page_title: The Christ Myth
section_title: The righteous as personification of wisdom, his persecution and death
hierarchical_section_title: The Christ Myth / Christ Myth II – the witnesses to the historicity of Jesus (1912) / The witness of the Gospels / The righteous as personification of wisdom, his persecution and death
context_page_description: The Christ Myth, first published in 1909, was a book by Arthur Drews on the Christ myth theory. Drews, along with Bruno Bauer and Albert Kalthoff, is one of the three German pioneers of the denial of the existence of a historical Jesus.
context_section_description: Drews also underlines the contribution of the character of the Just or the Righteous in the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach.
  - In "Wisdom 7:15–29", she is a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.
  - In "Wisdom 2:10–19" the wicked are plotting against the righteous man: Let us oppress the righteous poor man,
  - and in "Wisdom 2:20" they decide Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.
  
  Drews adds:
   [Ch. 7, "The Mythic-Symbolic Interpretation of the Gospels"] According to Deuteronomy (21:23), there was no more shameful death than to hang on a tree (in Greek xylon and stauros, in Latin crux); so that this naturally occurred as the true manner of the just one's death. Then the particular motive of the death was furnished by the passage in Wisdom and the idea of Plato. He died as a victim of the unjust, the godless.
  [Ch. 8, "Historians and the Gospels"] No one will question that the figure of Jesus in the gospels has a certain nucleus, about which all the rest has gradually crystallised. But that this nucleus is an historical personality, and not Isaiah's Servant of God, the Just of Wisdom, and the Sufferer of the 22d Psalm, is merely to beg the question; and this is the less justified since all the really important features of the gospel life of Jesus owe their origin partly to the myth, partly to the expansion and application of certain passages in the prophets.
  
  [Ch. 13, "The Historical Jesus and the Ideal Christ"]...There is not in the centre of Christianity one particular historical human being, but the idea of man, of the suffering, struggling, humiliated, but victoriously emerging from all his humiliations, servant of God, symbolically represented in the actions and experiences of a particular historical person. [emphasis added]
caption: Job, by Bonnat
exif: {"Image DateTime": "2007:08:26 11:28:02"}