DCHindley

For those who get into a good socio-economic analysis of early Christian development, check this out.

A flip comment on another thread (yes, mine) made me look up the above book. It turns out to be a rather good Marxist analysis of early Christianity that should resonate to an extent with some Jesus sceptics.

I had already run across his grandson, John H Kautsky, in The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (or via: amazon.co.uk) (1982), as this book was one of the two sources for J D Crossan's "Lenski-Kautsky" model for social stratification, touted in his book The Birth of Christianity (or via: amazon.co.uk) (1998).

While I decided long ago that Crossan's "Lenski-Kautsky" model was complete crap, I did gain an appreciation for John Kautsky. In the introduction he mentions the influence of his grandfather Karl Kautsky, explaining how he was the leading expositor of Marxism behind Karl Marx and Frederick Engles themselves.

Looking him up, I discovered that he had written a book on "primitive Christianity," published in German as Der Ursprung des Christentums: eine historische Untersuchung, in 1908.

While an "authorized" but anonymous English translation based on the 1923 13th German edition was published in 1925, I was unable to find any scans of it on the Internet.

What is available is a transcription of the 1953 translation by Henry F. Mins, which can be seen in full at the Marxist Internet Archive site, or click here.

There is one rtf file out there, but all online editions appear to be the transcript from the Marxist Internet Archive, not an OCRd scan. I cannot tell for sure whether it is based on the same German edition as the info in library catalogues seems to confuse the 1925 & 1953 translations. The website claims it is in the public domain (a later translation of 1972 has superseded this one). Numerous copies of the German original is available as PDF downloads (1st edition of 1908 mainly), but the last German edition I can find record of is the 16th, published 1972 and likely a reprint with updated front matter.

I'll have to admit Kautsky did a damn credible job of it. One can quibble with this or that interpretation offered, but he covers every single important matter that has come up for decades.

I have this sneaking suspicion that this book has influenced Robert Eisler's 1931 The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist (Josephus' Mundus & Paulina episode); Crossan's book above (Roman slave economy and exploitation of lower classes); (neither give him any credit) and perhaps not a few Crosstalk discussions (particularly William Arnal's insistence that even if Jesus existed we can't really know anything about him).

No one wants to credit him and open themselves to being called a commie, but as he wrote about these matters in 1908, and they already appear to be well digested thoughts and Kautsky presents the detail exactly as we find it discussed currently, I suspect it is not coincidence.

Here is a Review of the 1925 translation:

The Saturday Review Of Literature, August 29, 1925

"An Unorthodox Work"

FOUNDATIONS OF CHRlSTIANITY; A STUDY IN CHRISTlAN ORIGINS.
By KARL KAUTSKY. Authorized Translation from the Thirteenth German Edition.
New York: International Publishers. 1925. $4.

Reviewed by Henry J. Cadbury, Harvard University.

THE edition here translated of Kautsky's "Der Ursprung des Christentums" which first appeared in 1908, shows little change from the original one. An English translation was projected in 1917 but never issued. Now we have a very creditable representation of the work. The unnamed translator has rendered the German with accuracy into idiomatic English. The printing and paper are excellent.

The contents and contentions of the work will not excite general approval. It purports to be a work of history and its method is indeed not without justification of that claim. The author shows a detachment from passion, an effort to sift truth from falsehood, a power for historical synthesis on the basis of a general background of analysis, and he quotes effectively the primitive sources. It is no condemnation of the work that it questions many orthodox traditions of Christian history. Theologians had already done this, e.g., Pfleiderer, whom Kautsky often quotes. The miracles of the New Testament are rejected as part of contemporary credulity, the speeches of Jesus are considered too unreliable to give us any clear portrait of his character. The Jewish sources of early Christianity account for its Messianism and ethics as Gentile superstition does for its miracles and deceit. In fact Christianity is regarded as the product of its time. Its originality and its alleged superior humanitarianism are denied. Monotheism, redemption, and immortality were in the air.

Kautsky does not go so far as others have done towards denying the existence of Jesus. He admits his existence but despairs of knowing anything about him. The gospels only show the character of later Christianity and non-Christian historians add no clear information. But this is not a significant lack to Kautsky since he believes individual persons play little part in history. In fact Kautsky is an adherent of the socialist school,—the economic interpreters of history,— and the book is a brilliant if perverse sample of that method. Its selection for English translation was therefore well advised, if it is read with discrimination.

The body of the work is an analysis of Roman society in sociological terms and is followed by an attempt to reduce Judaism and Christianity to a similar mould. Ideological historiography is deprecated, and Christian origins are portrayed as a class affair. Christianity began as a movement of the proletariat. Its founder was a Jewish revolutionary who was curbed like other zealots by the Roman power. That he intended to use force seems to Kautsky to be shown by passages in the gospels, while the pacifist teachings ascribed to him there are later Christian corrections. The followers of Jesus maintained an existence because they were already organized. The resurrection did not hold them together. They lived still in hopes of a material millennium. Kautsky takes as sober history the accounts of communism in the Acts of the Apostles, and hints at corresponding irregularities in the Christian attitude to family ties.

In three centuries, however, according to Kautsky, Christianity completely changed. Its fighting character gave way to docility or passive resistance. As a proletarian movement it lost interest in the overthrow of wealth, since the ancient proletarian unlike the slave was a parasite on wealth. It failed to abolish slavery. Rather it fawned or even converted wealthy persons. In place of communism it developed a system of charity for emergencies no more extensive than modern mutual insurance. It developed gradually an organization of its own and when it became the state religion it became the instrument and ally of exploitation and domination.

The historical defects of this work and its school are well known to technical students and need no detailed comment here. The main fault is a one-sided understanding of history, emphasis on the economic factor to the exclusion of others and interpretation of unrelated phenomena in the light of true but irrelevant facts. The book shows a better understanding of New Testament times than of New Testament ideas. Christianity cannot in any fairness be regarded as the precipitate of certain class interests nor as ever animated primarily by class hatred. It is to be feared that the general reader who shares the author's presuppositions will overlook the glaring incompleteness of his picture and the arbitrary treatment of the source material.

Conservative Christians need not be warned against the book. They will be too much offended at its unorthodoxy to proceed very far. The object of the book is not however an attack on Christianity. Its effect is indeed to create doubt about its records, uncertainity (sic) about its founder's portrait, scepticism on its claims of miraculous attestation, originality, and moral achievement and positive scorn on its increasingly powerful organization. Nor docs the author attempt to commend his own economic theories as confirmed by early Christianity. For the socialism of his teachers Kautsky finds no precedent in the gospel. He does not make Jesus a Marxian nor does he commend the communism of the early church. He is more impressed with the differences between ancient and modern social conditions and his desire is to show that socialism in the twentieth century should not necessarily be expected to degenerate into class rule, conservatism, and the reverse of its original character as Christianity did in the third century of its development.

Enjoy! Comments welcome.

DCH

mountainman

Amazing find DCH. He seems to have written about the same time as the author of The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (1912) - Arthur Drews. You give the date 1908, so Drews may have been inspired by Kautsky.


I agree. His comments are still cogent enough to have discussion boards named after them, and to pre-empt most of the discussions about the ancient historical EVIDENCE and the ancient historical EVIDENCE ALONE ....

From Book One: The Person of Jesus; I. The Pagan Sources:


:realitycheck:

Does everyone appreciate that last sentence?
Is this an example of a sense of humor?

It's notable to see he cites Gibbon.


A hundred years ago today

What is the state of his "Free thought" today? What's changed in that 100 years? Perhaps one change has been the downfall of the historical value of the Hebrew Bible, and its characters. And the appearance of:

1) WW1, WWII,
2) Hollywood
3) Nag Hammadi codices and other "gnostic" [heretical] literature
4) Internet


But this writer was close to the action.
Thanks for digging him out of the archive DCH.

DCHindley

Thanks MM.

I tend to like critics from the 1880s to around 1915, as they seem to be much more willing to ask questions that would be considered "politically incorrect" today. Funny thing is, the phrase "politically incorrect" was invented to poke fun at Communist politicians and spokespersons who just parroted the party line. Now we westerners and perhaps you underers are almost afraid to speak of anything that might seriously rock the social boat.

Because Christianity is seen either as a means of personal salvation, which implies moral improvement, or seen as a convenient medium which society can use to help people get along and prosper, questioning the conventional wisdom about its origins, especially as they relate to the founder, is tantamount to kicking the base of a stack of canned peas.

The ability of critics of that era to catch and analyze everything so thoroughly really puts modern critics to shame. The only area he seemed to be a bit doctrinaire about was the section labeled "book four":

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

...

V. The Development of the Christian Community
Proletarians and Slaves
The Decline of Communism
Apostles, Prophets and Teachers
Bishop
Monasticism

However, one can see many useful observations in the discussion, and on the face of it his analysis is at least plausible.

DCH

tanya

I am not sure exactly what you mean here, but Kautsky was not a "Commie".

He was an heroic figure, who led the international working class Marxist movement, prior to the Bolshevik revolution, and who ardently opposed "communism", as that term is understood in modern society, as representing the type of government exercised in USSR, China, Cuba, N.Korea, and VietNam.

Kautsky denied the essential feature of "communism", i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat, another term often misunderstood, especially in certain societies. Marx intended, in writing this, to juxtapose leadership by the owners of farms and factories with leadership by those who performed the work at the farms and factories. The term "dictatorship", was meant by Marx, as a derogatory indication of the reality of a class based leadership based upon military force, dating back at least 3000 years, in most countries of the world.

Kautsky's wife was a good friend of one of my heroes, Rosa Luxemburg, a gal murdered by the fascists, during Hitler's rise to power in 1918. I think that the deformations obvious to all, in societies based upon Lenin's model, are a result of the murders of the Communards in Paris in 1870, and the subsequent slaughter of revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the existing regimes, replacing them with democratic societies, in which the vast majority had a voice, instead of only the minority of very wealthy land owners.

To your point of whether or not subsequent authors have credited Kautsky, I don't know, having never read Kautsky, but only criticisms of Kautsky, by Trotsky. I see a parallel with Marcion. We only read the criticisms, and try to figure out what he taught, and believed.

My question is: how many of the Christian reformers, throughout history, perhaps including Marcion, gained popularity based on a program which sought to overthrow the existing power structure, replacing it with a more democratic regime, reflective of the majority of inhabitants.

As far as I know, Kautsky himself, followed Engels, so, perhaps some of Kautsky's interpretation of Christianity is based upon even earlier analyses. I haven't read Engels' most famous text, which perhaps addresses this issue... Marx's comment on Christianity is often misunderstood in the popular media: Opium of the masses meant, in 1860, the only means of euphoria available to ordinary folks, who could not afford more luxurious pleasures. Back then, opium was dirt cheap, by comparison...

PhilosopherJay

Hi Tanya,

Good points, especially the last one about Marx and opium.

As far as the question of changing the power structure, I believe Christianity played different roles over time.

We should remember that it was only in 143 BCE that the Maccabees broke Judea from the Greek rulers who had conquered it under Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. The Greeks had conquered it from the Persians who had ruled it starting from 539 BCE.
After some 80 years of turbulent independence, in 63 BCE, Rome made Judea a client state under Herodian client kings. In 6 CE, it lost even the appearance of self rule, becoming a province of the Roman Empire.

The Jewish-Roman war started in 66 CE was to gain independence from Rome. It is probable that Christians represented extreme Jewish nationalists at the forefront of this war if we believe that Christianity was the "Fourth Philosophy" mentioned by Josephus. The forced circumcision that Paul talks about seems to indicate it was an extreme Jewish nationalist movement centered in Jerusalem.

After the defeat of the Jews in 73, Christianity re-emerges as a Sun worshipping Mystery cult, apparently starting in the 90's if the evidence of Pliny's letters to Trajan are to be believed.

In its first form, its only interest in changing the power structure was its desire to free Judea and surrounding territories form direct Roman rule. In its mystery cult form, its only interest was in getting recognized as a legitimate form of worship by the Roman hierarchy. It was also in competition with all the polytheistic religions and Judaism. So in the sense of wanting to destroy its competitors, it wanted to change the religious power structure.

It is not until the Fourth Century, circa 313 that the Emperor Constantine gets the idea of using it to enhance his power.

It is noteworthy that Christianity never challenged the class structure of ancient society. It was quite happy that people remained slaves or exploited workers until the apocalypse and the end of this world and the beginning of the heavenly kingdom that would replace it.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

DCHindley

Sorry! I should have put the word "commie" in scare quotes to show it was being used facetiously. Yes he was an "internationalist" Marxist, and I was aware that he was not a fan of "dictatorships of the proletariat." However, somewhere in the post I think I indicated that in some way.

IMO, Marcion was not very interested in this world.

Mike Conley, a former US Army intelligence analyst (PhD in history, worked in the 60's on intellegence from Vietnam) who used to post on various lists in the late 90s, claimed that the church of the 3rd century was a form of organized underground society resembling communist "cells" in modern times.

He has an essay over at the Hermann Detering's Radical Criticism website outlining some things he claims are fact, such as the early church's institutions such as "hospitals, orphanages, asylums for the poor and hostels" influencing local politics, but he never responded to my request for sources.

However, on reading Kautsky's Foundations I realized he was alluding to this:

Many administrators laid more stress on propaganda work than on their primary official duties, when the growth of the community created new organs that took some of the load off the others. Often the deacons could devote themselves more to propaganda, since their functions were performed in large communities by special hospitals, orphanages, asylums for the poor and hostels for visiting comrades.

Still, I am not aware of the mention of the existence of specific institutions, although 3rd century Christian churches did extend significant charity to the less fortunate, implying the existence of internal organs of some size and sophistication.

It was not until the Protestant Reformation that Christians took to imposing the right form of faith by force. Luther was happy to support kings or princes that supported his new church (and had a pretty low opinion of the common masses and their physical needs). The Roman Catholic church in return urged the Catholic kings and princes to defend the 2nd estate against the Lutheran princes.

Calvin was happy to burn "heretics" (especially Anabaptists) who did not submit to the authority of the state church. On the other hand, Anabaptists (Quakers, Mennonites, etc) tended to advocate more socially equitable communities, and did not force their views on others.

What passes for Right-Evangelical Christianity in the USA is more akin to Calvinism than anything else, although I am sure many of them do not identify themselves that way. What the political right here has done is tap into the 'prosperity through right belief" cults that had rose up in the 70s & 80s and become institutions in themselves.

DCH

andrewcriddle

Schweitzer suggests that Kautsky's work is based on the earlier ideas of Albert Kalthoff, but replaces Kalthoff's Roman Communist movement with a Palestinian Communist movement as the earliest form of Christianity.

Andrew Criddle

tanya

Thank you Andrew.

I am ignorant of this German text by Kalthoff (or via: amazon.co.uk), further, my German is inadequate to read it, and understand it. I could only read Marx with an English translation side by side.....

However, despite that obvious disqualification, I would doubt that Kautsky was particularly influenced by a Christian theologian.

The Socialist movement of the last decade of the 19th century was very rich in intellectual contribution. Many brilliant minds offered opinions on methods to improve the depressing living standards of the world's proletariat. China, India, Japan, as well as Russia had enormous social upheavals in the first decade of the twentieth century.

The main question confronting organizers of "revolutionary" organizations, was how to succeed, given the COMPLETE devastation of every other socialist attempt, particularly, the failure of the Paris Commune, thirty years earlier, as Marx had predicted, given the lack of attention to organizational issues by the French revolutionary leadership in Paris in 1870, leaders who seemed oblivious to the failure of the earlier revolution one generation earlier, in 1848.

The leadership, in general, was split on how to proceed: secret, violent change (Lenin, living in Switzerland, having escaped from the Russian Czar's police), or peaceful, democratic change (Kautsky in Protestant dominated Prussia). Both groups competed not only with each other, for membership, but also with the Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, for both Christian sects had very well developed infrastructures, especially, in Germany.

That Christian organizations were seen by socialists of all stripes, as institutions to emulate, raid, and study, in order to gain new adherents for the many different revolutionary groups of that era, may be acknowledged by reference to Rosa Luxumberg's pamphlet from 1905, written a couple of years before either Kautsky, or Kalthoff:

Toto

The Rise of Christianity by Kaltoff is available as a free google ebook

DCHindley

Hi Andrew,

I am aware of Schweitzer speaking of Kalthoff as follows:

Kalthoff, recognising that the origin of popular Christianity constitutes the main question, takes as his starting-point the social movements of the time.

In the Roman Empire, so runs his argument, among the oppressed masses of the slaves and the populace, eruptive forces were concentrated under high tension. A communistic movement arose, to which the influence of the Jewish element in the proletariat gave a Messianic-Apocalyptic colouring. The Jewish synagogue influenced Roman social conditions so that "the crude social ferment at work in the Roman Empire amalgamated itself with the religious and philosophical forces of the time to form the new Christian social movement." Early Christian writers had learned in the synagogue to construct "personifications." The whole Late-Jewish literature rests upon this principle. Thus "the Christ" became the ideal hero of the Christian community, "from the socio-religious standpoint the figure of Christ is the sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical forces which were at work at a certain period." The Lord's Supper was the memorial feast of this ideal hero.

"As the Christ to whose Parousia the community looks forward this Hero-god of the community bears within Himself the capacity for expansion into the God of the universe, into the Christ of the Church, who is identical in essential nature with God the Father. Thus the belief in the Christ brought the Messianic hope of the future into the minds of the masses, who had already a certain organisation, and by directing their thoughts towards the future it won all those who were sick of the past and despairing about the present."

The death and resurrection of Jesus represent experiences of the community. "For a Jew crucified under Pontius Pilate there was certainly no resurrection. All that is possible is a vague hypothesis of a vision lacking all historical reality, or an escape into the vaguenesses of theological phraseology. But for the Christian community the resurrection was something real, a matter of fact. For the community as such was not annihilated in that persecution: it drew from it, rather, new strength and life."

But what about the foundations of this imposing structure?

For what he has to tell us about the condition of the Roman Empire and the social organisation of the proletariat in the time of Trajan - for it was then that the Church first came out into the light-we may leave the responsibility with Kalthoff. But we must inquire more closely how he brings the Jewish apocalyptic into contact with the Roman proletariat.

Communism, he says, was common to both. It was the bond which united the apocalyptic "other-worldliness" with reality. [Quest, 317-318]

This makes Kalthoff a proponent of a lofty social gospel based on the myth of a resurrected Christ and a communism born of necessity from what was drawn from common culture. There is no room in this kind of view for Jesus the social revolutionary in reaction to socio-economic stress.

Kautsky himself has this to say about Kalthoff:

Recent Bible criticism ... shook the traditional picture of Jesus; but since it was carried on, for the most part, by theologians, it stopped short of the position first formulated by Bruno Bauer and later by others, in particular by A. Kalthoff: this was the position that, in view of the condition of the source materials, no new conception of Jesus could be formulated. The new Bible criticism keeps searching for such a new conception, always with the same result that the Christendom of previous centuries had produced: each theologian painted into the picture of Jesus his own private ideals and spirit. Like second century descriptions of Jesus, twentieth-century ones do not show what Jesus really taught, but what the makers of these descriptions wish he had taught.

Kautsky agreed with Kalthroff that modern critics were creating views about Jesus that were constructs of their own minds (is this where Schweitzer comes in, in the apocryphal well reflection comment?). However, Kautsky disagreed with Kalthoff that the whole Christian movement was the result of one ideal hero (the mythic Jesus, I think).

It is no wonder then that secular historiography feels no great need for investigating the origins of Christianity if it starts from the view that Christianity was the creation of a single person. If this view were correct, we could give up studying the rise of Christianity and leave its description to our poetic theologians.

But it is a different matter as soon as we think of a world-wide religion not as the product of a single superman but as a product of society. Social conditions at the time of the rise of Christianity are very well known. And the social character of early Christianity can be studied with some degree of accuracy from its literature.

I am not aware of anyplace in Schweitzer's works where he speaks of Kautsky simply rearranging Kalthoff's understanding of Roman communism.

DCH