Otto Pfleiderer

“The Development of Christianity (1910)”

“Religion and Historic Faiths (1907)”

“Primitive Christianity: Its Writings and Teachings in Their Historical Connections (1906)”

“Evolution and Theology and Other Essays (1900)”

“The Philosophy of Religion: On the Basis of Its History, Vol. 1, 1886 · Vol. 2, 1887 · Vol. 4, 1888 · Vol. 1, 1894 · Vol. 2, 1894 · Vol. 3, 1888 · Vol. 4, 1894”

“The Development of Theology since Kant (1890)”

“Lectures on the Influence of the Apostle Paul on the Development of Christianity, delivered in London and Oxford in April and May, 1885 (1885)”

“Paulinism : A contribution to the History of Primitive Christian Theology (1877), Vol. 1 · Vol. 2”

“Not to return to the old … can be the task of our time, but to clothe the spirit of Christianity, its religious-ethical principle, which lay as a compelling force at the basis of all preceding developments, in the fitting and intelligible form for our age.”

“The religious principle of Jesus was thus certainly freed by Paul from its original Jewish and national husk, but only to be immediately clothed again in a new supernaturalistic envelope, the origin of which likewise lay in the historically given ideas of Hellenism and Pharisaism. Therefore the Pauline Christ can just as little be for us a binding object of faith as the Jesus of history.”

“Paul abstracted this universal principle from the concrete phenomenon in the man Jesus, in whom it was interlaced with Jewish presuppositions and strivings, which as such would have been a hindrance to the universal and abiding effectiveness of that principle.”

“It is a hyperbole excusable in poetic language, but not scientifically valid, when he [Jesus] is identified with the ideal of humanity. The ideal is the unconditioned, the absolute, but every phenomenon in time and space is conditioned and limited, and cannot therefore coincide with the ideal. This hyperbole of pious faith may grow out of noble feelings, but for all that it remains essentially false, and is harmful when seriously regarded as dogma.”

“What has here been remarked in general of the prophets as the champions of religious progress is also true in particular of him who as the most perfect blossom of the religious development of Israel constituted also the essential force of the new Christian religion—Jesus of Nazareth. Against this logical conclusion of the evolutionary view of history the representatives of the new faith present the most obstinate resistance.”

“Here is the basis of the modern critical biblical science, which treats the documents of Christianity and Judaism according to the same principles of historical investigation which are valid in all other historical domains, particularly in that of the history of the ethnic religions.”