# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S49
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America. 1902. 49

and of historical knowledge stand, as indicated, not in opposition to one another, yet they are different in kind. The historian can abstract from what is properly religious. He has only to investigate the ideas which by their power give rise to the general movements and govern their course, and to recall the facts in which they are manifested." Then he describes, over several pages, how Jesus "held out to humanity, beyond the particular commonwealth of the Jews, a universal union of a purely spiritual kind," how he "claimed to be the Messiah, and during his life and even after his death laid claim to a direct divine mission for it." For this "the Sanhedrin condemned him" and brought Pilate to carry out the sentence. "The most spotless, most profound, most humane being," it then says, "that had ever appeared on earth, found no place in the world of that day. Jesus had seen his death coming with full certainty, but he knew that his teaching would thereby be strengthened and saved." Of the resurrection of Christ not a syllable! "I avoid, as already mentioned, entering into the mystery." "But," he says, "who would not have supposed that with the Master, whose disciples had often proved very weak and doubtful, the teaching too would be destroyed? But death itself and the appearances that accompanied it and followed it, of whose reality they were as firmly convinced as of anything one has seen with the eyes and touched with the hands, lifted their souls to a joyfulness they had never possessed before. From disciples they themselves became teachers of the world, apostles of the Master, whom, following his own declarations, they proclaimed as God." In other words: Ranke thinks that to say outright, Jesus has risen from the dead, is not fitting for a historian, even if he personally believes it; but this the historian may and must say: it is established that the disciples believed in Jesus' resurrection; they were convinced that he had risen. For without this faith on their part it could not be understood at all how Christianity gained such a spread. Ranke therefore does not deny Christ's resurrection, but neither does he confess it as a historical fact. That is a pitiful, sad thing and proves well how great the power of darkness is. I should like to know how many of the events which Ranke presents as facts, and for which he can give year and day, are even approximately as well and as unimpeachably attested as the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The late Dr. Walther once said to me, when we were speaking of Ranke's much-praised History of the Popes, with great seriousness a saying which I want not to remain unknown; he said: "Whoever does not hold the Pope to be the Antichrist cannot write a history of the popes, even if he is a Ranke."