The Christ Myth
The Christ Myth, first published in 1909, was a book by Arthur Drews on the Christ myth theory. Drews, along with Bruno Bauer and Albert Kalthoff, is one of the three German pioneers of the denial of the existence of a historical Jesus.
History
19th-century historical criticism
Drews emphatically argues that no independent evidence for the historical existence of Jesus has ever been found outside the New Testament writings. He denounces the Romanticism of the liberal cult of Jesus as a violation of historical method, and the naive sentimentalism of historical theology which attributes the formation of Christianity to Jesus's "great personality".He mentions the key names of historical criticism that emerged in the late 18th century and blossomed in the 19th century in Germany:
- Charles-François Dupuis and Comte Constantin-François de Volney, the two French critical thinkers of the Enlightenment, who were the first to deny the historicity of Jesus on astromythical grounds, which they saw as key factors in the formation of religions including Christianity.
- David Strauss, who, at 27, pioneered the search for the historical Jesus with his Life of Jesus in 1835 by rejecting all the supernatural events as mythical elaborations.
- Bruno Bauer, the first academic theologian to affirm the non-historicity of Jesus. He claimed that Mark was the original Gospel, and the inventor of the historicity of Jesus. He traced the impact of major Greco-Roman ideas on the formation of the NT, especially the influence of Stoic philosophy. Bruno Bauer's scholarship was buried by German academia, and he remained a pariah, until Albert Kalthoff rescued him from neglect and obscurity.
- Julius Wellhausen, an expert scholar of the Torah/Pentateuch, who was a leader in historical and source criticism;
- William Wrede, the promoter of the Messianic Secret in Mark, and who confirmed Bruno Bauer's claim that Mark was the real creator of Christianity;
- Johannes Weiss, the first exegete of the Gospels to attribute an apocalyptic vision to Jesus, accepted by Schweitzer and many others. He initiated form criticism later developed by Rudolf Bultmann. Weiss gave the name of Q to the "sayings of the Lord" common to Matthew and Luke. He was considered the highest authority in his time.
- G.J.P.J. Bolland, a Dutch autodidact radical, interested in Hegel and von Hartmann, who saw the origin of Christianity in syncretism by Hellenized Jews in Alexandria;
- Albert Schweitzer, a historian of theology, who presented an important critical review of the history of the search for Jesus's life in , denouncing the subjectivity of the various writers who injected their own preferences in Jesus's character. Schweitzer devotes three chapters to David Strauss, and a full chapter to Bruno Bauer. Ch. 10 discusses the Priority of Mark hypothesis of Christian H. Weisse and Christian G. Wilke advanced in 1838.
Consequences of German historical criticism
- A general skepticism about the validity of the New Testament: "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. Historical criticism resolves all details of the Gospel story in mythical mist and makes it impossible to say that there ever was such a person".
- A loss of substance and meaning in the figure of the "historical Jesus": "But what 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." The human Jesus of liberal theologians, found by reduction and elimination of supernatural and other unwanted features, is so bloodless that it could have never induced the emotional fervor of a new spiritual movement, let alone a new religion.
Syncretism
Drews argues that the figure of Christ arose as a product of syncretism, a composite of mystical and apocalyptic ideas:
1. A Savior/Redeemer derived from the major prophets of the Old Testament and their images of:
2. The concept of Messiah liberator freeing the Jews in Palestine from Roman occupation and taxation.
3. Mixed with the patterns of Persian and Greco-Roman dying-and-rising godmen — godly heroes, kings, and emperors, whose stories inspired the new anthropological concept of dying and rising gods popularized by Frazer – such as Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Attis, Tammuz, Asclepius, Orpheus, Persephone, Inanna, also known as Ishtar, as well as Ra the Sun god, with its fusion with Osiris, Zalmoxis, Dionysus, and Odin, figuring in mystery cults of the Ancient Near East.
The Jesus Cult and the Mystery Cults
Drews points out the marked similarities of the early Christ cult to the existing and popular mystery cults – a theme already developed by W.B. Smith and J.M. Robertson, and later echoed by Maurice Goguel and reprised by the older brother of G.A. van den Bergh van Eysinga and van Eysinga himself. The rapid diffusion of the Christ religion took place in a population already shaped by and conversant with the sacred features of the mystery cults.Mithras
The Christ Myth is sprinkled with comparisons between the Mithraic mysteries and the cult of Jesus. Although the god Mithras was not exactly a dying-and-rising god, the cults share some meaningful similarities, especially the sacramental feast which allowed the initiated to experience a mystical union with the god.Mithraism, imported from Persia to Rome, spread rapidly through the Roman Empire in the 1st century, and was considered a certain rival to early Christianity. The major images show the god being born from a rock. The central theme is the hunting and killing a bull with blood gushing out. The sun was portrayed as a friend of Mithras, and banquets with him on the hide of the bull. Females played no part in the images or the cult. The cult was popular among soldiers, and was likely spread by them.
Few initiates came from the social elite, until the revival in the mid-4th century. Drews claims that the figure of Jesus seemed more concrete, his story more moving, and it appealed more to women and the underdogs of society. The premature death of Emperor Julian was one of the causes of the Jesus mystery eventually winning over the Mithraic mysteries.
Christianity and the historical personality of Jesus
Drews asserted that everything about the story of Jesus had a mythical character, and that it was therefore not necessary to presuppose that a historical Jesus had ever existed. In fact, Christianity could have developed without Jesus, but not without Paul, and certainly not without Isaiah.Drews concludes in the last chapter, "The Religious Problem of the Present":
The Christ-faith arose quite independently of any historical personality known to us;... Jesus was in this sense a product of the religious social soul and was made by Paul, with the required amount of reinterpretation and reconstruction, the chief interest of those communities founded by him. The historical Jesus is not earlier but later than Paul; and as such he has always existed merely as an idea, as a pious fiction in the minds of members of the community...the Gospels are the derivatives...for the propaganda of the Church, and being without any claim to historical significance... is a group-religion...the connection of the religious community..., a religion of the individual, a principle of personal salvation, would have been an offense and an absurdity to the whole of ancient Christendom.
''Christ Myth II – the witnesses to the historicity of Jesus'' (1912)
Critique of circular historical theology
Arthur Drews published a second part to his book, Die Christusmythe II: "Die Zeugnisse für die Geschichtlichkeit Jesu", to answer objections of scholars and critically examine the historical method of theologians. Joseph McCabe, who started life as a Roman Catholic priest, produced a translation of Christ Myth II as The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, published both in London and Chicago.Historicity of Jesus
The preface of this classic book states: "The question of the historicity of Jesus is a purely historical question to be settled with the resources of historical research."In Ch. 3, "The Methods of Historical Criticism" of Part IV, "The Witness of the Gospels", Drews denounces the unscientific methodology principles of theological history which have been used in Schweitzer's The Quest for the Historical Jesus, the new theological vogue since David Strauss, and resulted in a long string of Lives of Jesus. Drews criticizes historical theology as not respecting the rules of non-Christian historical method, and giving way to "sentimental intuitions" and "basic circularity" of argumentation, where the existence of Jesus is presupposed, but not evidenced by outside sources. He takes as example the case of Johannes Weiss:
ritics are convinced of the historicity of the gospels a priori, before investigating the subject... to seek the "historical nucleus" in tradition...How is it that Weinel knows the of Jesus so well before beginning his inquiry that he thinks he can determine by this test what is spurious in tradition and what is not?...The gospels, it seems, are to be understood from "the soul of Jesus", not from the soul of their authors!..Johannes Weiss... acknowledges that in all his inquiries he starts with the assumption that the gospel story in general has an historical root, that it has grown out of the soil of the life of Jesus, goes back to eye-witnesses of his life, and comes so near to him that we may count upon historical reminiscences...There is a further principle, that all that seems possible... may at once be set down as actual... all theological constructions of the life of Jesus are based... the historicity of which is supposed to have been proved by showing that they are possible... Johannes Weiss is a master in... way of interpreting the miracles of Jesus... If any one ventures to differ from him, Weiss bitterly retorts: "Any man who says that these religious ideas and emotions are inconceivable had better keep his hand off matters of religious history; he has no equipment to deal with them" ... Weiss's Das älteste Evangelium...he tries to prove that... Mark is merely incorporating an already existing tradition. "Not without certain assumptions", he admits, "do we set about the inquiry..."
Drews, like Schweitzer in his Quest, focuses mostly on German liberal theologians, while mentioning Ernest Renan only en passant. He completely ignores Baron d'Holbach, the first to publish a critical Life of Jesus, with his Ecce Homo! .