# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1864_S245
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Life of Jesus by Ernst Renan. 245

against so wicked a defamation of the Most Holy. It is a flood of the most
frivolous lies which the devil foams up against Christ through Renan.
These lies are as stupid as they are ridiculous. They have all been
refuted a thousand times already; everyone who still possesses a spark of
reason and conscience, and some knowledge of world and church history,
and who has read the Bible even once, knows that Renan is lying.
Nevertheless his book is sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies.
Even booksellers who profess to be Christians spread this book for the
sake of filthy gain, and thereby help Renan and the devil to mock and
crucify Christ. Woe to them! The wages of Judas, for which they betray
and sell Christ, will bring them no blessing. There are some honorable
exceptions, but unfortunately only few.

This phenomenon, that Renan's book is devoured and praised by the
hundreds of thousands, is in any case a terrible sign of the times. The
world does not want the Christ whom the Bible paints for us, the holy
God-man, the redeemer from sin and death. As the Jews then preferred the
murderer Barabbas to the Lord Jesus, so the world now prefers to the true
Christ the false Christ which Renan conjures up for it. And who is this
false Christ? Well, Renan himself says: the agreeable moral teacher of a
world that has lived and wants to live, a merry man of the world, a
communist and revolutionary who abolishes the holy law of God, redeems
mankind from the doctrine that there is a holy God, and introduces
instead the unbridled freedom of the flesh. That the world should worship
with joy such a false Christ, who encourages it to fleshly lust, is a
matter of course.

But the readers who read and praise Renan's book with delight thereby
give testimony against themselves, that they are stupefied to a wholly
unusual degree. They know that Renan lies — as Renan knows that he lies —
they know that his lies are as gross as his contradictions are palpable,
they know that his book is disgustingly insipid, tasteless, and spiritless.
In that they praise this wretched work of the devil's making in spite of
all this, they thereby declare that they wish to be knowingly deceived,
and that they have thus lost all feeling for truth.

Yet this phenomenon also has its most gratifying sides. Renan, this
highly learned Parisian professor, brings to bear all his learning, art,
and cleverness in order to deny the truth of the Bible. And what does he
achieve by it? Only this, that Christians see all the more clearly that
the Bible is irrefutable, and Renan, by contrast, a mad ass. Furthermore,
the rising up of false prophets and false Christs, and the increasing
prevalence of unbelief, is a sign that the last day, and with it our
redemption, is near. F.