The history of early Christianity has notable points of re- 
semblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the 
latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: 
it first appeared as the religion of slaves and freedmen, of poor 
people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed 
by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers’ socialism preach 
forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity 
places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; 
socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society. 
Both are persecuted and subjected to harassment, their adherents 
are ostracised and made the objects of exceptional laws, the ones 
as enemies of the human race, the others as enemies of the state, 
enemies of religion, the family, the social order. And in spite of all 
persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, 
irresistibly ahead. Three hundred years after its appearance 
Christianity was the recognised state religion in the Roman World 
Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position 
which makes its victory absolutely certain. 

If, therefore, Prof. Anton Menger wonders in his Right to the 
Full Product of Labour why, with the enormous concentration of 
landownership under the Roman emperors and the boundless 
sufferings of the working class of the time, which was composed 
almost exclusively of slaves, “the fall of the Western Roman Empire 
was not followed by socialism’”’,’ it is because he cannot see that this 
“socialism” did in fact, as far as it was possible at the time, exist and 

a A. Menger, Das Recht auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag in geschichtlicher Darstellung, 
p- 108. For criticism of this book see F. Engels, Lawyers’ Socialism (present edition, 
Vol. 26, pp. 597-616).— Ed. 

even became dominant—in Christianity. Only this Christianity, as 
was bound to be the case in the historical conditions, did not seek to 
accomplish the social transformation in this world, but in the 
hereafter, in heaven, in eternal life after death, in the impending 
“millennium”. 

The parallel between the two historic phenomena becomes 
perfectly obvious as early as the Middle Ages in the first risings of 
the oppressed peasants and particularly of the town plebeians. 
These risings, like all mass movements of the Middle Ages, were 
bound to wear the mask of religion and appeared as the 
restoration of early Christianity from spreading degeneration *, 
but behind the religious exaltation there were every time 
extremely tangible worldly interests. This was demonstrated most 
splendidly in the organisation of the Bohemian Taborites under 
Jan Zizka,* of glorious memory; but this trait pervades the whole 
of the Middle Ages until it gradually fades away after the German 
Peasant War*™* to revive again with the worker communists after 
1830. The French revolutionary communists, as also in particular 
Weitling and his supporters, referred to early Christianity long 
before Ernest Renan said: 

When you want to get an idea of the early Christian communities, look at a local 
section of the International Working Men’s Association. 

This French man of letters, who by mutilating German criticism 
of the Bible in a manner unprecedented even in modern 

* A peculiar counterpart to this was the religious risings in the Mohammedan 
world, particularly in Africa. Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially 
Arabs, i.e., on the one hand to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the 
other to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically 
recurring collision. The townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in observing the 
“law”. The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and 
covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a 
Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the 
true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a 
hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new 
purge of the faith is required, a new Mahdi arises and the game starts again from 
the beginning. That is what happened from the campaigns of conquest by the 
African Almoravids and Almohads in Spain to the last Mahdi of Khartoum 4!? who 
so successfully thwarted the English. It happened in the same way or similarly with 
the risings in Persia and other Mohammedan countries. All these movements are 
couched in religion but they have their source in economic causes; and yet, even 
when they are victorious, they allow the old economic conditions to persist 
untouched. So the old situation remains unchanged and the collision recurs 
periodically. In the popular risings of the Christian West, on the contrary, the 
religious disguise is only a flag and a mask for attacks on an economic order which 
is becoming antiquated. This is finally overthrown, a new one arises and the world 
progresses. 

On the History of Early Christianity 449 

journalism composed the novel on church history Origines du 
christianisme? did not know himself how much truth there was in 
the words just quoted. I should like to see the old “International” 
who can read, for example, what goes under the name of the 
Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians without old wounds 
re-opening, at least in one respect. The whole epistle, from 
chapter eight onwards, echoes the eternal, and oh so well-known 
complaint: les cotisations ne rentrent pas—contributions are not 
coming in! How many of the most zealous propagandists of the 
sixties would sympathisingly squeeze the hand of the author of 
that epistle, whoever he may be, and whisper: “So it was like that 
with you too!” We too—Corinthians were legion in our Associa- 
tion—can tell you a tale about contributions not coming in but 
tantalising us as they floated elusively before our eyes. They were 
the famous “millions of the International”! 

One of our best sources on the first Christians is Lucian of 
Samosata, the Voltaire of classic antiquity, who was equally 
sceptical towards every kind of religious superstition and therefore 
had neither pagan-religious nor political grounds to treat the 
Christians otherwise than as some other kind of religious 
community. On the contrary, he mocked them all for their 
superstition, those who worshipped Jupiter no less than those who 
worshipped Christ; from his shallow rationalistic point of view one 
sort of superstition was as stupid as the other. This in any case 
impartial witness relates among other things the life story of a 
certain adventurer Peregrinus, who called himself Proteus, from 
Parium in Hellespontus. When a youth, this Peregrinus made his 
début in Armenia by committing adultery. He was caught in the act 
and lynched according to the custom of the country. He was 
fortunate enough to escape and, after strangling his father in 

Parium, he had to flee. 

“And so it happened”—I quote from Schott’s translation */°_“that he also 

came to hear of the astonishing learning of the Christians, with whose priests and 
scribes he had cultivated intercourse in Palestine. He made such progress in a short 
' time that his teachers were like children compared with him. He became a prophet, 
an elder, a master of the synagogue, in a word, all in everything. He interpreted 
their writings and himself wrote a great number of works, so that finally people 
saw in him a superior being, let him lay down laws for them and made him their 
overseer (bishop).... On that ground” (i.e., because he was a Christian) “Proteus 
was at length arrested by the authorities and thrown into prison.... As he thus lay 
in chains, the Christians, who saw in his capture a great misfortune, made all 
possible attempts to free him. But they did not succeed. Then they administered to 
him in all possible ways with the greatest solicitude. As early as daybreak one could 

a E. Renan, Histoire des origines du christianisme.— Ed. 

see aged mothers, widows and young orphans crowding at the door of his prison; 
the most prominent among the Christians even bribed the warders and spent whole 
nights with him; they took their meals with them and read their holy books in his 
presence; briefly, the beloved Peregrinus (he still went by that name) was no less to 
them than a new Socrates. Envoys of Christian communities came to him even 
from towns in Asia Minor to lend him a helping hand, to console him and to testify 
in his favour in court. It is unbelievable how quick these people are to act 
whenever it is a question of their community; they immediately spare neither 
exertion nor expense. And thus from all sides money then poured in to Peregrinus 
so that his imprisonment became for him a source of great income. For the poor 
people persuaded themselves that they were immortal in body and in soul and that 
they would live for all eternity; that was why they scorned death and many of them 
even voluntarily sacrificed their lives. Then their most prominent lawgiver 
convinced them that they would all be brothers one to another once they were 
converted, i.e., renounced the Greek gods, professed faith in the crucified sophist 
and lived according to his prescriptions. That is why they despise all material goods 
without distinction and own them in common—doctrines which they have accepted 
in good faith, without demonstration or proof. And when a skilful impostor who 
knows how to make clever use of circumstances comes to them he can manage to 
get rich in a short time and laugh up his sleeve over these simpletons. For the rest, 
Peregrinus was set free by the then prefect of Syria.” 

Then, after a few more adventures, 

“Our worthy set forth a second time” (from Parium) “on his peregrinations, the 
Christians’ good disposition standing him in lieu of money for his journey: they 
administered to his needs everywhere and never let him suffer want. He was fed 
for a time in this way. But then, when he violated the laws of the Christians too—I 
think he was caught eating of some forbidden food—they excommunicated him 
from their community.” 2 

What memories of youth come to my mind as I read this 
passage from Lucian! First of all the “prophet Albrecht” who 
from about 1840 literally plundered the Weitling communist 
communities in Switzerland for several years—a tall powerful 
man with a long beard who wandered on foot through Switzerland 
and gathered audiences for his mysterious new Gospel of world 
emancipation, but who, after all, seems to have been a tolerably 
harmless hoaxer and soon died. Then his not so harmless 
successor, “Dr.” Georg Kuhlmann from Holstein, who put to 
profit the time when Weitling was in prison to convert the 
communities of French Switzerland to his Gospel, and for a time 
with such success that he even caught August Becker, by far the 
cleverest but also the biggest ne’er-do-well among them. This 
Kuhlmann used to deliver lectures to them which were published 
in Geneva in 1845 under the title Die Neue Welt oder das Reich des 
Geistes auf Erden. Verkiindigung.’ In the introduction [pp. VIII 

4 Lucian, On the Death of Peregrinus, Chapters 11-14 and 16.— Ed. 

On the History of Early Christianity 451 

and IX], written by his supporters (probably August Becker) we 
read: 

“A man was needed who would give utterance to all our sorrows, all our longings 
and all our hopes, to everything, in a word, which moves our age most deeply... This 
man, whom our age was awaiting, has appeared. He is Dr. Georg Kuhlmann of 
Holstein. He has come forward with the doctrine of the new world or the kingdom of 
the spirit in reality.” 

I hardly need to add that this doctrine of the new world is 
nothing more than the most vulgar sentimental nonsense rendered 
in half-biblical expressions ad la Lamennais and declaimed with 
prophet-like arrogance. But this did not prevent the good 
Weitlingers from carrying the swindler shoulder-high as the Asian 
Christians once did Peregrinus. They who were otherwise arch- 
democrats and extreme equalitarians to the extent of fostering 
ineradicable suspicion against any schoolmaster, journalist, and 
any man generally who was not a manual worker as being an 
“erudite” who was out to exploit them, let themselves be 
persuaded by the melodramatically arrayed Kuhlmann that in the 
“New World” it would be the wisest of all, id est, Kuhlmann, who 
would regulate the distribution of pleasures and that therefore, 
even then, in the Old World, the disciples ought to bring pleasures 
by the bushel to that same wisest of all while they themselves 
should be content with crumbs. So Peregrinus Kuhlmann lived a 
splendid life of pleasure at the expense of the community—as 
long as it lasted. It did not last very long, of course; the growing 
murmurs of doubters and unbelievers and the threat of persecu- 
tion by the Vaudois Government put an end to the “Kingdom of 
the Spirit” in Lausanne— Kuhlmann disappeared. 

Everybody who has known by experience the European 
working-class movement in its beginnings will remember dozens of 
similar examples. Today such extreme cases, at least in the larger 
centres, have become impossible; but in remote districts where the 
movement has won new ground a small Peregrinus of this kind 
can still count on temporary limited success. And just as all those 
who can expect no favours from the official world or are finished 
with it—opponents of inoculation, supporters of abstemiousness, 
vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, nature-healers, free-community 
preachers whose communities have fallen to pieces, authors of 
new theories on the origin of the universe, unsuccessful or 
unfortunate inventors, silent sufferers of real or imaginary 
injustices who are termed ‘“good-for-nothing pettifoggers” by the 
bureaucracy, honest fools and dishonest swindlers—all throng to 
the working-class parties in all countries—so it was with the first 

Christians. All the elements which had been set free, i.e., shown 
the door by the dissolution of the old world came one after the 
other into the orbit of Christianity as the only element that 
resisted this process of dissolution—for the very reason that it was 
the necessary product of the process—and that therefore persisted 
and grew while the other elements were but nine-day wonders. 
There was no fanaticism, no foolishness, no scheming that did not 
attach itself to the young Christian communities and did not at 
least for a time and in isolated places find attentive ears and 
willing believers. And like our first communist workers’ associa- 
tions the early Christians too took with such unprecedented 
gullibility to anything which suited their purpose that we are not 
even sure that some fragment or other of the “great number of 
works” Peregrinus wrote for Christianity did not find its way into 
our New Testament. 

II 

German criticism of the Bible, so far the only scientific basis of 
our knowledge of the history of early Christianity, went in two 
directions. 

The first was that of the Tübingen school,‘'? in which, in the 
broad sense, D. F. Strauss must also be included. In critical 
inquiry it goes as far as a theological school can go. It admits that 
the four Gospels are not eyewitness accounts but only later 
adaptations of writings that have been lost; that no more than four 
of the Epistles attributed to the apostle Paul are authentic, etc. It 
strikes out of the historical narrations all miracles and contradic- 
tions, considering them unacceptable; but from the rest it tries “to 
salvage what can be salvaged” and then its nature, that of a 
theological school, is very evident. Thus it enabled Renan, who 
bases himself mostly on it, to “salvage” still more by applying the 
same method and, moreover, to try to impose upon us as 
historically authenticated many New Testament accounts that are 
more than doubtful and, on top of that, a multitude of other 
legends about martyrs. In any case, all that the Tübingen school 
rejects in the New Testament as unhistorical or apocryphal can be 
considered as definitively eliminated for scientific purposes. 

The other direction has but one representative— Bruno Bauer.” 
His greatest service consists not merely in having given a ee 
criticism of the Gospels and the Epistles of the apostles, but in 
having for the first time seriously undertaken an inquiry into not 
only the Jewish and Greco-Alexandrian elements but the purely 

On the History of Early Christianity 453 

Greek and Greco-Roman elements that first opened for Christiani- 
ty the career of a world religion. The legend that Christianity 
arose ready-made from Judaism and, starting from Palestine, 
conquered the world with its dogma already defined in the main 
and its morals, has been untenable since Bruno Bauer; it can 
continue to vegetate only in the theological faculties and among 
those people who wish “to keep religion alive for the people” even 
at the expense of science. The enormous influence which the 
Philonic school*?’ of Alexandria and Greco-Roman vulgar 
philosophy —Platonic and especially Stoic *”*—had on Christianity, 
which became the state religion under Constantine, is far from 
having been ascertained in detail, but its existence has been 
proved and that is primarily the achievement of Bruno Bauer: he 
laid the foundation of the proof that Christianity was not 
imported from outside—from Judea—into the Romano-Greek 
world and imposed on it, but that, at least in its world-religion 
form, it is the very own product of that world. Bauer, of course, 
like all those who are fighting against deep-rooted prejudices, 
overshot the mark by far in this work. In order to define also 
through literary sources Philo’s and particularly Seneca’s influence 
on emerging Christianity and actually to show up the authors of 
the New Testament formally as downright plagiarists of those 
philosophers he had to place the appearance of the new religion 
about half a century later, to reject the opposing accounts of 
Roman historians and take extensive liberties with historiography 
as such. According to him Christianity as such appears only under 
the Flavians, the literature of the New Testament only under 
Hadrian, Antonius and Marcus Aurelius. As a result the New 
Testament accounts of Jesus and his disciples are deprived for 
Bauer of any historical background: they are diluted into legends 
in which the phases of interior development and the moral 
struggles of the first communities are transferred to more or less 
fictitious persons. Not Galilee and Jerusalem, but Alexandria and 
Rome, according to Bauer, are the birthplaces of the new religion. 

If, therefore, the Tübingen school presents to us in the remains 
of the New Testament stories and literature that it left untouched 
the absolute maximum of what science today can still accept as 
disputable, Bruno Bauer presents to us the maximum of what can 
be contested. The actual truth lies between these two boundaries. 
Whether that truth can be defined with the means at our disposal 
today is very doubtful. New discoveries, particularly in Rome, in 
the Orient, and above all in Egypt, will contribute more to this 
than any criticism. 

But we have in the New Testament a single book whose time of 
writing can be defined within a few months, which must have been 
written between June 67 and January or April 68°; a book, 
consequently, which belongs to the very beginning of the Christian 
era and reflects with the most naive fidelity and in the 
corresponding idiomatic language the ideas of the beginning of 
that era. This book, therefore, in my opinion, is a far more 
important source from which to define what early Christianity 
really was than all the rest of the New Testament, which, in its 
present form, is of a far later date. This book is called the 
Revelation of John. And as this, apparently the most obscure book 
in the whole Bible, is moreover today, thanks to German criticism, 
the most comprehensible and the clearest, I shall give my readers 
an account of it. 

One needs but to look into this book in order to be convinced of 
the state of great exaltation not only of the author, but also of the 
“surrounding medium” in which he moved. Our “Revelation”’ is 
not the only one of its kind and time. From the year 164 B.C., 
when the first which has reached us, the Book of Daniel,*”? was 
written, up to about 250 A.D., the approximate date of 
Commodian’s Carmen, Renan counted no fewer than fifteen 
extant classical ““Apocalypses”’, not counting subsequent imitations. 
(I quote Renan because his book is the best known by non- 
specialists too, and the most accessible.) That was a time when 
even in Rome and Greece and still more in Asia Minor, Syria and 
Egypt an absolutely uncritical mixture of the crassest superstitions 
of the most varying peoples was indiscriminately accepted and 
complemented by pious deception and downright charlatanism; a 
time in which miracles, ecstasies, visions, apparitions, divining, 
gold-making, cabbala *** and other secret magic played the leading 
role. It was in that atmosphere, and, moreover, among a class of 
people who were more inclined than any other to listen to these 
supernatural fantasies, that Christianity arose. For did not the 
Christian gnostics in Egypt during the second century A.D. 
engage ‘extensively in alchemy and introduce alchemistic notions 
into their teachings,- as the Leyden papyrus documents, among 
others, prove. And the Chaldean and Judean mathematici, who, 
according to Tacitus, were twice expelled from Rome _ for 

a2 A misprint in Die Neue Zeit; it should read “between June 68 and January or 
April 69”; cf. p. 465 and also pp. 457, 460.— Ed. 

b Commodianus, Carmen apologeticum adversus Judaeos et gentes.— Ed. 

¢ Mathematicians.— Ed. 

On the History of Early Christianity 455 

witchcraft, once under Claudius and again under Vitellius,’ 

practised no other kind of geometry than the kind we shall find at 
the basis of John’s Revelation. 

To this we must add another thing. All the apocalypses attribute 
to themselves the right to deceive their readers. Not only were 
they written as a rule by quite different people than their alleged 
authors, and mostly by people who lived much later, for example 
the Book of Daniel, the Book of Henoch, the Apocalypses of Ezra, 
Baruch, Juda, etc., and the Sibylline books,*”© but, as far as their 
main substance is concerned, they prophesy only things that had 
already happened long before and were perfectly well known to 
the real author. Thus in 164, shortly before the death of 
Antiochus Epiphanes, the author of the Book of Daniel has 
Daniel, who is supposed to have lived in the time of Nebuchadnez- 
zar, prophesy the rise and fall of the Persian and Macedonian 
empires and the beginning of the Roman Empire, in order by this 
proof of his gift of prophecy to prepare the reader to accept the 
final prophecy that the people of Israel will overcome all 
hardships and finally be victorious. If therefore the Revelation of 
John were really the work of its alleged author it would be the 
only exception among the whole body of apocalyptic literature. 

_The John who claims to be the author was, in any case, a man 
of great distinction among the Christians of Asia Minor. This is 
borne out by the tone of the message to the seven churches. 
Possibly he was the apostle John, whose historical existence, 
however, is not completely authenticated but is very probable. If 
this apostle was really the author, so much the better for our point 
of view. That would be the best confirmation that the Christianity 
of this book is real genuine early Christianity. Let it be noted in 
passing that, demonstrably, the Revelation was not written by the 
same author as the Gospel or the three Epistles which are also 
attributed to John. 

The Revelation consists of a series of visions. In the first Christ 
appears clothed with a garment of a high priest, goes in the midst 
of seven candlesticks representing the seven churches of Asia and 
dictates to “John” messages to the seven “angels” of those 
churches. Here at the very beginning we see plainly the difference 
between this Christianity and Constantine’s world religion formu- 
lated by the Council of Nicaea.*”” The Trinity is not only 
unknown, it is even impossible here. Instead of the one Holy 
Ghost of subsequent times we here have the “seven spirits of God”’ 

a Tacitus, Annales, XII, 52 and Historiae, Il, 62.— Ed. 

31* 

construed by the Rabbis from Isaiah 11:2. Christ is the son of 
God, the first and the last, the alpha and the omega, by no means 
God himself or equal to God, but on the contrary, “the beginning 
of the creation of God”, hence an emanation of God, existing from 
all eternity but subordinate to God, like the above-mentioned 
seven spirits. In Chapter 15:3, the martyrs in heaven sing “the 
song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” 
glorifying God. Hence Christ here appears not only as subordinate 
to God but even, in a certain respect, on an equal footing with 
Moses. Christ is crucified in Jerusalem (11:8) but rises again (1:5, 
18); he is “the Lamb” that has been sacrificed for the sins of the 
world and with whose blood the faithful of all tongues and nations 
have been redeemed to God. Here we find the basic idea which 
enabled early Christianity to develop into a world religion. All 
Semitic and European religions of that time shared the view that 
the gods offended by the actions of man could be propitiated by 
sacrifice; the first revolutionary basic idea (borrowed from the 
Philonic school) in Christianity was that by the one great 
voluntary sacrifice of a mediator the sins of all times and all men 
were atoned for once and for all—in respect of the faithful. Thus 
the necessity of any further sacrifices was removed and with it the 
basis for a multitude of religious rites: but freedom from rites that 
made difficult or forbade intercourse with people of other 
confessions was the first condition of a world religion. In spite of 
this the habit of sacrifice was so deeply rooted in national customs 
that Catholicism—which borrowed so much from paganism— 
found it appropriate to accommodate itself to this fact by the 
introduction of at least the symbolical sacrifice of the mass. On the 
other hand there is no trace whatever of the dogma of original sin 
in our book. 

But what is most characteristic in these messages, as in the whole 
book, is that it never and nowhere occurs to the author to refer to 
himself and his co-believers by any other name than that of Jews. 
He reproaches the members of the sects in Smyrna and 
Philadelphia against whom he fulminates with the fact that they 

“say they are Jews, and are not but are the synagogue of Satan”; 

of those in Pergamos he says: they hold the doctrine of Balaam, 
who taught Balac to cast a stumbling-block before the children of 
Israel, so that they ate things sacrificed unto idols, and committed 
fornication. Here it is therefore not a case of conscious Christians 
but of people who make out they are Jews. Granted, their Judaism 
is a new stage in the development of the earlier one, but for that 

On the History of Early Christianity 457 

very reason it is the only true one. Hence, when the saints 
appeared before the throne of God there came first 144,000 Jews, 
12,000 from each tribe, and only after them the countless masses 
of heathens who had been converted to this renovated Judaism. 
That was how little our author was aware in the year 69 of the 
Christian era that he represented quite a new phase in the 
development of a religion which was to become one of the most 
revolutionary elements in the history of human thought. 

We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was 
still unaware of itself, was as different as heaven from earth from 
the later dogmatically fixed world religion of «he Nicene Council; 
the one cannot be discerned in the other. Here we have neither 
the dogma nor the morals of later Christianity, but instead a 
feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and that the 
struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness for struggle and a 
certainty of victory which are totally lacking in the Christians of 
today and which are to be found in our time only at the other 
pole of society, among the socialists. 

In fact, the struggle against an initially overpowering world, and 
at the same time among the novators themselves, is common to the 
early Christians and the socialists. Neither of these two great 
movements were made by leaders or prophets—although there 
are prophets in plenty in both of them—they are mass move- 
ments. And mass movements are bound to be confused at the 
beginning; confused because the thinking of the masses at first 
moves among contradictions, uncertainties and incoherencies and 
also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the 
beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of 
numerous sects which fight against one another with at least the 
same zeal as against the common external enemy. So it was with 
early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist 
movement, no matter how much that worried the well-meaning 
worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible. 

So was the International held together by a uniform dogma? 
Quite the opposite. There were communists of the French 
pre-1848 tradition, these in turn being themselves of varying 
complexion: communists of Weitling’s school and others of the 
regenerated Communist League, Proudhonists dominant in France 
and Belgium, Blanquists, the German Workers’ Party, and finally 
the Bakuninist anarchists, who for a while had the upper hand in 
Spain and Italy, to mention only the principal groups. It took a 
whole quarter of a century from the foundation of the Interna- 
tional before the separation from the anarchists was final and 

complete everywhere and unity could be established at least in 
respect of most general economic viewpoints. And that with our 
means of communication—railways, telegraph, giant industrial 
cities, the press, organised people’s assemblies. 

There was among the early Christians the same division into 
countless sects, which was the very means by which discussion and 
thereby, at a later date, unity was achieved. We already find it in 
this book, which is beyond doubt the oldest Christian document, 
and our author fights it with the same irreconcilable ardour as the 
great sinful world outside. There were first of all the Nicolaitans, 
in Ephesus and Pergamos; those that said they were Jews but were 
the synagogue of Satan, in Smyrna and Philadelphia; the 
supporters of Balaam, who is called a false prophet, in Pergamos; 
those who said they were apostles and were not, in Ephesus; and 
finally, in Thyatira, the supporters of the false prophetess known 
as Jezebel. We are given no more details about these sects, it being 
only said about the followers of Balaam and Jezebel that they ate 
things sacrificed to idols and committed fornication. Attempts 
have been made to conceive these five sects as Pauline Christians 
and all the messages as directed against Paul, the false apostle, the 
alleged Balaam and “Nicolaos”. Arguments to this effect, hardly 
tenable, are to be found collected in Renan’s Saint Paul (Paris 
1869, pp. 303-05 and 367-70). They all amount to explaining the 
messages by the Acts of the Apostles and the so-called Epistles of 
Paul, writings which, at least in their present form, are no less 
than 60 years younger than the Revelation and the relevant 
factual data of which, therefore, are not only extremely doubtful 
but also totally contradictory. But the decisive thing is that it could 
not occur to the author to give five different names to one and the 
same sect and even two to Ephesus alone (false apostles and 
Nicolaitans) and two also to Pergamos (Balaamites and 
Nicolaitans), and each time refer to them explicitly as two 
different sects. At the same time one cannot deny the probability 
that there were also elements among these sects that would be 
termed Pauline today. 

In both cases where further details are given the accusation 
amounts to eating meats offered to idols and to fornication, two 
points on which the Jews—the old ones as well as the Christian 
ones—were in continual dispute with converted heathens. The 
meat from heathen sacrifices was not only served at banquets 
where refusal of the food offered would have seemed improper 
and could even have been dangerous; it was also sold on the 
public markets, where it was not always possible to ascertain 

On the History of Early Christianity 459 

whether it was kosher or not. By fornication the Jews understood 
not only extra-nuptial sexual relations but also marriage within the 
degrees of kinship prohibited by Jewish law or between a Jew and 
a gentile, and it is in this sense that the word is generally 
understood in the Acts of the Apostles 15:20 and 29. But our 
John has his own views on the sexual relations allowed to 
orthodox Jews. He says, 14:4, of the 144,000 heavenly Jews: 

“These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.” 

And in fact, in our John’s heaven there is not a single woman. 
He therefore belongs to the trend, which also often appears in 
other early Christian writings, that considers sexual relations 
generally as sinful. And if we moreover take into consideration 
that he calls Rome the Great Whore with whom the kings of the 
earth have committed fornication and have become drunk with 
the wine of fornication and the merchants of the earth have 
waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies, it becomes 
impossible for us to take the word in the messages in the narrow 
sense that theological apologists would like to attribute to it in 
order thus to pick up some corroboration for other passages in the 
New Testament. On the contrary. These passages in the messages 
are an obvious indication of a phenomenon common to all 
tempestuous times, that the traditional bonds of sexual relations, 
like all other fetters, are shaken off. In the first centuries of 
Christianity, too, there appeared often enough, side by side with 
asceticism which mortified the flesh, the tendency to extend 
Christian freedom to more or less unrestrained intercourse 
between man and woman. The same thing was observed in the 
modern socialist movement. What unspeakable horror was felt in 
the then “pious nursery” * of Germany at Saint-Simon’s réhabilita- 
tion de la chair” in the thirties, which was rendered in German as 
“Wiedereinsetzung des Fleisches” [reinstatement of the flesh]! And 
the most horrified of all were the then ruling distinguished estates 
(there were as yet no classes in our country) who could not live in 
Berlin any more than on their country estates without constant 
reinstatement of their flesh! If only those good people had known 
Fourier, who contemplated quite different pranks for the flesh! 
When utopianism was superseded these extravagances yielded to a 
more rational and actually far more radical conception, and since 
Germany grew out of Heine’s pious nursery and developed into 

aH. Heine, “Zur Beruhigung”.— Ed. 
b “Regeneration of the flesh”.— Ed. 

the centre of the socialist movement, scorn has been poured upon 
the hypocritical indignation of the distinguished pious world. 
That is the entire content of the messages. The rest consists in 
exhorting the faithful to be zealous in propaganda, to courageous 
and proud confession of their faith in the face of the foe, to 
unrelenting struggle against the enemy both within and without— 
and as far as this goes they could just as well have been written by 
one of the prophetically minded enthusiasts of the International. 

III 

The messages are but the introduction to the theme proper of 
John’s communication to the seven churches of Asia Minor and 
through them to what remained of reformed Judaism in the 
year 69, out of which Christianity later developed. And herewith 
we enter the innermost holy of holies of early Christianity. 

What kind of people were the first Christians recruited from? 
Mainly from the “labouring and burdened”, the members of the 
lowest strata, as becomes a revolutionary element. And what did 
they consist of? In the towns of impoverished free men, all sorts of 
people, like the mean wuites of the southern slave states and the 
European beachcombers and adventurers in colonial and Chinese 
seaports, then of freedmen and, above all, slaves; on the large 
estates in Italy, Sicily, and Africa of slaves, and in the rural 
districts of the provinces of small peasants who had fallen more 
and more into bondage through debt. There was absolutely no 
common road to emancipation for all these elements. For all of 
them paradise lay lost behind them; for the ruined free men it was 
the former polis, the town and the state at the same time, of which 
their forefathers had been free citizens; for the war-captive slaves 
the time of freedom before their subjugation and captivity; for the 
small peasants the abolished gentile social system and communal 
landownership. All that had been smitten down by the levelling 
iron fist of conquering Rome. The largest social group that 
antiquity had attained was the tribe and the union of kindred 
tribes; among the barbarians grouping was based on alliances of 
families and among the town-founding Greeks and Italians on the 
polis, which consisted of one or more kindred tribes. Philip and 
Alexander gave the Hellenic peninsula political unity but that did 
not lead to the formation of a Greek nation. Nations became 
possible only through the downfall of Roman world domination. 

On the History of Early Christianity 461 

This domination had put an end once and for all to the smaller 
groups; military might, Roman jurisdiction and the tax-collecting 
machinery completely dissolved the traditional inner organisation. 
To the loss of independence and distinctive organisation was 
added the forcible plunder by military and civil authorities who 
first took the treasures of the subjugated away from them and 
then lent them back at usurious rates in order to extort still more 
out of them. The pressure of taxation and the need for money 
which it caused in regions with a purely or predominant natural 
economy plunged the peasants into ever deeper bondage to the 
usurers, gave rise to great differences in fortune, making the rich 
richer and the poor completely destitute. Any resistance by 
isolated small tribes or towns to the gigantic Roman world power 
was without prospect. Where was the way out, salvation, for the 
enslaved, oppressed and impoverished, a way out common to all 
these diverse groups of people whose interests were mutually alien 
or even opposed? And yet it had to be found if a great 
revolutionary movement was to embrace them all. 

This way out was found. But not in this world. As things were, 
it could only be a religious way out. Then a new world was 
embraced. The continued life of the soul after the death of the 
body had gradually become a recognised article of faith through- 
out the Roman world. A kind of recompense or punishment of 
the deceased souls for their actions while on earth also received 
more and more general recognition. As far as recompense was 
concerned, admittedly, the prospects were not so good: antiquity 
was too primitively materialistic not to attribute infinitely greater 
value to life on earth than to life in the shades; to live on after 
death was considered by the Greeks rather as a misfortune. Then 
came Christianity, which took seriously recompense and punish- 
ment in the world beyond and created heaven and hell, and a way 
out was found which would lead the labouring and burdened 
from this vale of woe to eternal paradise. And in fact only with the 
prospect of a reward in the world beyond could the stoico-philonic 
renunciation of the world and ascetics be exalted to the basic 
moral principle of a new world religion which would enthuse the 
oppressed masses. 

But this heavenly paradise does not open itself to the faithful by 
the mere fact of their death. We shall see that the kingdom of 
God, the capital of which is the New Jerusalem, can only be 
conquered and opened up after arduous struggles with the powers 
of hell. But the early Christians believed these struggles lay in the 
immediate future ahead. Our John describes his book at the very 

beginning as the revelation of “things which must shortly come to 
pass”; and then immediately, 1:3, declares 

“Blessed is he that readeth and they that hear the words of this prophecy ... for 
the time is at hand.” 

To the church in Philadelphia Christ sends the message: 
“Behold, I come quickly.” And in the last chapter the angel says he 
has shown John “things which must shortly be done” and gives 
him the order: 

“Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand.” 

And Christ himself twice says ([22:]12, 20): “I come quickly.” 
The sequel will show us how soon this coming was expected. 

The visions of the Apocalypse which the author now shows us 
are copied throughout, and mostly literally, from earlier models, 
partly from the classical prophets of the Old Testament, particu- 
larly Ezekiel, partly from later Jewish apocalypses written after the 
fashion of the Book of Daniel and in particular from the Book of 
Henoch which had already been written at least in part. Criticism 
has shown to the smallest details where our John got every 
picture, every menacing omen, every plague poured down upon 
unbelieving humanity, in a word, the whole of the material for his 
book; so that he not only shows great poverty of mind but actually 
proves himself that he never experienced even in the imagination 
the alleged ecstasies and visions he describes. 

The order of these visions is briefly as follows: First John sees 
God sitting on his throne holding in his hand a book with seven 
seals and before him the Lamb that has been slain and has risen 
from the dead (Christ) and is found worthy to open the seals of 
the book. The opening of the seals is accompanied by all sorts of 
miraculous menacing signs. When the fifth seal is opened John 
sees under the altar of God the souls of the martyrs of Christ that 
were slain for the word of God and who cry with a loud voice 
saying: 

“How long, O Lord, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that 
dwell on the earth?” 

And then white robes are given to them and they are told that 
they must rest for a little while yet, for more martyrs must be 
_ slain. 

So here there is no mention of a “religion of love”, of “Love 
your enemies, bless them that curse you’, etc. Here undiluted 
revenge is preached, sound, honest revenge on the persecutors of 
the Christians. So it continues throughout the book. The nearer 
the crisis comes, the heavier the plagues and punishments rain 

On the History of Early Christianity 463 

from the heavens and with all the more satisfaction John 
announces that the mass of humanity will still not atone for their 
sins, that new scourges of God must lash them, that Christ must 
rule them with a rod of iron and tread the wine-press of the 
fierceness and wrath of Almighty God, but that the impious still 
remain obdurate in their hearts. It is the natural feeling, free of 
all hypocrisy, that a fight is going on and that— a la guerre comme 
a la guerre.* 

When the seventh seal is opened there come seven angels with 
seven trumpets and each time one of them sounds his trumpet 
new horrors occur. After the seventh blast seven more angels 
come on to the scene with the seven vials of the wrath of God 
which they pour out upon the earth; still more plagues and 
punishments, mainly tedious repetitions of what has already 
happened several times. Then comes the woman, Babylon the 
Great Whore, sitting arrayed in scarlet over the waters, drunk with 
the blood of the saints and the martyrs of Jesus, the great city of 
the seven hills that rules over all the kings of the earth. She is 
sitting on a beast with seven heads and ten horns. The seven 
heads represent the seven hills, and also seven “kings”. Of those 
kings five are fallen, one is, and the other is not yet come, and 
after him comes again one of the first five; he was wounded to 
death but was healed. He will reign over the world for 42 months 
or 3'/) years (half of a week of seven years) and will persecute the 
faithful to death and bring the rule of.godlessness. But then 
follows the great final fight, the saints and the martyrs are 
avenged by the destruction of the Great Whore Babylon and all 
her followers, i.e., the great mass of mankind; the devil is cast into 
the bottomless pit and shut up there for a thousand years during 
which Christ reigns with the martyrs risen from the dead. But 
after a thousand years the devil is freed again and there is another 
great battle of the spirits in which he is finally defeated. Then 
follows the second resurrection, when the other dead also arise 
and appear before the throne of judgment of God (not of Christ, 
be it noted) and the faithful will enter a new heaven, a new earth, 
and a new Jerusalem for life eternal. 

As this whole monument is made up of exclusively pre-Christian 
Jewish material it presents almost exclusively Jewish ideas. Since 
things started to go badly in this world for the people of Israel, 
from the time of the tribute to the Assyrians and Babylonians, 
from the destruction of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judea to 

a In war as in war.— Ed. 

the bondage under Seleucids, that is from Isaiah to Daniel, in every 
dark period there were prophecies of a saviour. In Daniel, 12: 1-3, 
there is even a prophecy about Michael, the guardian angel of the 
Jews, coming down on earth to deliver them from great trouble; 
many dead will awake again, there will be a kind of last judgment 
and the teachers who have taught the people justice will shine like 
stars for all eternity. The only Christian point is the great stress 
laid on the imminent reign of Christ and the glory of the faithful, 
particularly the martyrs, who have risen from the dead. 

For the interpretation of these prophecies, as far as they refer to 
events of that time, we are indebted to German criticism, 
particularly Ewald, Licke and Ferdinand Benary. It has been 
made accessible to non-theologians by Renan. We have already 
seen that Babylon the Great Whore, stands for Rome, the city of 
seven hills. We are told in 17:9-11 about the beast on which she 
sits: 

“The seven heads” of the beast “are seven mountains, on which the woman 
sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not 
yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that 
was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into 
perdition.” 

According to this the beast is Roman world domination, 
represented by seven caesars in succession, one of them having 
been mortally wounded and no longer reigning, but he will be 
healed and will return. It will be given unto him as the eighth to 
establish the kingdom of blasphemy and defiance of God. It will 
be given unto him 

“to make war with the saints and to overcome them.... And all that dwell upon 
the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the 
Lamb.... And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to 
receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might 
buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of 
his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of 
the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore 
and six” (13: 7-18). 

We merely note that boycott is mentioned here as one of the 
measures to be applied against the Christians by the Roman 
Empire—and is therefore patently an invention of the devil—and 
pass on to the question who this Roman emperor is who has 
reigned once before, was wounded to death and eliminated but 
will return as the eighth in the series in the role of the Antichrist. 

Taking Augustus as the first we have: 2. Tiberius, 3. Caligula, 
4. Claudius, 5. Nero, 6. Galba. ‘Five are fallen, and one is.” 
Hence, Nero is already fallen and Galba is. Galba ruled from 

On the History of Early Christianity 465 

June 9, 68 to January 15, 69. But immediately after he ascended 
the throne the legions of the Rhine revolted under Vitellius while 
other generals prepared for military risings in other provinces. In 
Rome itself the praetorians rose, killed Galba and proclaimed 
Otho emperor. 

From this we see that our Revelation was written under Galba. 
Probably towards the end of his rule. Or, at the latest, during the 
three months (up to April 15, 69) of the rule of Otho, “the 
seventh”. But who is the eighth, who was and is not? That we 
learn from the number 666. 

Among the Semites—Chaldeans and Jews—there was at the 
time a kind of magic based on the double meaning of letters. 
From about 300 years B.C. Hebrew letters were also used as 
symbols for numbers: a=l, b=2, g=3, d=4, etc. The cabbala 
diviners added up the value of each letter of a name like a sum of 
digits and sought from the sum to prophesy the future of the one 
who bore the name, e.g., by forming words or combinations of 
words of equal value. Secret words and the like were also 
expressed in this language of numbers. This art was given the 
Greek name gematriah, geometry; the Chaldeans, who pursued this 
as a business and were called mathematici by Tacitus, were later 
expelled from Rome* under Claudius and again under Vitellius, 
presumably for ‘serious disorders”. 

It was by means of this mathematics that our number 666 
appeared. Behind it stands the name of one of the first five 
Roman emperors. But besides the number 666, Irenaeus, at the 
end of the second century, knew another version—616, which, at 
all events, appeared, at a time when the number puzzle was still 
widely known.” The proof of the solution will be if it holds good 
for both numbers. 

This solution was provided by Ferdinand Benary of Berlin. The 

name is Nero. The number is based on D3 yD. Neron Kesar, 

the Hebrew spelling of the Greek Ner6n Kaisar, Emperor Nero, 
authenticated by means of the Talmud and Palmyrian inscrip- 
tions. This inscription was found on coins of Nero’s time minted in 
the eastern half of the empire. And so—n (nun)=50; r (resh)=200; 
v (vav) for o=6; n (nun)=50; k (hkof)=100; s (samekh)=60; 
r (resh)=200. Total 666. If we take as a basis the Latin spelling Nero 
Caesar the second nun=50 disappears and we get 666—50=616, 
which is Irenaeus’ reading. 

a See this volume, pp. 454-55.— Ed. 
b Irenaeus, Libri V adversus Haeresis, V, 28-30.— Ed. 

In fact the whole Roman Empire suddenly broke into confusion 
in Galba’s time. Galba himself marched on Rome at the head of 
the Spanish and Gallic legions to overthrow Nero, who fled and 
ordered a freedman to kill him. But not only the praetorians in 
Rome plotted against Galba, the supreme commanders in the 
provinces did too; new pretenders to the throne appeared 
everywhere and prepared to march on Rome with their legions. 
The empire seemed doomed to civil war, its dissolution appeared 
imminent. Over and above all this the rumour spread, especially in 
the East, that Nero had not been killed but only wounded, that he 
had fled to the Parthians and was about to advance with an army 
over the Euphrates to begin another and more bloody rule of 
terror. Achaia and Asia in particular were terrified by such 
reports. And at the very time at which the Revelation must have 
been written there appeared a false Nero who settled with a fairly 
considerable number of supporters not far from Patmos and Asia 
Minor on the island of Kythnos in the Aegean Sea (now called 
Thermia), until he was killed while Otho still reigned. Little 
wonder that among the Christians, against whom Nero had 
launched the first great persecution, the view spread that he 
would return as the Antichrist and that his return and the 
intensified attempt at a bloody suppression of the new sect that it 
would involve would be the sign and prelude of the return of 
Christ, of the great victorious struggle against the powers of hell, 
of the thousand-year kingdom “shortly” to be established, the 
confident expectation of which inspired the martyrs to go joyfully 
to their deaths. 

Christian and Christian-influenced literature in the first two 
centuries gives sufficient indication that the secret of the 
number 666 was then known to many. Irenaeus no longer knew it, 
but on the other hand he and many others up to the end of the 
third century also knew that the returning Nero was meant by the 
beast of the Apocalypse. This trace is then lost and the work which 
interests us is fantastically interpreted by religious-minded future- 
tellers; I myself as a child knew old people who, following the 
example of old Johann Albrecht Bengel, expected the end of the 
world and the last judgment in the year 1836. The prophecy was 
fulfilled, and to the very year. The victim of the last judgment, 
however, was not the sinful world, but the pious interpreters of 
the Revelation themselves. For in 1836 F. Benary provided the key 
to the number 666 and thus put a torturous end to all the 
prophetical calculations, that new gematriah. 

Our John can only give a very superficial description of the 

On the History of Early Christianity 467 

kingdom of heaven that is reserved for the faithful. The new 
Jerusalem occupies a fairly large area, at least according to the 
conceptions of the time: it is 12,000 furlongs, or 2,227 kilometres 
broad, so that its area is about five million square kilometres, 
more than half the size of the United States of America. And it is 
built entirely of gold and precious stones. There God lives with his 
people, lightening them instead of the sun, and there shall be no 
more death, neither sorrow, neither shall there be any more pain. 
And a pure river of water of life flows through the city, and on 
either side of the river are trees of life, bearing twelve manner of 
fruits and yielding fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree 
“serve for the healing of the heathens’. (A kind of medicinal 
beverage, Renan thinks— L’Antechrist, p. 542.) Here the saints 
shall live for ever. 

Such, as far as we know, was Christianity in Asia Minor, its main 
seat, around the year 68. No trace of any Trinity but, on the 
contrary, the old single and indivisible Jehovah of later Judaism 
which had exalted him from the national god of the Jews to the 
one and supreme God of heaven and earth, where he claims to 
rule over all nations, promising mercy to the converted and 
mercilessly smiting down the obdurate in accordance with the 
ancient parcere subjectis ac debellare superbos.* Hence, this God, in 
person, not Christ as in the later accounts of the Gospels and the 
Epistles, will preside at the last judgment. According to the 
Persian doctrine of emanation which was current in later Judaism, 
Christ the Lamb proceeds eternally from him as do also, but on a 
lower footing, the ‘“‘seven spirits of God” who owe their existence 
to a misunderstanding of a poetical passage (Isaiah, 11:2). All of 
them are subordinate to God, not God themselves or equal to him. 
The Lamb sacrifices itself to atone for the sins of the world and 
for that its status is considerably enhanced in heaven, for its 
voluntary martyrdom is credited as an extraordinary feat through- 
out the book, not as something which proceeds necessarily from its 
intrinsic nature. Naturally the whole heavenly court of elders, 
cherubim, angels and saints is there. In order to become a religion 
monotheism has always had to make concessions to polytheism— 
since the time of the Zend-Avesta.*** With the Jews the decline to 
the sensuous gods of the heathens continued chronically until, 
after the exile,”? the heavenly court according to the Persian 
model adapted religion somewhat better to the imagination of the 
masses, and Christianity itself, even after it had replaced the 

a Pardon the humble and make war on the proud.— Ed. 

eternally self-equal immutable god of the Jews by the mysterious 
self-differentiating god of the Trinity, could find nothing to 
supplant the worship of the old gods but that of the saints; thus, 
according to Fallmerayer, the worship of Jupiter in Peloponnesus, 
Maina and Arcadia died out only about the ninth century 
(Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea, 1, p. 227). Only the modern 
bourgeois period and its Protestantism did away with the saints 
again and at last took differentiated monotheism seriously. 

In the book there is just as litthe mention of original sin and 
justification by faith. The faith of these early pugnacious 
communities is quite different from that of the later victorious 
church: side by side with the sacrifice of the Lamb, the imminent 
return of Christ and the thousand-year kingdom which is shortly 
to dawn form its essential content; this faith survives only through 
active propaganda, unrelenting struggle against the internal and 
external enemy, the proud profession of the revolutionary 
standpoint before the heathen judges and martyrdom, confident 
in victory. 

We have seen that the author is not yet aware that he is 
something else than a Jew. Accordingly there is no mention of 
baptism in the whole book, just as many more facts indicate that 
baptism was instituted in the second period of Christianity. The 
144,000 believing Jews are “sealed”, not baptised. It is said of the 
saints in heaven and the faithful upon earth that they had washed 
themselves of their sins and washed their robes and made them 
white in the blood of the Lamb; there is no mention of the water 
of baptism. The two prophets who precede the coming of the 
Antichrist in Chapter 11 do not baptise; and according to 19: 10, 
the testimony of Jesus is not baptism but the spirit of prophecy. 
Baptism should naturally have been mentioned in all these cases if 
it had already been in vigour; we may therefore conclude with 
almost absolute certainty that the author did not know of it, that it 
first appeared when the Christians definitively separated from the 
Jews. 

Neither does our author know any more about the second 
sacrament, Communion. If in the Lutheran text Christ promises 
every Thyatiran who remains firm in the faith to take Commun- 
ion with him, this creates a false impression. The Greek text 
has deipnéso—Ii1 shall eat supper (with him), and the English 
bible translates this correctly: I shall sup with um. There is no ques- 
tion here of Communion even as a mere commemoration 
meal. 

There can be no doubt that this book, with its date so originally 

On the History of Early Christianity 469 

authenticated as the year 68 or 69, is the oldest of all Christian 
literature. No other is written in such barbaric language, so full of 
Hebraisms, awful constructions and grammatical errors. Chap- 
ter 1, verse 4, for example, says literally: 

“Grace be unto you, and peace from him which is, and which was, and which is to 
come.” 

Only professional theologians and other historians who have a 
stake in it now deny that the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles 
are but later adaptations of writings which are now lost and whose 
feeble historical core is now unrecognisable in the maze of legend, 
that even the few Epistles supposed by Bruno Bauer to be 
“authentic” are either writings of a later date* or at best 
adaptations of old works of unknown authors altered by additions 
and insertions. It is all the more important since we are here in 
possession of a book whose date of writing has been determined to 
the nearest month, a book that displays Christianity to us in its 
most primitive form. This form stands in the same relation to the 
fourth-century state religion with its fully evolved dogma and 
mythology as Tacitus’ still vacillating mythology of the Germans does 
to the developed teaching of the gods of Edda as influenced by 
Christian and ancient elements. The germ of the world religion is 
there, but it includes without discrimination the thousand pos- 
sibilities for development which became realities in the countless 
subsequent sects. And the reason why this oldest writing of the 
time when Christianity was coming into being is especially valuable 
for us is that it shows without any dilution what Judaism, 
strongly influenced by Alexandria, contributed to Christianity. All 
that comes later is western, Greco-Roman appendage. It was 
only by the intermediary of the monotheistic Jewish religion 
that the cultured monotheism of later Greek vulgar philosophy 
could clothe itself in the religious form in which alone it could 
grip the masses. But once this intermediary was found, it could 
become a world religion only in the Greco-Roman world, and that 
by further development in and merger with the ideas of that 
world. 

a In the French authorised translation, published in Le Devenir social, the 
part of this sentence “that even the few Epistles ... of a later date” reads: “that 
even three of four Epistles still considered authentic by the Tibingen school are, as 
Bruno Bauer showed in his penetrating analysis, nothing more than later 
writings.” — Ed. 

470