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 com… - Otto Pfleiderer

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.

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.

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.