sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical forces which were at work at a certain period." The Lord's Supper was the memorial feast of this ideal hero.
"As the Christ to whose Parousia the community looks forward this Hero-god of the community bears within Himself the capacity for expansion into the God of the universe, into the Christ of the Church, who is identical in essential nature with God the Father. Thus the belief in the Christ brought the Messianic hope of the future into the minds of the masses, who had already a certain organisation, and by directing their thoughts towards the future it won all those who were sick of the past and despairing about the present."
The death and resurrection of Jesus represent experiences of the community. "For a Jew crucified under Pontius Pilate there was certainly no resurrection. All that is possible is a vague hypothesis of a vision lacking all historical reality, or an escape into the vaguenesses of theological phraseology. But for the Christian community the resurrection was something real, a matter of fact. For the community as such was not annihilated in that persecution: it drew from it, rather, new strength and life."
But what about the foundations of this imposing structure?
For what he has to tell us about the condition of the Roman Empire and the social organisation of the proletariat in the time of Trajan- for it was then that the Church first came out into the light-we may leave the responsibility with Kalthoff. But we must inquire more closely how he brings the Jewish apocalyptic into contact with the Roman proletariat.
Communism, he says, was common to both. It was the bond which united the apocalyptic "other-worldliness" with reality. The only difficulty is that Kalthoff omits to produce any proof out of the Jewish apocalypses that communism was "the fundamental economic idea of the apocalyptic writers." He operates from the first with a special preparation of apocalyptic thought, of a socialistic or Hellenistic character. Messianism is supposed to have taken its rise from the Deuteronomic reform as "a social theory which strives to realise itself in practice." The apocalyptic of Daniel arose, according to him, under Platonic influence. "The figure of the Messiah thus became a human figure; it lost its specifically Jewish traits." He is the heavenly prototypal ideal man. Along with this thought, and similarly derived from Plato, the conception of immortality makes its appearance in apocalyptic. [1] This Platonic apocalyptic never had any existence, or at least,
- ↑ If Kalthoff would only have spoken of the conception of resurrection instead of the conception of immortality! Then his subjective knowledge would have been more or less tolerable.
