The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus/Part 4/Section 8

by Arthur Drews

8. Historians and the Gospels.

When we consider these things, we see that the claim that the gospel narrative could not have been invented is an empty phrase. It would be well if those who use it would be more explicit, and tell us precisely what there is that could not be invented in the narrative.

No one will question that the figure of Jesus in the gospels has a certain nucleus, about which all the rest has gradually crystallised. But that this nucleus is an historical personality, and not Isaiah's “servant of God,” the “just” of Wisdom, and the sufferer of the twenty-second psalm, is merely to beg the question; and this is the less justified since all the really important features of the gospel life of Jesus owe their origin partly to the myth, partly to the expansion and application of certain passages in the prophets.

Theologians triumphantly point to the fact that even scholars who are not influenced by theology have not doubted the historical existence of Jesus. When we look closely into the matter, however, we find that these scholars have not given any critical consideration to the question, that in this matter they have spoken as laymen, not as experts, and that they adhere to the historicity of the man Jesus, not on personal scientific grounds, but out of conventional feeling. This is true of profane historians, who, as far as I can see, have almost all avoided up to the present a serious discussion of the question. It is true of Zimmern, who, as an Assyriologist, has certainly discovered the striking parallels between the Christ-myth and the Babylonian myth, and even admitted that these are not mere casual analogies, but proofs of a direct dependence and historical connection at important points, yet who, as a former theologian, adheres to the belief in the historicity of Jesus, without finding any foundation for it.^[1] In this Zimmern appeals to Wundt and to Hermann Schneider, who says in his Kultur und Denken der Babylonier und Juden that we must retain the historicity of Jesus for reasons drawn from the history of the evolution of religion. But what Schneider leaves intact of the personality and story of Jesus is so meagre, and so devoid of solid foundation, that it cannot claim any historical significance. One can see for oneself. “That the wise teacher,” says Schneider of Jesus, “first appeared in adult age, and first taught in the synagogues and open air of his native place, is very probable; also that he gathered about him a circle of disciples of his own social sphere. That in this way he came into collision with the professional interpreters, the scribes, and the professionally pious, the Pharisees, is very probable in view of the character of his teaching. It must remain an open question whether he went to Jerusalem and was executed there (!); that he should seek disciples of his new teaching in the centre of Judaism would not be surprising; that he was confused on account of some imprudent remark with the Messianic pretenders of that excited world, and executed, is not unthinkable, but it is just as possible that he never left Galilee and died there in obscurity (!). The gospel story of the entrance into Jerusalem and death of the Messiah swarms with historical and scientific impossibilities, and is, in view of the central position of these elements in the dogma, rather a disproof than a proof of their contents” (p. 464).

This, then, is the opinion of the historical Jesus of a scholar without theological prejudice—and at the same time a typical example of the blending of the method of subtraction with the practice of deducing reality from possibility, as we generally find in this department. I should imagine that a theologian would say in face of such witnesses: “Save us from our friends.”

Note

1. Zum Streit um die Christusmythe: Das babylonische Material in seinen Hauptpunkten dargestellt, 1910.