SOURCE: “Origins of Christianity,” in Soviet Studies in Philosophy, Vol. X, No. 1, Summer, 1971, pp. 81-102.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1970, Kazhdan references several writings by Engels on the origins of Christianity in order to explore the parallel Engels saw between the nineteenth-century development of the socialist movement and the founding of Christianity.]

Engels is the author of three articles devoted to the origins of Christianity. In 1882 the magazine Der Sozialdemokrat carried his “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity,” conceived of as an evaluation of Bauer's contribution to the treatment of this complex problem. The following year, in the English journal Progress, Engels published an article titled “The Book of Revelation,” a characterization of Christianity as it appears according to the Apocalypse of St. John. Finally, in 1894-1895, shortly before his death, Engels published in Die Neue Zeit a studied titled “A Contribution to the History of Early Christianity.”

The interest of Marx's closest co-worker in the problem of the founding of Christianity is explained not only by the fact that the matter at issue is one of the cardinal factors in the destiny of humanity, but also by the circumstance that Engels saw a very definite analogy between the development of the socialist movement in the nineteenth century and the founding of Christianity. He made this analogy as early as in “The Book of Revelation”¹, and the article “A Contribution to the History of Early Christianity” begins with a most notable sentence: “In the history of early Christianity, there are points of contact with the present-day movement of the workers that are worthy of attention.”² Then, in characterizing the practice of the early Christian movement throughout the entire article, Engels constantly returns in thought alternately to the Weitlingian communist communes in Switzerland and to the First International. “What memories of youth arise before me in reading this passage in Lucian!”³ “These appeals” (reference is to certain motifs in the epistles of Paul—A. K.) “could have been written with equal success by some prophetically minded enthusiast from the International.”⁴ This was the mood of the great revolutionary—very personal and human—when he spoke of early Christianity.

Of course, it is not an identity he refers to, but only an analogy—parallels—a more or less external similarity of the atmosphere of the culture and the daily round. Nevertheless, the analogies and parallels adduced by Engels remind one over and over again that to him Christianity was a very serious phenomenon in the history of the human mind.

The article “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity” falls into two parts. One of them deals directly with Bauer's heritage—his achievements and his mistakes. The second comprises Engels' own view of the treatment of the problem. About this part, Engels says specifically: “Our understanding of this problem is based not only on the works of Bauer, but on our own research.”⁵ The manner in which Engels applies the basic principle of historical materialism to the problem of the origin of Christianity deserves attention.

“The Roman conquest,” he begins his analysis, “destroyed first and foremost the former political order in all the conquered countries and then, indirectly, the old social conditions of life.”⁶ A vulgar materialist, holding the economic factor to be the sole determining one, would, naturally, have started with something else—with trade, with grain prices (had those of Roman times come down to us), or with production (say, with the squeezing out of slave labor by the colonist), or with the level of the productive forces—say, with their stagnation or, conversely, with the fact that they were advancing at a slow rate.⁷ But all the evidence indicated that change in forms of exploitation did not have a direct influence on the appearance of Christianity. In any case, its social principles could justify both Greco-Roman slavery and medieval serfdom: in other words, this religion lived alongside differing socioeconomic systems. The theory fashionable in our literature at one time, which associated the rise of Christianity with a so-called “revolution of the slaves”⁸, has no serious grounds whatever, the more so as that very “slave revolution” proved upon verification to have been a fiction in the writing of history or even in simple fact.

But let us return to the course of Engels' thinking. In what does he see the influence of the Roman conquest upon society in the Mediterranean—an influence that led to the development of a world religion? In the first place, Engels emphasized that the enormous leveling force of the Roman Empire, which crushed the distinctive political and social features of the oppressed peoples, “also condemned their particular religions to downfall.”⁹ Later, Engels wrote of the “iron leveling fist of the Roman conqueror” that destroyed the traditional social conditions existing in the former polis and clan communes.¹⁰ In other words, the Roman conquest (whose ultimate cause lay in economic factors) led to the establishment of a vacuum in the realm of social structure and ideas, i.e., to a societal atmosphere that was particularly favorable to a rise in religious belief. As the young Marx had written, “Religion is the consciousness of self and the feelings about self on the part of one who has either not yet gained control of himself or who has lost himself again.”¹¹ As a result of the Roman conquest (which, in a certain sense, was the high point of Greco-Roman history), Mediterranean man “lost himself,” i.e., lost the usual conditions of his social being and the forms of “consciousness of self and feelings about self” that corresponded to his previous way of life.

The social situation that came into being in the Mediterranean basin in the first centuries of our era had another aspect—a positive one, if one may so put it. Not only were the old social conditions destroyed and traditional beliefs shaken, but the Roman Empire came into being—a political organism differing fundamentally from the former states around the Mediterranean (although we can, of course, detect its roots in the Hellenistic monarchies). Engels analyzes in the most painstaking fashion the social and ideological environment distinguishing the Roman Empire, and it is worth thinking about his characterization of that environment. A strengthening of the state machinery is what he notes above all. The population had fallen into three classes (the rich, the free unpropertied, and the slaves). “In relation to the state, i.e., to the emperor, both of the first two classes were nearly as lacking in rights as were the slaves in relation to their masters.” Engels stresses the fact that the material base of support of the government consisted of troops resembling an army of lansquenets, while its moral buttress was “the universal conviction that there was no way out of that situation, that if one had not this or that particular emperor, still, imperial power founded on military rule was an irreversible necessity.” Further, Engels says: “Corresponding to the universal lack of rights and loss of hope for the possibility of a better order was a universal apathy and demoralization,” and it is specifically from these features of the societal relationships in imperial Rome that he derives “the character of the ideologists of that day.”¹²

Today we have a better knowledge than in the past century of the economic history of the Roman Empire and are in a position to emphasize a remarkable paradox: the social vacuum and shabby morality, the fundamental traits of which were so brilliantly drawn by Engels, came into being under conditions of relative progress in material things. In the first centuries of the Christian era, Romans lived, generally speaking, better than before: they built better homes, ate better, and perhaps even obtained a better education on the average. By all the evidence, the improvement in daily life also affected the slaves, not to speak of those who were manumitted. It is important to emphasize this because the critique “of the hypertrophy of the material,” criticism of the chase after the good things of this world, comprised one of the most important factors in the social program of early Christianity.

Christianity was not only a mass movement. By Engels' definition, it served as a revolutionary element, “ein revolutionäres Element.”¹³ We must adopt a very attentive attitude toward these thoughts of Engels in order to avoid the vulgar tendency to depict Christianity in general, regardless of history, as a religion of the exploiters. The social role of religion is not so simple a matter as is sometimes imagined. “The squalor of religion,” wrote Marx, “is at one and the same time an expression of the squalor of reality and a protest against that real squalor.”¹⁴ As we disseminate Marx's view of early Christianity, it is incumbent upon us to say that it was not only an expression of the atmosphere of social vacuum and apathy of ideas characteristic of the Roman Empire, but also a protest against that vacuum and apathy. This is why Engels called Christianity a revolutionary element.

Christianity was that, not only because its adherents were recruited “primarily from among the ‘suffering and disinherited’ in the lower strata of the people”¹⁵, and not only because early Christianity may be termed “the religion of the slaves and the oppressed.”¹⁶ Christianity, says Engels, “took a stand in sharp contradiction to all hitherto existing religions.”¹⁷

It is worth pausing to consider this position of Engels'. The point is not that Christianity was a unique religion. The notion that Christianity was unique is in such conflict with the totality of known facts that it is adhered to in pure form only by the most orthodox of theologians. Under the conditions of the ecumenical movement, the most flexible theologians, taking a careful attitude toward the needs of the time, more and more often find what they call elements of divine revelation in pre-Christian religions. In that same article “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity,” from which the above quotation is taken, Engels traces how the philosophy of Philo and Seneca prepared the way for the basic notions of Christianity. “As we see,” Engels summarizes, “all that is lacking is the capstone, for Christianity in its basic outlines to have been ready.”¹⁸ Moreover, Engels particularly insists upon the circumstance that “Christianity came out of popularized notions of Philo, and not directly from Philo's writings.”¹⁹

Today the ideological sources of primitive Christianity can be shown to have been more diverse than Bruno Bauer and Engels could have known. Now it is possible to take note of other social and ideological movements whose influence on early Christianity was, to the best of our knowledge, no smaller than that of the Alexandrian Platonist Philo and the Roman Stoic Seneca. Chief among these were the Palestinean Essenes, interest in whom was stimulated by the sensational discoveries at Qumran and neighboring localities and whose relationship to Christianity has been repeatedly dealt with by Soviet scholars.²⁰ Another ideological source of Christianity was gnosis, to which our literature has also given some attention.²¹ Whereas in the nineteenth century only late gnosis was known, and usually treated as a heresy within Christianity, today it is possible to speak of pre-Christian gnosis. Consequently, its relationship to Christianity acquires a converse character: it is not gnosis that arose as a branching off from Christianity, but primitive Christianity that made use of the gnostic mythology and ethics, which it amended or rejected.

In his polemic against Bauer, Engels, as we have seen, emphasized the fact that Christianity was influenced not by the philosophy of the scholar's study, not by pupils of Philo and Seneca, but by vulgarized and popularized Philonist and Stoic notions. He had no way of knowing the role played by the communes of Qumran and by pre-Christian gnosis in shaping Christian ideology and mythology. He took the general principle as his point of departure. “Religions are created,” wrote Engels, “by people who themselves perceive a need for it and understand the religious needs of the masses, and it is precisely this that is usually not the case with representatives of schools of philosophy.”²² The further accumulation of knowledge demonstrated the justice both of the general principle advanced by Engels and of the concrete conclusion drawn on the basis thereof that Christianity developed not so much on the basis of the philosophical speculations of Philo and the Stoics as under the influence of vulgarized religious-philosophical currents of the type of gnosis and Essenism.

In point of fact, we find as early as in the Essenean preachings the exaltation of poverty and condemnation of wealth, messianism—the expectation of the Lord's Anointed and the ceremony of ritual ablution, which was Christian baptism in embryo. The very phraseology of the New Testament is reminiscent of the language of the Essenes. The gnostic myth of Ennoia, the mother of God who materialized in human form and underwent every conceivable degradation on earth, reveals an indubitable similarity with the later Christian legend of God's son taking on human form. The Christian passion for miracles also corresponded to the folk belief in sorcery, widespread in the Roman Empire during the first centuries; and the Hellenistic mysteries, with their belief in the revival of man beyond the grave, all contributed their share to the shaping of the Christian ideology. In brief, the ideological sources of Christianity stem to a very great degree from the religious mass movement of the period between the first century B.C. through the first century A.D. The creators of Christianity, whoever they may have been, did not begin with a blank sheet of paper.

And so Engels does not at all deny the syncretism of early Christianity, nor the adoption by Christianity of elements already existing (in ideologies preceding and contemporary with it). But at the same time he is foreign to that simplified approach that reduces Christianity entirely to syncretism and sees nothing at all new in it. Christianity, according to Engels, is a revolutionary element, a religion standing in a fundamental contradiction to all prior religions.

Engels identifies the new features to be seen in the ideology of the Christians. And it is exceedingly important that he does not “secularize” Christianity, does not make of it either a social program or a philosophical system. Naturally, Christianity included both a social program and views on philosophy, if not a philosophical system. Its social program consisted, above all, of rejection of that chase after the material, of earthly goods, that distinguished Roman society. This was not a rejection of “the world,” because the world was thought of as a divine creation, and not one of Satan, as among consistent dualists, but a rejection of his “enslavement of the world.” A Christian, rendering to Caesar that which was Caesar's, counted on liberation from the Empire, which in fact was liberation “in Christ,” in spirit, outside the realm of the relationships existing in real life.²³ The philosophical views of the Christians were determined to a very great degree by a new concept of time and the future. Time, in the Greco-Roman understanding, was enclosed, limited, at best repetitive, as in Polybius' philosophy of history, according to which each society experiences youth, maturity, and old age. The Christian, on the other hand, lives sub specie aeternitatis; his consciousness of self is distinguished “by being radically open to the future,” as R. Bultmann put it.²⁴ Therefore, to a Christian, the development of history appears linear and infinite, with ends not yet accomplished.

A social program and philosophical views were doubtless present in the teachings of the early Christians. But Christianity was, above all, a religion, i.e., an aspect of world view that touched upon man's notions of his relationship to the Absolute, to God. Religious images were, of course, duplicates of the real world, “a fantastic reflection (in Engels' well-known formulation) in the heads of human beings of those external forces that dominate them in their everyday lives—a reflection in which terrestrial forces take on the form of nonearthly ones.”²⁵ But it would naturally be a vulgarization if, in studying the history of religion, we undertook to replace examination of religious images, rituals, and institutions themselves with analysis of the earthly forces that called them into life. One cannot satisfy oneself solely by stating that Christianity expressed the despair of the dispossessed, for that despair expressed itself in diverse forms. That which is distinctive of early Christianity must be sought, above all, in the specific features of its religious notions.

Engels begins his analysis with an examination of the denial of ritual characteristic of early Christianity. From this observation he draws a conclusion having both social and political importance: “By thus denying all national religions and the rituality they had in common, and by turning to all peoples without distinction, Christianity itself becomes the first possible world religion.”²⁶

Further, Engels regards as a special feature of Christianity the notion of “the embodiment of the Logos established by man in a specified person and his redemptive sacrifice on the cross to save sinning humanity.”²⁷ It thus touches upon the central mythologema of Christianity and once again, as in the matter of rituality, is not confined to affirming the dogmatic novelty of this proposition but clarifies its functional novelty. “The Christian consciousness of sinfulness,” explains Engels, called to life the notion of the personal responsibility of each individual for the tainted state of the world. “You individually are guilty of the tainted state of the world, all of you are guilty, your individual and your collective own internal tainted state.” And the acceptance of this notion, Engels continues, “has now become the prerequisite for salvation of the spirit which Christianity simultaneously proclaimed.”²⁸ Following this, unfortunately, the Russian translation contains a regrettable lack of precision that introduces a false nuance, as a consequence of which I permit myself recourse to the German original. “And that spiritual salvation was carried out in such fashion” (war so eingerichtet, rendered in the Russian translation as “bylo pridumano takim obrazom”—“was preconceived in such fashion”—but einrichten does not have the nuance of contempt present in the Russian “pridumyvat’”: the matter at issue is not that someone subjectively “preconceived” salvation, but that in the Christian concept salvation was “organized” or “arranged”) as to be readily understood by an individual member (Genosse) of any preexisting religious community (Religionsgemeinschaft) (the Russian translation has it: “chlen liuboi staroi religioznoi obshchiny”—“member of any preexisting religious congregation”; the translator apparently confused the German Gemeinde—“congregation”—with Gemeinschaft—“community”; Engels' point being, of course, adherence to a religion and not to a congregation). All the old religions had the notion of penitential sacrifice, and this archaic idea (which we now know to have totemist roots) served as favorable soil for assimilation of the idea of the mediator voluntarily offering himself as sacrifice. Engels sums up: “Thus, the broadly disseminated” (allgemein verbreitete, which the Russian translation renders as obscherasprostranennomu, “generally current” which has a different nuance, for the discussion is not of a banal, generally current idea, but of an idea that at that time attained broad dissemination) “feeling that people are themselves guilty of the universal taintedness was given clear expression by Christianity in consciousness of the sinfulness of each individual person; at the same time, in the sacrificial death of its founder, Christianity created a readily understandable form of internal salvation from a corrupt world.”²⁹

This is the conception of the origin of Christianity developed by Engels—a conception that was consistently materialist but at the same time one that gave a significant place to that form of social creation which in its specific ideal or (more narrowly) religious shell is of profound interest as an expression of the self-consciousness of society.

Aside from the positive presentation of his own concept, Engels' works contain, as has already been stated, an analysis of the views of Bruno Bauer. The present article does not undertake an analysis of the Young Hegelian critique of the bible. That is a subject all its own. However, it would be quite significant to make clear precisely what it was that Engels considered debatable and dubious in Bauer's critical theory, which, according to Engels' judgment, “went too far in many respects.”³⁰ Some polemical comments are already present in the first of the three articles, “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity,” but it may perhaps be more fitting to turn to the last of the writings in question, “A Contribution to the History of Early Christianity,” in which Engels brings together his judgments on Bauer.

Bauer's service, writes Engels, consists in his merciless criticism of the gospels and the epistles of the apostles and also in his being the first to make a serious investigation, not only of Judaic and Hellenistic, but also of the Greco-Roman elements, “which opened the road for the transformation of Christianity into a worldwide religion.”³¹ Bauer proved, Engels continues, that “Christianity was not introduced from without, from Judea, and imposed upon the Greco-Roman world, but that—at least in the form in which it became a world religion—it is a most highly characteristic product of that world.”³²

That was Bauer's service, but wherein did he “go too far”?

Engels provides a specific formulation of his differences with Bauer.

In the first place, “Bauer had to shift the origin of the new religion to a date half a century later.” He needed this in order “to present the writers of the New Testament as direct plagiarists” of Philo and Seneca. In order to validate his dating, Bauer had to “discard the information provided by Roman historians conflicting with this, and in general to permit himself a very free presentation of history.”

In the second place, “In Bauer, all historical grounds for the tales (Erzählungen) in the New Testament about Jesus and his pupils disappear; these tales are transformed into legends (in Sagen), in which the phases of the internal development of the first congregations and the intellectual struggle within these congregations are made the doings of more or less invented personalities.”

In the third place, “according to Bauer, the places where the new religion was born were not Galilee and Jerusalem, but Alexandria and Rome.”

On all these points, Engels sums up, “the real truth” lies somewhere between the conclusions of the Tübingen school and Bauer's critique. “New finds, particularly in Rome, in the East, and above all in Egypt will provide a great deal more help in solving this question than any critique whatever.”³³

It seems to me that our literature has not given these ideas of Engels the attention they deserve.³⁴ Therefore, let us make a detailed examination of each of the points noted by Engels.

Engels engages in a polemic with Bauer, who asserted that Christianity arose, not in Jerusalem and Galilee, but in the Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire. Engels formulates his attitude toward the place of origin of the new religion even more sharply in his article “The Book of Revelation”: “Christianity, like every other major revolutionary movement, was created by the masses. It arose in Palestine.”³⁵

At first glance, this notion is in conflict with Engels' words, cited more than once in our literature, from his article, “A Contribution to the History of Early Christianity”: “This was the state of Christianity, according to the best knowledge available to us, created in Asia Minor, as it existed in its principal center in about the year 68” (Takovo bylo khristianstvo, naskol'ko ono nam izvestno, sozdannoe v Maloi Azii, v ego glavnoi rezidentsii okolo 68 goda).³⁶ Fortunately, however, we are dealing, not with a contradiction in Engels, but with a translator's error, an error that immediately strikes an unprejudiced individual even without knowledge of German, for, in point of fact, how could Christianity have arisen in its principal center? In order to have a principal center, it had to have a certain history behind it.

But why bother with such ratiocinations when one can turn to the original: Solcher Art war das Christentum be-schaffen in Kleinasien, seinem Hauptsitz um das Jahr 68, soweit wir es kennen.³⁷ The translator apparently confused the word beschaffen with the more common geschaffen, which actually does mean “created.” As far as the term, beschaffen, which Engels did employ, is concerned, it means “possessing a certain character,” and the phrase as a whole should be translated: “This was the character, so far as we know it, of Christianity in Asia Minor, its principal center in about the year 68.”³⁸ Thus, Engels was a proponent of the theory that Christianity arose in Palestine, and not in Asia Minor.

Further, we recall that Engels criticizes Bauer for his late dating of the beginning of Christianity. Bauer placed this event in the time of the Flavian emperors, which in Engels' opinion was about half a century later than in actual fact. The Flavian dynasty held the throne from 69 to 96 A.D. Simple arithmetic persuades one that Engels dated the birth of Christianity to approximately the second quarter of the first century A.D. It is with this review of the dates that there is associated the criticism of Bauer to the effect that this critic of Christianity discarded information provided by Roman historians that did not accord with his conception. Engels is most probably thinking of Tacitus' recitation of the persecution of the Christians under Nero.

The question of the time when the literature comprising the New Testament was written is intimately interwoven with the problem of the dating of the origin of Christianity. In criticism of Bauer, Engels wrote: “In his opinion, Christianity as such arose only under the emperors of the Flavian dynasty, while the literature comprising the New Testament was not written until the times of Adrian, Antonius, and Marcus Aurelius.”³⁹ A similar hypercritical point of view, postponing the appearance of the gospels and epistles to the middle and even the third quarter of the second century A.D., is also represented in the Soviet literature, primarily in the writings of R. Iu. Vipper.⁴⁰ However, it is in poor agreement with the facts. As we know, Papias of Hierapolis, a Christian writer of the first half of the second century, knew the Gospels according to Mark and Matthew. Papias held that Mark was Peter's translator and wrote from his words, while Matthew wrote his Gospel “in a Hebrew dialect,” i.e., in Aramaic. True, the testimony of Papias can in no way be referred to the Gospel according to Matthew in its present form. It is recognized that the Gospel according to Matthew not only was not written in Aramaic, but altogether represents in very considerable measure a reworking of the Greek Gospel according to Mark.

Perhaps the finds of second century Egyptian papyruses, with fragments of New Testament texts, are more significant. In this category are the Manchester fragment of the Gospel according to John, dated in the first quarter of the second century; the three Oxford fragments of the twenty-sixth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew (end of the second century); the full text of the Gospel according to John, rewritten prior to 200 A.D. (the so-called Papyrus Bodmer II); fragments of a papyrus containing the Gospel according to Luke and John, dated at the end of the second century (Papyrus Bodmer XIV-XV).⁴¹ These finds, which were made available to the scientific community between 1935 and 1961, testify to the fact that gospel texts were well known in Egypt as early as the second century, and this makes the hypercritical dating by Bauer and Vipper highly doubtful.

The foresight of Engels, who anticipated decisive information precisely from such new Egyptian finds that would be more significant than any critique whatever, has been entirely confirmed.

Finally, Engels criticizes Bauer for the fact that the historical foundation upon which the stories (in the original, Erzählungen, which the translator rendered, not by the natural rasskazy, but by skazaniia, containing a nuance of invention and lack of authenticity) in the New Testament about Jesus and his pupils, later called apostles, rests, disappears in Bauer's presentation. In other words, unlike Bauer, Engels does not hold these stories to be utterly legendary (Sagen). He recognizes that the information with regard to the Palestinian period of the history of Christianity is not reliable⁴² but nonetheless holds that a certain historical basis is concealed beneath the unreliable “tales” of the New Testament.

Thus, Engels touches on the question of whether Jesus was a historical figure. He does this very cautiously indeed, but from his comments one sees that Bauer also went too far in denying the historical existence of the Palestinian “prophet” who founded the Christian sect.

One of the most consistent proponents of the mythological school, I. A. Kryvelev, recently wrote with complete justice that to accept the notion that the man Jesus was a historical figure does not in itself contradict materialism and atheism.⁴³ Contemporary theologians have also been compelled to grant that denial of the historical existence of Jesus does not represent taking a stand on matters of philosophy and that one can continue to be a Christian without granting to Jesus significance in the shaping of the preachings of Christianity, or what is called kerygma.⁴⁴ Thus, both sides strongly affirm that the problem of the historical existence of Jesus is not at all of primary importance to them, but they nonetheless continue to discuss it, with even greater passion.

This is not the place to return to that sensitive subject. I wish only to note that Engels did not accept Bauer's hypercritical construction, which rejected both the Palestinian period and the personality of Jesus. Bauer's theory was a typical product of the ideological searchings of the first half of the nineteenth century, when the law-governed nature of the historical process was ontologized, as it were, under the influence of Hegelian philosophy, and the course of history was merged with the spirit and separated from its real carrier: man. There was no place left for Jesus in history, just as none remained for Homer in the history of culture. Both Christianity and Homer's poems were regarded as having come into being of themselves, in the course of the appearance of the spirit. The Judaic prophet from Nazareth and the blind creator of the Iliad were compelled to leave the stage of history. It would appear that precisely this is what liberated critical reason would have us regard as its accomplishment.

Criticizing Bauer in this regard, Engels, as we remember, commented that mythologizing the images of Jesus and the apostles, and conversion of the stories about them into legends, has the consequence that the researcher loses sight of “the phase of internal development of the first congregations.” Engels himself, on the contrary, tries to distinguish between these phases.

In point of fact, his critique of Bauer contains a certain system. In Engels' opinion, the period in which Christianity began to undergo transformation (under the influence of the social conditions of the Roman Empire and under the influence of the Greco-Roman movement in ideas) into a world religion was preceded by another phase—one of birth, origin, formulation. Christianity arose, in Engels' opinion, in Palestine approximately in the first quarter of the first century A.D., with the participation of those persons whose activity was reflected in mythologized form in the gospels, i.e., Jesus and his pupils (naturally, Engels was far from weaving some novel about Jesus the rebel out of the cloudy testimony in the sources, as was later written by many, including Kautsky and Robertson).⁴⁵ He attempted to understand what it was during its early stages with the aid of the Book of Revelation which dates, according to Ferdinand Benari, from about 68 A.D.⁴⁶ He emphasizes that at that time “new sects, new religions, and new prophets appeared by the hundreds.” “In point of fact,” Engels continues, “Christianity took shape spontaneously, as something of a mean resulting from the mutual effects of the most developed of these sects, and later (my emphasis—A.K.) took shape as a teaching due to the addition of the propositions of the Alexandrian Jew Philo, and still later by extensive penetration of the ideas of the Stoics.”⁴⁷

The Christianity of the third quarter of the first century A.D. (according to the Book of Revelation) is still one of the Judaic sects, and its author “did not have the remotest notion that he was a spokesman for a new phase in the development of religion, a phase that was destined to become one of the greatest elements in the revolution.”⁴⁸ Christianity in the period of the writing of the Book of Revelation, says Engels in another work, “not yet aware of itself, differed as does heaven from earth, from the later world religion given fixed form in dogma.”⁴⁹

Thus, Engels recognizes the existence of two phases in the history of early Christianity. The first might be termed that of Palestine and Asia Minor. During that period, the followers of a little-known Jewish prophet, Jesus, had not emerged beyond the limits of Judaic sectarianism. The second phase was the period of transformation of the Judaic sects into a world religion. Christianity closed ranks and, from having been a grouping of sects, became a unified church. It began to develop dogmas binding upon all and, by all the evidence, mythologized the stories about the founder of the new religion.

These were Engels' views on primitive Christianity. They have long been known to Soviet scholars concerned with this problem, although, as we have seen, the old translation left a good deal to be desired and the new one too has preserved a certain degree of imprecision. Nevertheless, Engels' ideas have not been fully utilized in our historiography. Paradoxical as this may be, we tended rather to follow in the footsteps of Bruno Bauer and the mythological school of the turn of the present century than in those of Engels (all this is also applicable to my own early writings). A. B. Ranovich, too, essentially criticized Engels from the standpoint of the mythological school.⁵⁰ It became the practice to keep silent about Engels' late criticisms directed at Bauer, and attempts were even made, as we have seen, to transform Engels into an opponent of the theory of the Palestinian origin of Christianity. To the idealist views of Bauer and the mythological school we often appended vulgar economic explanations of the roots of Christianity, regarding this religion as the direct result of the defeat of a revolution (or uprisings) by the slaves.

The beginning of a reexamination of the tradition thus established was provided by a work by S. I. Kovalev published in 1958.⁵¹ A profound study of the facts, primarily by scholars of the middle and younger generations (E. M. Shtaerman, M. M. Kublanov, I. S. Sventsitskaia, M. K. Trofimova, and S. S. Averintsev) made it possible to discard a number of the hypercritical positions. This zigzag movement of scholarship should not be regarded as amazing or, even less, anything to be ashamed of: it was not hard to go beyond the limits of reason in the struggle against orthodox confessionalism. Study of the heritage of Engels, whose views with respect to matters of the greatest significance are splendidly confirmed by new finds, will facilitate the development of our studies of early Christianity.

Notes

1. See K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., Vol. 21, p. 8.

2. Ibid., Vol. 22, p. 467.

3. Ibid., p. 470.

4. Ibid., p. 481.

5. Ibid., Vol. 19, p. 310.

6. Ibid.

7. This type of approach is particularly characteristic of popular pamphlets on early Christianity, in which the new religion is derived more or less directly from the contradictions of the slaveholding mode of production (see, for example, V. R. Tarasenko, Proiskhozhdenie i sushchnost' khristianstva, Minsk, 1958, pp. 10-15) without considering the fact that slaveholding society existed for centuries before Christianity came into being.

8. See, for example, V. I. Nedel'skii, Revoliutsiia rabov i proiskhozhdenie khristianstva, Moscow and Leningrad, 1936. “Christianity was created,” wrote Nedel'skii, “precisely as an expression of the despair and sense of hopelessness that embraced the lower depths of Roman society as the result of the defeat of the revolution” (p. 66). Compare S. Enshlen, Proiskhozhdenie religii, Moscow, 1954, p. 118.

9. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 19, p. 312.

10. Ibid., Vol. 22, p. 482.

11. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 414.

12. Ibid., Vol. 19, pp. 310 ff.

13. The German original is cited in K. Marx and F. Engels, Werke, Vol. 22, p. 463. See Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 22, p. 482. In “The Book of Revelation,” too, Engels calls Christianity “a major revolutionary movement” (ibid., Vol. 21, p. 8).

14. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 1, p. 415.

15. Ibid., Vol. 22, p. 482.

16. Ibid., Vol. 20, p. 105. At the same time, Engels comments that “in all classes there had to be a certain number of people” seeking a new religion (ibid., Vol. 19, p. 312).

17. Ibid., Vol. 19, p. 313.

18. Ibid., p. 308.

19. Ibid., p. 309.

20. See I. D. Amusin, Rukopisi Mertvogo moria, Moscow, 1961, pp. 217-258; G. M. Livshits, Proiskhozhdenie khristianstva v svete rukopisei Mertvogo moria, Minsk, 1967.

21. With respect to Gnosis, see J. Leipoldt and W. Grundmann, Umwelt des Urchristentums, Vol. I, Berlin, 1965, pp. 371-414. In the Soviet literature, see I. S. Sventsitskaia, Zapreshchennye evangeliia, Moscow, 1965, pp. 88-96. On the Gnostic Acts of Thomas, see M. K. Trofimova, “Iz istorii ideologii II veka n.e.,” Vestnik drevnei istorii, 1962, No. 4, pp. 67-90; “K metodike izucheniia istochnikov po istorii rannego khristianstva,” Vestnik drevnei istorii, 1970, No. 1, pp. 142-150.

22. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 19, p. 308.

23. On certain features of the social program of early Christianity, see E. M. Shtaerman, Moral' i religiia ugnetennykh klassov Rimskoi imperii, Moscow, 1961, pp. 102-104, 139-141.

24. R. Bultmann, Das Urchristentum im Rahmen der antiken Religionen, Zurich and Stuttgart, 1963, p. 200. On Bultmann's views, see Trofimova, “Filosofiia ekzistentializma i problemy istorii rannego khristianstva,” Vestnik drevnei istorii, 1967, No. 2, pp. 283-294.

25. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 20, p. 328.

26. Ibid., Vol. 19, p. 313.

27. Ibid., p. 308.

28. Ibid., p. 314.

29. Marx and Engels, Werke, Vol. 19, p. 304. See Marx and Engels, Soch, Vol. 19, p. 314. In the translation provided in Soch., there is an entirely proper correction of an error in the old translation, in which the word Stifter (“founder”) was for some reason rendered as “judge” (sudiia) (see Marx and Engels, O religii, Moscow, 1955, p. 158).

30. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 22, p. 474.

31. Ibid., p. 473.

32. Ibid., p. 474.

33. Marx and Engels, Werke, Vol. 22, p. 456. Compare Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 22, p. 474. This last sentence evidently is not translated with perfect accuracy: namentlich in Rom, in [sic] Orient, vor allem in Egypten would have been better rendered as “a imenno v Rime, no Vostoke i prezhde vsego v Egipte.” In my view, the setting off of “v osobennosti” [particularly] and “prezhde vsego” [above all] makes no sense.

34. I. A. Kryvelev, in the book Marks i Engel's o religii (Moscow, 1964), in which there is a special subchapter, “Engel's o znachenii rabot burzhuazno-liberal'nykh istorikov khristianstva” (pp. 87-89), makes only a general reference to “a number of forced interpretations” by Bauer “in presenting the factual aspect of history” (only there?—A.K.), but does not indicate what Engels regarded these forced interpretations as being. G. M. Livshits in his historiographic work, Ocherki istoriografii Biblii i rannego khristianstva (Minsk, 1970, p. 139) justly mentions Engels' criticism of Bauer's idealism but touches upon the actual criticisms themselves only in passing (compare ibid., p. 187).

35. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 21, p. 8.

36. I cite the old translation: Marx and Engels, O religii, p. 262. In defending the notion of the extra-Palestinian origin of Christianity, Livshits (Proiskhozhdenie khristianstva, p. 151) continued in 1967 to cite the old translation, despite the fact that this passage had been corrected in Vol. 22 of Soch., published in 1962.

37. Marx and Engels, Werke, Vol. 22, p. 470.

38. That is the new translation: Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 22, p. 489. However, the rendering of Hauptsitz as “rezidentsiia” seems to me inexact: “glavnyi tsentr” would have been better. Livshits in Proiskhozhdenie khristianstva (p. 151) cites not only this sentence, but also Engels' words to the effect that Bauer “laid the foundation of the proof that Christianity was not imported from without, from Judea” but does not note the important qualification: “at least in the form in which it became a world religion” (Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 22, p. 474). This qualification reduces to nought the entire argument of the scholar from Minsk.

39. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 22, p. 474.

40. R. Iu. Vipper, Vozniknovenie khristianskoi literatury, Moscow and Leningrad, 1946; same author, Rim i rannee khristianstvo, Moscow, 1954. The evolution of Lentsman's thinking in this regard is curious. In 1958 he wrote: “The Gospels could not have been written earlier than the middle of the second century” (Ia. A. Lentsman, Proiskhozhdenie khristianstva, Moscow, 1958, p. 33). In a book he wrote shortly before he died, the formulation is more cautious: “By no later than about 125 A.D., certain of the gospels of the New Testament, apparently in a form that has not come down to us, were already in circulation among the faithful” (same author, Sravnivaia evangeliia, Moscow, 1967, p. 23 ff.). At one time I too adhered to the late dating of the literature in the New Testament, following in the wake of Vipper and Lentsman.

41. P. Feine, J. Behm, and W. G. Kümmel, Einleitung in das Neue Testament, Berlin, 1965, pp. 380 ff.

42. See Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 21, pp. 8 ff.

43. I. A. Kryvelev, Chto znaet istoriia ob Iisuse Khriste?, Moscow, 1969, p. 192.

44. Compare, for example, J. Jeremias, “Der gegenwärtige Stand der Debatte um Problem [sic] des historischen Jesus,” in Der historische Jesus und der kerygmatische Christus, Berlin, 1964, p. 12.

45. K. Kautsky, Proiskhozhdenie khristianstva, 5th ed., Moscow and Leningrad, 1930; A. Robertson, Proiskhozhdenie khristianstva, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1959.

46. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 21, pp. 10-13. Compare ibid., Vol. 22, pp. 486-489. For that matter, Benari's dating cannot be regarded as beyond dispute. Irinei dated the vision of St. John to the end of the rule of Domitian (81-96 A.D.), while in actuality the Revelation contains hints with respect to events that most probably occurred during that reign (see P. Feine, J. Behm, and W. G. Kümmel, op. cit., pp. 341-344). At one time, A. B. Ranovich expressed doubts about the tenability of Benari's dating (see O rannem khristianstve, Moscow, 1959, p. 45), but later, however, he returned to the date proposed by Benari (ibid., p. 74). Kryvelev (see Marks i Engel's o religii, p. 91) holds that the major portion of the Revelation dates to about 68 A.D. and that the text was later supplemented by various insertions.

47. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 21, p. 9.

48. Ibid., p. 10. The Judaic character of the Revelation, was also emphasized by Engels in another work (ibid., Vol. 22, p. 486).

49. Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. 22, p. 478.

50. See A. B. Ranovich, O rannem khristianstve, p. 46.

51. S. I. Kovalev, Osnovnye voprosy proiskhozhdeniia khristianstva, Moscow and Leningrad, 1964, pp. 21-48.