# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1864_S239
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan. 239

of Jesus," p. 34. "This unceasing striving to raise oneself up and put
oneself in the foreground, this constant arguing, this pompous, theatrical
posturing, this endless moralizing after every miracle, these stiff,
ponderous speeches — often faulty and awkward in their manner of
expression — and the long disputations, are, in comparison with the
splendid discourses in the synoptic books, insufferable to a man of taste,"
p. 37. Finally he comes to the conclusion that the Gospel of John contains
"the sometimes wonderfully fresh, sometimes badly distorted, memories
of an old man," p. 32, and that "the discourses in the fourth gospel are
not historical, but simply compositions meant to clothe with the authority
of Jesus certain doctrines dear to the heart of the compiler," p. 35. John,
"accustomed to letting his thoughts work with the feverish restlessness of
an exalted soul, reshaped his master even as he tried to portray him, and
sometimes leads us to suspect that in composing that peculiar work he did
not always recognize plain truth as his guiding principle — unless other
hands reworked his book," p. 199. Clearly enough, Renan says, in his
concealed rogue's language, that all the evangelists were frauds: "All too
simple explanations are always false in the analysis of these cunning
creations, calculated for the masses, which, by their dazzling glitter and
their endless variety, defy every systematic order," p. 49. John, too, was
just as colossally stupid as the other disciples. "The founders of
Christianity lived, at the very least, just as fully as St. Clare and her three
companions, in a state of poetic ignorance," p. 286. Naturally the Gospel
of St. John above all had to draw down Renan's wrath, because it testifies
so unshakably to the divinity of Christ.

Renan just as venomously reviles the Old Testament, especially the
five books of Moses, which he calls a code of blood. "Fanatical believers
constantly incited the persecution and punishment of anyone who fell
away from the service of Jehovah. A blood code, which imposed the death
penalty for religious crimes, was successfully introduced," p. 70. The
Book of Daniel Renan relegates to the Apocrypha, while he assigns high
importance to the legend-rich apocryphal Book of Enoch. But Renan
crowns his fatuous assertions by declaring the Talmud to be one of the
most important sources for the history of Christ. "In the history of the
sources of Christianity, the Talmud has thus far by no means received the
attention it deserves. We are of the same opinion as M. Geiger, namely
that this strange compilation, which, alongside the most vapid
scholasticism, offers much valuable information, gives us a correct notion
of the conditions under which Jesus appeared.

While Christian and Jewish theology have indeed pursued two parallel