Apart from the various other features in which Adolf Hitler reincarnated Jesus Christ, the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were slaughtered in various ways was directly inspired by the Jesus of the gospels. The Jews had been denounced by him as snakes, as a brood of vipers, as sons of the Devil, as killers of prophets, as an adulterous nation, and as permanent enemies of his church simply because they refused to acclaim him as the Messiah. The Christian theology that followed, stamped them with a permanent guilt — they were killers of Christ. The Jews had been reduced to non-citizens, and subjugated to repeated pogroms all over Christianised Europe and throughout the centuries. Muhammad had also done the same after he failed to persuade the Jews to accept his claim of prophethood. He had massacred the Jews of Medina and his Muslims had followed the precedent wherever Islam prevailed. No one, however, had worked out the message of the gospels systematically, and blueprinted the final solution before Hitler arrived on the scene. Human emotions other than religious fanaticism had intervened frequently in favour of the Jews. In short, no one before Hitler had grasped completely the verdict passed on the Jews by the Jesus of the gospels. Small wonder that serious thinkers in the West came to look at the gospels as the First Nazi Manifesto.
Christian historians are now making herculean efforts to salvage the Jesus of the gospels from the history he has created. They are blaming on "non-Christian elements and forces" all brutalities committed by Christian churches and missions in Europe and elsewhere, and presenting Jesus as an embodiment of humility, charity, compassion, and peace. They are saying that the spread of Western imperialism and Christianity at the same time, was a mere coincidence, and that the purposes of the two should be perceived separately. But there are few serious historians who subscribe to this cult of "the disentangled Christ". For most of them, the inspiration for crimes committed by Western imperialism in league with Christian missions, came from the Jesus of the gospels. James Morris put it bluntly when he said that "every aspect of the Empire was an aspect of Christ".
All in all, therefore, by the middle of the twentieth century the Jesus of the gospels had become a thoroughly discredited figure in the modern West, and could hardly he presented as the Christ of Faith. Christian theology had to overcome yet another crisis, and save whatever could he saved of its tattered mantle. It was at this point that Rudolf Bultmann of the University of Marburg in Germany came forward with his "defiant manifesto on faith's independence of the historians' labours".14 As he is supposed to be the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, I shall present him at some length.