German Protestant theologian (1850-1906)
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Albert Kalthoff (5 March 1850, Barmen – 11 May 1906, Bremen) was a German Protestant theologian, who along with Emil Felden (1874–1959), Oscar Mauritz (1867–1959), Moritz Schwalb (1833–1916) and Friedrich Steudel (1866–1939) formed a group in Bremen, named the Deutscher Monistenbund (German Monists League), who no longer believed in Jesus as a historical figure.
Biography
Kalthoff criticized what he regarded as the romanticist and sentimental image of Jesus as a "great personality" of history developed by German liberal theologians, including Albert Schweitzer who noted Kalthoff in his work The Quest of the Historical Jesus.[1] In Kalthoff's views, it was the early church that created the New Testament, not the reverse; the early Jesus movement was socialist, expecting a social reform and a better world, which was combined with the Jewish apocalyptic belief in a Messiah. Kalthoff saw Christianity as a social psychosis.[2] (Per Arthur Drews, The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present - see the section on Kalthoff)[3] Arthur Drews was influenced by Kalthoff.
Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) was the first academic theologian posit the ahistoricity of Jesus. However his scholarship was buried by German academia, and he remained a pariah, until Albert Kalthoff rescued his works from neglect and obscurity. Kalthoff revived Bruno Bauer's Christ Myth thesis in his Das Christus-Problem. Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie (The Problem of Christ: Principles of a Social Theology) and Die Entstehung des Christentums, Neue Beiträge zum Christusproblem (The Rise of Christianity).
