The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith: Reimarus to Strauss
1. Introduction
What is the relationship between "history" and "faith" - between "what happened" and "what is believed as a consequence of what happened"?
"Whenever a religion, resting upon written records, prolongs and extends the sphere of its dominion, accompanying its votaries through the varied and progressive stages of mental cultivation, a discrepancy between the representations of those ancient records, referred to as sacred, and the notions of more advanced periods of mental development, will inevitably sooner or later arise" Strauss, Life of Jesus.
2. Reimarus and the Gospels' Two Histories
i. Reimarus the Deist
Reimarus, Hermann Samuel (1694-1768). Deist biblical scholar who was appointed Professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at Hamburg. His most famous and notorious work was kept from the public until extracts were published as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments(1774-8) by the philosopher and critic, G. E. Lessing. The complete treatise consisted of a Deist attack on Christianity and its claims to revelation. The published fragments argued for Christian origins as based in apostolic fraud. The complete work was not published until 1972.
"It can be seen from the foregoing book, especially its last chapter, that the doctrine of the salvation and immortality of the soul, which must be the essential element of a religion, especially a revealed religion, had not yet been expounded by the writers of the Old Testament and thus had been unknown to the Jews during the days of their own prophets. Rather, later Jews had learned and accepted this important tenet through contacts with rational hea-thens and their philosophers," Reimarus, Fragments.
ii. Reimarus and the Fraudulent Apostles
The unerring signs of truth and falsehood are clear, distinct consistency and contradiction. This is also the case with revelation, insofar as that it must, in common with other truths, be free from contradiction, Reimarus, Fragments.
3. Strauss and the Mythological
i. Beyond Rationalism or Orthodoxy
Strauss, David Friedrich (1808-74). Appointed lecturer at Tübingen in 1832. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined which was published in 1845 led to his dismissal from his lectureship. His later writings, produced in a continuing academic exile, move from a Hegelian position to an eventually anti-theological materialist one.
ii. The Historical Task
Religion involves "the perception of truth, not in the form of an idea, which is the philosophic perception, but [as] invested with imagery."
"Myth" is "the representation of an event or an idea in a form which is historical, but, at the same time, characterized by the rich pictorial and imaginative mode of thought and expression of the primitive ages."
iii. The Theological Task
"The Redeemer…is like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of His God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him," Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith.
"This is the key to the whole of Christology, that, as subject of the predicate which the church assigns to Christ, we place, instead of an individual, an idea; but an idea which has an existence in reality, not in the mind only, like that of Kant. In an individual, a God-man, the properties and functions which the church ascribes to Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the race, they perfectly agree. Humanity is the union of the two natures - God become man, the infinite manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude; it is the child of the visible Mother and the invisible Father, Nature and Spirit; it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as the inert mat-ter on which he exercises his active power; it is the sinless existence, for the course of its development is a blameless one, pollution cleaves to the individual only, and does not touch the race or its history. It is Humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its phenomenal life there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life; from the suppression of its mortality as a personal, national, and terrestrial spirit, arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens. By faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is justified before God; that is, by the kindling within him of the idea of Humanity, the individual man participates in the divinely human life of the species. Now the main element of that idea is, that the negation of the merely natural and sensual life, which is itself the negation of the spirit (the negation of negation, therefore), is the sole way to true spiritual life," Strauss, Life of Jesus.
Reimarus' Fragments: Outline
Jesus and Pharisaic Judaism added to Old Testament Judaism the belief, derived from "rational heathens and their philosophers," in Eternal Life
Jesus Purpose and Teaching
Jesus and the Call to Moral Action
Penitential Preparation for the Messiah
Sincere Love of God and Neighbor
Jesus and Judaism
Jesus Proposed no New Mysteries or Articles of Faith
The One Article of Faith: Jesus is the promised Messiah
"Son of God"
"Son of God means the just man whom God loves
Applied to Jesus it refers to God's special love for him as the Messiah
"Holy Spirit" refers either to God, to special gifts from God, or to that "goodness of mind and heart which comes, ultimately, from God
Neither of the "Trinitarian" passages in the gospels nor any of the statements involving unity between God and Jesus should be taken to imply distinct "divine persons" or an ontological unity between Jesus and God
Jesus Did not Intend to Abolish the Ceremonial Law or Found a New Religion
Jesus maintained and affirmed the Ceremonial Law
Baptism
The rite of baptism, as Jesus' understood it, implies no repudiation of Judaism
The "Trinitarian" baptismal formula is most likely a late addition to Matthew's gospel but even if it is accepted as deriving from Jesus its meaning, grasped in the light of contemporary Jewish usage, simply affirms the baptizand's faith in God's Messiah and expectation of God's spiritual gifts.
Jesus' inclusion of a remembrance of his own death in the Passover meal in no way abolishes the celebration of the Passover in favor of a new rite, rather it confirms and presupposes the Jewish Passover.
Jesus' Teaching of the "Kingdom of God"
Jesus' references to the Kingdom of God presuppose the current Jewish understanding of the phrase
Jesus and the disciples, prior to his death, understood "Kingdom of God" to refer to a temporal kingdom established by God through Jesus as the Messiah
Belief in Jesus as a suffering redeemer - and all reflections of that belief in the gospels - originated in their disappointment after Jesus' death
The Two Alternatives: a Comparison of the Evidence
The Alternatives: Worldly Ruler or Suffering and Risen Savior?
The Gospel Accounts Considered as Evidence for Jesus' self-understanding as the Messianic Ruler of a Worldly Kingdom
Jesus nowhere suggests a revision to the existing teaching concerning the Kingdom of God
Accounts of Jesus relation with John the Baptist fit most naturally with the proposal that the two men staged an announcement of Jesus' Messiahship
Jesus' conduct regarding his miracles and his journey to Jerusalem suggest most reasonably the manipulation of the common people to accept him as ruler
Jesus' final actions and the circumstances of his crucifixion suggest the disappointment of a Messianic pretender whose claims to work miracles and be called by God was seen through by the educated and by the Jewish leaders and only accepted - and then briefly - by the credulous crowd
The Gospel Accounts Considered as Evidence for Jesus' identity as a Suffering and Risen Savior
[Reimarus continues by examining the Resurrection narratives and the early Christian belief in Jesus' imminent return. In both he finds inconsistencies and contradictions that demand their rejection as evidence for a suffering and risen savior. He concludes by arguing that the Gospel narratives as they stand are best accounted for with a reconstruction that begins with Jesus' failed attempt to establish a worldly Messianic rule and ends in the disciples faking his resurrection, fashioning a new religion and, in the process, manipulating the history of Jesus to accord with their own claims.]