Justified True Belief

(●) A Hamburg professor of Hebrew who defended God in print and, in private, wrote the book that began the modern search for the historical Jesus. + For forty-one years Hermann Samuel Reimarus taught Hebrew to the sons of Hamburg merchants, many of whom went on to Lutheran pulpits. He went to church. He published a warm and careful defence of the existence of God against the atheists of his day, and it went through seven editions. When he died in 1768 the city mourned a modest, sociable, universally respected scholar, and his friend Johann Georg Büsch wrote a memorial that does not contain a hint of anything else. There was something else. From about 1735 until the last months of his life, Reimarus had been writing a second book that he never meant to print. Its title was Apology, or Defence for the Rational Worshippers of God, and it argued that the Old Testament reveals no religion, that miracles prove nothing, that Jesus preached an earthly kingdom and died believing that God had abandoned him, and that the disciples, unwilling to go back to their fishing boats, stole the body and invented Christianity. He showed it to two or three trusted friends and locked the question of publication away with it. His children let Gotthold Ephraim Lessing have a copy on the one condition that their father’s name never be given, and six years after the death Lessing began printing pieces of it anonymously, between 1774 and 1778, which set off one of the fiercest theological quarrels in German history. In 1906 Albert Schweitzer opened his history of the study of Jesus with this man’s name and wrote that before Reimarus, nobody had attempted to form a historical conception of the life of Jesus. He is on a Christian apologetics site for that reason. The questions modern readers ask about the Gospels, and a good many of the answers Christians have learned to give, were first put into their modern shape by a churchgoing Hebrew professor writing in secret.

(●) 1694 AD: Born in Hamburg to a schoolmaster who taught him at home until he was twelve. + Hermann Samuel Reimarus was born in Hamburg on 22 December 1694. His father Nicolaus was a Kiel man, the son of a clergyman from near Stettin, who had studied theology and then made his living teaching. He taught his son himself, at home, until the boy was about twelve, and the biographers of the next century thought that mattered more than anything else in the education that followed. Hamburg was a port and a free imperial city, which meant that it answered to the emperor and to nobody in between, and ran its own affairs, its churches included. In daily life it meant ships, money, news carried in off the boats from England and Holland, and a Lutheran ministry that took its watchman’s duties seriously. The boy went to the Johanneum, the city’s Latin school, and at about fifteen moved up to the Akademisches Gymnasium, the senior school that stood between the Latin school and university. There he came under Johann Albert Fabricius, the most formidable cataloguer of ancient literature in Europe, whose Bibliotheca Graeca set out to list every Greek author who had ever written and very nearly managed it. Reimarus would marry his daughter, write his life, and finish his great edition of a Roman historian. Everything solid in his career came out of that house.

(●) 1714 AD: He went up to Jena at nineteen, and came home from Holland and England a working scholar. + He entered the University of Jena in 1714. Theology was his favourite study, but he worked with the same appetite at philosophy and at classical philology, the close study of ancient languages and of the texts written in them, word by word and manuscript by manuscript. In 1716 he moved on to Wittenberg, took his master’s degree there with a study of the shades of meaning that separate one Hebrew word from another, and in 1719 was made an adjunct of the philosophical faculty, which is roughly what a junior lecturer is now. Then, in 1720 and 1721, he travelled through Holland and England, as an ambitious young scholar was expected to, because that was where the libraries were and where the arguments were loudest. It is tempting to say that he caught his doubts abroad, and the dates almost invite it. England in 1720 was full of deists, men who held that reason by itself gives us God, providence and a moral law, and that revealed religion adds nothing but priests and quarrels. John Toland and Anthony Collins were in print and being argued over; Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation, which would become the movement’s handbook, was ten years away. A young Lutheran walking through all that would have had plenty to carry home in his luggage. The tidy story does not fit the evidence, though. A decade later, in 1731, Reimarus wrote a defence of the New Testament for his own students, the Vindicatio, and Peter Stemmer, working through it, showed that the man who wrote it was still arguing against the deists from inside orthodox Lutheran assumptions, and arguing in earnest. Whatever happened to Reimarus had not happened yet. The break with the faith he was defending in that lecture room came in the middle of the 1730s, at home, in his forties, and not on a young man’s tour. He returned to his Wittenberg post and held it until 1723, when he took the rectorship of the town school at Wismar on the Baltic. The great libraries were behind him now. He was twenty-eight, married to nobody, and running a provincial grammar school.

(●) 1727 AD: He came home to the chair of Hebrew and held it for forty-one years. + In 1727 the professorship of Hebrew and the Oriental languages at the Hamburg Akademisches Gymnasium fell vacant on the death of its holder, Georg Elieser Edzardi. The salary was poor. Reimarus took it anyway, out of attachment to his native city, and turned down whatever else came along for the next four decades. Büsch’s memorial records the length of the service on its title page: professor in the Hamburg Gymnasium for forty-one years. In 1728 he married Johanna Friederike Fabricius, his old teacher’s daughter. They had seven children and buried four of them. The three who outlived him were Johann Albert Heinrich, who became a well-known physician and writer on lightning conductors, and two daughters, one of them Elise, who never married and who would one day make a decision that changed her father’s reputation forever. The house on which all this settled became one of the intellectual centres of the city. In his later years Reimarus liked to gather a circle of friends who talked without ceremony about whatever they were working on and told each other what they had found. He was, by every account of him, good company: dignified without being stiff, interested without being tiresome, a man who wanted to bring learning closer to ordinary life. Nothing in the picture prepares you for what was in his desk.

(●) 1731 AD: He defended the New Testament’s use of the Old in a course he never printed. + There is a real puzzle in the Gospels, and any attentive reader meets it sooner or later. Matthew says that the holy family stayed in Egypt until Herod died, and that this fulfilled what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son" (Matthew 2:15). Turn to the prophet, though, and Hosea is plainly talking about the exodus, about the nation of Israel brought out of Egypt as a child (Hosea 11:1). How is the one a fulfilment of the other? Multiply that by every place where an apostle quotes the Old Testament in a sense the original context does not obviously carry, and you have a standing question for anyone who teaches Hebrew for a living. In 1731 Reimarus answered it in the apostles’ favour. His Vindicatio dictorum Veteris Testamenti in Novo allegatorum, a vindication of the Old Testament sayings cited in the New, defended the way the New Testament writers read their Bible. He wrote it for the lecture room and never sent it to a printer, so it waited until 1983 for an editor, and it is a thoroughly orthodox piece of work: it argues against the deists, not with them. That is why scholars can date what happened next. The man who would spend thirty years taking the Old Testament apart in manuscript began by defending it in front of his students, and he meant it at the time.

(●) c. 1735 AD: He began writing down, for himself, doubts he never intended to print. + He said afterwards that he wrote from time to time to pacify his mind. Doubts had troubled him for several years, and he resolved to set them down carefully so that he could look them in the face and see whether they carried enough weight to settle the matter. The first one to take root, on his own account, was about hell. If salvation is found in the name of Jesus alone, and everyone who does not believe in him is damned forever, then the overwhelming majority of the human race, who never heard the name, are sentenced after a short life to endless torment for a sin committed at the beginning of the world by somebody else. "I confess," he wrote, "that this doubt was the first which rooted itself in my mind, and so immovably, that in spite of all my efforts, I never was able to conquer it." The words come down through David Friedrich Strauss, who worked from the manuscript in the 1860s, and reached English in Charles Voysey’s translation of Strauss’s life of him. They are the sound of a man arguing with a doctrine because he cannot bear what it says about God. The manuscript grew for more than thirty years. He called it Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, an Apology, or Defence for the Rational Worshippers of God, and the title is the key to the man. An apology here is the old word for a reasoned defence, the same word Justin Martyr used in the second century when he wrote to defend Christians to an emperor. Reimarus thought he was defending true worship, not abolishing it. He was not an atheist and never pretended to be one; he simply came to believe that the book his city trusted was not from God. He made a fair copy in 1767 and 1768. Along the way he showed the work in strict confidence to two or three friends, among them the Hamburg poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes, and told them that the time had not come to bring his theological denials forward openly.

(●) 1754 AD: He published a defence of God against the materialists, and it became a standard textbook. + The strangest fact about Reimarus is that the years of the secret manuscript are also the years of his public books, and the public books are on God’s side. Die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion, the principal truths of natural religion, appeared in 1754 in ten dissertations. Natural religion means what human reason can work out about God from the world alone, with no Bible open: that there is a maker, that he is wise and good, that he governs what he made, that the soul does not die with the body. Reimarus defended all four against the ancient materialist Lucretius and against the modern men who had revived him, above all Julien Offray de La Mettrie, whose L’homme machine of 1747 had argued that a human being is a piece of clockwork and nothing more. It sold, and it went on selling. Seven German editions had appeared by 1798, and translations followed, among them an abridged English version in nine dissertations, printed in London in 1766 by R. Wynne, whose title page advertises the book the way a bookseller would, promising that the doctrines of Lucretius, Buffon, Maupertuis, Rousseau and La Mettrie are considered there and refuted. Nor was that the only iron in the fire. Two years later came Die Vernunftlehre (1756), a textbook of logic and clear thinking that schools went on using for half a century, so that a generation of German boys learned to tell a sound argument from a shoddy one out of Reimarus. Four years after that came the book he was proudest of as a naturalist, Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere (1760), on the instincts of animals. And running underneath all of it was the task he had inherited along with his wife: the work his father-in-law had left unfinished, a two-volume edition of the Roman history of Cassius Dio (1750 to 1752) that nobody replaced for some seventy years. Set the two shelves side by side and the effect is dizzying. The same hand, in the same study, in the same decade, was proving that the world must have a wise and good author and arguing that the book claiming to be that author’s word was a fraud.

(●) 1768 AD: He died respected and unsuspected, and six years later Lessing began to print the manuscript. + Büsch’s memorial tells the end of it. On 19 February 1768 Reimarus invited a number of his closest friends to his house for the midday meal and was as cheerful as ever. At the door, as they left, he told them with solemn certainty that this was the last time they would all meet. Three days later he fell seriously ill. He died peacefully at three in the morning on 1 March 1768, at seventy-three. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the dramatist and critic, had met Reimarus only in that last year and did not know him well. He came to know the son and daughter much better, and it was they, Elise above all, who let him have a copy of an earlier draft, on one condition: the author’s name was never to be given. Then a small administrative fact turned out to matter enormously. Lessing was librarian to the Duke of Brunswick at Wolfenbüttel, and the series in which he published treasures from the ducal library was exempt from the censor, which meant that whatever appeared in it went to press without a churchman reading it first. So in the autumn of 1774 he printed the first piece, on the toleration of deists, as a fragment by an unnamed author found among the library’s papers. In January 1777 five more followed. On 21 May 1778 he printed the seventh and worst, On the Aims of Jesus and His Disciples. What followed is known in Germany simply as the Fragmentenstreit, the quarrel over the fragments, and it was less a debate than a brawl. Johann Melchior Goeze, chief pastor of St Catherine’s in Hamburg and head of the city’s Lutheran clergy through the 1760s, went after Lessing in print, and Lessing, who was one of the best writers in Europe and knew it, answered with eleven pamphlets titled Anti-Goeze between April and July 1778. Earlier in the quarrel, replying to a milder opponent, he had already set out his famous complaint that the accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason. It sounds forbidding, but the worry underneath it is one anybody can feel. Whether a particular man walked out of a particular tomb in a particular year is the sort of claim you settle with witnesses and documents, and witnesses and documents can make a thing very likely without ever quite making it certain. The claims Christianity then wants to hang on that event are claims about God and the soul, which are supposed to be certain if anything is. That is the gap Lessing said he could not get across, and theologians have been building bridges over it ever since. The Duke ended the quarrel instead of settling it. On 6 July 1778 he revoked the censorship exemption by cabinet order, and a week later demanded the manuscript back. Lessing, shut out of the argument, turned to the stage and wrote Nathan the Wise, a play in which a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian have to work out what to make of one another. The secret held for another generation. In 1814 the son, Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus, had a complete copy placed in the university library at Göttingen and named his father as the author, and the quiet Hebrew professor of Hamburg became, permanently, the first name in the modern study of Jesus.

What He Taught

(T1) Reason alone, reading the world, arrives at a wise and good God. + Pick up a pocket watch, said William Paley half a century later, and you know without being told that somebody made it. Reimarus had already run the argument on a larger object. The world, he says, is inanimate machinery: rock, water, air, light, none of it alive, none of it capable of wanting anything. Yet the whole of it is arranged so that living creatures can eat, breathe, see and reproduce. Machinery arranged for a purpose does not arrange itself, and so behind it there must be a being who is not part of it, who did not begin, and who could not fail to exist. He worked with what philosophers call final causes, a term worth learning because it runs through every design argument ever made. Aristotle distinguished four kinds of cause, and the final cause is simply the purpose a thing serves: the final cause of a knife is cutting, the final cause of an eyelid is keeping grit out of the eye. To argue from final causes is to say that when you find an arrangement that serves a purpose, you have found evidence of somebody who had that purpose in mind. Reimarus insisted on approaching God from two directions at once, and both directions have names worth carrying away. One is a priori, which means reasoning from an idea rather than from anything you have gone out and looked at, the way you can know, without going out and measuring any triangles, that a triangle’s three angles come to two right angles. Taken that way, the argument begins from the bare notion of a being that exists necessarily, one that could not have failed to be there and does not depend on anything else to keep it in existence, and shows that such a being must be unchanging and eternal. The other is a posteriori, reasoning backward from what has actually been made, the way a mechanic who has never met the driver can tell you something about him from the wear on the tyres. Taken that way, we may, he writes, view his perfections displayed in his works, "as in a visible mirrour of the power and attributes of the invisible God". A reader who knows Paul will hear the echo, because that is very nearly Romans 1:20. Reimarus would have accepted the verse without a murmur. What he would not accept is the next step, that this God ever opened his mouth.

(Q) "This self-existent, eternal, and necessary Being, who hath created the whole world and the inanimate things that are in it, for the sake of animate Beings, we usually denominate God." + Source: Reimarus, The Principal Truths of Natural Religion, Dissertation IV, section 1 (R. Wynne’s abridged English version, London, 1766, p. 145). The sentence sits at the head of the dissertation on God and his design in creation, and it is a definition rather than a flourish: Reimarus has just finished arguing that neither the world nor nature can have produced living things, and he is naming what is left over.

(T2) Animals practise a thousand arts that nobody taught them. + This was the part of his case Reimarus made his own, and it is the reason naturalists went on citing him long after theologians had stopped. A silkworm that has never seen a cocoon spins one. A bee builds a cell at an angle that wastes no wax. A bird that was itself hatched in a nest, and has watched nobody build one, builds the nest its species builds. A salmon that has spent years at sea finds the mouth of a particular river and swims up it against the current. None of these creatures has been shown how, and none of them gets it wrong. He gave the thing a name: Kunsttriebe, art-instincts, the drives by which an animal performs a skilled piece of work without having learned it. His 1760 book on them is one of the first systematic attempts in any language to sort animal behaviour into kinds, and the reasoning in it is careful. The skill cannot come from experience, because the animal succeeds the first time. It cannot come from the body alone, because bodies do not plan. And it cannot be the animal’s own invention, because that would make animals cleverer than we are: humans have laboured for thousands of years, in company, to bring their arts to their present state, while every creature does what it needs to do perfectly from birth. What is left, he argued, is that the skill was put there. Christians have used this argument for centuries and still do. It is also the point where the modern reply lands hardest. Charles Darwin devoted a chapter of the Origin of Species in 1859 to instinct, arguing that a small advantage in behaviour, inherited and accumulated over enough generations, will produce exactly the untaught skills Reimarus catalogued. Anyone who wants to run the argument from instinct today has to answer that chapter, and the versions of the design argument that carry weight in current philosophy have moved to other ground, to the fine-tuning of the universe’s physical constants rather than to the nest of a bird.

(Q) "Thus, in all animals which do not partake of reason, we perceive a certain natural impulse, instinct, or skill, by which they perform, in a masterly manner, all that the most perfect reason could suggest to them for the welfare of each species; and this by an innate and prompt dexterity, without any deliberation, trial, or experience; without any instruction, model, or pattern." + Source: Reimarus, The Principal Truths of Natural Religion, Dissertation V, section 4 (R. Wynne’s abridged English version, London, 1766, pp. 216 to 217). The examples he reaches for immediately afterwards are the silkworm and the caterpillar spinning a bed to change shape in, the bee building cells and laying up stores against winter, the bird building for its eggs, and fish that come in from the open sea and swim upstream to spawn.

(T3) A miracle cannot prove a doctrine, because the miracle needs as much proving as the doctrine does. + Suppose a man asks you to believe an unlikely story and offers, as his evidence, a second story even less likely than the first. You have not been given a reason; you have been given another thing to check. That, in one move, is what Reimarus thought the appeal to miracles amounts to. A miracle is an event outside the ordinary course of nature, so it is by definition the least expected sort of report there is, and it therefore requires as much examination as the doctrine it is wheeled in to support. If the doctrine is credible on its own, the wonder is unnecessary. If the doctrine contains a contradiction, no wonder can mend it. He applied the knife to the Old Testament with some relish. In the fragment on the crossing of the Red Sea, he asks his reader to picture what the narrative actually requires: three million people with women, babies, the old, the sick, the lame and the blind, with tents, furniture and ten thousand wagons, three hundred thousand oxen and six hundred thousand sheep, going down into a sea bed in the dark and out the other side before morning. Schweitzer called that fragment "one of the ablest, wittiest, and most acute which has ever been written" in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and added in the same breath that Reimarus never suspected how much of the trouble came from a narrative stitched together out of older sources. Two other objections run alongside it. One is about reach: a revelation that all people could reasonably be expected to believe would have to arrive everywhere, in every language, in every century, and a book written in Hebrew and Greek and carried by missionaries reaches a fraction of the human race at any given moment. The other is the one that started him, about hell, and the two are the same complaint in different clothes. A saving message that most people never hear, backed by a punishment for not hearing it, looked to Reimarus like a charge against God rather than a report from him.

(Q) "No one can affirm that miracles of themselves establish a single article of faith." + Source: Reimarus, On the Aims of Jesus and His Disciples, section 46 (Charles Voysey’s English edition, London, 1879, p. 69). It comes a few lines into his chapter on miracles and prophecies, where he is sorting the essential articles of Christianity from everything else, and a page further on he says why: miracles "are unnatural events, as improbable as they are incredible, requiring as much examination as that which they are supposed to prove" (T3).

(T4) Jesus preached the kingdom his hearers were already expecting, an earthly deliverance for Israel. + Here is the observation on which everything else turns, and it is a genuinely good one. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17). Jesus sends that message through every town in Judea, and neither he nor John the Baptist ever stops to explain what the phrase means. Reimarus draws the obvious inference from the silence: if you use a familiar expression without correcting it, you mean it in the sense your hearers already give it. And the sense first-century Judea gave it was not obscure. The kingdom was the restoration of Israel, the end of foreign rule, the throne of David occupied again. So Reimarus concluded that Jesus was not founding a new religion at all. He stood inside the Jewish faith, accepted its expectations without correcting them, and announced that the hope thousands of people were already nursing was about to arrive. On this reading his followers understood him perfectly well. Even after the crucifixion, two of them walking out of Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus say exactly what they had been hoping, and say it in the past tense: "But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel" (Luke 24:21). And then the cross, and the cry in Aramaic that Matthew keeps in the original before translating it: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). Reimarus read that as a plan collapsing in public, and said so without softening it. Whether or not he was right, notice what he had done. He had insisted that Jesus must be understood inside the hopes and the vocabulary of first-century Judaism rather than out of a catechism, and that is now the first rule of the field.

(Q) "It was then clearly not the intention or the object of Jesus to suffer and to die, but to build up a worldly kingdom, and to deliver the Israelites from bondage." + Source: Reimarus, On the Aims of Jesus and His Disciples, section 8 (Charles Voysey’s English edition, London, 1879, p. 27). The sentence directly follows his reading of the cry from the cross, which he takes to be a confession that God had not helped Jesus to carry out his intention and attain his object as he had hoped he would (T4).

(T5) The disciples invented a suffering spiritual saviour only after their first hope had collapsed. + Reimarus called the two accounts of Jesus the old system and the new one. The old system, the one the disciples actually held while he was alive, was the worldly deliverance of Israel. The new system, assembled after the execution, was the one the church has preached ever since: that the Messiah had to die to obtain forgiveness, that he rose on the third day, that he ascended, and that he will return in the clouds with power and glory to judge the living and the dead. The motive he assigns is deliberately unheroic. These were men who had left their trades and enjoyed three years of being somebody; going back to the boats was intolerable. So, on his reconstruction, they took the body, waited the seven weeks until identification was impossible, and began preaching. He is aware that this is an old accusation and does not mind: Matthew himself records the story put about in Jerusalem, "His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep" (Matthew 28:13), and Reimarus simply says that he finds the Sanhedrin, the council of chief priests and elders that governed Jewish affairs in Jerusalem, more credible than the fishermen. The pressure point he chose, though, is not the tomb but the calendar. The new system promised a return, and promised it soon, within the lifetime of the people listening. That is the parousia, the Greek word for an arrival or a royal visit, which the New Testament uses for the coming of Christ in glory. Reimarus argued that the appointed time had come and gone, that generation after generation had quietly moved the date, and that the theologians of his own day passed over the matter briskly because it did not suit them. Christianity, he said, rests on two pillars, a resurrection and a return, and he set out to knock down both.

(Q) "The new system of a suffering spiritual Saviour, which no one had ever known or thought of before, was invented after the death of Jesus, and invented only because the first hopes had failed." + Source: Reimarus, On the Aims of Jesus and His Disciples, section 9 (Charles Voysey’s English edition, London, 1879, p. 28). The sentence closes his survey of the life of Jesus, and the next lines turn to the new belief and the long examination of the resurrection accounts that fills the rest of the fragment.

(Q) "I have avoided touching unessential contingencies, but have forced my way right up to the substance and main point of Christianity." + Source: Reimarus, On the Aims of Jesus and His Disciples, section 45 (Charles Voysey’s English edition, London, 1879, p. 67). He is taking stock near the end. He has left aside, he says, the decorative arguments on both sides, the edifying circumstances and the repulsive ones, because nothing can be concluded with certainty from them, and has gone instead for the two claims that hold the whole structure up. Whatever else is true of him, that instinct was sound, and it is why Christian scholarship had to answer him on his own ground rather than on easier ground.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The first replies came within a year, and they moved Christian argument onto historical ground. + The loudest response was also the least useful. Johann Melchior Goeze, chief pastor of St Catherine’s in Hamburg, went after Lessing rather than the fragment, and the ground he chose to stand on was verbal inspiration, the view that God gave the biblical writers not merely their message but their very words, so that one mistake anywhere would bring the whole building down. That is a position which leaves its defender nowhere to give an inch, and Goeze was defending it against one of the best prose stylists in Europe. The public watched a churchman lose an argument about whether an argument should be allowed, which was not what anybody needed. The serious answer came from Halle. Johann Salomo Semler was himself one of the pioneers of historical criticism, which means reading the biblical books the way one reads any other ancient document, asking who wrote this, and when, and for whom, and out of what older material; he was no friend of wooden literalism, and that made him a far more dangerous opponent than Goeze. In 1779 he published a reply of more than four hundred pages that went through the fragment section by section. Johann Heinrich Daniel Moldenhawer took the earlier fragments one at a time, and gave a whole book of 1779 to the fifth of them, the one on the resurrection of Jesus. What those men grasped, and Goeze did not, is that the fragment had changed the subject. The question was no longer whether the Bible is inspired but whether the events in it happened, and that is a question you answer with evidence, sources and testimony rather than with an appeal to the authority of the book itself. Christian apologetics reorganised around that, and not only in Germany. Fifteen years later, in England, William Paley published A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794), whose central argument goes straight at any account that makes the apostles deceivers: they passed their lives, he says, in labours, dangers and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of what they claimed to have seen, which is not what men do for a story they made up. Simon Greenleaf at Harvard would put the Gospel witnesses through the rules of legal evidence in 1846 on the same instinct. The line runs unbroken from there to the resurrection arguments being made today.

(†) Albert Schweitzer began the story of the modern search for Jesus with him, and called the fragment a masterpiece. + In 1906 Albert Schweitzer published Von Reimarus zu Wrede, which English readers know as The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and the title says where he thought the story starts. His verdict on the fragment is famous and worth quoting whole: "This essay is not only one of the greatest events in the history of criticism, it is also a masterpiece of general literature." He added that seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, or so lofty a scorn, and then noted that the scorn came with dignity and serious purpose, because Reimarus was not writing a pamphlet. Schweitzer credited him with three things. He saw that the phrase "kingdom of God" is left undefined in the preaching of Jesus because it needed no defining. He saw that there is a real historical difference between what Jesus proclaimed in his lifetime and what the apostles wrote afterwards, and that the difference is a question rather than a scandal. And he saw that early Christianity did not simply grow out of the teaching of Jesus like a plant from a seed, but came into being in response to events. Schweitzer thought the whole century of theology after him had gone backwards by ignoring all three. He also said where Reimarus went wrong, and the correction is the important part. Reimarus had found two strands of messianic expectation running through the Judaism of the period, two different pictures of the deliverer Israel was waiting for. One was political: a son of David, a king of the old line, who would put the foreign armies out and reign in Jerusalem. The other was apocalyptic, a word that means an unveiling and describes the strand of Jewish writing in which God breaks history open from outside; its central figure is the Son of Man of Daniel 7, a human figure who comes with the clouds of heaven and is handed a kingdom that never ends. Reimarus laid those two strands out one after the other, in sequence. The first, he said, belonged to Jesus. The second was invented by the disciples after the crucifixion. Schweitzer answered that they were not consecutive but superimposed, laid over one another and held together in the same minds at the same time, so that for a first-century Jew the king and the Son of Man could be one and the same figure. Two hopes in one head, in other words, rather than two centuries in a row. Once you see that, the whole case for a post-crucifixion invention loses its foundation, because the material was already in the air and there was nothing left to invent. The field Reimarus opened has been worked hardest, in the last half-century, by scholars who believe the creed. N. T. Wright’s account of Jesus inside Israel’s hope of restoration takes Reimarus’s question with complete seriousness and answers it in the church’s favour. That is the pattern of this whole episode: the Jewishness of Jesus, which Reimarus produced as the acid that would dissolve Christianity, turned out to be one of the strongest reasons for trusting the Gospels, because a fabricated Messiah would have been fabricated to fit.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the stolen body, the useless miracle, the cry from the cross, and a God who never speaks. + There are four places where the road divides, and in each of them Reimarus deserves to be heard at his full strength before he is answered. - The stolen body. The charge is as old as the empty tomb, and Matthew prints it himself rather than hiding it (Matthew 28:13, 28:15), which is not the behaviour of a cover-up. What theft explains is an empty grave. What it does not explain is the rest: the appearances to individuals and to groups, including one to more than five hundred people at once while most of them were still alive to be questioned (1 Corinthians 15:6); the conversion of Paul, who had been hunting the church (1 Corinthians 15:8, 15:9); the conversion of James, the brother who had not believed in him (John 7:5, 1 Corinthians 15:7); the women as the first witnesses, in a culture where an invented story would never have chosen them; and men dying, one after another, for a body they would have known was in a ditch. Reimarus answered that he found the Sanhedrin more credible than the disciples, which is a preference rather than an argument. - The uselessness of miracles. Against a free-standing wonder offered as a proof, his rule is fair, and Christians should concede it. The New Testament does not work that way. Its wonders are signs inside a claim, done in daylight in front of hostile witnesses who conceded the deed and disputed the meaning: the council in John’s Gospel says "this man performs many signs" and asks what to do about it (John 11:47), and Peter’s opponents in Acts admit that a notable sign has been done and that they cannot deny it (Acts 4:16). When Paul made his case before a king he rested it on public knowledge, "for this has not been done in a corner" (Acts 26:26). That is a different kind of appeal from the one Reimarus refuted. - The cry from the cross. Matthew 27:46 is the opening line of Psalm 22, a psalm that begins in abandonment and ends with the nations remembering and turning to the Lord. A dying Jew quoting its first line is not necessarily reporting the end of hope. And the Gospels present the suffering as the plan rather than its failure: Jesus tells the disciples plainly that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer, be killed and rise (Matthew 16:21), and the risen Christ asks on the Emmaus road whether it was not necessary that he should suffer these things and enter his glory (Luke 24:26). - The God who never speaks. This is the deepest division, and it is not really about evidence. Reimarus argued for a maker who built a world for the sake of living things and cares what becomes of them, and then ruled out in advance that such a being would ever say anything to them. That line was drawn rather than discovered. If the God of Dissertation IV exists, there is no reason in the world why he should be mute, and Christians have said from the beginning that he was not: "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1, 1:2). The apostles knew the accusation Reimarus would bring, and answered it in advance: "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16). Reimarus wanted worshippers who were rational, and kept God, providence and immortality to the end. What he lost was the Word: a God who can be inferred from the wiring of an insect but never heard, adored but never addressed. The church’s reply has never been that his questions were impious. It has been that the rational thing to do with a testimony is to examine it, which is precisely what two and a half centuries of Christian scholarship, provoked in no small part by him, have gone on doing.