Justified True Belief

(●) The German playwright and critic who asked whether a fact of history can carry the weight of a religion, and left the question on the church’s doorstep. + Most of the men and women who mattered to Christian thought are remembered for what they believed. Lessing is remembered for a question he asked and then walked away from, whistling. He was a pastor’s son who never took orders, the finest German critic of his century, the author of the first German comedy anyone still performs, and the librarian who printed a dead man’s unpublished attack on the resurrection and then declined to say whether he agreed with a word of it. The question is short enough to fit on a postcard. Christianity rests on things that are said to have happened: a man born, a man crucified, a tomb found empty on a particular morning outside a particular city. Reports of such things, Lessing said, can be more or less well supported, but they can never be more than probable, and you cannot get from a probability about the past to the kind of certainty a person stakes his soul on. Between the two there is a gap. He called it a ditch, and he said he could not jump it. Two and a half centuries later that ditch is still where the argument happens. Kierkegaard built a whole theology of the leap because of it. Bultmann rebuilt the New Testament around it. The evidentialists, meaning the Christians who hold that the faith stands or falls on evidence a person can actually weigh, have spent their careers arguing that the ditch is a trick of the light, and they run from William Paley in the generation after Lessing’s death to Richard Swinburne and Lydia McGrew in ours. Whatever else he was, Lessing set the terms of a conversation the church has not finished.

(●) 1729 AD: Born in a crowded Saxon parsonage, and marked from the start for his father’s pulpit. + Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born on 22 January 1729 in Kamenz, a small town in Upper Lusatia in what was then the Electorate of Saxony. His father, Johann Gottfried Lessing, was one of the town’s Lutheran clergymen and soon became its head pastor. He was no country simpleton: trained at Wittenberg, sound in Greek and Hebrew, he had taught himself French and English at a time when hardly anyone in Germany bothered with English, and he translated the sermons of Archbishop Tillotson into German for his countrymen. There were twelve children in the house, ten sons and two daughters, and the salary of a head pastor did not stretch to twelve. The family was often deeply in debt. Lessing’s brother Karl remembered their father shutting himself up among his books for hours at a stretch, going out only for pastoral duties, keeping up the scholarship he had begun at university while the household squeezed itself into a clergyman’s income. The first child was a daughter, Justine Salome. Gotthold came next, and both parents settled early on what the eldest son would be. He would be a clergyman, like his father and like his mother’s father before that, and his mother in particular set her heart on seeing Gotthold in a pulpit. In 1741 he went off on a scholarship to St. Afra at Meissen, one of the three Saxon Fürstenschulen or prince’s schools, boarding schools Maurice of Saxony had carved out of suppressed monasteries at the Reformation for the express purpose of turning out Lutheran pastors. The discipline was close to monastic and a great deal of the day went on reading and expounding the Bible. He learned there, among other things, exactly how the Bible is argued about.

(●) 1746 AD: Sent to Leipzig to read theology, he fell in with a company of actors and never went back. + He arrived at the University of Leipzig at seventeen, enrolled for theology, and discovered a city with a theatre in it. The actress and manager Caroline Neuber was then the most respected figure on the German stage, and when the student showed her a comedy he had sketched at school, The Young Scholar, she recognised what she was holding and put it straight into rehearsal. It was performed in January 1748, and it was a hit. Lessing wrote afterwards that if a comedy is to be judged by the laughter of the audience and the clapping of hands, he had reason to think his was none of the worst. His parents did not see it that way, and there was worse coming. He had gone surety for the debts of Neuber’s company, which is to say he had put his own name to them and promised to pay if she could not. Then the company collapsed, and the creditors came looking for him. In July 1748 he left Leipzig with a cousin, telling a friend he would be gone a day or two, and did not come back. He fell ill at Wittenberg, wrote home for permission to study there instead, and spent a miserable few months in a sober little university town with his plans in pieces. Then in November he went on to Berlin, where his cousin Christlob Mylius was editing a newspaper. He was nineteen, without money or patrons, and he had just decided to do something no German had yet managed: to live by writing, answering to no prince, no church, and no university. The next decade in Berlin brought a friendship with the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn that lasted the rest of his life, a tragedy called Miss Sara Sampson (1755) in which for the first time on a German stage the suffering people were ordinary middle-class people rather than kings, and the Letters concerning the Most Recent Literature, written with Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai, in which he told his countrymen to stop imitating the French and read Shakespeare.

(●) 1760 AD: Five years as a general’s secretary in Breslau produced the two books that made his name, a study of the limits of the arts and the first great German comedy. + In 1760 he took a salaried post as secretary to General Tauentzien, the Prussian governor of Breslau, in the middle of the Seven Years’ War. It looks like a detour and it was the making of him. He had a soldier’s world in front of him, a regular income for the first time in his life, and long evenings for reading, book-buying, and a good deal of gambling. Out of those years came Laocoön (1766), named for the ancient statue group of a Trojan priest and his sons strangled by sea serpents. Everyone had been saying since Horace that poetry and painting were sister arts doing the same work in different materials. Lessing asked why, then, the sculptor gives Laocoön a restrained groan while the poet Virgil gives him a shriek that reaches the stars, and answered that the two arts have different jobs: painting and sculpture work in bodies laid out in space and must choose one moment, poetry works in actions unfolding in time. It is one of the founding books of modern criticism. Out of them also came Minna von Barnhelm (1767), a comedy about a discharged Prussian officer too proud to marry the woman who loves him because the war has left him poor and under suspicion. It was the first German comedy drawn from the life of its own country and its own moment, and it is still staged.

(●) 1767 AD: Hamburg’s national theatre collapsed under him, and so did the publishing house he had put his money into. + A group of Hamburg merchants decided that Germany should have a national theatre and hired Lessing to write about it. He was not a manager and not a director. His title was something closer to critic in residence, and what he produced was the Hamburg Dramaturgy, a running commentary on the performances, issued in instalments, which turned into the most important work of dramatic criticism written in German. He used it to demolish the French rules that German playwrights had been copying, the rules of the three unities that required a play to happen in one day, in one place, in one action. Aristotle, he argued, had never demanded any such thing, and Shakespeare, who kept none of the rules, satisfied the purpose of tragedy better than the French tragedian Corneille, who kept every one of them. The enterprise itself was a disaster. The public would not come, the actors quarrelled, and the theatre closed in 1769. A publishing house Lessing had gone into with the translator Johann Joachim Christoph Bode failed as well and took his savings with it. He was forty, celebrated across Germany, and out of work.

(●) 1770 AD: A ducal library in a country town gave him a salary, an exemption from the censor, and the locked-away manuscript he would eventually print. + In the spring of 1770 he took up the post of librarian to the Duke of Brunswick at Wolfenbüttel, then one of the great book collections of Europe. The town was small and the society was thin, and he complained about both, but the shelves were extraordinary and he went through them like a man let loose in a mine. Within months he had turned up a manuscript of Berengar of Tours, the eleventh-century scholar condemned for denying that the bread of the Supper becomes Christ’s body, and published it with a defence of Berengar’s right to a fair hearing. The post came with something more dangerous than manuscripts. As ducal librarian he was exempted from the Brunswick censorship for anything he printed out of the library’s holdings, an ordinary courtesy to a scholar who would mostly be issuing medieval documents. He would put that exemption to a use nobody had foreseen. The family of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the Hamburg orientalist who had died in 1768, a scholar of Hebrew and the other old languages of the Bible’s world, had let him read the enormous manuscript their father had kept locked away all his life: a systematic case that the Old Testament teaches no immortality, that the miracle stories will not stand, and that the disciples stole the body and invented the resurrection to keep the movement alive. In 1774 Lessing printed a short piece of it in his library papers, headed Fragment of an Anonymous Writer, with a hint that the author might have been a certain Lorenz Schmidt, a Wolfenbüttel scholar long dead. The hint was a blind. The writer was Reimarus, and the peace of his family depended on nobody guessing it. Nobody much noticed. He put the rest away for three years.

(●) 1776 AD: He married at forty-seven, and was a widower within fifteen months. + Eva König was the widow of a Hamburg friend, left with children and a tangled silk business when her husband died. Lessing had known her since his Hamburg years. They became engaged in 1771 and then waited five years while she travelled to Vienna and back trying to settle the estate, writing to each other across Germany about money, lawsuits, and how long it was all taking. They married in October 1776. A little over a year of happiness followed, and then it ended in a fortnight. On Christmas Day 1777 a son was born, delivered with iron forceps, and he lived a single day. His mother was not expected to live either. On the last day of the year, with his wife still lying in danger, Lessing wrote to his friend Johann Joachim Eschenburg one of the most terrible letters any grieving man has left behind. He seized that moment, of all moments, to make a bitter joke of the child’s good sense in leaving a world like this one so quickly. On 10 January he wrote again: "My wife is dead; this experience also I have now passed through. I rejoice that there cannot be many more such experiences left for me, and am quite easy." He was not easy. Those letters survive at Wolfenbüttel in a clear, firm hand, and the steadiness of the writing is the hardest thing about them. The man who spent the next three years arguing that no report of a past event can ground a present faith had just buried the two people he loved, at the very moment his public war over the resurrection began.

(●) 1778 AD: Stripped of his right to publish, he answered from what he called his old pulpit, the stage. + In 1777 he had printed five more of the Reimarus fragments, including one on the history of the resurrection, still under the name of the anonymous writer, and this time Germany noticed. Johann Melchior Goeze, chief pastor of Hamburg, came after him in print: an able, hard, thoroughly serious Lutheran who understood precisely what was at stake and said so. Lessing answered with eleven pamphlets he simply numbered and called Anti-Goeze, the best polemical prose in the German language, and with the short theological pieces that hold almost everything he had to say about revelation. The government of Brunswick stepped in. In June 1778 it forbade his publisher to print anything of his without a minister’s signature, confiscated the volumes containing the fragments, and in July revoked his exemption from the censorship altogether, demanding the manuscript and forbidding him to publish anything anywhere without permission. The confiscation delighted him, since nothing sells a book like seizing it. The gag did not. He wrote to a friend that he must try whether they would still let him preach undisturbed "at least from my old pulpit, the stage." What he preached from it was Nathan the Wise (1779), a verse drama set in Jerusalem under Saladin in which a Jewish merchant, a Muslim sultan, and a Christian Templar discover how much they owe each other, and in which the parable of the three rings says what the censor had forbidden him to say in prose. The Education of the Human Race followed in 1780. On 15 February 1781, at Brunswick, after an evening in which he had seemed unusually well and joked with visitors, he rose from his bed, came into the next room to greet the friends waiting there, bowed, lifted his cap with an effort that was beyond him, and collapsed. He was fifty-two. He died so poor that the Duke paid for his funeral, and the grave in the churchyard of St. Magnus went unmarked so long that it had to be found again by searching.

What He Taught

(T1) The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion. + Think of a family that has kept its recipes in one battered notebook for a hundred years. The notebook is precious, and a smudged page is a real loss. But the cooking is not the notebook. If a page tore, the family would still know how to make the soup, because the soup was being made in that kitchen before anybody wrote it down. That is roughly the move Lessing makes, and he makes it first. Christianity existed, he pointed out, before a line of the New Testament was written. The church was preaching for years before there were Gospels to preach from, and what the early congregations recited together was the rule of faith, a short spoken summary of the gospel that converts learned by heart. That summary was older than the canon, the settled list of books the church came to recognise as Scripture, which only later confirmed it. So an attack on the Bible is not automatically an attack on Christianity. If a fragment of the Old Testament will not bear the weight that has been put on it, or if the four resurrection accounts cannot be harmonised down to the last detail, the religion is not thereby finished, because the religion was never a book in the first place. Pastor Goeze saw immediately where this leads and refused to grant an inch of it. Once you have separated the spirit from the letter, who decides what the spirit says? Lessing had an answer, though it is not an orthodox one: the spirit is what the human mind can recognise as true on its own, and the letter is scaffolding around it. Christians who want to keep the useful half of his point, that the faith rests on the events and the apostolic preaching rather than on an unbroken chain of textual perfection, still have to answer the question Goeze asked, since Scripture is not simply a record of the revelation but part of it (2 Timothy 3:16).

(Q) "The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion. Consequently accusations against the letter, and against the Bible, are not also accusations against the spirit and against religion." + Source: Counter-propositions of the Editor, printed with the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, 1777 (James Sime’s translation, 1877). Lessing set it down in his own commentary on the fragments, as the reason a Christian reader need not panic at what he had just printed, and when Goeze came at him the following year he made the same sentence the first of his Axiomata. It is the hinge of everything he wrote in the controversy (T2).

(T2) No report of a past event, however well attested, can prove a truth of reason. + Here is the argument that made him famous. It needs stating slowly, because it is the kind of thing a reader nods along to without noticing how much has been assumed on the way past. Lessing works with a distinction philosophers were using everywhere in his century. A truth of reason is one you can see must be so, and could not have been otherwise: that two and two make four, or that nothing can be both round and square. A truth of history is one that merely happens to be so: that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, that a man named Alexander conquered Asia. History could have gone differently; arithmetic could not. Lessing’s claim is that these are two different kinds of thing, and that you cannot pile the second up high enough to reach the first. That is the gap in another form. A report of something that happened long ago, however many good witnesses stand behind it, can only ever make the thing likely; and the evidence can go on getting better and better without ever turning into the other sort of certainty, the sort a person stakes his soul on. Apply it to the Gospels. Suppose, he says, I have nothing historical to urge against the report that Christ raised a dead man, or even against the report that he rose himself. What follows? Only that some things happened. That God has a Son of the same nature as himself is a claim of an entirely different order, and no pile of well-attested happenings will carry me across to it. We all believe an Alexander lived who conquered Asia, he wrote, but who would stake anything of enduring worth on that belief, or renounce all knowledge that conflicted with it? Certainly not him. - The force of it. He is not saying the miracles did not happen. He explicitly takes the reports at their highest value and argues that even then they will not do the job. - The soft spot. Almost nothing anybody lives by is a truth of reason. That your mother loves you, that the medicine in the bottle is what the label says, that the man you married is who he claims to be: all historical, all merely probable, all of them things people stake everything on every day. If probable evidence cannot ground commitment, Lessing has proved far too much. - The honest part. He does not pretend to have refuted Christianity. He says he cannot get across, and he asks for help in a tone that sounds, in print, close to sincere.

(Q) "That, that is the foul wide ditch across which I am unable to spring, however often and earnestly I make the attempt. If any one can help me over, let him do it; I entreat him, I conjure him. He will deserve a divine reward from me." + Source: On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power, 1777 (James Sime’s translation, 1877). Later translators render the same phrase "the ugly broad ditch," which is how it is usually quoted in English. The title comes from Paul’s phrase about preaching "in demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (1 Corinthians 2:4), which Lessing’s opponents used to mean the evidential force of prophecy and miracle. His reply was that whatever that demonstration once was for eyewitnesses, what reaches us is a report of a report.

(T3) The worth of a man lies in his search for truth, not in the truth he thinks he owns. + This is the sentence of Lessing’s that people who have read nothing else of his tend to know, and it is usually quoted as a slogan for open-mindedness. In context it is sharper than that and more personal. The position he is arguing against, and Goeze held it in its hardest form, is that a Christian holds the truth, has held it since the apostles, and is obliged to defend it rather than reopen it. Lessing’s answer is that a truth held that way goes inert. It has to be turned over, tested against new facts, attacked and defended, or it stops doing anything in the life of the person holding it. Possession, he says, makes the mind stagnant, indolent, proud. Christian readers should notice both halves. The warning is one the church has often needed, and it is not far from the apostolic instruction to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15), which assumes a faith that can stand examination. But the claim underneath it is that the searching, not the finding, is where a human being is perfected, and that puts a permanent premium on not arriving. The gospel is an announcement that something has happened and that the search is over, which is why the same passage that thrills a sceptic reads to a believer like a man refusing a chair after a long walk.

(Q) "If God held enclosed in His right hand all truth, and in His left simply the ever-moving impulse towards truth, although with the condition that I should eternally err, and said to me, ‘Choose!’ I should humbly bow before His left hand, and say, ‘Father, give! Pure truth is for Thee alone!’" + Source: A Rejoinder (Eine Duplik), 1778 (James Sime’s translation, 1877). The sentences just before it are the argument the image is made to carry: "Not the truth, of which a man is or believes himself to be possessed, but the sincere effort he has made to come behind the truth, makes the worth of the man. For not through the possession but through the investigation of truth does he develop those energies in which alone consists his ever-growing perfection."

(T4) In the parable of the three rings nobody can prove which one is genuine, so each brother must show it by the life he lives. + Forbidden to publish prose, Lessing wrote a play. Nathan the Wise is set in Jerusalem between crusades, and the scene everyone remembers comes when Saladin, short of money and looking for a pretext to squeeze a rich Jewish merchant, asks Nathan a trap of a question: of the three religions, which is the true one? Nathan answers with a story he takes from Boccaccio and rebuilds. A man owns a ring with the secret power of making its wearer beloved of God and men, to be handed down to the favourite son in each generation. One father loves his three sons equally, promises the ring to each of them privately, and in his last years has a jeweller make two copies so exact that he cannot tell them apart himself. He blesses each son, gives each a ring, and dies. The brothers go to law. The judge throws the case out, and then offers advice instead of a verdict: since the true ring’s power is to make its wearer beloved, and since none of you seems to be loved, either the rings are all copies or the power is dormant. So live as though yours were the true one. Let each of you outdo his brothers in gentleness, generosity, and devotion to God, and in a thousand thousand years come back to a wiser judge than I am. Two things in that story need keeping apart. The practical counsel is the first of them: in a city where Jews, Muslims, and Christians have been killing each other, the way to commend a faith is to live it. A Christian can accept that without flinching, and Jesus said as much about a tree and its fruit. The claim underneath it is different: that the question of which ring is genuine is unanswerable now and will stay unanswerable. The apostles thought it had been answered, and staked their lives on the answer (Acts 4:12).

(Q) "Let each endeavour to vie with both his brothers in displaying the virtue of his ring; assist its might with gentleness, benevolence, forbearance, with inward resignation to the godhead." + Source: Nathan the Wise, Act III, scene 7 (William Taylor’s translation, 1805). The judge’s counsel to the three brothers, and the moral centre of the play. Lessing told his brother, while the censors were still on him, that he meant to fall on the enemy with it from another side, on the flanks.

(T5) Revelation is God educating the human race the way a tutor teaches one child. + A tutor with a seven-year-old does not begin with algebra. He starts with counting, moves to arithmetic, and only years later shows the child that the rules he was drilled in were instances of something larger. Nothing he teaches is false; a great deal of it is incomplete on purpose, because the child could not yet hold the rest. That is Lessing’s picture of the history of religion, set out in a hundred numbered paragraphs at the end of his life. Israel was given a primer suited to a childlike people: one God, plain commands, rewards and punishments in this world, and nothing yet about immortality, because the class was not ready for it. Christ came as the first reliable teacher of the soul’s survival, and the New Testament is the second primer, better than the first and aimed at a people who have grown. The doctrines in it that look like mysteries, the Trinity among them, are truths of reason that revelation handed over early and that reason will one day work out for itself. The picture cuts two ways. It is genuinely generous to revelation, and that should be granted first. The deists of his day, the men who held that God made the world, left it to run by its own laws, and never afterwards spoke into it, treated the Bible as an obstacle to be cleared out of reason’s way. Lessing will not do that. Revelation, he insists, gave the race things it needed and would not otherwise have had for centuries. And it is still not Christianity. A primer, by definition, is outgrown. Lessing says so in as many words, looks forward to a "new eternal Gospel" beyond the New Testament, and closes the essay by playing with the idea that a soul might come back to this world again and again to learn the rest, since a whole eternity is his. The church has never taught that the New Covenant will become as antiquated as the Old.

(Q) "That which Education is to the Individual, Revelation is to the Race." + Source: The Education of the Human Race, §1 (F. W. Robertson’s translation, 1858). The first sentence of the book, and the thesis of the hundred paragraphs that follow. §4 draws the consequence: "Revelation gives nothing to the human race, which the human reason left to itself might not attain; only it has given, and still gives to it, the most important of these things earlier."

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Goeze fought him line by line, and German Protestantism had its first full public argument about the Bible’s authority. + Johann Melchior Goeze is usually remembered as the villain of the story, mostly because Lessing was the better writer and got the last word. He deserves better. He was chief pastor of St. Catherine’s in Hamburg, a serious scholar with one of the finest private Bible collections in Europe, and he grasped the real issue faster than anyone else: if the letter and the spirit can be prised apart, then the church has lost the only public standard by which anyone can say what the faith is. He put that question to Lessing again and again and never got a straight answer. The controversy did what controversies sometimes do and forced the whole German church to think. Johann Salomo Semler at Halle, no friend of orthodoxy himself, published a long reply to the fragments in 1779 and argued that the historical study Reimarus had abused was also the cure for him: read the documents as documents, in their setting, and the case for the disciples as conspirators falls apart. That is the shape a great deal of later Christian scholarship would take. The habit of meeting an attack on the Gospels with historical work rather than with an appeal to authority begins, in Germany, here.

(†) The fragments he printed opened the two-century search for the Jesus of history. + When Albert Schweitzer came to write the history of that search in 1906, he began it with the fragments Lessing had published, and titled his survey From Reimarus to Wrede. Before 1774 the life of Jesus had been told by harmonising the Gospels, fitting the four accounts together into one continuous story and smoothing the seams where they did not sit flush. After it, there was a discipline devoted to asking what a historian, working only with the tools historians use, can establish about a Galilean preacher of the first century. Christians have had two centuries to decide what they think of the thing Lessing started, and the verdict has not been simple. Much of the quest produced portraits that turned out to be self-portraits, which was Schweitzer’s own complaint: each generation looked down the well of history and saw its own face. But the discipline also produced a great deal that has served the church well, including work on the Gospels as first-century documents that has made the case for their reliability far stronger than a harmonising piety ever could. Luke had already announced the historian’s programme in the first four verses of his Gospel, writing an orderly account from those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning so that his reader might have certainty (Luke 1:1–4), and much of the best modern defence of the Gospels amounts to taking that claim seriously and testing it. Lessing himself was careful, over and over, to say that he did not hold Reimarus’s opinions. He claimed only the right to have them examined in daylight.

(†) The ditch he could not jump has been answered in two very different ways, and the choice between them still divides Christian thinkers. + Picture the ditch with a man standing on the near bank of it, the evidence in his hands and the creed on the far side. Christians have tried two quite different things with that man, and they have been arguing ever since about which of the two to try. One family of answers accepts the ditch and looks for another way across. Søren Kierkegaard read Lessing closely and took him seriously enough to argue that faith was never supposed to be the conclusion of a historical argument: it is a decision, a leap, and the "approximation" that historical research yields, the best-anybody-can-say-so-far that is all a historian ever hands you, is not the kind of thing that could ever produce it. Rudolf Bultmann took a harder version of the same road in the twentieth century, relocating faith to an encounter with the preached word that does not depend on what a historian can dig up. The strength of this family is that it refuses to make a person’s standing with God hostage to the next archaeological season. Its cost is that it can leave the empty tomb looking optional, which is not how the New Testament treats it (1 Corinthians 15:14). The other family denies that the ditch is there. William Paley, whose Evidences of Christianity came out thirteen years after Lessing’s death, simply went on presenting the evidence and asking what best explains it. In our own time Richard Swinburne has argued the case in the formal language of probability, and Lydia McGrew has pressed the undesigned coincidences and incidental details of the Gospels as marks of testimony rather than invention. Their common reply is that Lessing’s two categories are the wrong pair. Nobody ever claimed that the resurrection was a necessary truth like a theorem. It is a contingent event, and contingent events are established exactly the way this one is: by testimony, weighed. Paul, standing in front of the Athenian council on the Areopagus, does not offer it a deduction. He points to a man raised from the dead and calls that the assurance God has given (Acts 17:31).

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a faith that hangs on an event, a name that is not one of three, and a covenant that is not a primer. + The disagreement is with what Lessing himself wrote, and it runs deep in four places. - The event. Lessing’s rule is that no historical report can bear the weight of a religion. Christianity was built on the opposite conviction from the first week, and Paul stakes the entire thing on a fact that could in principle have gone the other way: "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14). A faith that could survive the disproof of its central event would not be the faith the apostles preached. - The three rings. The parable’s counsel to live well is good; its premise is that the true ring cannot be identified, and the apostles held that it had been. "And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). That is not a claim about which religion has the better manners. It is a claim that something happened in one place, to one man, once. - The primer. In The Education of the Human Race the New Testament is a schoolbook to be outgrown, superseded by a "new eternal Gospel," and the essay ends by toying with the transmigration of souls, the idea that one soul passes out of one body and into the next, as the mechanism by which each of us gets enough lessons. Scripture puts the number of lives at one: "And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). - The concealment. This one is a matter of conduct rather than doctrine. He printed the fragments under a privilege granted for publishing the library’s own holdings, presented them as the work of an unnamed writer, and floated the name of a long-dead scholar he knew perfectly well had not written them. He had reasons, and the Reimarus family’s safety was one of them. It was still a misdirection, and Goeze was not wrong to say so. None of this makes him a small man or an enemy worth dismissing. He was the most honest opponent the church had in his century, he insisted that the argument be conducted in public and in daylight, and the ditch he could not jump is a real feature of the ground. The reply is not that the jump is easy. It is that the far side is reached the way any past event is reached, by testimony that can be weighed, and that a God who acts in history has not thereby put himself out of reach.