Perhaps if I posted the TOC's of the two books and the key paragraph from the essay:
"On the History of Early Christianity," by Frederick Engels (1894-95)
[Re:] Bruno Bauer. His greatest service consists not merely in having given a pitiless 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 Greek and Greco-Roman elements that first opened for Christianity the career of a universal religion. The legend that Christianity arose ready and complete out of 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 with 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 mainly Stoic — had on Christianity, which became the state religion under Constantine, is far from having been defined 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 that world's own product. Bauer, of course, like all those who are fighting against deep-rooted prejudices, overreached his aim in this work. In order to define through literary sources, too, Philo's and particularly Seneca's influence on emerging Christianity and 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 in general. According to him Christianity as such appears only under the Flavians, the literature of the New Testament only under Hadrian, Antoninus 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 in 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.
The Rise of Christianity, by Albert Kalthoff (1904)
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Was There A Historical Jesus? (1)
Chapter 2: The Preparation For Christianity In The Roman Empire (33)
Chapter 3: The Preparation For Christianity In Greek Philosophy (59)
Chapter 4: The Preparation For Christianity In Judaism (73)
Chapter 5: The Communistic Clubs (101)
Chapter 6: The Organisation Of The Christian Community (117)
Chapter 7: The Christian Church (154)
Chapter 8: The Future Of Christianity (184)
There is nothing here to suggest that they were slapping together a fanciful hypothesis grasped from thin air in order to counter something they feared. I do get that impression from reading modern Jesus Mythers. They instead engaged in a serious examination of the economic, philosophical and cultural conditions that preceded the development of Christian theology and its concept of its own history.Foundations of Christianity, by Karl Kautsky (1908)
CONTENTS
Book One: The Person Of Jesus
I. The Pagan Sources
II. The Christian Sources
III. The Dispute Over the Concept of Jesus
Book Two: Society in the Roman Empire
I. The Slave Economy
Landed Property
Domestic Slavery
Slavery in Commodity Production
The Technological Inferiority of the Slave Economy
The Economic Decline
II. The State
State and Commerce
Patricians and Plebeians
The Roman State
Usury
Absolutism
III. Thought and Sentiment in the Age of the Roman Empire
Insecurity
Credulity
Untruthfulness
Humaneness
Internationalism
Piety
Monotheism
Book Three: The Jews
I. Israel
Migrations of the Semitic Peoples
Palestine
The Conception of God in Ancient Israel
Trade and Philosophy
Trade and Nationality
Canaan, Road of the Nations
Class Struggles in Israel
The Decline of Israel
The First Destruction of Jerusalem
II. The Jews After the Exile
The Exile
The Jewish Diaspora
The Jewish Propaganda
Anti-Semitism
Jerusalem
The Sadducees
The Pharisees
The Zealots
The Essenes
Book Four: The Beginnings of Christianity
I. The Primitive Christian Community
The Proletarian Character of the Community
Class Hatred
Communism
Objections to the Existence of Communism
Contempt for Labor
Destruction of the Family
II. The Christian Idea of the Messiah
The Coming of the Kingdom of God
The Lineage of Jesus
Jesus as a Rebel
The Resurrection of the Crucified
The International Savior
III. Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians
Agitation among the Pagans
The Opposition between Jews and Christians
IV. The History of Christ’s Passion
V. The Development of the Christian Community
Proletarians and Slaves
The Decline of Communism
Apostles, Prophets and Teachers
Bishop
Monasticism
DCH
Solo wrote:FYI, Kautsky actually contradicted Engels on Jesus existence. He believed there were authentic scraps of history in which Jesus was one of many Jewish rebels/zealots in his time. For the leading German socialist, the ultimate historical proof of Jesus was the 'primitive Christian communist society' in Jerusalem. He wrote a Marxist theory on the Origins of Christianity for which he received the nickname the Pope of Marxism. I have never been convinced by the argument but nonetheless it is an interesting and absorbing reading. I have discovered that despite his being lamented as an infamous "renegade" by Lenin and the bolsheviks (he was committed to parliamentary democracy), in the latter Soviet Union, his theory was readily embraced and the "mythical Jesus" of Bauer, Engels, Lenin and Drews (which I was taught at university in Prague in 1960's) all but discarded in the 1980's by the Soviet Academia. Many Russian Orthodox churches were built under Gorbachev and many historical ones, destroyed by the early bolshevik activists, rebuilt. Most famous among them is the cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (yes, yes the one in which Pussy Riot screamed obscenities).DCHindley wrote:mh,If one were to ask me, the Marxists Engels and Kautsky, and the Monist Kalthoff, have made the best attempts at actually explaining, with plausible antecedents, how the Christian salvation-myth could have formed in the 1st century Roman empire without a human Jesus actually existing.
Best,
Jiri