Shadow of the Third Century by Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Author:Alvin Boyd Kuhn [Kuhn, Alvin Boyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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of the Christ by telling them that he had been a celestial hierarch and was on earth as an incarnation of the Spirit, the Pneuma of God. One has to ask where simple fishermen would have learned about the Pneuma of God. Such a datum goes far to prove that these simple "fishermen," loudly boasted of as children in mental culture, either were not historical men at all, or that they were somehow in the intellectual grade and attainment of university wranglers, familiar with abstruse and recondite philosophical technical terms, the Holy Ghost having worked a miracle by inspiring untutored men with divine knowledge.

And how does Guignebert know that Paul told the twelve fishermen anything? The historical existence of both the Galilean Jesus and the twelve disciples is questioned on the most solid of grounds,--lack of actual evidence and the implications of a host of "internal" evidences contradicting it. No Christian historian examined in much reading has claimed that Paul ever contacted or apparently ever heard of the man of Galilee, and therefore it is unlikely that he ever told the disciples--if they did exist--anything in person.

Then Guignebert characterizes the second wing of the Christian movement, the first having been described above:

"The other movement, known to Christianity from the second century and possibly even earlier, sets out from a different starting point. It, too, seeks to inflate the too simple confession of faith of the early days and to excavate deeper foundations for it. It can accomplish this purpose only by combining it with beliefs and theories borrowed from its surroundings. But in the first place it shows no discrimination in its choice, which settles upon numerous features widely different in nature: The Olympian paganism, Orphism, diverse Oriental religions, systems of philosophy--everything is gathered into its net. In the second place it takes no interest in reconciling what it borrows with the historical data or even with the traditions of the faith. Instead, it pretends to possess a special revelation of its own, which it uses to justify most anomalous combinations of ideas that constitute real syncretistic systems, in which true Christianity appears as only one more element. It becomes almost unrecognizable as part of a complicated cosmogony and an abstruse system of metaphysics, neither of which owes anything of value to it."

If this is a true historical record--and nobody has found warrant to dispute it--there is here again a disclosure of unrecognized truth that confutes all common belief about the early history of Christianity. Finding its first professions of simple faith too bodiless, too ephemeral, too subject to the flows and ebbs of pietistic fervor, too much an emo-

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