Arthur Drews

Background

Arthur Drews (1865–1935) was a German monist philosopher, professor of philosophy at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe and a follower of Eduard von Hartmann's speculative religion of the unconscious. Die Christusmythe (1909; 2nd ed. 1911; English translation The Christ Myth, 1910) made him the most publicly influential mythicist of the twentieth century. His thesis, in his own words: "This work seeks to prove that more or less all the features of the picture of the historical Jesus, at any rate all those of any important religious significance, bear a purely mythical character, and no opening exists for seeking an historical figure behind the Christ myth" (Drews 1910, Preface to the Second Edition). For Drews it is Paul, not Jesus, who is Christianity's "great personality": "Without Jesus the rise of Christianity can be quite well understood, without Paul not so" (Drews 1910, Preface to the Second Edition).

His motive was avowedly religious, not merely destructive: the "romantic cult of Jesus" of liberal theology "must be combated at all costs... by taking its basis in the theory of the historical Jesus from beneath its feet" (Drews 1910, Preface to the Second Edition). The book derives the Gospel Christ from a pre-Christian cult of Jesus and the dying-and-rising vegetation deities; the second edition added astral mythology.

Positions held in this wiki

• Jesus Mythicism Assessed — the comparative-religion wing of the thesis, drawing on Frazer's dying-and-rising-god material and, per Schweitzer's summary of the 1911 edition, the identification of "the crucified Christ [with] Orion, hanging with outstretched arms on the world-tree of the Milky Way" (Schweitzer, Introduction to the Third Edition, p.xiii). Assessed fringe.

Key works in our corpus

• The Christ Myth (1910 ET) — newly in corpus (public-domain Gutenberg text). This closes the steelman gap flagged in the 2026-07-05 peer review of Jesus Mythicism Assessed, which noted the mythicist case had been reconstructed entirely via Schweitzer, its rebutter; Drews can now be cited directly. His preface also documents the international mythicist network he synthesized — Robertson, Smith, Kalthoff, Bolland, Niemojewski (Drews 1910, Preface to the Second Edition).

Principal critics

• Albert Schweitzer — the standing structural objection: the mythical theory must "show how this fictitious non-Jewish figure was introduced into the Judaism of the early Roman Empire — a hopeless undertaking. Why make him a preacher of the coming of the Kingdom of God...? Why attribute to him unfulfilled predictions?" (Schweitzer, Introduction to the Third Edition, p.xiii).
• J. Gresham Machen — against the comparative-religion derivation of Christian origins generally: the earliness of what Paul "received" leaves no room for mythological syncretism at the foundation (Machen 1921, p.240).
• Flavius Josephus — the documentary rebuttal: the James passage (Josephus, Ant. XX.9.1) with Gal 1:19 (bib).

See also

• Bruno Bauer — the nineteenth-century founder of the thesis Drews popularized.
• Richard Carrier — the contemporary restatement; not in corpus.
• Albert Schweitzer — whose third-edition introduction remains the classic reply.