about the Son of David had some kind of reference to Jesus Himself.
On the other hand, he takes it for granted that Jesus did not prophesy His death, on the ground that the arrest, trial, and betrayal must have lain outside all possibility of calculation even for Him. All these, he thinks, came upon Jesus quite unexpectedly. The only thing that He might have apprehended was "an attack by hired assassins," and it is to this that He refers in the saying about the two swords in Luke xxii. 36 and 38, seeing that two swords would have sufficed as a pro- tection against such an attack as that, though hardly for anything further. When, however, he remarks in this connexion that "this has been constantly overlooked" in the romances dealing with the Life of Jesus, he does injustice to Bahrdt and Venturini, since according to them the chief concern of the secret society in the later period of the life of Jesus was to protect Jesus from the assassination with which He was menaced, and to secure His formal arrest and trial by the Sanhediin. Their view of the historical situation is therefore identical with Pfleiderer's, viz. that assassination was possible, but that administrative action was unexpected and is inexplicable.
But how is this Jesus to be connected with primitive Christianity? How did the primitive Church's belief in the Messiahship of Jesus arise? To that question Pfleiderer can give no other answer than that of Volkmar and Brandt, that is to say, none. He laboriously brings together wood, straw, and stubble, but where he gets the fire from to kindle the whole into the ardent faith of primitive Christianity he is unable to make clear.
According to Albert Kalthoff,[1] the fire lighted itself-Christianity arose-by spontaneous combustion, when the inflammable material, religious and social, which had collected together in the Roman Empire, came in contact with the Jewish Messianic expectations. Jesus of Nazareth never existed; and even supposing He had been one of the numerous Jewish Messiahs who were put to death by crucifixion, He certainly did not found Christianity. The story of Jesus which lies before us in the Gospels is in reality only the story of the way in which the picture of Christ arose, that is to say, the story of the growth of the Christian community. There is therefore no problem of the Life of Jesus, but only a problem of the Christ.
- ↑ Albert Kalthoff, Das Christusproblem. Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie. (The Problem of the Christ: Ground-plan of a Social Theology.) Leipzig, 1902. 87 pp. Die Entstehung des Christentums. Neue Bzitriige zum Christusproblem. (How Christianity arose.) Leipzig, 1904. 155 pp. Albert Kalthoff was born in 1850 at Barmen, and is engaged in pastoral work ln Bremen.
