# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1864_S241
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Life of Jesus by Ernst Renan. 241

the Gospels bear witness, just as Christ, too, would not listen to the
devil, although he declared him to be the Holy One of God, Luke 4. But if
Renan imagines that he has therefore rightly understood the evangelical
ideal, the person of Christ, because he traveled through the land in which
Christ lived, he thereby proves only that he is the stupidest ass of the
nineteenth century. The Jews and heathen who crucified Christ, and Judas,
Renan's forerunner, likewise traveled through the "evangelical province,"
visited "Jerusalem, Hebron, and Samaria," without this "source of light,"
this "fifth Gospel," bringing them to a true knowledge of Christ.

Renan's relation to the sources of his Life of Jesus takes shape as
follows. He regards the Gospels as the "cunning creations of ignorant and
feeble-minded disciples," who did not always speak the plain truth. From
them, then, he can draw not much; all the more does he draw from Philo,
Josephus, and above all from the Talmud, that sewer of the devil. Whatever
else is found in Renan's work, the devil has revealed to him in the
"evangelical province," where Renan found his "source of light," his
"fifth Gospel." With this we by no means wish to deny that Renan has made
no additions out of his own ass's head. For in Renan's work there stand
assertions of so demented a kind that, however stupid the devil may be, it
is more likely that they originated either from Renan, or — which is also
not impossible — from the Jew Neubauer.

Besides this stance of Renan's toward the sources of the history, there
also comes into consideration his own personal conviction. He is a
thoroughly common atheist, and indeed of the pantheistic sort which is now
most fashionable. So one must indeed say that the devil could have found no
more fitting tool for the defamation of Jesus than Renan. Withal he
possesses a ridiculous arrogance, in that he bestows upon himself the
following self-praise: "We all who have devoted our life to science have,
through our strict conscientiousness in the application of the
means of conviction, through our incorruptible honesty,
and our unselfish love for the pure idea, founded a new
ideal of morality." P. 455.

Much as it now disgusts us to cite anything at all from Renan's
blasphemies, we believe nevertheless that we must lay before the reader,
in that man's own words, the chief propositions of the ideal which Renan
sketches of Jesus, so that he may form a clear notion of this disgraceful
book, with which Renan has already earned 250,000 thalers, and which is
therefore in any case one of the most-read books of the present day.

Renan denies not merely the deity of Christ — "not once does Jesus utter
the blasphemous idea that he is God," p. 128; "legend made him into God,"
p. 454 — but also his sinlessness. "Jesus was not without fault." "As so
many sublime traits of his
character were lost to us through the fault of his disciples, so