# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1864_S244
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

244 The Life of Jesus by Ernst Renan.

"In all this, a wonderful feeling governed Jesus as well as the throng of
cheerful children who accompanied him, and made him for all time the true
author of peace of soul, the sublime comforter of life," 216. One sees
that the devil has revealed all manner of things to Renan in the
"evangelical province." The "fifth Gospel" which Renan "reveals" here,
translated from his rogues' cant into German, means: Let us eat and
drink, for tomorrow we die. Such a cheerful, jesting, pleasure-seeking
Messiah, who keeps holiday every day, such an agreeable moral teacher and
sweetly smirking rabbi — should he not please the world?

Naturally, to Renan the doctrine of redemption is foolishness. Men are,
after all, cheerful, upright, honest, happy children of a pure heart. And
Renan himself is, as he boasts, a man of "incorruptible honesty," who
believes he needs no redemption at all, but rather sets himself high
above Jesus. What he praises in Jesus is accordingly only his morality.
But the morality that Jesus teaches "is the morality of a world which
wishes to live and has lived. 'The kingdom of God is within you,' he
said to those cunning ones who demanded outward signs of him," 132.
Jesus declared "his religion to be, to act rightly," 258. Of the kingdom
of God Renan gives the following senseless description: "The kingdom of
God will be like a closed hall, brightly lit within, in the midst of
this world full of darkness and torment," 300. Jesus taught "that the
rule of the poor was near," 218. "Everyone already saw himself sitting
on a throne beside the Master. They divided up the places and tried to
calculate the day. They called the doctrine nothing else than 'the glad
tidings,'" 230. Jesus taught a "tender communism," 217. "The sin of
avarice consisted then in the mere possession of property," 213. "The
mendicant orders, the countless communistic sects of the Middle Ages ....
were in fact the true disciples of Jesus," 222. "Property was forbidden
.... celibacy was decidedly preferred," 328. Jesus teaches "the
brotherhood of men," 140, "millenarianism," 172, "the rights of man,"
256, "the religion of humanity," 450. Jesus was a "democratic leader,"
223, a "destroyer of Judaism," 255, "a revolutionary in the highest
degree," 256, an "anarchist." "Government appears to him solely and only
as an abuse," 173. "His dream is a monstrous social upheaval, in which
the roles are exchanged, in which everything that possesses standing in
this world will be brought low," 174. "He despised the existing powers,"
166. Christianity "was the first triumph of revolution, the victory of
popular opinion," etc., 445. "Seditious in the highest degree, the
crucifixion ..... represented the Roman eagles, as they sanction the most
unjust punishments, a prefect orders them and soldiers carry them out.
What a blow against all existing authorities! They have never fully
recovered from it," 446. — —

Human language has no words to express the just abhorrence