Karl Kautsky

Origin of Christianity

G. I. Ezrin. Karl Kautsky and his book "The Origin of Christianity" 1

Preface 10

Department I. Sources of Early Christianity 16

Chapter 1. Pagan Sources 16

Chapter 2. Christian Sources 19

Chapter 3. Struggle for the Image of Christ 24

Section II. Social structure in the era of the Roman Empire 27

Chapter 1 Slavery 27

Chapter 2. Political system 47

Chapter 3. Mental and moral state of Roman society 62

Department III. Judaism 98

Chapter 1. Israel 98

Chapter 2. Judaism after the Babylonian captivity 119

Chapter 3. The Struggle of the Party in Jerusalem 141

Section IV. Early Christianity 167

Chapter 1 The Original Christian Community 167

Chapter 2. Christian Messianism 182

Chapter 3. Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians 196

Chapter 4. History of the Passion of Christ 202

Chapter 5. The evolution of the internal structure of the original Christian community 209

Name Index 245

G. I. Ezrin. Karl Kautsky and his book "The Origin of Christianity"

A huge, in fact, an immense number of books, articles and other publications have been written about the origin of Christianity. Christian authors, philosophers of the Enlightenment, representatives of biblical criticism, and atheist authors worked in this field. This is understandable, since we are talking about a historical phenomenon - Christianity, which arose 2000 years ago, created numerous churches with millions of followers, occupied and still occupies a large place in the world, in the ideological, economic and political life of peoples and states.

Few of these books have stood the test of time. Most of them are forgotten, others are known only to a small circle of specialists. But some books in our time have retained their relevance and therefore may be of interest to the general reader.

One such book is The Origin of Christianity by Karl Kautsky.

Kautsky is an extraordinary and ambiguous figure who played a prominent role in the ideological life of the late 19th and 20th centuries. He was born in 1854 in Prague. His father, a Czech by nationality, Johann Kautsky worked as a theater decorator. Mother Minna Kautskaya, a German, began her career as an actress and then became a famous writer.

After graduating from the gymnasium, Karl Kautsky from 1874 to 1879 studied at the University of Vienna. In 1875, he joined the German Social Democratic Party, having determined his ideological and political choice for life.

In 1878, during the period of the "exclusive law against the socialists," Kautsky actively collaborated in the illegal Social Democratic organ Social Democrat, published in Zurich, where he left in 1880 after graduating from the university. But soon Kautsky moved to London, where in 1881 he met K. Marx and F. Engels. This acquaintance finally determined Kautsky's ideological choice, his transition to the positions of Marxism.

In 1883, Kautsky founded the journal Novoye Vremya, the theoretical organ of German Social Democracy, of which he was editor from its inception until 1917.

In 1885-1888. Kautsky lives in London, working closely with F. Engels. Since 1890, he has lived permanently in Germany, actively participating in the activities of the German Social Democratic Party, and then the Second International. In 1934, after fascism came to power in Germany, Kautsky moved to Vienna, and after the capture of Austria by fascist Germany in 1938, he left for Prague. From there he moved to Amsterdam, where he died in the same year, 1938.

Here it is not possible to fully explore the ideological evolution of Kautsky, but we note that Kautsky believed all his life in the historical inevitability of socialism, always considered himself a Marxist and was proud of it, served the cause of socialism as he understood it. His enormous capacity for work, activity and conviction in the correctness of socialist ideas, undoubted literary talent make him one of the most important figures in the international working-class movement.

Kautsky highly appraised the revolution of 1905 in Russia, devoting a number of brilliant works to its analysis.

In 1910-1912. Kautsky becomes the ideologist of so-called centrism. In 1914, centrism, together with the right-wing Social Democrats, declared an imperialist war "defensive", waged for the sake of "defending the fatherland". Lenin called Kautsky's attempts to theoretically justify these actions "an infinitely vulgar mockery of socialism."

In 1917, in protest against the policy of the leadership of the SPD, Kautsky left the party, left the post of editor of Novoye Vremya and organized an independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which did not last long.

Kautsky's attitude to the October Revolution certainly deserves an independent analysis. Here we will only note that he wrote a number of articles and pamphlets about this revolution (Democracy and Dictatorship, Russian translation, 1918; Democracy or Dictatorship, Russian translation, 1921; Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918 "From Democracy to State Slavery", 1921).

Lenin replied to Kautsky's pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat with the book The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918).

The literary heritage of Kautsky is very great. He created such fundamental works as The Economic Teachings of Karl Marx (1887, Russian translation 1956), Ethics and the Materialist Understanding of History (1906, Russian translation 1922), Predecessors socialism” (1909-1921), “Materialistic understanding of history” (1927), etc.

Among the most significant books written by Kautsky is The Origin of Christianity. This book was published in Germany in 1908 and soon (in 1909) was published in Russia in D. Ryazanov's translation under a different title. This translation has been approved and authorized by the author. This book is based on the 1909 edition, with the exception of the paragraph "Christianity and Social Democracy" of the last chapter, which is omitted from this edition. Now it is difficult to judge why the title of the book was changed in its Russian edition. It can be assumed that this was done for censorship reasons, since the new name looks more neutral than in the German original. In any case, the post-revolutionary edition of this book in Russian in the same translation came out under the title of the original. Under Soviet rule, this book went through four editions in a relatively short period of time (from 1919 to 1930). After 1930, it was never published, becoming, in essence, a bibliographic rarity. And the point here is not in the book itself, but in its author, whose life path, as we see, was not straightforward and unambiguous.

In this Kautsky's book is not alone. She shared, unfortunately, the fate of many scientific and artistic works that were withdrawn from use, which, as we see, caused significant damage to the development of our culture. This attitude towards Kautsky's book is not accidental. Over the years, attitudes towards the author have been unambiguously negative. In our literature, after the death of V. I. Lenin, Kautsky, contrary to historical truth, was regarded as a kind of antipode of Marxism. It has become a bad tradition to evaluate all of Kautsky's activities as a continuous chain of mistakes and direct actions against Marxism. It was customary to speak and write about Kautsky in this spirit for many years. The basis for this was Lenin's sharp criticism of K. Kautsky during the First World War, and then the October Revolution. It is known that V. I. Lenin at that time called Kautsky a renegade. Does this mean that such an assessment, given by V. I. Lenin in a certain period, crosses out all of Kautsky's pre-war activities? Certainly not. If the theoretical and political activity of Kautsky after 1909 was criticized by V. I. Lenin, then Lenin assessed its previous periods in a completely different way. Thus, noting that Karl Kautsky, one of the leaders of the proletarian party, was highly valued by all future Bolsheviks, Lenin called him "an outstanding socialist." He wrote: "We know from many of Kautsky's works that he knew how to be a Marxist historian, that such works of his will remain the lasting property of the proletariat, despite his later renegade."

This Leninist appraisal of Kautsky's theoretical activity refers entirely to the book The Origin of Christianity, written during the period when Kautsky was

"Outstanding Socialist" Its publication is not only useful, but also necessary for at least partial restoration of historical justice.

Quite naturally the question arises: why is Kautsky, one of the leaders of the Social Democracy, whose works are devoted to quite different problems, writing this book? This is not an accident. In the preface to the book, Kautsky writes: "The history of Christianity and biblical criticism have long been the subject of my studies." His first work on this topic - the article "The Origin of Biblical History" - was published in the magazine "Cosmos" in 1883, and two years later, in 1885, he published the article "The Rise of Christianity" in the Neue Zeit. We see that Kautsky has been interested in the problem of the origin of Christianity for a long time. In this he was not alone. Approximately in the same years, the most prominent figures of the labor movement appeared with publications on the problems of the origin of Christianity: F. Engels, A. Bebel, F. Mering - in Germany, P. Lafargue - in France.

In addition to the problems mentioned above, Kautsky devoted a number of other works to the problems of religion and the church. Suffice it to name at least his pamphlet The Catholic Church and Social Democracy, published in Russian translation in 1906.

Thus, this book, offered to the reader, was the result of many years of work by Kautsky on the study of religious and ecclesiastical problems.

There were several reasons for the increased interest in the problems of early Christianity, its origin.

As is known, in 1869, at a congress in Eisenach, W. Liebknecht and A. Bebel founded the first political party of the working class in history - the German Social Democratic Labor Party.

From that moment on, a new period began in the history of the labor movement, which required an urgent solution to a number of new problems of a programmatic nature and, in particular, the question of the attitude of the workers' party to religion and the church, which in the conditions of Central Europe meant the attitude of the workers' party to Christianity. In this situation, it turned out that only a general theoretical approach to the problem of religion and the church is not enough. This circumstance alone could explain the interest of working-class theoreticians in Christianity.

Another important circumstance that necessitated a Marxist study of early Christianity was also the striving of a section of the workers to clothe their social protest in religious forms. They followed the already established historical tradition, when the protest of the working masses against social conditions resulted, as a rule, in various kinds of religious movements or found expression in religious ideas. Such a basic idea of ​​any social protest was the opposition of the ideas and spirit of primitive Christianity to the modern dominant church. Under feudalism, when religion in its Christian form was the all-encompassing form of ideology, the protest of the masses could not be expressed in any other form.

On this occasion, F. Mehring rightly noted that the increased interest in early Christianity is “a concomitant phenomenon of instinctive workers’ communism, which in its theoretical formulation takes as its starting point material that is closely familiar to it”, that “in the initial stages of its liberation struggle, the modern proletariat willingly recalls primitive Christianity.

The validity of this remark by F. Mering will become clear if we consider that in Germany and in neighboring France, before the spread of Marxism in the working class, such forms of “instinctive workers’ communism” as the theories of Etienne Cabet and Wilhelm Weitling, not free from religious accretions, had a certain influence.

In addition, one must bear in mind the fact that Christian socialism, which began a wide propaganda of its views, strengthened Christian illusions in the minds of the workers, since, as K. Marx and F. Engels noted, “there is nothing easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist shade."

However, in Germany, the issue of attitudes towards religion and the church became particularly acute in connection with the Kulturkampf policy that unfolded in 1872. Despite the name, this struggle had nothing to do with culture. It was purely political in nature, since the unification of Germany by Bismarck under the auspices of Protestant Prussia placed the Catholic Church and the Center Party associated with it in opposition. The Catholic Church, having every reason to fear the fall of its influence, supported anti-Prussian sentiments and contributed to the growth of separatism.

Bismarck and the entire Junker-bourgeois bloc retaliated against the Catholic Church with laws (1872-1876) that affected its fundamental interests. These laws, as well as the subsequent police repression and persecution of Catholic clergy, led to results directly opposite to those Bismarck had in mind: the number of active Catholics increased, the position of the center party strengthened. Since 1876 the Kulturkampf has been in decline. Subsequently, most of the anti-Catholic laws were repealed.

Bismarck's struggle against Catholicism led to the fact that the religious question turned out to be one of the most acute in the political life of Germany, not only during the period of the most violent struggle, but also for a number of years after that. The desire of the ruling classes to incite the working people against the Catholic Church as their main enemy, as the primary bearer of social evil, and thereby divert the masses from solving their real problems, required the development of their own policy of the workers' party in relation to religion and the church.

Kautsky understood that there could be no alliance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat on this question. In the pamphlet The Catholic Church and Social Democracy we have already mentioned, he wrote: “The bourgeoisie and the proletariat cannot wage a joint struggle against the Church, since the class position of the proletariat forces it to adhere to a different policy on this issue than the policy of the bourgeoisie.” However, it was possible to answer the question of what this policy should be only after a detailed study of such a phenomenon as Christianity. This task of investigating Christianity, its origin and development, was set before Marxist researchers by Engels.

In 1882, he wrote that religion, which for 1800 years had dominated a large part of civilized mankind, could not be dealt with by declaring it nonsense concocted by deceivers. He believed that "it is necessary first to be able to explain its origin and its development, based on the historical conditions under which it arose and achieved dominance."

Karl Kautsky sought to solve this problem in his book The Origin of Christianity.

The study of any ideological phenomenon is always a difficult task. It is necessary to understand and explain from what conditions it arose, what ideas of the past influenced its formation, and why they played this role from the entire past ideological heritage. But the difficulties of investigating the origins of Christianity are many times greater. There are many reasons for this. First of all, Christianity is not an ordinary ideological phenomenon, if only because its followers even today, after many centuries of its existence, are hundreds of millions of people in all countries of the world without exception. It presents a particular difficulty for the researcher, since its content reflects the influence of many ideas that arose in different regions of the ancient world, on different national and ideological grounds. Finally, the difficulty was that until the middle of the XVIII century. the undivided dominance of theological views on Christianity, in essence, removed the problem of its origin. According to these views, Christianity emerged at once with all its complex set of ideas. Hence the special attention to the personality of Christ, who, being the son of God and at the same time a god, gave people his teaching in finished form. The enlighteners of the 18th century, who strongly criticized Christianity, in opposition to the theological tradition, turned many of their arguments against the historicity of Christ, leaving unanswered questions about why Christianity arose and how it turned into a mass movement, created many religious organizations, could become a force, affecting not only the ideological, but also the political and economic life of society.

The Enlighteners' definition that every religion is a product of deceit and ignorance does not explain much and, of course, does not answer the question of what historical circumstances gave rise to Christianity and what aspirations of the masses it answered.

With the development of historical science, with the emergence of biblical criticism, matters have changed in a significant way. A particularly significant contribution to the explanation of the origin of Christianity was made by Bruno Bauer, who studied the ideas that Christianity adopted and its connection with the development of contemporary culture. At the same time, Bauer rejected the historical existence of Christ, because, as he believed, the emergence of Christianity can be explained even without this detail.

Kautsky writes that in the study of Christianity he follows Bauer. But, unlike Bauer, Kautsky uses a different research methodology, the basis of which is a materialistic understanding of history. He writes: "He who stands on the point of view of a materialistic understanding of history can look at the past quite impartially, even if he takes the most active part in the practical struggle of the present."

Examining in detail the historical circumstances of the emergence of Christianity and following the traditions of biblical criticism, Kautsky considers evidence of the mythological image of Christ, but, unlike Bauer, does not claim that Christ did not exist, but only emphasizes the unreliability of information about him contained both in the gospels and in historical books. writings. Kautsky notes that in terms of their historical value the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are no higher than the Homeric poems or the Nibelungenlied. The activities of historical figures are depicted in them with such poetic liberty that they cannot be used for the historical description of these personalities, and it is even difficult to say which of the heroes described in them are historical figures and which are the fruit of fantasy. In other words, Kautsky does not deny the possibility of the historical existence of Christ. (A. Bebel noted that there can be many more or less reliable hypotheses regarding the mythological or historic nature of Christ, of which only one can be absolutely unacceptable: the hypothesis that Christ is the son of God).

Most modern scholars associate the historicity of Christ with some new discoveries, in particular, with the Arabic version of the testimony of Josephus Flavius ​​(testimoniurn Flavianum), published in 1971 by S. Pinness, as well as with the study of the entire set of canonical and apocryphal early Christian sources, not all of which were known to Kautsky. The latter include, for example, Qumran manuscripts, papyri with fragments of the gospels, and a library of Gnostic Christians opened in 1945 in Nag Hammadi.

But it is necessary to answer the questions about what aspirations of the masses Christianity answered, what historical conditions gave birth to it.

To answer these questions, Kautsky examines the history of Rome and Judaism. In detail (we would even say - excessively detailed) he sets out the history of slavery in Rome from its earliest stages, from the appearance of domestic slavery. In the same detail, he sets out the history of Israel and Judah from the moment the Semitic tribes (12 tribes of Israel) migrated to Palestine.

With amazing knowledge of the era, Kautsky analyzes the nature of the development of production based on slave labor, those aspects and tendencies of it that ultimately led to the stagnation of ancient Roman society and created a situation in which the oppressed masses, and then the ruling classes, found themselves seized by moods of hopelessness and despair.

Analyzing the history of Judea, its inconsistency, and often tragedy, Kautsky emphasizes those changes in the content of religious beliefs that arose in Judaism as a reflection of real social cataclysms experienced by a small nation that found itself at the intersection of the interests of the powerful states of antiquity (Egypt, Assyria, later Babylon) . But of particular interest are the sections devoted to the study of mentality both in Rome and in Palestine at the time of the emergence of Christianity.

Kautsky notes that the epoch in which Christianity arose was a period of the most difficult crisis that engulfed the entire Roman Empire. It led to the complete disintegration of traditional forms of production, the state, ideas and beliefs. The impasse that developed in ancient society gave rise to such phenomena as individualism, gullibility, passion for the miraculous, deceit (as an addition to passion for the miraculous and gullibility), all kinds of falsifications. And the same era in the history of the Roman Empire is distinguished by the growth of religiosity, the spread of eschatological and messianic ideas.

Kautsky analyzes in detail the mentality that has engulfed various sections of the population of Palestine in the last centuries of the past and the beginning of the present era.

The continuous struggle for independence with powerful enemies, endless devastation from enemy invasions, ever-increasing exploitation of the oppressed led to the formation of a diaspora (the dispersion of Jews outside their homeland), which later played an important role in the emergence of Christianity. It is no coincidence that Engels called Philo, a resident of the Jewish colony in Alexandria, "the father of Christianity."

The impotence of the oppressed masses of Palestine in the struggle against exploitation and oppression, for independence, against the formidable Roman Empire gave rise to a fiery faith in the Messiah, whose coming would solve all problems. But, as Kautsky rightly points out, each class imagined the coming messiah in its own way. The result of this was the emergence of three currents in Judaism: the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. The first two were traditional. As for Essenism, it, having arisen in the II century. BC e., in their ideas, in the organization of communities, they already carried a lot of things that were then developed in early Christianity.

The Essenes, mentioned in the works of Josephus Flavius, Pliny the Elder, Philo of Alexandria, most modern scholars include the Qumranites, the Qumran community. Qumran (after the name of the locality Wadi Qumran) manuscripts and settlements were discovered in the Dead Sea region shortly after the Second World War.

Describing the Essenes, Kautsky says of their "sharply expressed communism" that "with them communism was carried to the extreme." The extent to which such characterizations are adequate can now be verified by referring to the written testimonies of the Qumran community. Let us only note that the ideas of community of property, common life, etc. were also characteristic of the early Christian communities.

Analyzing the content of the teachings of early Christianity, Kautsky notes significant differences between his original ideas and the views of the Apostle Paul. It was through his efforts that Christianity freed itself from connection with Judaism and was thus able to overcome ethnic limitations.

The expansion of Christianity beyond the borders of Palestine and its spread in the large cities of the Roman Empire necessarily, as Kautsky shows, led to the loss of the "communist" character of the Christian communities. The community of property and common life, characteristic of the remote corners of Palestine, became impossible in large cities, where the system of mutual assistance of Christians was reduced mainly to joint meals.

Christianity attracted the poor not only with the totality of its ideas, but also with material support, which required an influx of funds from outside, since the community itself, which consisted of the poor, itself only consumed, but did not produce. This, of course, facilitated the entry into the community of representatives of the propertied strata. However, the change in the social composition of Christian communities was associated not only with their poverty. Kautsky notes that the need to attract the rich to the communities gave rise to the zealous efforts of Christian agitators to convince them that the achievement of eternal bliss is possible only in the event of renunciation of property. “And this sermon did not remain without success at that time of general spleen and satiety, which engulfed precisely the propertied classes.”

There is no dispute. Of course, Christian agitation did indeed play a very important role in the dissemination of the new dogma; spleen and satiety of some segments of the population also took place. But, I think, these circumstances alone are still not enough to explain the fact that Christianity has become widespread among the propertied classes. The point, obviously, is that many of his ideas corresponded to the mentality of various classes of society, including the propertied, in the realization of the historical impasse in which the slave-owning society found itself, in the inability of all classes without exception to change social reality.

Karl Kautsky

G. I. Ezrin

Karl Kautsky and his book "The Origin of Christianity"

A huge, in fact, an immense number of books, articles and other publications have been written about the origin of Christianity. Christian authors, philosophers of the Enlightenment, representatives of biblical criticism, and atheist authors worked in this field. This is understandable, since we are talking about a historical phenomenon - Christianity, which arose 2000 years ago, created numerous churches with millions of followers, occupied and still occupies a large place in the world, in the ideological, economic and political life of peoples and states.

Few of these books have stood the test of time. Most of them are forgotten, others are known only to a small circle of specialists. But some books in our time have retained their relevance and therefore may be of interest to the general reader.

One such book is The Origin of Christianity by Karl Kautsky.

Kautsky is an extraordinary and ambiguous figure who played a prominent role in the ideological life of the late 19th–20th centuries. He was born in 1854 in Prague. His father, a Czech by nationality, Johann Kautsky worked as a theater decorator. Mother Minna Kautskaya, a German, began her career as an actress and then became a famous writer.

After graduating from the gymnasium, Karl Kautsky from 1874 to 1879 studied at the University of Vienna. In 1875, he joined the German Social Democratic Party, having determined his ideological and political choice for life.

In 1878, during the period of the "exclusive law against the socialists," Kautsky actively collaborated in the illegal Social Democratic organ Social Democrat, published in Zurich, where he left in 1880 after graduating from the university. But soon Kautsky moved to London, where in 1881 he met K. Marx and F. Engels. This acquaintance finally determined Kautsky's ideological choice, his transition to the positions of Marxism.

In 1883, Kautsky founded the journal Novoye Vremya, the theoretical organ of German Social Democracy, of which he was editor from its inception until 1917.

In 1885–1888 Kautsky lives in London, working closely with F. Engels. Since 1890, he has lived permanently in Germany, actively participating in the activities of the German Social Democratic Party, and then the Second International. In 1934, after fascism came to power in Germany, Kautsky moved to Vienna, and after the capture of Austria by fascist Germany in 1938, he left for Prague. From there he moved to Amsterdam, where he died in the same year, 1938.

Here it is not possible to study Kautsky's ideological evolution in full, but we note that Kautsky believed all his life in the historical inevitability of socialism, always considered himself a Marxist and was proud of it, served the cause of socialism as he understood it. His enormous capacity for work, activity and conviction in the correctness of socialist ideas, undoubted literary talent make him one of the most important figures in the international working-class movement.

Kautsky highly appraised the revolution of 1905 in Russia, devoting a number of brilliant works to its analysis.

In 1910–1912 Kautsky becomes the ideologist of so-called centrism. In 1914, centrism, together with the right-wing Social Democrats, declared an imperialist war "defensive", waged for the sake of "defending the fatherland". Lenin called Kautsky's attempts to theoretically justify these actions "an infinitely vulgar mockery of socialism."

In 1917, in protest against the policy of the leadership of the SPD, Kautsky left the party, left the post of editor of Novoye Vremya and organized an independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which did not last long.

Kautsky's attitude to the October Revolution certainly deserves an independent analysis. Here we will only note that he wrote a number of articles and pamphlets about this revolution (Democracy and Dictatorship, Russian translation, 1918; Democracy or Dictatorship, Russian translation, 1921; Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918 "From Democracy to State Slavery", 1921).

Lenin replied to Kautsky's pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat with the book The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918).

A huge, in fact, an immense number of books, articles and other publications have been written about the origin of Christianity. Christian authors, philosophers of the Enlightenment, representatives of biblical criticism, and atheist authors worked in this field. This is understandable, since we are talking about a historical phenomenon - Christianity, which arose 2000 years ago, created numerous churches with millions of followers, occupied and still occupies a large place in the world, in the ideological, economic and political life of peoples and states.

Few of these books have stood the test of time. Most of them are forgotten, others are known only to a small circle of specialists. But some books in our time have retained their relevance and therefore may be of interest to the general reader.

One such book is The Origin of Christianity by Karl Kautsky.

Kautsky is an extraordinary and ambiguous figure who played a prominent role in the ideological life of the late 19th–20th centuries. He was born in 1854 in Prague. His father, a Czech by nationality, Johann Kautsky worked as a theater decorator. Mother Minna Kautskaya, a German, began her career as an actress and then became a famous writer.

After graduating from the gymnasium, Karl Kautsky from 1874 to 1879 studied at the University of Vienna. In 1875, he joined the German Social Democratic Party, having determined his ideological and political choice for life.

In 1878, during the period of the "exclusive law against the socialists," Kautsky actively collaborated in the illegal Social Democratic organ Social Democrat, published in Zurich, where he left in 1880 after graduating from the university. But soon Kautsky moved to London, where in 1881 he met K. Marx and F. Engels. This acquaintance finally determined Kautsky's ideological choice, his transition to the positions of Marxism.

In 1883, Kautsky founded the journal Novoye Vremya, the theoretical organ of German Social Democracy, of which he was editor from its inception until 1917.

In 1885–1888 Kautsky lives in London, working closely with F. Engels. Since 1890, he has lived permanently in Germany, actively participating in the activities of the German Social Democratic Party, and then the Second International. In 1934, after fascism came to power in Germany, Kautsky moved to Vienna, and after the capture of Austria by fascist Germany in 1938, he left for Prague. From there he moved to Amsterdam, where he died in the same year, 1938.

Here it is not possible to study Kautsky's ideological evolution in full, but we note that Kautsky believed all his life in the historical inevitability of socialism, always considered himself a Marxist and was proud of it, served the cause of socialism as he understood it. His enormous capacity for work, activity and conviction in the correctness of socialist ideas, undoubted literary talent make him one of the most important figures in the international working-class movement.

Kautsky highly appraised the revolution of 1905 in Russia, devoting a number of brilliant works to its analysis.

In 1910–1912 Kautsky becomes the ideologist of so-called centrism. In 1914, centrism, together with the right-wing Social Democrats, declared an imperialist war "defensive", waged for the sake of "defending the fatherland". Lenin called Kautsky's attempts to theoretically justify these actions "an infinitely vulgar mockery of socialism."

In 1917, in protest against the policy of the leadership of the SPD, Kautsky left the party, left the post of editor of Novoye Vremya and organized an independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which did not last long.

Kautsky's attitude to the October Revolution certainly deserves an independent analysis. Here we will only note that he wrote a number of articles and pamphlets about this revolution (Democracy and Dictatorship, Russian translation, 1918; Democracy or Dictatorship, Russian translation, 1921; Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918 "From Democracy to State Slavery", 1921).

Lenin replied to Kautsky's pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat with the book The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918).

The literary heritage of Kautsky is very great. He created such fundamental works as The Economic Teachings of Karl Marx (1887, Russian translation 1956), Ethics and the Materialist Understanding of History (1906, Russian translation 1922), Predecessors socialism” (1909–1921), “Materialistic understanding of history” (1927), etc.

Among the most significant books written by Kautsky is The Origin of Christianity. This book was published in Germany in 1908 and soon (in 1909) was published in Russia in D. Ryazanov's translation under a different title. This translation has been approved and authorized by the author. This book is based on the 1909 edition, with the exception of the paragraph "Christianity and Social Democracy" of the last chapter, which is omitted from this edition. Now it is difficult to judge why the title of the book was changed in its Russian edition. It can be assumed that this was done for censorship reasons, since the new name looks more neutral than in the German original. In any case, the post-revolutionary edition of this book in Russian in the same translation came out under the title of the original. Under Soviet rule, this book went through four editions in a relatively short period of time (from 1919 to 1930). After 1930, it was never published, becoming, in essence, a bibliographic rarity. And the point here is not in the book itself, but in its author, whose life path, as we see, was not straightforward and unambiguous.

In this Kautsky's book is not alone. She shared, unfortunately, the fate of many scientific and artistic works that were withdrawn from use, which, as we see, caused significant damage to the development of our culture. This attitude towards Kautsky's book is not accidental. Over the years, attitudes towards the author have been unambiguously negative. In our literature, after the death of V. I. Lenin, Kautsky, contrary to historical truth, was regarded as a kind of antipode of Marxism. It has become a bad tradition to evaluate all of Kautsky's activities as a continuous chain of mistakes and direct actions against Marxism. It was customary to speak and write about Kautsky in this spirit for many years. The basis for this was Lenin's sharp criticism of K. Kautsky during the First World War, and then the October Revolution. It is known that V. I. Lenin at that time called Kautsky a renegade. Does this mean that such an assessment, given by V. I. Lenin in a certain period, crosses out all of Kautsky's pre-war activities? Certainly not. If the theoretical and political activity of Kautsky after 1909 was criticized by V. I. Lenin, then Lenin assessed its previous periods in a completely different way. Thus, noting that Karl Kautsky, one of the leaders of the proletarian party, was highly valued by all future Bolsheviks, Lenin called him "an outstanding socialist." He wrote: "We know from many of Kautsky's works that he knew how to be a Marxist historian, that such works of his will remain the lasting property of the proletariat, despite his later renegade."

This Leninist appraisal of Kautsky's theoretical activity refers entirely to the book The Origin of Christianity, written during the period when Kautsky was

"Outstanding Socialist" Its publication is not only useful, but also necessary for at least partial restoration of historical justice.

The great German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky wrote the book The Origin of Christianity in 1908. In it, from the point of view of revisionist Marxism and political economy, he traced many features of the development (or degradation) of the world of that time, which led both to the emergence of Christianity and to its soon gaining the status of the main religion of the Roman Empire and its environs. For example, among them, Kautsky names the decline in the profitability of slavery, the economic advantage of the East of the empire over the West, the unwillingness of the lumpen proletariat to work, cowardice and lack of self-confidence, self-humiliation before those in power, indifference and satiety with life and the pursuit of miracles; hypocrisy and deceit.

Kautsky approaches the study of early Christianity not only as a Marxist, historian, and religious scholar, but also as an economist, ethnographer, demographer, and also a specialist in a dozen specialties. For the beginning of the twentieth century, this was a new approach. The German Social Democrat, as they would say today, does not in the least hurt the feelings of believers; Christianity interests him as an attempt by society from below to improve the society of that time.

In the preface to the book, Kautsky notes that the epoch in which Christianity arose was a period of the most difficult crisis that engulfed the entire Roman Empire. It led to the complete disintegration of traditional forms of production, the state, ideas and beliefs. The impasse that developed in ancient society gave rise to such phenomena as individualism, gullibility, passion for the miraculous, deceit (as an addition to passion for the miraculous and gullibility), all kinds of falsifications. And the same era in the history of the Roman Empire is distinguished by the growth of religiosity, the spread of eschatological and messianic ideas.

In the preface to the book, it is pointed out that Kautsky analyzes in detail the mentality that has gripped various sections of the population of Palestine in the last centuries of the past and the beginning of the present era. The continuous struggle for independence with powerful enemies, endless devastation from enemy invasions, and the increasing exploitation of the oppressed led to the formation of a diaspora (the dispersion of Jews outside their homeland), which later played an important role in the emergence of Christianity. It is no coincidence that Engels called Philo, a resident of the Jewish colony in Alexandria, "the father of Christianity."

The impotence of the oppressed masses of Palestine in the struggle against exploitation and oppression, for independence, against the formidable Roman Empire gave rise to a fiery faith in the Messiah, whose coming would solve all problems. But, as Kautsky rightly points out, each class imagined the coming messiah in its own way. The result of this was the emergence of three currents in Judaism: the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. The first two were traditional. As for Essenism, it, having arisen in the II century. BC, in its ideas, in the organization of communities, it already carried a lot of things that were then developed in early Christianity. Describing the Essenes, Kautsky says of their "sharply expressed communism", that "their communism was carried to the extreme".

The expansion of Christianity beyond Palestine and its spread in the large cities of the Roman Empire, as Kautsky shows, led to the loss of the "communist" character of Christian communities. The community of property and common life, characteristic of Palestine, became impossible in large cities, where the system of mutual assistance of Christians was reduced mainly to joint meals.

Christianity attracted the poor not only with the totality of its ideas, but also with material support, which required an influx of funds from outside, since the community, which consisted of the poor, itself only consumed, but did not produce. This, of course, facilitated the entry into the community of representatives of the propertied strata. However, the change in the social composition of Christian communities was associated not only with their poverty. Kautsky notes that the need to attract the rich to the communities gave rise to the zealous efforts of Christian agitators to convince them that the achievement of eternal bliss is possible only in the event of renunciation of property. “And this sermon did not remain without success at that time of general spleen and satiety, which engulfed precisely the propertied classes,” he writes.

Kautsky, noting changes in the class character of Christianity, in the adaptation of its principles and the activities of communities to this new reality, says that the Christian community, which arose as the antipode of class society, as its negation, eventually turns into a similarity of this society with its class contradictions, relations dominance and submission.

Kautsky traces in detail how a whole hierarchy based on strict subordination grows out of primitive Christian communities, which at first did not know any intra-communal authority, except for the personal authority of an apostle or preacher.

The growth of Christian communities, the increase in their wealth with a change in their class character, required the performance of a number of functions: organizing a meal and serving its participants, purchasing and storing supplies, disposing of the community's funds, etc. All this staff of officials had to be managed. Thus arises the institution of bishops, whose power increased; the position itself was for life.

If earlier any member of the community could preach, then as the apostles and prophets are forced out, the bishop becomes the central figure in propaganda activities. Thus, says Kautsky, the most reliable support of despotism and exploitation arose, representing the exact opposite of the community founded by the poor of Galilee and Jerusalem.

Kautsky also draws attention to the fact that the main bearers of Christian ideas, the free urban proletarians, were imbued with the desire to live at the expense of society, doing nothing. Such aspirations of the “free urban proletarians”, as well as the very nature of the economy in the Roman Empire, determined the consumerist character of Christian communism, the essence of which, according to Kautsky, was the distribution of products, and not the socialization of the means of production.

We publish several excerpts from Karl Kautsky's book "The Origin of Christianity" ("Political Publishing House", 1990).

For each class there were preachers who boldly took upon themselves the task of raising people to high moral perfection, exposing their own exalted personality as a model. The proletarians were especially offered their services by the Cynic philosophers, followers of the famous Diogenes: they preached in the streets, lived on alms and saw bliss in filth and lack of needs, which freed them from all labor, which they hated and despised as a grave sin. Christ and his apostles are also portrayed as mendicant street preachers. There is not a single word about labor in all the gospels. On this point, despite all their contradictions, they agree with each other.

Falsifications become even bolder when, during the migration of peoples, barbarians flooded the Roman Empire. The new rulers of the world were simple peasants, rich, it is true, in peasant cunning, sober and well versed in all things that they understood. For all their simplicity, they were less gullible and prone to the miraculous than the heirs of ancient culture. But the ability to read and write was an unfamiliar art for them. The latter remained the privilege of the Christian clergy, who now alone represented the educated class. It could therefore not be afraid of any criticism of its falsifications in favor of the church, and they began to use this more often than ever. But now they were no longer limited to the field of study, they served not to support any theoretical, tactical or organizational differences, but became a source of acquisition or legal rehabilitation of the expropriation.

The most grandiose falsifications of this kind were, of course, the gift of Constantine and Isidore's decrees. Both documents were fabricated in the 8th century. In the first of these, Constantine (306-337) transfers to the popes unlimited and eternal dominion over Rome, Italy and all the countries of the West. Isidore's Decretals were a collection of ecclesiastical laws allegedly drawn up by the Spanish bishop Isidore at the beginning of the 7th century, establishing the unlimited dominance of the pope in the church.

It is the huge number of distortions that explains to us to a large extent why the history of the emergence of Christianity is still shrouded in darkness. Many of these distortions and fakes are easy to install. Some were revealed many centuries ago: for example, Lavrentiy Balla proved the forgery of the Constantine gift back in 1440.

Decline in all respects and areas, economic, political decline, and at the same time scientific and moral. The ancient Romans and Greeks saw virtue in the full, harmonious development of courage in the best sense of the word. Virtus and apexrj denoted courage and constancy, but at the same time self-esteem, readiness to sacrifice oneself and selfless devotion to society. But the more society sank into slavery, the more servility became the supreme virtue, servility, from which and with which beautiful properties developed - flight from society and restriction of one's own "I", cowardice and lack of self-confidence, the hope of salvation with the help of Caesar or god, and not through one's own power or the power of one's class; self-humiliation before those in power and priestly arrogance before the lower ones; indifference and satiety with life and the pursuit of sensation, of miracles; immoderation and ecstasy, hypocrisy and deceit. Here is the picture that Rome of the times of the empire presents us, and the features of which are reflected by Christianity, a product of that time.

It was the development of international relations in the era of the Roman Empire that led to internationalism in the field of religious worship. Foreign merchants and travelers brought their gods with them everywhere. And foreign gods then enjoyed even greater reverence than the native ones, who did not bring any help, turned out to be completely powerless. The despair which was the result of the general decadence nourished doubts about the power of the old gods and led some bold and independent minds to atheism and skepticism, to doubt in every deity or in every philosophy. On the contrary, the waverers, the weaker ones, were looking for a new savior in whom they could find protection and support. Some thought to find it in the Caesars, whom they deified, others thought that they were following a more reliable path, turning to gods who had long existed, but whose power in the country had not yet been tested. So foreign cults came into fashion.

But in this international competition of the gods, the East defeated the West, partly because the Eastern religions were less naive, were more imbued with deep philosophical meaning, bore a stronger imprint of the civilization of large cities, and partly because the East was industrially superior to the West.

The cultural countries of the East were superior in industrial development to those of the West when they were conquered and plundered first by the Macedonians and then by the Romans. One could think that the process of international leveling, which began from that time, would also lead to industrial leveling, that the West would overtake the East industrially. But the opposite happened. From the first century onwards, the general decline of the ancient world began as a result, in part, of the displacement of free labor by slave labor, and in part of the plunder of the provinces by Rome and usurious capital. But this decline took place in the West faster than in the East, so that the cultural superiority of the latter, starting from the second century of our era, not only does not decrease, but, on the contrary, grows over many centuries, until almost the year 1000. Poverty, barbarism and depopulation are growing faster in the West than in the East.

The reason for this phenomenon lies in the industrial superiority of the East and the growing exploitation of the working classes. The surplus delivered by the latter flowed more and more from all over the empire to Rome, the center of all the big exploiters. But as soon as the treasures accumulated there turned into money, the lion's share of them floated back to the East, since only it produced all the luxury items that the big exploiters demanded. He delivered skilled slaves and industrial products: glass and purple from Phoenicia, linen and knitwear from Egypt, fine woolen and leather products from Asia Minor, carpets from Babylonia. The declining fertility of Italy turned Egypt into the granary of Rome, because thanks to the floods of the Nile, which annually covered the fields of Egypt with fresh fertile silt, its agriculture was inexhaustible.

Most of the products delivered by the East were taken from him by force, in the form of taxes and interest, but still there was still a significant part for which it was necessary to pay for the products of the exploitation of the West, which was becoming more and more impoverished at the same time.

And relations with the East were not limited to the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Alexandria grew rich not only by selling the products of the Egyptian industry, but also through trade with Arabia and India. A trade road led from Sinop on the Black Sea to China. In his Natural History, Pliny calculates that for Chinese woolen fabrics, Indian jewels and Arabic spices alone, the empire annually paid 100 million sesterces (over 20 million German marks; about 10 million rubles of the 1908 model, or 250 million modern dollars ). And all this without a corresponding equivalent in goods or taxes and interest. The entire amount was to be paid in precious metals.

Along with oriental goods, oriental merchants penetrated the empire, and with the latter their religious cults. They corresponded to the needs of the West, especially since similar social conditions had already developed in the East, although not in such a bleak form as in the empire. The idea of ​​deliverance with the help of a god, whose favor is acquired by renouncing earthly pleasures, was inherent in most of those cults that were now rapidly spreading in Rome, especially the Egyptian cult of Isis and the Persian cult of Mithra.

More in the Blog of the Interpreter about antiquity.

In this work of the well-known theorist of German social democracy, the main attention is paid to the social preconditions for the emergence of Christianity. The author analyzes the economic, political and spiritual prerequisites that caused the need for a new religion, shows on what historical basis and under the influence of what external influences Jewish monotheism developed and how the Christian church arose on its basis.

K. Kautsky explains why the memory of the founder of the original Christian community did not disappear as completely as the memory of other messiahs. The work has not been published in Russian since 1930 and has long become a bibliographic rarity. Designed for a wide range of readers.

Text version: Kautsky K. The origin of Christianity: Per. with him. - M.: Politizdat, 1990. - 463 p.

• Karl Kautsky and his book "The Origin of Christianity"
• Section I. Sources of Early Christianity
• Section II. Social structure in the era of the Roman Empire
  • Chapter 3. The mental and moral state of Roman society
• Section III. Judaism
• Section IV. Early Christianity
  • Chapter 5

Scanning and processing: Ekaterina Sinyaeva.
Source: www.scepsis.ru

Karlheinz Deschner

In the book of a modern German scientist, the centuries-old activities of the Christian church are comprehensively studied, interesting, little-known facts about the formation and development of Christianity, about the fight against heresy, about the methods by which this religion was spread, and sometimes planted in different countries. Over the course of four volumes, Karlheinz Deschner remains true to his thesis: "Who writes world history not as a criminal history is its accomplice."

Ranovich A. B.

The value of the work of A. B. Ranovich "Ancient Critics of Christianity" for the modern reader is that it reflects the perception of Christianity by figures of ancient culture in the first centuries of the existence of a new religion, from the practice of early Christian communities to the formation of a strong church organization, shows the methods and directions of religious -philosophical controversy during the II-IV centuries.

Mary Boys

One of the oldest religions in the world, Zoroastrianism was the state religion of the three great Iranian empires from the 6th century BC. BC. - according to the 7th century. AD and had a great influence on Christianity and Islam. In the book of the famous British Iranianist. Mary Boyce, the author of many books on Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, traces the historical destinies of the Zoroastrian communities in Iran and India from their inception to the present day.

Grekulov E.F.

In pre-revolutionary historical literature, though very timidly, the idea was expressed that the Orthodox Church, like the Catholic Church, used inquisitorial methods of reprisals against those who opposed religious ideology and feudal oppression, and had a special apparatus for this. Church authorities objected to attempts to expose the inquisitorial nature of the activities of the Orthodox Church. Prominent church historians, on behalf of the Synod, appeared in the press with a refutation of such attempts. They argued that the Orthodox Church in Russia did not know the Inquisition and that it did not have such an apparatus as the Catholic Church had.

Friedrich Delitzsch

The proposed book is the content of three readings by the famous German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzch, which were soon published as a separate edition (“Babel und Bidel”, ein Vortrag von Friedrich Delitzch). Immediately after the publication of this work, this work caused a stir both among the wide circles of the reading public and among theologians. Bold comparisons of the text of the Bible with fragments of Babylonian and Assyrian literature that have come down to us, and a lot of new information introduced by Delich into this area of ​​history, little studied until then, brought accusations against the author of wanting to undermine the foundations of religion, to drop the divine nature of the origin of biblical legends. However, these attacks should be recognized as completely untenable. After all, it was the Bible that gave Delic hints for many of his discoveries, which in turn confirmed some of the historical facts set forth in the biblical texts. In his research, Delitzsch tells in a lively and entertaining manner about the results of the very successful Assyro-Babylonian excavations, and also reveals new pages of the ancient history of the Near East. The author's text is accompanied by numerous visual illustrations.

Robertson A.

The book of the famous English public figure and historian A. Robertson "The Origin of Christianity", first published in 1953, is a remarkable phenomenon in modern foreign scientific literature. The author examines the social role of Christianity from a Marxist standpoint, analyzes with great erudition the circumstances of the emergence of the reactionary ideology of Christianity. The controversial issues raised in this monograph are indicated in the introductory article, where the author's concept is critically considered.