Translation:Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin/Preface
The course of the hypotheses which tried to interpret the origin of the Gospels – the hypotheses at least which belong to history and served, even by their fall, to bring about the correct position of the question, was completed when I appeared ten years ago with what I considered to be the beginning of the solution.
And I still think so – even if I do not expect even from the most degenerate corporation the testimony that its time is over.
Least of all would it behoove him who examines the basis of religious and ecclesiastical custom to expect this concession from the opponent. He would only renew the error of the opponent and keep it alive.
Only the religious innovators drew down from heaven the fire with which they threatened to destroy the unbelievers whom they could neither win nor refute.
But they never succeeded. Jehovah, who wanted to refute all gods of the earth, has had to surrender calmly to the fact that Zeus with his Olympic Round Table upholds the laws of ideal beauty and that the Capitoline God still decides today by his sayings the rights of the civilized world. Zeus and Jupiter have survived his most terrible threats; he has not been able to refute even the lowest fetish, if the refutation consists only in the total annihilation. It was in vain that the creators of the Christian community brought together the immense multitude of sinners in order to overthrow the privilege of Judaism with their help and to break the severity of God’s law – it was in vain that the bold innovators profaned the privilege of Judaism and exposed it to the nations – in vain the sentence of condemnation and destruction that they pronounced on the privileged people of Jehovah, which they pronounced on the privileged people of Jehovah – Judaism still exists, after having followed Christianity on all its conquests, in order to remind it of its weakness and of the intemperance of its threats. The daughter, who wanted to be the child of heaven, has not been able to stifle the curses and abuses of her biological mother.
The World is big and still has room enough for the past, if it is already serving as a stage for the new prerogatives. The old prerogatives still find a place on which they can maintain their existence alongside the new privileges.
But probably the later ones will always rob the earlier ones, which threatened them in vain with complete annihilation, of their procreative power. The world gives the old room to exist, but the innovators claim the power of progress and of historical shaping for themselves alone and, even if the struggle for this prerogative lasts for centuries, they will acquire it exclusively in the end. Their appearance is the certain sign that the old has exhausted itself – has exhausted its power precisely in the bringing forth of the new. Zeus will no longer beget ideals – the law book of the Capitoline God is closed – the synagogue, besides the church, has no longer been able to discover and form anything of value for the world.
Christianity, too, will remain and never be refuted, never be made to confess that it is refuted, — it will enjoy the same triumph that Judaism and the lowest fetish service won over its claims to autocracy.
It will stand invincible and irrefutable. It will suffer no danger when its existence is recognized and its origin investigated. It will never lack confessors who suspect nothing of the fact that their foundation of life was only one of those layers on which the ever higher rising ground of history rests; it will never lack teachers who, by their obscurity and by the indeterminacy of their spirit, are made to serve as bearers of the confused and attenuated tradition of a power which, by the clarity and sharpness of its inner contrasts, had subjugated the world to itself.
It will exist all the more securely because the dissolution of consciousness, in which its strict opposites have been lost, the apathy that has drawn from the unsuccessful struggles of recent years only the lesson of the advantage of passivity, the indifference to detail and the veneration of the phrase serve it as a rampart and protective defense.
It can no longer fight – but it also no longer needs to fight, since the dulness of the opposites that surrounds it as a safe screen repels all attacks, if the results of research could be called attacks. What does it mean when it is shown that the original type of evangelical history has been preserved for us in the Gospel of Marcus?[1] — Nothing if the general indifference to detail helps the ecclesiastical consciousness and entitles it to save itself from the disintegration of the Gospels to the phrase of the Gospel and to balance and blunt the differences and contrasts of the real Gospels by means of that phrase.
What does the Church miss if it is proved that the content of the Gospels is the work of different epochs, the product of points of view separated from each other by a long series of historical experiences and shocks? Nothing! For habit protects them against this proof – the habit that dominates even those who have long since renounced obedience to the sanctity of the letter and make up for the indeterminacy of their unbelief by the veneration of the iota.
To the prevailing formlessness, the simplified investigation, which determines from the scriptural construction of the Gospels their mutual relationship and their origin, will be regarded as formalism, as pure formalism, and the ecclesiastical consciousness will rejoice that its indifference to coherence and proportion finds a support in the popular aversion to strict definiteness. The sanctuary of its evangelical history will be preserved to the church unharmed, for outside the gates the great crowd of unbelievers stands guard, who owe the treasures that divine inspiration has given them to the mysterious coldness of tradition. Ask these unbelieving guardians whether tradition is capable of carrying around a great historical plan with all its details or of retaining fragmented details, whether in the multitude of the most diverse minds the whole can be preserved as such and with its original coherence, whether, with the changing interests of the epochs, with the incessant transformation of the individual circles of life, the detail must not gradually reshape itself, finally disappear and dissipate – whether tradition has the memory to retain large, artistically composed sections, the breath to recite them all at once, pigeonholes for petty, intrinsically indifferent notes – she asks: they will not let themselves be misled in the service of their goddess, Tradition, and their steadfastness will protect the last nest of the ecclesiastical dogma of inspiration.
This meager remnant can even rely on the protection of the unbelievers, who ascribe to tradition the power to create individual parts of evangelical history, for which it is not only a canal but also a source: – it asks whether the tradition of the church in its mystical indeterminacy is capable of drawing up a plan and creating the detail, whether there is a being apart from the writer and artist which can produce the form and shape, whether there is definite content apart from the form, it asks whether the tradition has the hand to write, the taste, the taste to compose, the power of judgment to connect the coherent, to cut off the extraneous – the question will be in vain, the shamans will go on circling the sanctuary and inside the ecclesiastics will smile at you if you want to prove that plan and detail of Protestant history owe their origin to the literary art. For whom is there proof that general principles, general views were what gave the congregation its existence – that even the first facts of Christian consciousness of the atoning death and resurrection of the Messiah at first had the value and form of general propositions and only later became a biography and a collection of anecdotes – that the general elements, the general essence, that the general elements, the general essence, the principle and its relation to the existing, to the law and to paganism were the subject with which the first church was concerned – that only later the general principles gained received their confirmation by individual collisions and utterances of Jesus, the individual cases and utterances are therefore always in contradiction with the general interest which they are to confirm and bring to view? – For the ecclesiastical consciousness at least and for those who owe their sacred history to the mysterious tradition, this proof will never be there. In the sandy desert of their obscurity and dissolution, the bearers of ecclesiastical consciousness will invincibly and irrefutably resist any progress of culture, and if they were in need of an ally against research, they are sure of one in those mighty spirits who are so secure in their unbelief that that they have not fought the battle unnecessarily, the detail of the proof an abundance, the execution a useless burden. To be sure, the church uses these confederates, but in the end, when it has used their help, it unfailingly strikes them on the head. Thus the last European peoples’ uprising broke out first at the bulwark of the state church of England, on the mainland the reform efforts of the capitals had to surrender to the ecclesiastical custom of the plains, the modest fundamental rights of the German parliament could not find the transition from paper to life, because they were lost in the labyrinth of ecclesiastical ruins which the bourgeois Enlightenment defends against serious attack, and now the church is giving the reins of government into the hands of those whom it can expect to punish the peoples for the superficial rebellion against its ancient privilege.
The Church remains, but by means of research the detail of its possession will be taken from it.
The vagueness of the spirits that surrounds it as a protective wall and in whose nebulous images its presuppositions are repeated in a weakened form will remain – if the church saw in Christianity only the outward execution of a plan long since prophesied and fixed and dogmatically formed in the expectation of the Jewish people, the Enlightenment will insist, that Christianity is nothing more than “the application of a found messianic dogmatics to the person of Jesus” – but this Enlightenment, even with its lack of self-awareness, will remain the prey of any violence – it will remain as the spiritless precipitation of Christianity and the negating and creative spirit of the same will be carried away by research as a profit and carried over into the future, by eliminating the chimera of that pre-Christian messianic dogmatics and providing the proof that the congregation created its dogmatics itself and contained in the first self-feeling of its higher power and dignity the source of the conviction that it was the purpose of the O . T . and that this is its prophecy. The confusion of consciousness, in which all differences of the gospels are lost, will remain, but it will become harmless, when the most glaring contradiction, which is concentrated in the fourth gospel, the contradiction between its new tendencies and intentions and between presuppositions, which are only at home in the synoptic gospels, in these only really executed, can be denied by the believers, but can no longer be circumvented.
The antiquity has become so weakened, the consciousness of the present, in which the entire antiquity is decaying, has become so indifferent that it no longer even takes an interest in itself, and the question that must finally be asked, the question of whether Paul can really be the author of the epistles, which previous theological criticism held to be intangible and inviolable, The question whether the revolution that constituted the new content and the supremacy of Christianity over the antagonisms of the old world was a purely Jewish act or was ignited by the friction of the chaotic struggles of all cultural elements of the old world – is considered a highly indifferent question. Out of indifference to itself, antiquity ignores research – but it also avoids it because it does not want to be recognized, i.e. because it does not want to give itself up, and because it hopes to win once again in its subtle half-heartedness, weakness and disgruntlement. If the European upheaval of 1848 was a consequence of the passive dissolution to which the entire antiquity fell victim, why should the fall not more often lead to glimpses in which whole parts of the old edifice once again collapse with a crash? It will happen, but the decay, even the crashing collapse, will never be a victory, and the decaying cultural world of the West, which is afraid of its self-knowledge, will nevertheless become the prey of the Lord, who will only create the great terrain on which it is worth fighting and research will prove itself as the victor over antiquity. The dissolution of the Christian world will take its course, but we will orient ourselves in it and assert ourselves in the midst of the general decay by getting to know its model, the dissolution of the Oriental and Classical antiquity, and Christianity itself as this dissolution.
The present work will describe this dissolution of the ancient world and the rise of Christianity. In order to gain the real historical ground, we will first examine the detail of the sacred history and let the scriptural relationship of the Gospels both to each other and to the contemporaneous and preceding products of Christian consciousness interpret the origin of the evangelical view in general.[2]
The later work will lead to the original: therefore, the latest, the fourth Gospel, makes the beginning.
- ↑ It is absolutely certain that only in the Gospel of Marcus are the individual sections correctly designed and their inner balance made to harmonize with the context, which itself brings them together again into an almost complete whole (however there are individual deficiencies in its presentation, individual errors and contradictions so great that it cannot claim the glory of absolute priority). Its advantages over the other two Synoptic Gospels will always be established; but once it has been established, it is important to seriously consider its shortcomings - shortcomings that conflict with its own correctness - and to take up again the question of its origin and its relationship to the other two synoptic Gospels. It is not the original gospel, but it has been the one most faithfully preserved for us.
- ↑ I will especially give my earlier works in this field the refutation that others have tried without success – but at the same time the thorough refutation that gives their lasting content the completion it deserves and as far as I am now able to give it.