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Albert Kalthoff (5 March 1850,Barmen – 11 May 1906,Bremen) was a German Protestanttheologian, who along withEmil Felden (1874–1959),Oscar Mauritz (1867–1959),Moritz Schwalb (1833–1916) andFriedrich Steudel (1866–1939) formed a group inBremen, named theDeutscher Monistenbund (GermanMonists League), who no longer believed in Jesus as ahistorical figure.
Kalthoff criticized what he regarded as the romanticist and sentimental image of Jesus as a "great personality" of history developed by German liberal theologians, includingAlbert Schweitzer who noted Kalthoff in his workThe Quest of the Historical Jesus.[1] In Kalthoff's views, it was the early church that created the New Testament, not the reverse; the early Jesus movement wassocialist, expecting a social reform and a better world, which was combined with the Jewish apocalyptic belief in a Messiah. Kalthoff saw Christianity as a socialpsychosis.[2] (Per Arthur Drews,The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present - see the section on Kalthoff)[3]Arthur Drews was influenced by Kalthoff.
Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) was the first academic theologian posit theahistoricity of Jesus. However his scholarship was buried by German academia, and he remained a pariah, until Albert Kalthoff rescued his works from neglect and obscurity. Kalthoff revived Bruno Bauer's Christ Myth thesis in hisDas Christus-Problem. Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie (The Problem of Christ: Principles of a Social Theology) andDie Entstehung des Christentums, Neue Beiträge zum Christusproblem (The Rise of Christianity).
| Author | Albert Kalthoff |
|---|---|
| Original title | Die Entstehung des Christentums. Neue Beiträge zum Christus-problem. (How Christianity arose. New contributions to the Christ-problem.) |
| Translator | Joseph McCabe |
| Published | London: Watts & CO. |
Publication date | 1904 |
Published in English | 1907 |
| Text | The Rise of Christianity atHathiTrust |
A Son of God, Lord of the World, born of a virgin, and rising again after death, and the son of a small builder with revolutionary notions, are two totally different beings. If one was the historical Jesus, the other certainly was not. The real question of the historicity of Jesus is not merely whether there ever was a Jesus among the numerous claimants of a Messiahship in Judea, but whether we are to recognise the historical character of this Jesus in the Gospels, and whether he is to be regarded as the founder of Christianity.[4]
