# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1864_S237
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan. 237

be shown, so that they may acquire what is needful with their money in
such a way that conscience is not injured. If now someone wanted to say:
I like neither the repurchase contract nor the partnership contract, but I
wish to retain the power to reclaim the principal, and to be certain both
of the profit and of the principal without risk of loss, as happens with
usury — to such a person, because he does not want to walk according to
love, we can give no other counsel from God's word than 1 Thessalonians
4:6: The Lord is the avenger over all these things.
(To be continued.)

(Submitted by Pastor Fick.)

The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan.

Translated by H. Otto.

Renan's work, the Life of Jesus, has as is well known created an
enormous stir. What has given it such success? This question is indeed
worth attention. In Renan's entire book we look in vain for a single new
thought. All the slanders, objections, and arguments that he brings
forward against Christianity have long since been made before, and have
already been proved far more "scientifically" and expressed far more
"brilliantly." The charm that Renan's book exercises upon the world lies
in something else. Renan has studied the taste of the spirit of the age;
he knows the ideas that presently move the masses. He knows well
enough what reception the true Christ has found, and still finds, in the
world. That is why he is careful indeed not to describe to the world the
life of the true Christ as the evangelists set him before us. Instead, under
the name of Jesus, he sketches such an ideal that everyone — even the
most ordinary worldling — recognizes himself again in it, to his own
pleasant surprise. Naturally, the Jesus whom Renan portrays bears as
little resemblance to the Jesus of Holy Scripture as the devil does to God.

Now, in order to make room for his own Jesus, Renan must first
undermine the authority of Holy Scripture. This he does with the utmost
shamelessness. He cannot find words enough to defame the apostles and
evangelists. "Even the evangelists, he says on p. 455, who have left us the
image of Jesus, stand so far beneath their Master that they frequently
distort him, since they are unable to rise to his height. Their writings are
full of false conceptions and misunderstandings. In every line we
recognize discourses of sublime beauty, reported by people who did not
understand them, and who substituted their own ideas for those they only
half grasped. On the whole, the character of Jesus was, at the hands of
his biographers, not only not embellished, but actually diminished. In
order to discover it in