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الدين والصراع الطبقى فى المجتمع الشرقى العبودى القديم
مقدمة المترجم - اهتممت منذ زمن طويل بمسألة تطبيق المنهج المادى التاريخى على الاديان . وصادفت منذ عقود كتاب كارل كاوتسكى : اسس المسيحية الذى يعده البعض واحدا من اهم مائة كتاب فى العالم . وهو كتاب لازال يلقى التقدير رغم انصرام مايزيد عن قرن على كتابته . والكتاب لايتعرض للمسيحية فقط وانما لليهودية ايضا , وفى كل الاحوال فان الابحاث العلمية الاخيرة التى تابعتها حتى وقت قريب فى هذا المجال لم تنقض اطروحاته ومقولاته الأساسية . وقد ترجمته بوصفه منهجا يحتذى فى النظر للديانات الابراهيمية الثلاث اجمالا مقتفيا اثر من قال ان الترجمة هى " تأليف بشكل غير مباشر" . ورغم ان الكتاب يتعرض لما تناوله بشكل علمى نقدى يحترم عقائد المؤمنين بالدينين الا ان الظروف التى احاطت ببلادنا قد دعتنى الى ارجاء نشره عدة مرات رغم انتهائى منه منذ زمن طويل. وقد افادتنى هذه الترجمة فائدة هائلة فقد كان على ان اقرأ مكتبة كاملة تتناول تاريخ هذه الفترة من نواح عدة بدءا بحضارات الشرق الادنى القديم حتى مخطوطات البحر الميت مرورا بالطبع بالتوراة باسفارها المعترف بها وغير المعترف بها ( الابوكريفا ) وكذلك التوراة والانجيل فضلا عن بعض ماورد عن المسيحية فى تراثنا الاسلامى فى فترات تاريخية حاسمة ( فترتا الغزو الصليبى , والخروج من الاندلس بكل مافيهما من مرارة ) . ولابد من التنويه الى ان " الحقائق الدينية " تتمايز عن الحقائق التاريخية . فالحديث عن شخصية يسوع عند المؤرخ الذى تعنيه المصادر التاريخية غيرها عند المؤمن بالمسيحية او الاسلام الذى يرجع فى هذه الحال الى القرآن والأناجيل . وأود هنا ان اشير لبعض الكتابات التى يمكن الرجوع لها لتعميق المعرفة ولمتابعة التطورات اللاحقة لمن يرغب : 1 - سيرة السيد المسيح لابن عساكر الدمشقى - تحقيق سليمان على مراد - الصادر عن المعهد الملكى للدراسات الدينية - دار الشروق - رام الله -1996 - 2 -عيسى ومريم فى القرآن والتفاسير- تحرير رياض ابو وندى وعلاء رشق وآخرون - المعهد الملكى للدراسات الدينية - دار الشروق - رام الله 1996 - وكذلك الى : 3- التاريخ القديم للشعب الاسرائيلى - توماس ل . طومسون - ترجمة صالح على سوداح - دار بيسان - بيروت - ط.ا. 1995 . 4 -- تاريخ نقد العهد القديم تحرير زالمان شازار - ترجمة احمد محمد هويدى - المشروع القومى للترجمة - 2000 ج. م. ع. 5 - بابل والكتاب المقدس - جان بوتيرو ومحاورات مع ايلين مونساكريه- ترجمة روزا مخلوف - دار كنعان - دمشق 2000 - 5 - انبياء التوراة والنبؤات التوراتية - م . ريجسكى - ترجمة د . آحويوسف - دار الينابيع - دمشق 1993 .
أسـس المسيحيـة دراسة فى أصول مسيحية
تأليف: كارل كاوتسكي
ترجمة: سعيد العليمي
المحتويات
مدخل ................................................................
القسم الأول: شخصية يسوع .........................................
الفصل الأول: المصادر الوثنية ...............................................
الفصل الثانى: المصادر المسيحية .............................................
الفصل الثالث: الصراع من أجل صورة يسوع ................................
القسم الثانى: المجتمع الرومانى فى المرحلة الإمبراطورية ...........
الفصل الأول: نظام تملك العبيد ...............................................
أ - ملكية الأرض ...........................................................................
ب - العبودية المنزلية .......................................................................
ج - العبودية فى الإنتاج السلعى .............................................................
د - الدونية التقنية لنظام تملك العبيد ..........................................................
هـ - التدهور الاقتصادى ...................................................................
الفصل الثانى: حياة الدولة ....................................................
أ - الدولة والتجارة ..........................................................................
ب - النبلاء والعامة .........................................................................
ج - الدولة الرومانية ........................................................................
د - الربـا ..................................................................................
هـ - النزعة الاستبدادية ....................................................................
الفصل الثالث: التيارات الفكرية فى الفترة الإمبراطورية الرومانية .............
أ - ضعف الروابط الاجتماعية ...............................................................
ب - الـســذاجة ..........................................................................
ج - اللـجوء إلى الكـــذب ...............................................................
د - النزعة الإنسانية .........................................................................
هـ - النزعة الأممية ........................................................................
و - الاتجاه إلى الدين .......................................................................
ز - التوحيــد .............................................................................
القسم الثالث: اليهود .................................................
الفصل الأول: بنــو إسرائيــل ............................................
أ - الهجرات القبلية السامية ..................................................................
ب - فلســطــين ........................................................................
ج - مفهوم الرب فى إسرائيل القديمة ........................................................
د - التجارة والفلسفة .............
أسـس المسيحيـة دراسة فى أصول مسيحية
تأليف: كارل كاوتسكي
ترجمة: سعيد العليمي
المحتويات
مدخل ................................................................
القسم الأول: شخصية يسوع .........................................
الفصل الأول: المصادر الوثنية ...............................................
الفصل الثانى: المصادر المسيحية .............................................
الفصل الثالث: الصراع من أجل صورة يسوع ................................
القسم الثانى: المجتمع الرومانى فى المرحلة الإمبراطورية ...........
الفصل الأول: نظام تملك العبيد ...............................................
أ - ملكية الأرض ...........................................................................
ب - العبودية المنزلية .......................................................................
ج - العبودية فى الإنتاج السلعى .............................................................
د - الدونية التقنية لنظام تملك العبيد ..........................................................
هـ - التدهور الاقتصادى ...................................................................
الفصل الثانى: حياة الدولة ....................................................
أ - الدولة والتجارة ..........................................................................
ب - النبلاء والعامة .........................................................................
ج - الدولة الرومانية ........................................................................
د - الربـا ..................................................................................
هـ - النزعة الاستبدادية ....................................................................
الفصل الثالث: التيارات الفكرية فى الفترة الإمبراطورية الرومانية .............
أ - ضعف الروابط الاجتماعية ...............................................................
ب - الـســذاجة ..........................................................................
ج - اللـجوء إلى الكـــذب ...............................................................
د - النزعة الإنسانية .........................................................................
هـ - النزعة الأممية ........................................................................
و - الاتجاه إلى الدين .......................................................................
ز - التوحيــد .............................................................................
القسم الثالث: اليهود .................................................
الفصل الأول: بنــو إسرائيــل ............................................
أ - الهجرات القبلية السامية ..................................................................
ب - فلســطــين ........................................................................
ج - مفهوم الرب فى إسرائيل القديمة ........................................................
د - التجارة والفلسفة .............
Paperback
First published January 1, 1908
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About the author
Karl Kautsky
542 books60 followersCzech-German philosopher and politician. He was a leading theoretician of Marxism. He became the leading promulgator of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 26, 2017
(Review of a different Kindle edition, 532 pages)
For Christmas this year I read a book about Jesus -- you know, the "reason for the season" and all that . . . . [insert appropriate emoticon here].
This is a classic work, usually translated into English as The Foundations of Christianity. Last month I read a similarly titled German book (though in translation) from 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, which was an influence on the early Marx; this book, by a leading Marxist of the generation after Marx, is a complete contrast in every way, and demonstrates the difference that Marx made, even leaving aside his economic theories and views on revolution and communism, in the way that we view and discuss history and even religion. The earlier book discusses Christianity in an abstract, philosophical and psychological way, which makes it seem as if it could have originated (in its nineteenth century Lutheran form) at any time from the stone age to the present, in any part of the world -- the preconditions are all in the nature of man as a species and the development is a kind of quasi-logical deduction. Kautsky's work, on the other hand, begins from the social, economic and historical conditions of the particular place and time that Christianity originated and developed in, showing why and in what social classes it arose and spread and why it found such a successful reception. This is one of the best works I have read on early Christianity, although I have a few reservations.
Kautsky begins with a very modern-sounding critique of attempts to explain Christianity from the character and teachings of a historical Jesus (Ch.I). He points out that, apart from obvious Christian interpolations, there are no non-Christian sources for the existence, much less the life of Jesus. He gives examples of ancient historiography, showing that all the ancient historians from Thucydides to the end of antiquity wrote history as edification or polemic, and attributed speeches to the main actors, not as some sort of transcript that somehow survived but as what these generals, statesmen, philosophers, etc. (in the opinion of the historian) would have or should have said in the given circumstances. He points out that it was very unlikely (read: impossible) that anyone recorded the sermons and prayers of Jesus and transmitted them word for word to be translated long after into another language and incorporated in the gospels. In fact, the gospels give us not the biography of the historical Jesus or his actual teachings but the views about him that were held by the Christian communities of the time that they were written (many decades after his death, at the earliest), and represent the disagreements and polemics between them. In short, any speculation about Jesus is bound to be wrong; what we can, however, get from these sources is a picture of the early church, and that is what is of real interest from a historical point of view -- not who the man Jesus was or what he said, but why and how the Christian church as a real, historically important institution spread through the world and gained the dominant position it held from the fourth century to almost the present day (the "almost" is Kautsky's optimism.)
He then (Ch. II) gives a sketch of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the early days of the Empire, primarily from an economic viewpoint, showing why the society of the early Empire would find the doctrines of Christianity so attractive (and points out, interestingly at such an early date, that nearly all the elements of Christianity existed separately or in various combinations in other sects and movements of the time). Next (Ch. III) he moves to Palestine, and gives a history of the Hebrew people from their beginnings to the return from exile, explaining the origins of Judaism from the economic position of the country, its trade relations and so forth, and describes the situation of Jews in the diaspora. Then he combines the two strands to give a materialist description of the history of Judea from the return to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the class relations represented by the four major parties or groupings at the time of Jesus, the Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essenes. After this background, he turns to Christianity itself (Ch. IV, sec. 1), and argues quite convincingly that the original Christian community practiced "consumer-communism" (as he defines it at more length in his other book I read this year, on the communist sects at the time of the Reformation.) This all makes up more than half the book.
Of course, the book is somewhat over a hundred years old, and many of the specific "facts" he is trying to explain simply weren't the case; but overall he gives a good, clear explanation of the environment in which Christianity developed. With respect to the Roman history, he is certainly on the right track in seeing the decline of the Empire essentially as the result of internal economic causes, with the barbarian invasions and so forth as a result of the decline rather than its cause; some details might need to be revised, and of course he wasn't aware of the climatic changes we know about now, but I found this part very informative. (I do intend soon to read a more recent (half-century rather than century old) book on the decline of the Empire, from a similar materialist perspective, Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, which has been on my shelves since the more political days of my youth.) While, again unusually for the time, Kautsky recognizes that the Old Testament, whatever we may surmise about its original sources, was written in its present form to meet the ideological needs of the post-exile theocracy, his sketch of Hebrew history uses it much more literally than many scholars today (especially of a "minimalist" orientation) would be comfortable with. Finally, his account of the later Jewish history is based very largely on Josephus, and his account of the Essenes was written long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. My major reservations however are not about this first half of the book.
The problem is, he then (Ch. IV, sec. 2) does just what he argued at the beginning was impossible: he tries to separate out the "genuine" early traditions in the gospels and Acts of the Apostles, to arrive a a construction of -- the historical Jesus! Granted, he does not attempt to reconstruct the religious doctrines, but he has a particular view of who Jesus was: the founder of a communist sect among the lower classes of Jerusalem, who also led an unsuccessful attempt at insurrection against the Romans and was captured and crucified. Now, this is not impossible, but it is very speculative (as he admits), and I've read too many other versions of the "historical Jesus" to be convinced: from those who essentially begin from a "synoptic" gospel view, minus the miracles (I leave out of account those who accept the miracles -- that's religion, not history -- or those who take the gospels as literally true but try to "explain" the miracles as fakes, like The Passover Plot, which is just senseless), to the various accounts from Schweizer to Chilton and the "Jesus Seminar", which variously interpret him as an apocalyptic preacher, an Essene, a renegade Pharisee, a Cynic philosopher, etc., to the extreme views that he was a Greek god or a psychedelic mushroom (at least that one was fun.) Kautsky at least has the advantage of basing his speculations on economic and historical reality, but it's still just speculation, and I would rather he had kept to his original promise of beginning with the Christian communities at the time we have evidence for.
He does return to this in Ch. IV, sec. 3-4, presenting the (still speculative, but better supported) view of the first century church as originally an entirely lower class, communist organization (in the sense of consumer-communism) organized around common meals (and in Jerusalem at least a common residence), and a mutual-support organization, with an ideology based on the idea that Jesus was the Messiah who would return again to punish the rich and reward the poor. In his view, what principally distinguished the Christians from similar Messianic sects of the times was what he calls its "internationalism", that is, that it replaced the ethnic hatred of Jews against Romans with a class hatred of poor against rich. (As I was reading this, my Facebook feed got several memes about Jesus as a long-haired anarchist etc., you've all seen them I'm sure; while we know nothing much about the real Jesus, this was certainly the view that the early church had of him and of itself.) In sec. 3 he follows this out, arguing that the class rather than ethnic basis of the Christian community allowed it initially to spread among the Jews of the diaspora, to the gentile sympathizers who accepted the Jewish monotheism and attended the synagogue without accepting the whole Mosaic law, and from there to the non-Jewish proletariat. (I should note that throughout the book, Kautsky, confusingly to those who know he is a Marxist, uses the term "proletariat" or "proletarian" in more or less its original latin sense of those without property, which would include the -- very small -- proletariat in the modern sense, i.e. wage-workers, but also semi-skilled artisans, peddlars and small-scale traders (think of a flea-market or the markets in underdeveloped countries), beggers, and others who were not actual workers in the modern sense.) He argues that outside Jerusalem, the high price of houses and the largely underground status of the communities eliminated the possibility of common residence and focused the "communist" tendency entirely on the common meals, while the influx of non-Jewish members led to other changes in the nature of the organization, which resulted in a split between Jewish and non-Jewish Christian communities. Especially after the destruction of Jerusalem the Christians began to try to distance themselves from the Jews who were largely a stateless and persecuted minority and play down their opposition to Rome (Ch. IV, sec. 4 is devoted to a discussion of the "Passion history" in the four gospels, showing how it contradicts itself and gets involved in many obvious absurdities from even a logical, let alone historical view, in trying to turn the blame for the crucifixion from the Romans onto the Jews.) At the same time, he points out, the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its population led the diaspora Jews themselves to band together as Jews without regard to class distinctions, resulting in the collapse of the Jewish Christian communities and essentially leaving Christianity as a Hellenistic movement. He attempts to give evidence for this from the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of "Paul" to various churches, as well as some early non-scriptural sources such as the Didache and the writings of what Catholics call the Apostolic Fathers (most of which I have read, and his interpretation seems reasonable enough.)
With Ch. IV, sec. 5 he begins the story of the change of Christianity from this original radical proletarian organization to the "Oppression and Exploitation Machine" that was the later church. He argues that after the destruction of Jerusalem, the plausibility of any overthrow of Roman power disappeared. This change explains the turn to the anti-Jewish, pro-Roman orientation mentioned above, but more importantly, as the church became less an organization for struggle and more of a mutual support organization for its members, it required money. There were rich supporters who were attracted to the Christians by their doctrines, especially about salvation and resurrection (and Heaven and Hell after death, which now largely replaced the idea of the coming of an earthly Kingdom of God for the poor.) At first, they were not allowed as full members of the congregations unless they sold their possessions and gave the money to the poor (i.e. to the church community), but gradually it became enough to make a large donation and they could belong to the church despite still being rich. This resulted in downplaying the original class hatred. There is an interesting passage, although much earlier in the book, where Kautsky contrasts the Gospel according to Luke with the Gospel according to Matthew, showing how the class content of the former is converted into a religious-only content in the latter (the parable of Lazarus disappears completely, in the Sermon on the Mount "blessed are the poor", "blessed are they that hunger" become "blessed are the poor in spirit", "blessed are they that hunger after rightousness", and so forth.) Kautsky asssumes that this is because the Gospel according to Matthew is a few decades later, but it seems to me (I don't know what modern scholars hold about the chronology) that it could just as well represent different congregations, since the process would not have taken place at the same rate everywhere. At the same time, as the communities grew, the tasks that were originally taken on by various members as voluntary "callings" took so much time and skill that they had to be given to full-time paid officials, and the official who held the common purse and paid these salaries, the Bishop, grew correspondingly in importance. However, it was precisely the Bishop, as the one responsible for finances, who had the most interest in attracting and keeping well-to-do members, and so played the major role in the changes in the composition of the church. As time went on, the Apostles, that is to say the travelling preachers, became less important relative to the local presbyters (the origin of the word "priest") and teachers, who were paid by and eventually therefore appointed by the Bishop; and the connections between communities, which they had been the ones to keep up, were kept up through conferences of the Bishops, which also increased the powers of the Bishops over their own congregations as representatives of the common or "catholic" church. I won't go over the whole process, but this is perhaps the most interesting part of the book, how the church became bureaucratized and the hierarchy (the word literally in Greek means "rule by priests") turned it into its opposite, an institution for supporting the imperial government and the rich against the poor. The main point is that this change, the real "apostasy" of the church, was not primarily a change in religion and was not brought about consciously by some sort of conspiracy, as Protestants seem to think (although insofar as they still support the rich against the poor and obedience to "constitued" authority, for all their claims to be "reformed" or "restored" they are still on the post-apostasy side of the development), but was a natural, unavoidable (and largely unconscious) process connected with the growth of the church. The result, however, was that the church which "triumphed" under Constantine and became the dominant power in the western world was not the original proletarian church but its opposite, a church controlled by the rich and powerful. There was no "victory of Christianity" over heathen society, the church that won the victory was one with the previously heathen society it replaced.
Kautsky says in one place that the proletarian struggle today cannot take the religious form it did in the days of the early church; of course he is right that it cannot succeed that way, but it seems that it can in fact take religious forms and still does. In reading his description of the early Christians, for example, I frequently found myself thinking of the Rastafarians in Jamaica. But Kautsky has a very different comparison in mind; his last section is devoted to a comparison of early Christianity to the social-democratic movement he was so personally involved with. Essentially, this last section tries to show that, although social-democracy was growing and developing a bureaucracy, this bureaucracy could not betray the workers, could not turn the movement into its opposite. I won't go over his arguments; he was proved wrong only six years later when the social-democratic leadership in nearly all countries led the proletariat into the bloodbath of World War I as followers of their "own" bourgeois governments. Kautsky, to his credit, opposed this. He also -- perhaps initially wrongly -- opposed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which very quickly became bureaucratized and turned into its opposite just as Christianity had centuries earlier.
[The e-book edition I read specifically says in its description on Amazon that it was "carefully proofread". Would that it had been so; it's full of typos, mostly of the kind that would not show up on spell-check, which is apparently what "careful proofreading" means today (either the typos form real, though wrong, words, or contain numbers which are ignored by spellcheck.) I have to admit that it is not the kind of gibberish that foreign language e-books so often are today, though -- perhaps the OCR program they used was actually designed for German.]
For Christmas this year I read a book about Jesus -- you know, the "reason for the season" and all that . . . . [insert appropriate emoticon here].
This is a classic work, usually translated into English as The Foundations of Christianity. Last month I read a similarly titled German book (though in translation) from 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, which was an influence on the early Marx; this book, by a leading Marxist of the generation after Marx, is a complete contrast in every way, and demonstrates the difference that Marx made, even leaving aside his economic theories and views on revolution and communism, in the way that we view and discuss history and even religion. The earlier book discusses Christianity in an abstract, philosophical and psychological way, which makes it seem as if it could have originated (in its nineteenth century Lutheran form) at any time from the stone age to the present, in any part of the world -- the preconditions are all in the nature of man as a species and the development is a kind of quasi-logical deduction. Kautsky's work, on the other hand, begins from the social, economic and historical conditions of the particular place and time that Christianity originated and developed in, showing why and in what social classes it arose and spread and why it found such a successful reception. This is one of the best works I have read on early Christianity, although I have a few reservations.
Kautsky begins with a very modern-sounding critique of attempts to explain Christianity from the character and teachings of a historical Jesus (Ch.I). He points out that, apart from obvious Christian interpolations, there are no non-Christian sources for the existence, much less the life of Jesus. He gives examples of ancient historiography, showing that all the ancient historians from Thucydides to the end of antiquity wrote history as edification or polemic, and attributed speeches to the main actors, not as some sort of transcript that somehow survived but as what these generals, statesmen, philosophers, etc. (in the opinion of the historian) would have or should have said in the given circumstances. He points out that it was very unlikely (read: impossible) that anyone recorded the sermons and prayers of Jesus and transmitted them word for word to be translated long after into another language and incorporated in the gospels. In fact, the gospels give us not the biography of the historical Jesus or his actual teachings but the views about him that were held by the Christian communities of the time that they were written (many decades after his death, at the earliest), and represent the disagreements and polemics between them. In short, any speculation about Jesus is bound to be wrong; what we can, however, get from these sources is a picture of the early church, and that is what is of real interest from a historical point of view -- not who the man Jesus was or what he said, but why and how the Christian church as a real, historically important institution spread through the world and gained the dominant position it held from the fourth century to almost the present day (the "almost" is Kautsky's optimism.)
He then (Ch. II) gives a sketch of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the early days of the Empire, primarily from an economic viewpoint, showing why the society of the early Empire would find the doctrines of Christianity so attractive (and points out, interestingly at such an early date, that nearly all the elements of Christianity existed separately or in various combinations in other sects and movements of the time). Next (Ch. III) he moves to Palestine, and gives a history of the Hebrew people from their beginnings to the return from exile, explaining the origins of Judaism from the economic position of the country, its trade relations and so forth, and describes the situation of Jews in the diaspora. Then he combines the two strands to give a materialist description of the history of Judea from the return to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the class relations represented by the four major parties or groupings at the time of Jesus, the Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essenes. After this background, he turns to Christianity itself (Ch. IV, sec. 1), and argues quite convincingly that the original Christian community practiced "consumer-communism" (as he defines it at more length in his other book I read this year, on the communist sects at the time of the Reformation.) This all makes up more than half the book.
Of course, the book is somewhat over a hundred years old, and many of the specific "facts" he is trying to explain simply weren't the case; but overall he gives a good, clear explanation of the environment in which Christianity developed. With respect to the Roman history, he is certainly on the right track in seeing the decline of the Empire essentially as the result of internal economic causes, with the barbarian invasions and so forth as a result of the decline rather than its cause; some details might need to be revised, and of course he wasn't aware of the climatic changes we know about now, but I found this part very informative. (I do intend soon to read a more recent (half-century rather than century old) book on the decline of the Empire, from a similar materialist perspective, Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, which has been on my shelves since the more political days of my youth.) While, again unusually for the time, Kautsky recognizes that the Old Testament, whatever we may surmise about its original sources, was written in its present form to meet the ideological needs of the post-exile theocracy, his sketch of Hebrew history uses it much more literally than many scholars today (especially of a "minimalist" orientation) would be comfortable with. Finally, his account of the later Jewish history is based very largely on Josephus, and his account of the Essenes was written long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. My major reservations however are not about this first half of the book.
The problem is, he then (Ch. IV, sec. 2) does just what he argued at the beginning was impossible: he tries to separate out the "genuine" early traditions in the gospels and Acts of the Apostles, to arrive a a construction of -- the historical Jesus! Granted, he does not attempt to reconstruct the religious doctrines, but he has a particular view of who Jesus was: the founder of a communist sect among the lower classes of Jerusalem, who also led an unsuccessful attempt at insurrection against the Romans and was captured and crucified. Now, this is not impossible, but it is very speculative (as he admits), and I've read too many other versions of the "historical Jesus" to be convinced: from those who essentially begin from a "synoptic" gospel view, minus the miracles (I leave out of account those who accept the miracles -- that's religion, not history -- or those who take the gospels as literally true but try to "explain" the miracles as fakes, like The Passover Plot, which is just senseless), to the various accounts from Schweizer to Chilton and the "Jesus Seminar", which variously interpret him as an apocalyptic preacher, an Essene, a renegade Pharisee, a Cynic philosopher, etc., to the extreme views that he was a Greek god or a psychedelic mushroom (at least that one was fun.) Kautsky at least has the advantage of basing his speculations on economic and historical reality, but it's still just speculation, and I would rather he had kept to his original promise of beginning with the Christian communities at the time we have evidence for.
He does return to this in Ch. IV, sec. 3-4, presenting the (still speculative, but better supported) view of the first century church as originally an entirely lower class, communist organization (in the sense of consumer-communism) organized around common meals (and in Jerusalem at least a common residence), and a mutual-support organization, with an ideology based on the idea that Jesus was the Messiah who would return again to punish the rich and reward the poor. In his view, what principally distinguished the Christians from similar Messianic sects of the times was what he calls its "internationalism", that is, that it replaced the ethnic hatred of Jews against Romans with a class hatred of poor against rich. (As I was reading this, my Facebook feed got several memes about Jesus as a long-haired anarchist etc., you've all seen them I'm sure; while we know nothing much about the real Jesus, this was certainly the view that the early church had of him and of itself.) In sec. 3 he follows this out, arguing that the class rather than ethnic basis of the Christian community allowed it initially to spread among the Jews of the diaspora, to the gentile sympathizers who accepted the Jewish monotheism and attended the synagogue without accepting the whole Mosaic law, and from there to the non-Jewish proletariat. (I should note that throughout the book, Kautsky, confusingly to those who know he is a Marxist, uses the term "proletariat" or "proletarian" in more or less its original latin sense of those without property, which would include the -- very small -- proletariat in the modern sense, i.e. wage-workers, but also semi-skilled artisans, peddlars and small-scale traders (think of a flea-market or the markets in underdeveloped countries), beggers, and others who were not actual workers in the modern sense.) He argues that outside Jerusalem, the high price of houses and the largely underground status of the communities eliminated the possibility of common residence and focused the "communist" tendency entirely on the common meals, while the influx of non-Jewish members led to other changes in the nature of the organization, which resulted in a split between Jewish and non-Jewish Christian communities. Especially after the destruction of Jerusalem the Christians began to try to distance themselves from the Jews who were largely a stateless and persecuted minority and play down their opposition to Rome (Ch. IV, sec. 4 is devoted to a discussion of the "Passion history" in the four gospels, showing how it contradicts itself and gets involved in many obvious absurdities from even a logical, let alone historical view, in trying to turn the blame for the crucifixion from the Romans onto the Jews.) At the same time, he points out, the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its population led the diaspora Jews themselves to band together as Jews without regard to class distinctions, resulting in the collapse of the Jewish Christian communities and essentially leaving Christianity as a Hellenistic movement. He attempts to give evidence for this from the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of "Paul" to various churches, as well as some early non-scriptural sources such as the Didache and the writings of what Catholics call the Apostolic Fathers (most of which I have read, and his interpretation seems reasonable enough.)
With Ch. IV, sec. 5 he begins the story of the change of Christianity from this original radical proletarian organization to the "Oppression and Exploitation Machine" that was the later church. He argues that after the destruction of Jerusalem, the plausibility of any overthrow of Roman power disappeared. This change explains the turn to the anti-Jewish, pro-Roman orientation mentioned above, but more importantly, as the church became less an organization for struggle and more of a mutual support organization for its members, it required money. There were rich supporters who were attracted to the Christians by their doctrines, especially about salvation and resurrection (and Heaven and Hell after death, which now largely replaced the idea of the coming of an earthly Kingdom of God for the poor.) At first, they were not allowed as full members of the congregations unless they sold their possessions and gave the money to the poor (i.e. to the church community), but gradually it became enough to make a large donation and they could belong to the church despite still being rich. This resulted in downplaying the original class hatred. There is an interesting passage, although much earlier in the book, where Kautsky contrasts the Gospel according to Luke with the Gospel according to Matthew, showing how the class content of the former is converted into a religious-only content in the latter (the parable of Lazarus disappears completely, in the Sermon on the Mount "blessed are the poor", "blessed are they that hunger" become "blessed are the poor in spirit", "blessed are they that hunger after rightousness", and so forth.) Kautsky asssumes that this is because the Gospel according to Matthew is a few decades later, but it seems to me (I don't know what modern scholars hold about the chronology) that it could just as well represent different congregations, since the process would not have taken place at the same rate everywhere. At the same time, as the communities grew, the tasks that were originally taken on by various members as voluntary "callings" took so much time and skill that they had to be given to full-time paid officials, and the official who held the common purse and paid these salaries, the Bishop, grew correspondingly in importance. However, it was precisely the Bishop, as the one responsible for finances, who had the most interest in attracting and keeping well-to-do members, and so played the major role in the changes in the composition of the church. As time went on, the Apostles, that is to say the travelling preachers, became less important relative to the local presbyters (the origin of the word "priest") and teachers, who were paid by and eventually therefore appointed by the Bishop; and the connections between communities, which they had been the ones to keep up, were kept up through conferences of the Bishops, which also increased the powers of the Bishops over their own congregations as representatives of the common or "catholic" church. I won't go over the whole process, but this is perhaps the most interesting part of the book, how the church became bureaucratized and the hierarchy (the word literally in Greek means "rule by priests") turned it into its opposite, an institution for supporting the imperial government and the rich against the poor. The main point is that this change, the real "apostasy" of the church, was not primarily a change in religion and was not brought about consciously by some sort of conspiracy, as Protestants seem to think (although insofar as they still support the rich against the poor and obedience to "constitued" authority, for all their claims to be "reformed" or "restored" they are still on the post-apostasy side of the development), but was a natural, unavoidable (and largely unconscious) process connected with the growth of the church. The result, however, was that the church which "triumphed" under Constantine and became the dominant power in the western world was not the original proletarian church but its opposite, a church controlled by the rich and powerful. There was no "victory of Christianity" over heathen society, the church that won the victory was one with the previously heathen society it replaced.
Kautsky says in one place that the proletarian struggle today cannot take the religious form it did in the days of the early church; of course he is right that it cannot succeed that way, but it seems that it can in fact take religious forms and still does. In reading his description of the early Christians, for example, I frequently found myself thinking of the Rastafarians in Jamaica. But Kautsky has a very different comparison in mind; his last section is devoted to a comparison of early Christianity to the social-democratic movement he was so personally involved with. Essentially, this last section tries to show that, although social-democracy was growing and developing a bureaucracy, this bureaucracy could not betray the workers, could not turn the movement into its opposite. I won't go over his arguments; he was proved wrong only six years later when the social-democratic leadership in nearly all countries led the proletariat into the bloodbath of World War I as followers of their "own" bourgeois governments. Kautsky, to his credit, opposed this. He also -- perhaps initially wrongly -- opposed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which very quickly became bureaucratized and turned into its opposite just as Christianity had centuries earlier.
[The e-book edition I read specifically says in its description on Amazon that it was "carefully proofread". Would that it had been so; it's full of typos, mostly of the kind that would not show up on spell-check, which is apparently what "careful proofreading" means today (either the typos form real, though wrong, words, or contain numbers which are ignored by spellcheck.) I have to admit that it is not the kind of gibberish that foreign language e-books so often are today, though -- perhaps the OCR program they used was actually designed for German.]
January 4, 2021
العنوان الأصلي للكتاب هو: أسس المسيحية.. دراسة في أصول المسيحية. يتتبع الكاتب نشأة المسيحية من خلال دراسة تاريخية واجتماعية واقتصادية للعصر الذي نشأت فيه من خلال دراسة روما القديمة وأورشليم، وصولا إن التكوين البيروقراطي للكنيسة وإعلانها دين الدولة على يد قسطنطين.
كتاب جيد ولكنه قديم، يعتمد على المنهج الصراعي أو الماركسي في علم الاجتماع لتحليل أصول المسيحية. يعتمد في الجزء الخاص بدراسة أورشليم على دراسات قديمة تعود إلى "فلهاوزن" عن العهد القديم، لكن هذه الرؤية تم تجاوزها وطرح دراسات أخرى مع التطور الأركيولوجي الحديث.
ويمكن أن نشير إلى نقطة أخرى مميزة وهي وقوفه على التشابه ما بين الإسنيين والجماعة المسيحية الأولى، وقد انطلق فراس السواح في كتابيه "الوجه الآخر للمسيح" و"ألغاز الإنجيل" من طرح مشابه ولكن أكثر راديكالية بتحليله الأصل الإسني للمسيح وأن تعاليمه أو روح أفكاره الأصلية غنوصية تنمتي إلى الفرقة الإسنية في بعض النقاط.
في المجمل دراسة منهجية هامة وجيدة بالرغم من قدمها.
كتاب جيد ولكنه قديم، يعتمد على المنهج الصراعي أو الماركسي في علم الاجتماع لتحليل أصول المسيحية. يعتمد في الجزء الخاص بدراسة أورشليم على دراسات قديمة تعود إلى "فلهاوزن" عن العهد القديم، لكن هذه الرؤية تم تجاوزها وطرح دراسات أخرى مع التطور الأركيولوجي الحديث.
ويمكن أن نشير إلى نقطة أخرى مميزة وهي وقوفه على التشابه ما بين الإسنيين والجماعة المسيحية الأولى، وقد انطلق فراس السواح في كتابيه "الوجه الآخر للمسيح" و"ألغاز الإنجيل" من طرح مشابه ولكن أكثر راديكالية بتحليله الأصل الإسني للمسيح وأن تعاليمه أو روح أفكاره الأصلية غنوصية تنمتي إلى الفرقة الإسنية في بعض النقاط.
في المجمل دراسة منهجية هامة وجيدة بالرغم من قدمها.
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May 20, 2023Was Jesus real? No
Proof 1. Pagan sources
Non-Christian historians show almost no proof whatsoever of there being an existence of Jesus. For example the Bible claims that, upon Jesus’ death, there was a 3 hour eclipse (which apparently took place near modern day Palestine). This would have happened around the same time as Pliny, an ancient historian who kept meticulous notes on eclipses, was alive. He makes no mention (nor does anyone else for that matter) of what would have been a historically long eclipse. Generally the earliest source of Jesus held up by Christians is found in the Jewish Antiquities by Flavius Josephus. This source is claimed to have been written about Jesus by someone living at the time of Jesus’ supposed life, yet even by the 1600s the few mentions of Jesus in Jewish Antiquities were already proven to be forgeries, probably written over 100 years later by Christian forgers. Even if Josephus did happen to write about Jesus, there were so many supposed messiahs running around at the time, and Jesus was quite a common name, that this too does not inherently support the evidence that Josephus was writing about Jesus of the Bible rather than another random cult leader also named Jesus. The only other source from a non-Christian writing about Jesus during Jesus’ supposed lifetime comes from Roman historian Tacitus. Tacitus writes about a man who was believed to be a Messiah and was executed by a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate. The name Jesus is never mentioned and the actual facts given are threadbare at best. This alone is the only non-Christian source Christians can really rely on to prove the existence of Jesus, which is lacking to say the least.
Proof 2. Christian sources
Christians love to hold up the Gospels as the undisputed truth about Jesus and his life. However it is almost certain that none of them were written anywhere near the time Jesus was reportedly alive, and they absolutely were not written by who has claimed to have written them. The oldest Gospel, that of St. Mark, has been proven to have been written at least 50 years after Jesus’ supposed death (you can literally just google search this because it is so well documented at this point). The farther away you get from Jesus' supposed lifetime, the more ridiculous the Gospels get. You start out in Mark Chapter 5 with Jesus “raising someone from the dead” even though he was actually just sleeping, then you get all the way to John where Jesus is raising Lazarus from the dead after his body has been decomposing for 4 days.
An example of blatant Christian historical inaccuracy is the famous story in the Gospel of Luke where a decree comes down from Roman emperor Augustus that a census must be taken. So Jesus’ parents, Mary and Joseph, must leave their home of Nazareth to go take a census in the town of Bethlehem; after arriving in Bethlehem, so the story goes, Jesus is soon born via immaculate conception. Not only did no such census ever take place under Augustus’ reign, but the region of Judea where Bethlehem was supposedly located was not even a Roman province until after the date given for Jesus’ birth. Roman census practice also did not require people to travel anywhere because the census was taken where people currently lived (you know, like a normal census).
Many sayings accredited to Jesus can be attributed to figures of much earlier time periods, another example of blatant forgery and lies of the early Christians. The lord’s prayer, for example, greatly predates any of the Christian forgeries as it was actually an Armadic Kaddish prayer. Jesus’ speeches too are contradictory, which is indicative of different sects of Christians writing different things they wish Jesus had ‘said’ to further push their own agendas. For example, the Sermon on the Mount as written in Luke is starkly different from how it is written in Matthew. In Luke, the earlier and more radical of the two texts, Jesus praises the poor and disparages the rich, while in Matthew the message is neutered and Jesus merely praises the “poor of spirit”, which really does not make a lot of sense when you consider Christianity is all about praising the ‘Holy Spirit’ and spiritual faith in God. Compare:
Luke 6:20: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God”
Luke 6:25-25: “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry”
Versus:
Matthew 5:3: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount gives no mention at all to the woeful rich.
Consider how unlikely it is that, assuming Jesus was in fact real, any of his sermons would have ever been preserved in any reputable manner: the speeches Jesus gave would have had to immediately been written down, because the odds that they could have been preserved orally for decades until written into the Gospels seems like the world’s longest and most inaccurate game of telephone. Then the recorders of these speeches (which were more than likely written down by jewish people indifferent or even hostile to Jesus’ message) would have had to go through the hard work of preserving their written down accord of the sermons for years upon years. Somehow, these preserved records of speeches would have to wind up in the hands of the actual writers of the Gospels decades to centuries after Jesus supposedly gave these speeches. Not a very likely chain of events.
All this is to say that “out of the gospels and the acts of the apostles, similarly, we cannot learn anything definite as to the life and doctrine of Jesus, but very valuable things about the social character, the ideals and aspirations of the primitive Christian communities” (44). To learn just what Christianity really was and how its formation came about Kautsky delves into the historical and material forces surrounding the birth and growth of the religion.
Slave society
Roman society was built off of the backs of slaves. Rome, like most states, formed when large landowners coalesced into a state to enforce their will over the masses of less fortunate peasants. These large landowners needed huge amounts of labor to work their fields, which could only be obtained through compulsory slavery. War was the principle means by which these victorious landowners would enslave entire populations of their defeated foes. However, these wars had to be fought not by the large landowners themselves but by the small landowning peasants, which often resulted in the ruin of the peasants’ farms; you cannot tend your crops, plow your fields, and upkeep your livestock when you are out fighting in a war. The more the large landowners needed slaves, the more they waged war, and the more the peasants fell into ruin. Large landowners' estates grew while smallholders were thrown into lumpen-proletarianization, banditry, or slavery.
The labor power of a slave was inherently inefficient when compared to that of a “free” peasant. Slaves worked less hard, were less educated, and often destroyed the very instruments they worked with (often intentionally) because they had less to gain from hard work than a peasant would. As Marx writes in Capital Vol 1: ”it is a universal principle in production by slave labour that none but the rudest and heaviest implements shall be used, such tools as are difficult to damage”. The inefficiency of slaves and the expansion of the large landowners’ latifundias led to a need for constant warfare to expand the supply of cheap slaves, but the creation of more advanced means of production was useless due to the fact that slave labor inherently could not use them. The surpluses of the large landowners grew and grew but they could not be reinvested into more efficient means of production like under capitalism; instead, they were almost always used to bolster the personal consumption habits of the landowners themselves. The parasitic ruling class became marked by a love for pleasure and opulence above all else.
Slaves often tried to rebel against their subordination but this was often to no avail. The failure of rebellions to improve life, combined with the fact that the slave economy was inherently a step-back from the peasant economy, led to a prevailing sense of hopelessness that existence on Earth could not be improved; while capitalism is marked by a limitless drive of “progress”, slave society was marked by a perpetual longing for “the good old days”. Eventually the entropy of the Roman imperialist slave economy would rip the empire apart. The more territory they conquered, the more wars they fought, and the more peoples they subjugated under the heel of Rome the more the peasantry had to be recruited, who were then stretched thinner and thinner between their commitments to their land and to the army. Around the time that Jesus’ supposed life was estimated to take place (the reign of Tiberius) the Roman expansion had essentially come to a standstill as soldiers became more expensive and were recruited from ‘less loyal’ populations within the empire. The end of expansion and the decreased flow of slaves led to a decline in the slave economy, which was replaced by turning the slaves into tenant farmers (coloni) who were given their own (small) patches of land on condition that they devote a portion of their labor power to the master’s land. These were still forced laborers, which came with the same drawbacks and inefficiencies as slave labor; thus, economic decline could not be averted so long as the large latifundia owners controlled their masses of land. Under economic and military decline, and surrounded by neighbors both hostile to Rome and hungry to plunder their riches (when failed to be bought off), the Roman empire collapsed under its own weight.
Rome’s downfall led to Christianity’s ascendance
As the Roman government, mode of production, and overall society began to break down so did the ways of thinking associated with those previously concrete conditions. New meanings, reasons for hope, and morality had to be searched for and found in the midst of the utter despair and destitution that was the collapse of Rome. Previously, citizens who had lived in communes during classical antiquity felt an attachment to their community which overcame death, because after their death the impacts they made on their community would live on. Death was something scary, something cloaked in darkness and shadows (an explanation that was the result of people seeing the dead in their dreams). However, Roman slave society had ripped the commune apart, killed the hitherto dominant traditions, and turned man from a communal being into an individual forced to sink or swim in a sea of changing ideas and conditions. In a world where genuine progress seemed impossible and society seemed to be in decay, people began putting faith in living in a better world in the afterlife, and to secure that life they would be required to live a more ‘moral’ life on Earth.
The more desperate the isolated individuals of the Roman empire felt the more they tried to latch on to anything that would ease their immiseration. When people search for miracles they become more willing to accept anything as a miracle. Many cults sprung up due to the harsh living conditions, and often these cults were based around a strong personality who performed miracles: a savior who would rescue the destitute from their pain and suffering. The cult of Apollonius and the so-called miracles performed by the titular cult leader draw blatant similarities to Christian miracles written in the Bible. He was said to be of miraculous birth, where his mother was unknowingly impregnated by a god; he raised a woman from the dead purely by his touch; and his body supposedly was never recovered because it was actually lifted off into Heaven itself. It is no surprise that many of these cults, including Chrisitianity, directly competed with each other to perform the most audacious miracles. The more people experience something, the less that experience affects them; therefore, the bar on miracles was constantly being raised to extravagant heights. Besides miracles these cults also partook in vast amounts of forgery to spread their message and grow their followings. Charity too was common amongst them, for in a time of extreme poverty with few social safety nets charity was much needed and these religions, longing for the charitable aspects of the long-gone communal living, were quick to take up the mantle of charity and distribution of supplies and food. As these cults began to compete more vigorously, religious intolerance (the idea that one was superior to another based solely on their religion) became rampant, yet this never stopped them from borrowing from each other.
Christianity borrowed heavily from various Asian religions, rites, and rituals which they had come into contact with through the Roman Empire’s vast trade networks. Jesus seems very similar to the Egyptian God Osiris. Where Osiris was represented on Earth as a bull, Jesus is often called the “lamb of God''. Osiris’ bull was said to be born out of a woman impregnated by a ray of light, much like how Jesus, born out of a woman impregnated by the “holy spirit”, was to become a “light to the world”. The birth of the Buddha also shows similarities to the immaculate conception of Christ. The Guatama Buddha was born from the virgin queen Maya, and once conceived all of heaven sang his praises. However, the religion that Christianity was most influenced by was the monotheistic religion from which it spawned from: Judaism.
Proof 1. Pagan sources
Non-Christian historians show almost no proof whatsoever of there being an existence of Jesus. For example the Bible claims that, upon Jesus’ death, there was a 3 hour eclipse (which apparently took place near modern day Palestine). This would have happened around the same time as Pliny, an ancient historian who kept meticulous notes on eclipses, was alive. He makes no mention (nor does anyone else for that matter) of what would have been a historically long eclipse. Generally the earliest source of Jesus held up by Christians is found in the Jewish Antiquities by Flavius Josephus. This source is claimed to have been written about Jesus by someone living at the time of Jesus’ supposed life, yet even by the 1600s the few mentions of Jesus in Jewish Antiquities were already proven to be forgeries, probably written over 100 years later by Christian forgers. Even if Josephus did happen to write about Jesus, there were so many supposed messiahs running around at the time, and Jesus was quite a common name, that this too does not inherently support the evidence that Josephus was writing about Jesus of the Bible rather than another random cult leader also named Jesus. The only other source from a non-Christian writing about Jesus during Jesus’ supposed lifetime comes from Roman historian Tacitus. Tacitus writes about a man who was believed to be a Messiah and was executed by a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate. The name Jesus is never mentioned and the actual facts given are threadbare at best. This alone is the only non-Christian source Christians can really rely on to prove the existence of Jesus, which is lacking to say the least.
Proof 2. Christian sources
Christians love to hold up the Gospels as the undisputed truth about Jesus and his life. However it is almost certain that none of them were written anywhere near the time Jesus was reportedly alive, and they absolutely were not written by who has claimed to have written them. The oldest Gospel, that of St. Mark, has been proven to have been written at least 50 years after Jesus’ supposed death (you can literally just google search this because it is so well documented at this point). The farther away you get from Jesus' supposed lifetime, the more ridiculous the Gospels get. You start out in Mark Chapter 5 with Jesus “raising someone from the dead” even though he was actually just sleeping, then you get all the way to John where Jesus is raising Lazarus from the dead after his body has been decomposing for 4 days.
An example of blatant Christian historical inaccuracy is the famous story in the Gospel of Luke where a decree comes down from Roman emperor Augustus that a census must be taken. So Jesus’ parents, Mary and Joseph, must leave their home of Nazareth to go take a census in the town of Bethlehem; after arriving in Bethlehem, so the story goes, Jesus is soon born via immaculate conception. Not only did no such census ever take place under Augustus’ reign, but the region of Judea where Bethlehem was supposedly located was not even a Roman province until after the date given for Jesus’ birth. Roman census practice also did not require people to travel anywhere because the census was taken where people currently lived (you know, like a normal census).
Many sayings accredited to Jesus can be attributed to figures of much earlier time periods, another example of blatant forgery and lies of the early Christians. The lord’s prayer, for example, greatly predates any of the Christian forgeries as it was actually an Armadic Kaddish prayer. Jesus’ speeches too are contradictory, which is indicative of different sects of Christians writing different things they wish Jesus had ‘said’ to further push their own agendas. For example, the Sermon on the Mount as written in Luke is starkly different from how it is written in Matthew. In Luke, the earlier and more radical of the two texts, Jesus praises the poor and disparages the rich, while in Matthew the message is neutered and Jesus merely praises the “poor of spirit”, which really does not make a lot of sense when you consider Christianity is all about praising the ‘Holy Spirit’ and spiritual faith in God. Compare:
Luke 6:20: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God”
Luke 6:25-25: “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry”
Versus:
Matthew 5:3: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount gives no mention at all to the woeful rich.
Consider how unlikely it is that, assuming Jesus was in fact real, any of his sermons would have ever been preserved in any reputable manner: the speeches Jesus gave would have had to immediately been written down, because the odds that they could have been preserved orally for decades until written into the Gospels seems like the world’s longest and most inaccurate game of telephone. Then the recorders of these speeches (which were more than likely written down by jewish people indifferent or even hostile to Jesus’ message) would have had to go through the hard work of preserving their written down accord of the sermons for years upon years. Somehow, these preserved records of speeches would have to wind up in the hands of the actual writers of the Gospels decades to centuries after Jesus supposedly gave these speeches. Not a very likely chain of events.
All this is to say that “out of the gospels and the acts of the apostles, similarly, we cannot learn anything definite as to the life and doctrine of Jesus, but very valuable things about the social character, the ideals and aspirations of the primitive Christian communities” (44). To learn just what Christianity really was and how its formation came about Kautsky delves into the historical and material forces surrounding the birth and growth of the religion.
Slave society
Roman society was built off of the backs of slaves. Rome, like most states, formed when large landowners coalesced into a state to enforce their will over the masses of less fortunate peasants. These large landowners needed huge amounts of labor to work their fields, which could only be obtained through compulsory slavery. War was the principle means by which these victorious landowners would enslave entire populations of their defeated foes. However, these wars had to be fought not by the large landowners themselves but by the small landowning peasants, which often resulted in the ruin of the peasants’ farms; you cannot tend your crops, plow your fields, and upkeep your livestock when you are out fighting in a war. The more the large landowners needed slaves, the more they waged war, and the more the peasants fell into ruin. Large landowners' estates grew while smallholders were thrown into lumpen-proletarianization, banditry, or slavery.
The labor power of a slave was inherently inefficient when compared to that of a “free” peasant. Slaves worked less hard, were less educated, and often destroyed the very instruments they worked with (often intentionally) because they had less to gain from hard work than a peasant would. As Marx writes in Capital Vol 1: ”it is a universal principle in production by slave labour that none but the rudest and heaviest implements shall be used, such tools as are difficult to damage”. The inefficiency of slaves and the expansion of the large landowners’ latifundias led to a need for constant warfare to expand the supply of cheap slaves, but the creation of more advanced means of production was useless due to the fact that slave labor inherently could not use them. The surpluses of the large landowners grew and grew but they could not be reinvested into more efficient means of production like under capitalism; instead, they were almost always used to bolster the personal consumption habits of the landowners themselves. The parasitic ruling class became marked by a love for pleasure and opulence above all else.
Slaves often tried to rebel against their subordination but this was often to no avail. The failure of rebellions to improve life, combined with the fact that the slave economy was inherently a step-back from the peasant economy, led to a prevailing sense of hopelessness that existence on Earth could not be improved; while capitalism is marked by a limitless drive of “progress”, slave society was marked by a perpetual longing for “the good old days”. Eventually the entropy of the Roman imperialist slave economy would rip the empire apart. The more territory they conquered, the more wars they fought, and the more peoples they subjugated under the heel of Rome the more the peasantry had to be recruited, who were then stretched thinner and thinner between their commitments to their land and to the army. Around the time that Jesus’ supposed life was estimated to take place (the reign of Tiberius) the Roman expansion had essentially come to a standstill as soldiers became more expensive and were recruited from ‘less loyal’ populations within the empire. The end of expansion and the decreased flow of slaves led to a decline in the slave economy, which was replaced by turning the slaves into tenant farmers (coloni) who were given their own (small) patches of land on condition that they devote a portion of their labor power to the master’s land. These were still forced laborers, which came with the same drawbacks and inefficiencies as slave labor; thus, economic decline could not be averted so long as the large latifundia owners controlled their masses of land. Under economic and military decline, and surrounded by neighbors both hostile to Rome and hungry to plunder their riches (when failed to be bought off), the Roman empire collapsed under its own weight.
Rome’s downfall led to Christianity’s ascendance
As the Roman government, mode of production, and overall society began to break down so did the ways of thinking associated with those previously concrete conditions. New meanings, reasons for hope, and morality had to be searched for and found in the midst of the utter despair and destitution that was the collapse of Rome. Previously, citizens who had lived in communes during classical antiquity felt an attachment to their community which overcame death, because after their death the impacts they made on their community would live on. Death was something scary, something cloaked in darkness and shadows (an explanation that was the result of people seeing the dead in their dreams). However, Roman slave society had ripped the commune apart, killed the hitherto dominant traditions, and turned man from a communal being into an individual forced to sink or swim in a sea of changing ideas and conditions. In a world where genuine progress seemed impossible and society seemed to be in decay, people began putting faith in living in a better world in the afterlife, and to secure that life they would be required to live a more ‘moral’ life on Earth.
The more desperate the isolated individuals of the Roman empire felt the more they tried to latch on to anything that would ease their immiseration. When people search for miracles they become more willing to accept anything as a miracle. Many cults sprung up due to the harsh living conditions, and often these cults were based around a strong personality who performed miracles: a savior who would rescue the destitute from their pain and suffering. The cult of Apollonius and the so-called miracles performed by the titular cult leader draw blatant similarities to Christian miracles written in the Bible. He was said to be of miraculous birth, where his mother was unknowingly impregnated by a god; he raised a woman from the dead purely by his touch; and his body supposedly was never recovered because it was actually lifted off into Heaven itself. It is no surprise that many of these cults, including Chrisitianity, directly competed with each other to perform the most audacious miracles. The more people experience something, the less that experience affects them; therefore, the bar on miracles was constantly being raised to extravagant heights. Besides miracles these cults also partook in vast amounts of forgery to spread their message and grow their followings. Charity too was common amongst them, for in a time of extreme poverty with few social safety nets charity was much needed and these religions, longing for the charitable aspects of the long-gone communal living, were quick to take up the mantle of charity and distribution of supplies and food. As these cults began to compete more vigorously, religious intolerance (the idea that one was superior to another based solely on their religion) became rampant, yet this never stopped them from borrowing from each other.
Christianity borrowed heavily from various Asian religions, rites, and rituals which they had come into contact with through the Roman Empire’s vast trade networks. Jesus seems very similar to the Egyptian God Osiris. Where Osiris was represented on Earth as a bull, Jesus is often called the “lamb of God''. Osiris’ bull was said to be born out of a woman impregnated by a ray of light, much like how Jesus, born out of a woman impregnated by the “holy spirit”, was to become a “light to the world”. The birth of the Buddha also shows similarities to the immaculate conception of Christ. The Guatama Buddha was born from the virgin queen Maya, and once conceived all of heaven sang his praises. However, the religion that Christianity was most influenced by was the monotheistic religion from which it spawned from: Judaism.
January 15, 2021
انتهيت من رحلة طوييييييلة مع هذا الكتاب المبهر. المرة الأولى التي سمعت فيها عن ذلك اكلتاب، كانت أثناء ترجمتي للمقالة الرئيسة بكتاب "الوضع البشري المعاصر" لفروم، وهي مقالة بعنوان: "عقيدة المسيح". عاد فروم إلى ذلك الكتاب، لكنه اختلف معه في بعض المناحي.
تحاول مقالة فروم تحليل العقيدة المسيحية من منظور التحليل النفسي الاجتماعي، بينما يحاول كاوتسكي تحليل العقيدة المسيحية من منظور ماركسي. استغرق كاوتسكي ثلثي الكتاب تقريبًا في التحدث عن الدولة الرومانية وبنيتها الاقتصادية والاجتماعية والسياسية، ثم التحدث عن اليهود، حتى وصل في الثلث الأخير وحب إلى التحدث عن المسيحية.
الحقيقة يبدو الكتاب مبهرًا بكل معنى الكلمة، وفي أوقات كثيرة يقدم التحليل الماركسي نتائج رائعة ومذهلة، ولكن في بعض الأحيان تظهر عيوبه، حينما تكون هناك حاجة ماسة لمناهج أخرى، ويبدو مثلا افتقار التحليل الماركسي إلى نظرة نفسية عميقة. في كل الأحوال الكتاب رائع جدًا جدًا، ويطرح تساؤلات مثيرة ويقدم نتائج هائلة تزيد من بصيرة القارئ، مهما اختلف معها. استفدت منه بشكل شخصي إلى أبعد حد.
تحاول مقالة فروم تحليل العقيدة المسيحية من منظور التحليل النفسي الاجتماعي، بينما يحاول كاوتسكي تحليل العقيدة المسيحية من منظور ماركسي. استغرق كاوتسكي ثلثي الكتاب تقريبًا في التحدث عن الدولة الرومانية وبنيتها الاقتصادية والاجتماعية والسياسية، ثم التحدث عن اليهود، حتى وصل في الثلث الأخير وحب إلى التحدث عن المسيحية.
الحقيقة يبدو الكتاب مبهرًا بكل معنى الكلمة، وفي أوقات كثيرة يقدم التحليل الماركسي نتائج رائعة ومذهلة، ولكن في بعض الأحيان تظهر عيوبه، حينما تكون هناك حاجة ماسة لمناهج أخرى، ويبدو مثلا افتقار التحليل الماركسي إلى نظرة نفسية عميقة. في كل الأحوال الكتاب رائع جدًا جدًا، ويطرح تساؤلات مثيرة ويقدم نتائج هائلة تزيد من بصيرة القارئ، مهما اختلف معها. استفدت منه بشكل شخصي إلى أبعد حد.
October 14, 2014
الرفاق الاعزاء اذا توفر لكم الوقت رجاء ان تولوا هذا الكتاب اهتماما كافيا فهو نموذج فى النظر لتاريخ الديانات فى صلتها بالاوضاع الاقتصادية الاجتماعية . وهو يحاول ان يطبق عليها المنهج المادى التاريخى . وفى كل الاحوال كتب الكتاب قبل " انحراف" كاوتسكى بزمن طويل - كما اطلع انجلز على صيغته الاولى التى صدرت تحت عنوان : رواد الاشتراكية
November 8, 2012
It's an easy read, mostly because if you have read materialist criticism before, it falls into line. His derision and harsh rhetoric are comic at times, but it comes across as very unbalanced. As he writes in his introduction, he is not an expert in the field of biblical studies or theology, so his treatment of the subject is somewhat superficial.
His perspective is unapologetically skewed toward socio-economic critique, specifically communism. He calls early Christianity's existence a communism of consumption, which later devolved into the Roman culture of primitive agrarian economy. He takes a fairly lengthy section in explaining why none of the tenants, ideologies, or practices of Christianity are unique, which I thought entertaining but highly simplistic. Even the communism he sees in the early church he traces to the new cultural emphasis on taking care of widows and orphans, because Greco-Roman thought has shifted toward individualism, breaking down community ties (I mean, what?).
Again, it's a fast read, but I would suggest some background in marxist thought before diving in, so you can take him with a grain of salt.
His perspective is unapologetically skewed toward socio-economic critique, specifically communism. He calls early Christianity's existence a communism of consumption, which later devolved into the Roman culture of primitive agrarian economy. He takes a fairly lengthy section in explaining why none of the tenants, ideologies, or practices of Christianity are unique, which I thought entertaining but highly simplistic. Even the communism he sees in the early church he traces to the new cultural emphasis on taking care of widows and orphans, because Greco-Roman thought has shifted toward individualism, breaking down community ties (I mean, what?).
Again, it's a fast read, but I would suggest some background in marxist thought before diving in, so you can take him with a grain of salt.
May 25, 2017
I recently re-read this classic work by Kautsky after I had developed an interest in the historicity of Jesus. Although the book was written in 1925, it holds up remarkably well. It is a very sweeping look at the life and times of first century Roman society, with a particular focus on the Jewish origins of Christianity. Kautsky offers a penetrating class analysis of Roman society and the early Christians viewing the Christians as an early proletarian group, with proletarian values but of course restricted to the level of material and cultural development of their day. Although there are certain interpretations that he offers that clash with later scholarship (post-Dead Sea Scrolls, post-Nag Hammadi), overall it still compares favorably. And he's just plain funny.
Well worth the read.
Well worth the read.
March 4, 2025
The Content:
Foundations of Christianity is an attempt at a historical materialist appraisal of the economic and political contexts out of which the social phenomenon of Christianity emerged. Such a project is important because this institution and its worldview have been subsumed by subsequent modes of production—from patriarchal (or, as Kautsky refers to it, “domestic”) and chattel slavery, through feudalism, to its present form as an organ of capital. As an institution, Christianity bears no resemblance to the first-century Jesus movement of Jerusalem after which it is named. Its survival depended on the ability of the Christian community to adapt it to the needs of the class forces that claimed it as their own.
Kautsky demonstrates how, despite repeated and thorough revision, the Christian literary tradition found in the Bible still bears traces of its origins among a persecuted and revolutionary Jewish people fighting for independence from their imperial Roman oppressors. The contradictions in the Gospels are explained as the result of Christianity’s changing hands, as it was adapted to the needs of a declining ruling class. Coming to this text already well acquainted with both religious and secular interpretations of Christian scripture, I found Kautsky’s reading of the Gospels to be novel. Foundations of Christianity challenges the reader to see the ancient Jewish and Christian communities at the turn of the Christian era in a new light.
I particularly appreciated the section on the decline of the Roman Empire, Kautsky’s formulation of the metamorphosis of the working classes from slaves to serfs, and his discussion of the role of imported foreign political power in Rome. Kautsky rightly argues that sentimental products such as poetry—rather than purely historical accounts—offer greater insight into the daily lives and outlook of the masses, since historians often focus on exceptional events with the least lasting effect. According to Kautsky, poetic works better capture those aspects of society that historians take for granted as well-known and self-evident.
In his introduction, Michael Löwy accuses Kautsky of “projecting into the past, in an anachronistic way, modern social and political concepts.” This tendency permeates the text and, predictably, leads to some equivocation on concepts that might have been more precisely delineated had Kautsky not applied a schematic approach to class dynamics in a period that did not belong to capital. Ironically, he commits the very distortion he cautions against in the foreword:
“Now although the practical politician with scholarly training has many advantages over the mere bookish men when it comes to writing history, he often loses the advantage because he has stronger temptations, which interfere with his impartiality. There are two in particular: first, the attempt to put the past into the mold of the present; and then the effort to see the past in a way that corresponds to the needs of the politics of the present.
We socialists, to the extent that we are Marxists, feel ourselves insured against these dangers by the materialist conception of history that is directly connected with our proletarian point of view.” (pp. xxii-xxiii)
It is difficult to believe, this being my first exposure to Kautsky's work, that he—Engels’ correspondent for over a decade and publisher of Theories of Surplus Value—would fall prey to a mechanical application of Marxist principles by misusing terms of art. This is especially the case with his conception of communism as a mode of consumption in the first Christian community of Roman Judaea which he extrapolates from the communal meal and the practice of holding in common what would otherwise be personal property, while at the same time acknowledging the mode of production as the principal determinant of social relations.
Beyond this tendency, which can at times be grating, Kautsky also presents a few interpretations of scripture that go unsupported, giving the impression that he is eisegeting the text rather than providing a materialist explanation. Given the 120 years that separate us, this may seem like a harsh critique, but the point stands even when granting all the developments in scholarship and textual additions (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Library) since Kautsky’s time. As expected, the text is dated in some respects. For instance, Kautsky argues for the nomadic origins of the Hebraic peoples, whereas more recent developments support the theory that the Israelites emerged as an underclass within ancient Canaanite society. This “peasant revolt theory” provides a more contemporary and scientific explanation for the origins of the Israelites, aligning more closely with the Marxist theory of social development.
The Form:
The 2008 Socialist Resistance reprint is formatted in double columns, printed on what appears to be a dot-matrix printer, with the text fading in contrast throughout. This made the book difficult to read at times, even for someone like me who wears relatively mild prescription lenses. The cover art, however, is beautiful. The book could not have been printed in a smaller format without sacrificing readability, given the double-column layout. I would have opted for a more conventionally formatted edition, but I wanted to read the introduction and afterword by Michael Löwy and David Packer, despite their respective petty-bourgeois and sectarian perspectives.
Packer articulated many of my own thoughts on the text, and his additional insights were, as far as I can tell, sophisticated and worth considering before a second reading. I found his appraisal of Kautsky's errors to be more accurate than Löwy’s.
Overall, I highly recommend Foundations of Christianity. I don’t think a Marxist education could be considered well-developed without the insights this text offers. When my friend found out I was reading it, he remarked that it pairs well with Abram Leon’s The Jewish Question, and I agree. I definitely recommend placing the two titles side by side on your reading list.
Foundations of Christianity is an attempt at a historical materialist appraisal of the economic and political contexts out of which the social phenomenon of Christianity emerged. Such a project is important because this institution and its worldview have been subsumed by subsequent modes of production—from patriarchal (or, as Kautsky refers to it, “domestic”) and chattel slavery, through feudalism, to its present form as an organ of capital. As an institution, Christianity bears no resemblance to the first-century Jesus movement of Jerusalem after which it is named. Its survival depended on the ability of the Christian community to adapt it to the needs of the class forces that claimed it as their own.
Kautsky demonstrates how, despite repeated and thorough revision, the Christian literary tradition found in the Bible still bears traces of its origins among a persecuted and revolutionary Jewish people fighting for independence from their imperial Roman oppressors. The contradictions in the Gospels are explained as the result of Christianity’s changing hands, as it was adapted to the needs of a declining ruling class. Coming to this text already well acquainted with both religious and secular interpretations of Christian scripture, I found Kautsky’s reading of the Gospels to be novel. Foundations of Christianity challenges the reader to see the ancient Jewish and Christian communities at the turn of the Christian era in a new light.
I particularly appreciated the section on the decline of the Roman Empire, Kautsky’s formulation of the metamorphosis of the working classes from slaves to serfs, and his discussion of the role of imported foreign political power in Rome. Kautsky rightly argues that sentimental products such as poetry—rather than purely historical accounts—offer greater insight into the daily lives and outlook of the masses, since historians often focus on exceptional events with the least lasting effect. According to Kautsky, poetic works better capture those aspects of society that historians take for granted as well-known and self-evident.
In his introduction, Michael Löwy accuses Kautsky of “projecting into the past, in an anachronistic way, modern social and political concepts.” This tendency permeates the text and, predictably, leads to some equivocation on concepts that might have been more precisely delineated had Kautsky not applied a schematic approach to class dynamics in a period that did not belong to capital. Ironically, he commits the very distortion he cautions against in the foreword:
“Now although the practical politician with scholarly training has many advantages over the mere bookish men when it comes to writing history, he often loses the advantage because he has stronger temptations, which interfere with his impartiality. There are two in particular: first, the attempt to put the past into the mold of the present; and then the effort to see the past in a way that corresponds to the needs of the politics of the present.
We socialists, to the extent that we are Marxists, feel ourselves insured against these dangers by the materialist conception of history that is directly connected with our proletarian point of view.” (pp. xxii-xxiii)
It is difficult to believe, this being my first exposure to Kautsky's work, that he—Engels’ correspondent for over a decade and publisher of Theories of Surplus Value—would fall prey to a mechanical application of Marxist principles by misusing terms of art. This is especially the case with his conception of communism as a mode of consumption in the first Christian community of Roman Judaea which he extrapolates from the communal meal and the practice of holding in common what would otherwise be personal property, while at the same time acknowledging the mode of production as the principal determinant of social relations.
Beyond this tendency, which can at times be grating, Kautsky also presents a few interpretations of scripture that go unsupported, giving the impression that he is eisegeting the text rather than providing a materialist explanation. Given the 120 years that separate us, this may seem like a harsh critique, but the point stands even when granting all the developments in scholarship and textual additions (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Library) since Kautsky’s time. As expected, the text is dated in some respects. For instance, Kautsky argues for the nomadic origins of the Hebraic peoples, whereas more recent developments support the theory that the Israelites emerged as an underclass within ancient Canaanite society. This “peasant revolt theory” provides a more contemporary and scientific explanation for the origins of the Israelites, aligning more closely with the Marxist theory of social development.
The Form:
The 2008 Socialist Resistance reprint is formatted in double columns, printed on what appears to be a dot-matrix printer, with the text fading in contrast throughout. This made the book difficult to read at times, even for someone like me who wears relatively mild prescription lenses. The cover art, however, is beautiful. The book could not have been printed in a smaller format without sacrificing readability, given the double-column layout. I would have opted for a more conventionally formatted edition, but I wanted to read the introduction and afterword by Michael Löwy and David Packer, despite their respective petty-bourgeois and sectarian perspectives.
Packer articulated many of my own thoughts on the text, and his additional insights were, as far as I can tell, sophisticated and worth considering before a second reading. I found his appraisal of Kautsky's errors to be more accurate than Löwy’s.
Overall, I highly recommend Foundations of Christianity. I don’t think a Marxist education could be considered well-developed without the insights this text offers. When my friend found out I was reading it, he remarked that it pairs well with Abram Leon’s The Jewish Question, and I agree. I definitely recommend placing the two titles side by side on your reading list.
May 31, 2018
Kautsky's book on the effects of Christianity on the masses, while dryly pedantic in only the fashion that a Soviet Marxist could write at the turn of the last century, is fairly accurate in its depiction of that particular religion as being the heaviest oppressor of the greater parts of society.
Not the best read on the subject (quite honestly, unless you're really into this, it's actually very boring), but it is a fairly accurate condemnation of the practices of the Christian Church over it's history.
Not the best read on the subject (quite honestly, unless you're really into this, it's actually very boring), but it is a fairly accurate condemnation of the practices of the Christian Church over it's history.
January 16, 2023
Have basically zero ability or context to judge this as in terms of accuracy or as a work of history, but enjoyed reading this a lot. The materialist histories of the Roman Empire and Judaism of the day stand on their own, but the way in which those are leveraged to contextualize and explain some of the contradictions in early christian texts is extremely fascinating
August 20, 2025
DIFFICULT! It's like Karl Marx meets Bart Ehrman and textual deconstruction. Since I am both a heretic and apostate, I enjoyed that last half greatly. The first part, concentrating on the Mediterranean and the Roman Empire, had LARGE parts that I barely, if truly at all, comprehended. If it made sense WHEN I read it, I cannot now recite parts from memory and expound upon them. But the analysis of the Church was fantastic.
July 5, 2025
Ich habe nie ein Buch mit so vielen Rechtschreib- bzw. Druckfehlern gelesen (1. Auflage des Manifest Verlags).
November 1, 2025
I read a book a few years ago which claimed to be following the method of Kautsky--but wasn't. It was an all-out attack on all the "desert religions," from Judaism to Islam. It claimed that the town of Nazareth didn't exist at the time of Jesus, who the author is also sure never existed. And he's even certain that Muhammad never existed! There is one religion which we know is based simply on someone who decided to invent a religion, but it's quite unlikely that others were formed in the same manner. There are usually some elements of truth.
But this book isn't an attack on religion; it examines the place and time of the alleged birth of Jesus of Nazareth using analysis of the classes and nationalities in play at the time. It's a book that helps people to understand the world. Attacks on religion ignore the fact that it existed for a reason and will die out when that reason has ceased to exist. It can't be abolished. All these idealists who try to blame every war on religion, simply because it was rationalized by recourse to religion! Wars are always about territory, resources, and other material things. These same people don't credit religion for all the great art and music it inspired. Don't start with atheism, it gets you nowhere. Start with this and The Origins of Materialism: The Evolution of a Scientific View of the World.
But this book isn't an attack on religion; it examines the place and time of the alleged birth of Jesus of Nazareth using analysis of the classes and nationalities in play at the time. It's a book that helps people to understand the world. Attacks on religion ignore the fact that it existed for a reason and will die out when that reason has ceased to exist. It can't be abolished. All these idealists who try to blame every war on religion, simply because it was rationalized by recourse to religion! Wars are always about territory, resources, and other material things. These same people don't credit religion for all the great art and music it inspired. Don't start with atheism, it gets you nowhere. Start with this and The Origins of Materialism: The Evolution of a Scientific View of the World.
August 27, 2016
العنوان الأصلي للكتاب هو "أسس المسيحية, دراسة في أصول المسيحية"
يتحدث الكاتب عن الأديان من وجهة نظر المادية التاريخية, و صلة الأوضاع الإقتصادية في نشأة الأديان و طبيعتها.
يعرض الكتاب طبيعة الاوضاع التي كانت سائدة قبل ظهور المسيحية ثم بداية نشأتها و تأثرها بالفلسفات السائدة حينها, و يتحدث عن اليهودية و نشأتها و تأثيرها على المسيحية. و أخيراً يظهر أوجه التشابه و الإختلاف بين الإشتراكية و المسيحية.
يتحدث الكاتب عن الأديان من وجهة نظر المادية التاريخية, و صلة الأوضاع الإقتصادية في نشأة الأديان و طبيعتها.
يعرض الكتاب طبيعة الاوضاع التي كانت سائدة قبل ظهور المسيحية ثم بداية نشأتها و تأثرها بالفلسفات السائدة حينها, و يتحدث عن اليهودية و نشأتها و تأثيرها على المسيحية. و أخيراً يظهر أوجه التشابه و الإختلاف بين الإشتراكية و المسيحية.
July 30, 2014
I am by far not a Marxist, but historical materialism usually gives the best explanations about distant times like those, when Jesus appeared. A must read for everyone interested in the origins of not only Christianity, but religion itself.
November 2, 2020
christianity arises out of slave economics of the bloody romans, or so.
June 2, 2025
Nobody writes history like this anymore. instead we get perry Anderson. sorry perry, but you gotta write better, brother. EP Thompson had you beat there.
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