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The Life of Christ, of a Critical Examination of His History; Translated From the German and Reprinted From an English Edition
The Life of Christ of a Critical Examination of His History Translated From the German and Reprinted From an English Edition Author:David Friedrich Strauss General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1845 Original Publisher: G. Vale Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select ... more »from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: $ XXVIII. The History of the Conception of Jesus considered as a Myth. If we would escape from the supernatural origin of Jesus, in order that we may not excite the derision of the men of the present day, says Gabler, in his Examination of the Commentary of Paulus ; and if, on the other hand, the natural explanation leads to conclusions, not only strange, but altogether revolting, it would be better to have recourse to a myth; by which we should avoid all the difficulties of these explanations. Many great men, in the ancient mythological world, have had an extraordinary birth, and have been considered sons of the gods. Jesus himself speaks of his celestial origin, -- speaking of God as his father ; and at other times he calls himself the son of God, in his quality of the Messiah. By Matthew (i. 22, et sequitus), it is clear that the passage of Isaiah (vii. 14) was applied to Jesus in the early Christian church. Jesus as the Messiah, said they, ought, agreeably to that passage, to be born of a virgin by a divine operation ; that which ought to be, they concluded, had really taken place, and in that was developed (dogmatically) a philosophic myth upon the birth of Jesus. The mythic explanation gives up the history of Jesus as a reality, in the vulgar sense ; according to the myth, Jesus was Iforn of a regular marriage between Joseph and Mary ; this preserves, as has been remarked with reason, both the dignity of Jesus and the respect due to his mother. It is requisite to explain the manner of formation of such a myth. A disposition prevailed among the ancients to represent ...« less