Osterwunder – criticism of the resurrection

By definition of reason, religion contradicts reason: If something is insightful, well occupied and generally understandable, you don’t need to believe it to be true. Faith, on the other hand, connects our minds with all kinds of fairy tale stories, whether they act from Santa Claus, from Karma or from dear God, and who wants to cover a protective coat over it, calls such ants: spirituality.

The religion designs a counter -world to the factual world experienced every day, and again and again it has to reject the annoying inquiries of common sense. She likes to fight back by creating an inviolable aura of holiness. If she can, she allies with secular power to turn off questions, for example: How can you seriously claim to believe this whole nonsense? Or do you really believe that? And why can you bomb children with your nonsense?

Such questions are suppressed by large religions such as smaller sects, but, like daisy between concrete, always penetrate, like daisy. Heroes of persistence are often people who have been religiously indoctrinated, but simply cannot or do not want to give up their innate mind. One of them was the Hamburg orientalist Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768): Because he believed in a reasonable God, he found the intellectual impositions of the Bible particularly painful, and he attacked many of their content, even before theology had invented its modern excuse: that was all meant allegorically.

His main work “Apology or Protection for the reasonable admirers of God” questioned the literal credibility of the Bible, ultimately their divine origin. How should such a crude work come from an almighty, perfect world creator? Reimarus didn’t let it go, he ranked with his holy book. He dedicated special care to Easter history: Here the weathered, confused, shaky building of Christian theology can be brought to a particularly easy collapse.

With wit and meticulousness, Reimarus dismantled the story of the resurrection of the executed Jesus from 1735 until his death. The narrow description in the Bible already aroused his suspicion: Why is this top history of the world history dealt with on a few droughts? Why are there four versions that are all full of inconsistencies and contradict each other? Reimarus was literally forced to become a source critic.

He gave Matthew the least faith, who decorates the questionable fairy tale of the resurrection with many special effects: there is earthquake, an angel comes from the sky and rolls the heavy stone aside, and the grave is empty. Matthew thus contradicts everyone else, and interestingly, he also has an exclusive story. After the Easter miracle, Matthäus writes, a rumor came up: the Jesus disciples would have stolen the body of their leader and let it disappear! At this point, Reimarus notes: Why does this rumor have to be combated here, in the middle of the Bible? Maybe because it looks so credible next to the resurrection story?

Reimarus goes through all biblical information about the action, as if he felt in court for a dodgy witness: Why does the high advice know about the upcoming resurrection and lets the grave be guarded sharply, but the disciples fall out of all clouds when they experience the disappearance of the body? Why do you march to the grave to wrap Jesus in herbs and towels – should you miss the sealing and sharp guarding of the grave? Why don’t the women in the Gospel of Mark not notice the earthquake, which rumbles through the Gospel of Matthew, why do you not encounter any guards when visiting the grave? Point by point, Reimarus cracked the tradition, and he names the elephants in the room: Why did the Almighty God not provide adequate staging in this highlight?

“Because (…) wanted to awaken God Jesus to the miracle of all over the world, why shouldn’t he do it for days, in front of everyone’s eyes, do it? Why should he organize the matter in such a way that if one came to the grave, the grave would already be open and single, and did not notice the slightest difference than if the body secretly removed from the grave? “

The time after the alleged resurrection, the weeks in which Jesus is said to have been changed through the country to appear to him in order to appear to his disciples from time to time …

“In all the time of forty days, since Jesus is said to have risen and changed among them, they do not say a word under us that he lives again so that we could come to them and see and speak of Jesus; But after forty days, since it should already be driven on the sky, they first go out and speak, he was there and there. Do you ask them, where was he? Who saw him? So he was in the locked room without a door opening without anyone having him could come or see it: So it was in the field, in Galilea on the sea, on the mountains. My! Why not in the temple? Before the people? “

However, the Son of God remained very modest before he flew into heaven away from the public. When assessing his own, he had also relied on understatement: According to current state of research, the hiking preacher probably assumed that a Jewish king would build a Jewish kingdom of Judea during his lifetime. Hanging on the cross, Jesus showed little forecast that he would soon be called to God and a world religion would be knitted around his name.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus had a more realistic assessment of his own resurrection, the on living in posterity: He did not dare to publish his main publication throughout his life. After his death, Lessing, anonymously, did that under the title “Fragments of an unnamed”. The scandal was enormous. Nobody gets angry than religious dogmatics who cannot answer simple questions.

Reimarus had probably seen it so much; Fortunately, the hype passed him because he was no longer there. His body lay calm and cold in the grave and fell out, like the body of all people. After all, unlike Jesus, Hermann Samuel Reimarus left clear, understandable writings, whose ingenuity and esprit still inspire. In a Germany that has been cultivating the felt between the church and the state for ages, this brave, good thinker was of course chronically chronic as possible.