Abraham Geiger

Judaism and Its History, in Two Parts. Abraham Geiger

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1911 Excerpt: ... Renan and Strauss. A Glance at the Latest Works on the Life of Jesus. About thirty years ago, Strauss accomplished the great feat of writing a critical work on the life of Jesus, and showed that the accounts of that time, as contradictory in themselves and impossible as the records are in conflict with one another, contained no actual history, but merely the legends which were formed within the circle of the first Christian Congregation about the personality of Jesus, and that those same legends were the result of the Messianic belief, were the offspring of expectations connected with the coming Messiah or with the events that were related in the bible, of the lives of other men, either by direct statement or put into it by interpretation. Thus it was very doubtful how much there would be left of real history besides the fact of the existence of the person. But Strauss had then just emerged from the School of Hegel, which, in the habit of converting historical facts into a dialectic process from within, in the habit of regarding events of the past as preparatory steps to later finished ideas, had long before viewed the facts of incipient Christianity--without, however, denying their historical character--as the hulls of higher ideas, and had asserted that those formerly veiled ideas had been brought to light and made perfectly clear in philosophy--the Hegelian philosophy, of course. That School called its philosophy the Absolute. Philosophy; it represented Christianity, which it respected as a ruling religious power, as the chrysalis of its philosophy, as the popular, yet immature religious presentation, preceding the complete, clear conception, and called the Absolute Religion. In that manner, the Hegelian School had persuaded itself and others that it was...