weakness of Christian thought as compared with the general culture of our time result from the fact that it did not face the battle when it ought to have faced it, but persisted in appealing to a court of arbitration on which all the sciences were represented, but which it had successfully bribed in advance?
Now there comes to join the philosophers a jurist. Herr Doctor jur. De Jonge lends his aid to Eduard von Hartmann in "destroying the ecclesiastical," and "unveiling the Jewish picture of Jesus." [1]
De Jonge is a Jew by birth, baptized in 1889, who on the 22nd of November 1902 again separated himself from the Christian communion and was desirous of being received back "with certain evangelical reservations" into the Jewish community. In spite of his faithful observance of the Law, this was refused. Now he is waiting "until in the Synagogue of the twentieth century a freedom of conscience is accorded to him equal to that which in the first century was enjoyed by John, the beloved disciple of Jeschua of Nazareth." In the meantime he beguiles the period of waiting by describing Jesus and His earliest followers in the character of pattern Jews, and sets them to work in the interest of his "Jewish views with evangelical reservations."
It is the colourless, characterless Jesus of the Superintendents and Konsistorialrats which especially arouses his enmity. With this figure he contrasts his own Jesus, the man of holy anger, the man of holy calm, the man of holy melancholy, the master of dialectic, the imperious ruler, the man of high gifts and practical ability, the man of inexorable consistency and reforming vigour.
Jesus was, according to De Jonge, a pupil of Hillel. He demanded voluntary poverty only in special cases, not as a general principle. In the case of the rich young man, He knew "that the property which he had inherited was derived in this particular case from impure sources which must be cut off at once and for ever."
But how does De Jonge know that Jesus knew this?
A writer who is attacking the common theological picture of Jesus, and who displays in the process, as De Jonge does, not only
- ↑ Jeschua. Der klassisch'e fildische Mann. Zerstorung des kirchlichen, Enthullung des judischen Jesus-Bildes. Berlin, 1904, 112 pp. Earlier studies of the Life of Jesua from the Jewish point of view had been less ambitious. Dr. Aug. Wunsche had written in 1872 on "Jesus in His attitude towards women" from the Talmudic standpoint (146 pp.), and had described Him from the same standpoint as a Jesus who rejoiced in life, Der lebensfreudige Jesus der synoptischen Evangelier. im Gegensatz W leidenden Messias der Kirche, Leipzig, 1876, 444 pp. The basis is so far correct that the eschatological, world-renouncing ethic which we find in Jesus was due to temporary conditions and is therefore transitory, and had nothing whatever to do with Judaism as such. The spirit of the Law is the opposite of world-renouncing. But the Talmud, be its traditions never so trustworthy, could teach us little about Jesus because it has preserved scarcely a trace of that eschatological phase of Jewish religion and ethics.
