It goes without saying that these historians should not allow themselves to be making this mistake. The problem that stands before them to solve is the following: eighteen hundred years ago, some sort of poor person showed up and said something. He was cut down and hung up and everyone forgot about him, just as millions of such instances have been forgotten, and for two hundred years the world did not hear a thing about him. But then, it turns out, somebody remembered him and what he had said and so he told it to another person and then to a third. And so on and so on, to the point that billions of people, smart and stupid, learned and illiterate, cling to the thought that this man, and only this man, was God. How can we explain this amazing phenomenon? The church leaders say that this occurred because Jesus actually was God. So everything makes sense. But if he was not God, then how can we explain that this man, specifically, is recognized by all as God?
And the scholars of this school earnestly attempt to uncover all the details of the conditions of this man’s life, paying no attention to the fact that no matter how much they seek out these details (and all they do is refer to what was printed in Josephus Flavius and the Gospels, they don’t actually seek anything out), even if they were to completely reconstruct Jesus’s life to the most minute details and discover when he ate a certain thing or where he slept, the question of why he—specifically he—had such an influence on people would remain, all the same, unanswered. The answer is not to be found in the environment where Jesus was born, who it was that raised him and so on, and it is even less to be found in what was taking place in Rome at the time and whether the people tended toward superstition and so on, but only in what this man preached, what was so special that it forced people to place him apart from all the others and recognize him as a God both then and now. It would seem that if you really want to understand this, then the first thing you would need to do is attempt to understand the teaching of this man and, it goes without saying, understand his actual teaching and not the vulgar interpretations of that teaching that were spread and are still being spread after him. But they do not do this. These scholarly historians of Christianity are so overjoyed with their understanding that Jesus was not a God and they want so badly to prove that his teaching was not divine and that it is therefore unnecessary. They forget that the more they try to prove that he was just a simple man and that his teaching was not divine, the further they will be from answering the question they are trying to solve, because they are wasting all their energy proving him a simple man and his teaching not divine. To see this delusion clearly, it would be worth looking at Renan and his followers: Havet, who naively asserts that Jesus Christ n’avait rien de chritien, and Souris, who demonstrates with great joy that Jesus was an exceptionally rude and stupid man.
The task is not to prove that Jesus was not a God and that therefore his teachings were not divine, any more than it is to prove that he was Catholic. The task must be to understand the essence of his teaching, this teaching that became so high and precious for people that they recognized the messenger of it as a God. I have tried to do this very thing; for myself at least, I have done it. And now I am offering it to my brothers.
If the reader belongs to the enormous majority of the educated, raised in the church faith, who have not strayed from that faith despite its incongruity with good common sense and conscience (for such a man, love and respect for the spirit of the Christian teaching must remain, otherwise, as in the proverb, he “throws the fur coat onto the fire because he is angry at the fleas,” considering all of Christianity a dangerous superstition), then I ask such a reader to consider that what pushes him away and what he deems superstition is not the teaching of Christ and that Christ can in no way be blamed for the repulsive beliefs that have been stitched onto his teaching and presented as Christianity. One must study the teaching of Christ alone, insofar as we have access to it—that is, those words and actions which have been attributed to Christ and which have an instructive meaning. Reading my account, such a reader will be convinced that Christianity not only is not a mixture of high and low, not only is it not superstitious, but that, on the contrary, it is the strictest, purest and fullest metaphysical and ethical teaching, above which no other human intellect has ascended to this day and in the radiance of which, though it may not do so consciously, all higher human activity operates: political, scientific, poetic and philosophical. If the reader belongs to that insignificant minority of educated people who cling to church faith, confessing it not for any external purposes but for inner peace, then I ask such a reader, before reading, to decide first in his soul, which is more valuable to him: spiritual peace or truth? If it is peace, then I ask him not to read; if it is truth, then I ask him to remember that the teaching of Christ, laid out here, despite the identical name, is a completely different teaching than the one he confesses, and that therefore the relationship of someone who confesses church faith to this account of Christ’s teaching is the same as the relationship of the Muslims to the sermons of Christianity. The question for him is not does this teaching in question agree with his faith or not, but only which teaching agrees more with his mind and heart. Is it the church teaching, which is founded on a reconciliation of all the scriptures, or is it the teaching of Christ on its own. For him, the question can only be framed like this: Does he want to accept a new teaching or remain in his own faith?
If the reader belongs to the group of people who externally claim church faith and value it not because they believe in its truth but because of external considerations, since they consider its ritual and preaching appropriate to their lifestyle, then let such people remember that no matter how many kindred thinkers they may have, no matter how strong they may be, no matter which thrones they may sit on, whichever high names they may call themselves, they are not in the position of the accusers, but of the accused, and not by me, but by Christ. Let such readers remember that they said what they had to say a long time ago and that even if they proved what they want to prove, they would merely be proving what all the hundreds of contradictory church faiths prove for themselves. They should remember that they have no need to prove anything; they should instead justify themselves. Justify themselves in the sacrilege of equating the teaching of Jesus the God with that of Ezdra, that of the councils and that of Theophylact and the sacrilege of allowing themselves to overinterpret the word of God and alter it based on the words of people. Justify themselves in slandering God, which they did by taking all the fanaticism that was in their hearts and dumping it on Jesus the God and passing it off as his teaching. Justify themselves in the fraud of hiding the teaching of God that was sent to bring goodness into the world, and putting in its place their own Holy Ghost faith. With this replacement they have deprived and continue to deprive billions of people of the goodness which Christ brought to the people, and in place of the peace and love he brought, they have brought sects into the world, along with judgments and all manner of evil, twisting it all in the name of Christ.