Him, inadequate because it did not truly represent Him
or the world in which He lived. And by hearing the writers' characteristic
phrases, uncompromising as they may be, by looking at things for a moment
from their own point of view, different as it may be from ours, we are
able to be more just, not only to these men of a past age, but also to the
great Problem that occupied them, as it also occupies us._

_For, as Father Tyrrell has been pointing out in his last most impressive
message to us all, Christianity is at the Cross Roads. If the Figure of
our Lord is to mean anything for us we must realise it for ourselves. Most
English readers of the New Testament have been too long content with the
rough and ready Harmony of the Four Gospels that they unconsciously
construct. This kind of __"__Harmony__"__ is not a very convincing picture
when looked into, if only because it almost always conflicts with
inconvenient statements of the Gospels themselves, statements that have
been omitted from the __"__Harmony__"__, not on any reasoned theory, but
simply from inadvertence or the difficulty of fitting them in. We treat
the Life of our Lord too much as it is treated in the Liturgical
__"__Gospels__"__, as a simple series of disconnected anecdotes._

_Dr. Schweitzer's book does not pretend to be an impartial survey. He has
his own solution of the problems, and it is not to be expected that
English students will endorse the whole of his view of the Gospel History,
any more than his German fellow-workers have done. But valuable and
suggestive as I believe his constructive work to be in its main outlines,
I venture to think his grasp of the nature and complexity of the great
Quest is even more remarkable, and his exposition of it cannot fail to
stimulate us in England. Whatever we may think of Dr. Schweitzer's
solution or that of his opponents, we too have to reckon with the Son of
Man who was expected to come before the apostles had gone over the cities
of Israel, the Son of Man who would come in His Kingdom before some that
heard our Lord speak should taste death, the Son of Man who came to give
His life a ransom for many, whom __ they would see hereafter coming with
the clouds of heaven. __"__Who is this Son of Man?__"__ Dr. Schweitzer's
book is an attempt to give the full historical value and the true
historical setting to these fundamental words of the Gospel of Jesus._

_Our first duty, with the Gospel as with every other ancient document, is
to interpret it with reference to its own time. The true view of the
Gospel will be that which explains the course of events in the first
century and the second century, rather than that which seems to have
spiritual and imaginative value for the twentieth century. Yet I cannot
refrain from pointing out here one feature of the theory of thoroughgoing
eschatology, which may appeal to those who are accustomed to the venerable
forms of ancient Christian aspiration and worship. It may well be that
absolute truth cannot be embodied in human thought and that its expression
must always be clothed in symbols. It may be that we have to translate the
hopes and fears of our spiritual ancestors into the language of our new
world. We have to learn, as the Church in the second century had to learn,
that the End is not yet, that New Jerusalem, like all other objects of
sense, is an image of the truth rather than the truth itself. But at least
we are beginning to see that the apocalyptic vision, the New Age which God
is to bring in, is no mere embroidery of Christianity, but the heart of
its enthusiasm. And therefore the expectations of vindication and judgment
to come, the imagery of the Messianic Feast, the __"__other-
worldliness__"__ against which so many eloquent words were said in the
nineteenth century, are not to be regarded as regrettable accretions
foisted on by superstition to the pure morality of the original Gospel.
These ideas are the Christian Hope, to be allegorised and
__"__spiritualised__"__ by us for our own use whenever necessary, but not
to be given up so long as we remain Christians at all. Books which teach
us boldly to trust the evidence of our documents, and to accept the
eschatology of the Christian Gospel as being historically the eschatology
of Jesus, help us at the same time to retain a real meaning and use for
the ancient phrases of the Te Deum, and for the mediaeval strain of
__"__Jerusalem the Golden.__"_

_F. C. Burkitt._

_Cambridge, 1910._





I. THE PROBLEM


When, at some future day, our period of civilisation shall lie, closed and
completed, before the eyes of later generations, German theology will
stand out as a great, a unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life
of our time. For nowhere save in the German temperament can there be found
in the same perfection the living complex of conditions and factors--of
philosophic thought, critical acumen, historical insight, and religious
feeling--without which no deep theology is possible.

And the greatest achievement of German theology is the critical
investigation of the life of Jesus. What it has accomplished here has laid
down the conditions and determined the course of the religious thinking of
the future.

In the history of doctrine its work has been negative; it has, so to
speak, cleared the site for a new edifice of religious thought. In
describing how the ideas of Jesus were taken possession of by the Greek
spirit, it was tracing the growth of that which must necessarily become
strange to us, and, as a matter of fact, has become strange to us.

Of its efforts to create a new dogmatic we scarcely need to have the
history written; it is alive within us. It is no doubt interesting to
trace how modern thoughts have found their way into the ancient dogmatic
system, there to combine with eternal ideas to form new constructions; it
is interesting to penetrate into the mind of the thinker in which this
process is at work; but the real truth of that which here meets us as
history we experience within ourselves. As in the monad of Leibnitz the
whole universe is reflected, so we intuitively experience within us, even
apart from any clear historical knowledge, the successive stages of the
progress of modern dogma, from rationalism to Ritschl. This experience is
true knowledge, all the truer because we are conscious of the whole as
something indefinite, a slow and difficult movement towards a goal which
is still shrouded in obscurity. We have not yet arrived at any
reconciliation between history and modern thought--only between half-way
history and half-way thought. What the ultimate goal towards which we are
moving will be, what this something is which shall bring new life and new
regulative principles to coming centuries, we do not know. We can only
dimly divine that it will be the mighty deed of some mighty original
genius, whose truth and rightness will be proved by the fact that we,
working at our poor half thing, will oppose him might and main--we who
imagine we long for nothing more eagerly than a genius powerful enough to
open up with authority a new path for the world, seeing that we cannot
succeed in moving it forward along the track which we have so laboriously
prepared.

For this reason the history of the critical study of the life of Jesus is
of higher intrinsic value than the history of the study of ancient dogma
or of the attempts to create a new one. It has to describe the most
tremendous thing which the religious consciousness has ever dared and
done. In the study of the history of dogma German theology settled its
account with the past; in its attempt to create a new dogmatic, it was
endeavouring to keep a place for the religious life in the thought of the
present; in the study of the life of Jesus it was working for the
future--in pure faith in the truth, not seeing whereunto it wrought.

Moreover, we are here dealing with the most vital thing in the world's
history. There came a Man to rule over the world; He ruled it for good and
for ill, as history testifies; He destroyed the world into which He was
born; the spiritual life of our own time seems like to perish at His
hands, for He leads to battle against our thought a host of dead ideas, a
ghostly army upon which death has no power, and Himself destroys again the
truth and goodness which His Spirit creates in us, so that it cannot rule
the world. That He continues, notwithstanding, to reign as the alone Great
and alone True in a world of which He denied the continuance, is the prime
example of that antithesis between spiritual and natural truth which
underlies all life and all events, and in Him emerges into the field of
history.

It is only at first sight that the absolute indifference of early
Christianity towards the life of the historical Jesus is disconcerting.
When Paul, representing those who recognise the signs of the times, did
not desire to know Christ after the flesh, that was the first expression
of the impulse of self-preservation by which Christianity continued to be
guided for centuries. It felt that with the introduction of the historic
Jesus into its faith, there would arise something new, something which had
not been foreseen in the thoughts of the Master Himself, and that thereby
a contradiction would be brought to light, the solution of which would
constitute one of the great problems of the world.

Primitive Christianity was therefore right to live wholly in the future
with the Christ who was to come, and to preserve of the historic Jesus
only detached sayings, a few miracles, His death and resurrection. By
abolishing both the world and the historical Jesus it escaped the inner
division described above, and remained consistent in its point of view.
We, on our part, have reason to be grateful to the early Christians that,
in consequence of this attitude they have handed down to us, not
biographies of Jesus but only Gospels, and that therefore we possess the
Idea and the Person with the minimum of historical and contemporary
limitations.

But the world continued to exist, and its continuance brought this one-
sided view to an end. The supra-mundane Christ and the historical Jesus of
Nazareth had to be brought together into a single personality at once
historical and raised above time. That was accomplished by Gnosticism and
the Logos Christology. Both, from opposite standpoints, because they were
seeking the same goal, agreed in sublimating the historical Jesus into the
supra-mundane Idea. The result of this development, which followed on the
discrediting of eschatology, was that the historical Jesus was again
introduced into the field of view of Christianity, but in such a way that
all justification for, and interest in, the investigation of His life and
historical personality were done away with.

Greek theology was as indifferent in regard to the historical Jesus who
lives concealed in the Gospels as was the early eschatological theology.
More than that, it was dangerous to Him; for it created a new
supernatural-historical Gospel, and we may consider it fortunate that the
Synoptics were already so firmly established that the Fourth Gospel could
not oust them; instead, the Church, as though from the inner necessity of
the antitheses which now began to be a constructive element in her
thought, was obliged to set up two antithetic Gospels alongside of one
another.

When at Chalcedon the West overcame the East, its doctrine of the two
natures dissolved the unity of the Person, and thereby cut off the last
possibility of a return to the historical Jesus. The self-contradiction
was elevated into a law. But the Manhood was so far admitted as to
preserve, in appearance, the rights of history. Thus by a deception the
formula kept the Life prisoner and prevented the leading spirits of the
Reformation from grasping the idea of a return to the historical Jesus.

This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in
quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of
His existence. That the historic Jesus is something different from the
Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self-
evident. We can, at the present day, scarcely imagine the long agony in
which the historical view of the life of Jesus came to birth. And even
when He was once more recalled to life, He was still, like Lazarus of old,
bound hand and foot with grave-clothes--the grave-clothes of the dogma of
the Dual Nature. Hase relates, in the preface to his first Life of Jesus
(1829), that a worthy old gentleman, hearing of his project, advised him
to treat in the first part of the human, in the second of the divine
Nature. There was a fine simplicity about that. But does not the
simplicity cover a presentiment of the revolution of thought for which the
historical method of study was preparing the way--a presentiment which
those who were engaged in the work did not share in the same measure? It
was fortunate that they did not; for otherwise how could they have had the
courage to go on?

The historical investigation of the life of Jesus did not take its rise
from a purely historical interest; it turned to the Jesus of history as an
ally in the struggle against the tyranny of dogma. Afterwards when it was
freed from this {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} it sought to present the historic Jesus in a form
intelligible to its own time. For Bahrdt and Venturini He was the tool of
a secret order. They wrote under the impression of the immense influence
exercised by the Order of the Illuminati(3) at the end of the eighteenth
century. For Reinhard, Hess, Paulus, and the rest of the rationalistic
writers He is the admirable revealer of true virtue, which is coincident
with right reason. Thus each successive epoch of theology