Kalthoff has not indeed always been so negative. When in the year 1880 he gave a series of lectures on the Life of Jesus he felt himself justified "in taking as his basis without further argument the generally accepted results of modern theology." Afterwards he became so completely doubtful about the Christ after the flesh whom he had at that time depicted before his hearers that he wished to exclude Him even from the register of theological literature, and omitted to enter these lectures in the list of his writings, although they had appeared in print. [1]
His quarrel with the historical Jesus of modern theology was that he could find no connecting link between the Life of Jesus constructed by the latter and primitive Christianity. Modern theology, he remarks in one passage, with great justice, finds itself obliged to assume, at the point where the history of the Church begins, "an immediate declension from and falsification of, a pure original principle," and that in so doing "it is deserting the recognised methods of historical science." If then we cannot trace the path from its beginning onwards, we had better try to work backwards, endeavouring first to define in the theology of the primitive Church the values which we shall look to find again in the Life of Jesus.
In that he is right. Modern historical theology will not have refuted him until it has explained how Christianity arose out of the life of Jesus without calling in that theory of an initial "Fall" of which Harnack, Wernle, and all the rest make use. Until this modern theology has made it in some measure intelligible how, under the influence of the Jewish Messiah sect, in the twinkling of an eye, in every direction at once, Graeco-Roman popular Christianity arose; until at least it has described the popular Christianity of the first three generations it must concede to all hypotheses which fairly face this problem and endeavour to solve it their formal right of existence.
The criticism which Kalthoff directs against the "positive" accounts of the Life of Jesus is, in part, very much to the point. "Jesus," he says in one place, "has been made the receptacle into which every theologian pours his own ideas." He rightly remarks that if we follow "the Christ" backwards from the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament right to the apocalyptic vision of Daniel, we always find in Him superhuman traits alongside of the human. "Never and nowhere," he insists, "is He that which critical theology has endeavoured to make out of Him, a purely natural man, an indivisible historical unit." "The title of 'Christ' had been raised hy the Messianic apocalyptic writings so completely into the sphere of the heroic that it had become impossible to
- ↑ Das Leben Jesu. Lectures delivered before the Protestant Reform Society at Berlin. Berlin, 1880. 173 pp.
