12. “”.
When we regard all that we have seen as to the mythic, Old Testament, and Talmudic character of the actions and words of Jesus, it is difficult to maintain with good conscience the existence of an historical Jesus. Of which of his actions or words could it be said with confidence that they really go back to an historical Jesus? The situation is not that certain things in the gospels are found to be fictitious, and that this by no means robs all the rest of historical value. The fact is that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, either in the actions or words of Jesus, that has not a mythical character or cannot be traced to parallel passages in the Old Testament or the Talmud, and is therefore under suspicion of being derived from them. Let us hear no more of the “uniqueness” of and “impossibility of inventing” the Jesus of the gospels! Until the passages in the gospels are positively shown to us on which such a claim is made, we are justified in ignoring it.
It is a complete misunderstanding of the facts to say that this admitted “mythical woof” of the gospels proves nothing against their substantial accuracy, and to attempt to convict those who reject the historical Jesus of defective method. The wrong method is altogether on the side of those who believe in an historical Jesus, although there is not a single passage in the gospels they can show to be historical. “When the throne falls, the duke must go.” If all the details of the gospel story are resolved in mythical mist, as they are resolved in the hands of historical criticism, then, precisely from the methodological point of view, we lose all right, not merely to say what Jesus was, but to make the bare assertion that there ever was such a person. “It is uprooting the foundations of history, we are told, not to believe in the existence of Christ and the truth of the narratives of his apostles and the sacred writers. Cicero’s brother also said: ‘It is uprooting the foundations of history to deny the truth of the Delphic oracles.’ I would ask Christians if they think they destroy the foundations of history when they reject these oracles, and whether the Roman orator would have thought that he was destroying the foundations of history if he had rejected their oracles, supposing that he had known them. Each man fights for his own chimera, not for history.”
But “our confidence in tradition and in historical reason will be profoundly shaken if there never was such a person as Jesus,” exclaims Herr von Soden—and hundreds echo the lament. For in that case “the whole of civilisation has been deceived for 2,000 years” (p. 8). The answer to this difficulty—so profoundly penetrated with the “historical sense”—was given by Steudel. It almost looks as if the old French scholar Dupuis had foreseen von Soden when he says that “in matters of religion the belief of many generations proves nothing but their own credulity; Hercules was assuredly the sun, whatever the Greeks may have believed and said of him. A great error is propagated more easily than a great truth, because it is easier to believe than to reflect, and men prefer the wonders of romance to the plain facts of history. If we were to adopt that rule of criticism, we might urge against Christians that the faith of any people in the miracles and oracles of its religion proved its truth; I doubt if they would admit the argument, and we will do the same with theirs. I know that they will say that they alone have the truth; but the other people say the same. Who shall judge between them? Sound reason, not preformed faith or pre-formed opinion, however widespread it may be” (p. 227). For the rest, have not nearly eighteen centuries believed in the “god-man” Christ, and died in the belief, though a more enlightened age has shown that the belief was a mythological illusion, and our liberal theologians have succeeded it with their human Jesus? Our confidence in historical reason will be shaken if there never was such a person as Jesus! But must not this confidence in reason be shaken if it should be true that a man has been made a god, and for centuries has been honoured as Jesus was in Christianity? One defends, so to say, the honour of human reason, when one shows it the error of what liberal theology calls history and the origin of Christianity. Liberal theologians would do well to reflect before they cut the ground from under their own feet with such arguments.