Foundations of Christianity: A study in Christian origins

by Karl Kautsky (Author),‎ David Packer (Preface),‎ Michael Löwy (Introduction)

7 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0902869936

ISBN-10: 0902869930

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Karl Kautsky is probably the first Marxist to interest himself both in the movement and the enigmatic personality of the crucified prophet. His 1908 book The Foundations of Christianity is a rather impressive attempt at a Marxist analysis. The book is rather original, innovative and has been rranslated into nine languages. Kaustky made his Foundations of Christianity into one of the most popular Marxist theoretical works. Its popular success is probably due to the interest of socialist militants to see a vision of the origins of Christianity which permits the modern workers' movement to appropriate to itself the figure of Jesus as a prophet and martyr for the proletarian cause. Kautsky wanted to interpret early Christianity as a precursor of the contemporary working class socialist movement. His friend, and later his opponent, Rosa Luxemburg, in an article of 1905 called "The Church and Socialism insisted that the first Christian apostles were Communists who denounced injustice and the cult of the Golden Calf". He counterposed a materialist account of the new religion against the Christian mythology and showed the capacity of the Marxist method to give an account of a complex historical process, interpreting a religious phenomenon in terms of the class struggle. The book is divided into four sections: 1) Society at the time of the Roman Empire: the slave economy, the absolutist forms of the state, the different manifestations of cultural and religious crisis. 2) Judaism: the class conflicts of Israelite society and the various political-religious currents (Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essene. 3) The beginnings of Christianity: the early Christian communities, the idea of the messianic Christ and Christian communism. 4) The fourth section is dedicated to the "personality of Jesus". According to Kautsky, what distinguishes Jesus' messianism from the other rebellious Jewish prophets of the era - all of whom had a strictly national character - is its social character, its calling as an international redeemer. "Only the social Messiah, not the national, could transcend the limits of Judaism", survive the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and, above all, find a hearing among the poor of all nations. By associating the hostility of the oppressed classes to the rich with proletarian solidarity, the messianism of the Christian communities promised the redemption of the poor, and so it could gain followers beyond the Jewish world. In the last analysis, Jesus, "the crucified proletarian Messiah" managed to defeat Rome and conquer the world, but in the course of this process the Christian movement suffered an "inverse dialectic":it lost its proletarian and communist character and was transformed into a state religion, under the control of a vast dominating and exploiting apparatus - the Church.

Foundations of Christianity: A study in Christian origins

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Product details

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: IMG Publications (July 7, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0902869930
ISBN-13: 978-0902869936
Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 0.6 x 9.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 7 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,642,464 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #999 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Churches & Church Leadership > Ecclesiology
- #1120 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > Religious Studies > Judaism
- #1952 in Books > History > World > Religious > Judaism

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witchcult today

Great quality edition.

April 17, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a very good book, and if you're looking at it, you probably already know anyways, about Kautsky and what not. I wanted to review the book edition though, put out by Socialist Resistance, which is what you as a consumer of the book probably cares about (otherwise you'd just read the pdf). In all, the book quality is very good. Paper quality is excellent with a textbook-like feel. The dimensions are a bit uncommon. It's a large book, and the font size is good, similar to a magazine size. The book is printed in two columns, making the text very easy and quick to read. I was cautious about buying this edition but in the end I'm very happy with it and surprised at how much I like it. It also includes an introduction by Michael Lowy which I actually skipped, but it's better than none at all. The cover art is blurry and I don't know why they put such a bad quality image on the cover, but really who cares about that. Really happy with my purchase. Just as a sidenote, the version that the text is taken from is the Marxist Internet Archive edition.

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Amazon Customer

August 12, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

scholarly and revealing insights ,very readable

scholarly insights , very readable

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a bit of truth for Kautsky sympathizers

December 5, 2012

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

purchased for our Dad who has since passed away, but who was very educated in matters of socialism; he approved this book

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Rome, Jesus and the Jews; a Marxist viewpoint.

October 29, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

An amazingly prescient book; will remind you of Bart Ehrman's. Excellent explication of the slave system in ancient Rome.

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Christianity examined from a different perspective

July 22, 2010

Format: Paperback

I read this book more than 30 years ago and can't remember enough to write a detailed review, but I will add some material to what has been posted as of this writing.

For those readers who are not Marxists, please do not be put off by the "Product Description" for this book. I think the description is accurate but someone reading it might conclude that the book is nothing more than a doctrinaire harangue. In my view, that is not the case. The book has a political perspective but seems to me to be a serious attempt at objective history. Each reader will have to judge for himself whether that attempt succeeds.

Kautsky believed in the Marxist concept of "historical materialism", the view that the social, cultural, and political institutions of society are conditioned by, and created in response to, the underlying material conditions of society. On this view, to understand the origins of Christianity, we have to understand the economy of the period: How was the economy of the Roman Empire organized? Who were the elites, the commanders of the army, the owners and controllers of the land, the animals, the ships, the slaves, and other "means of production" and distribution? Who were the workers or, in this period, the slaves? What were the relations between the two? What effects did these relationships have on people's ideas? How did the elites understand their world? How did the slaves understand it?

Kautsky examines all of this with great insight. He doesn't focus much on the specific events that occurred in Roman Palestine, but rather on the nature of Roman society as a whole. I remember, for example, his description of a feast prepared for a Roman Emperor in which nightingale's tongues were served. It was a feast intended, not to provide good food to the guests, but to impress the guests with the fabulous wealth and power of the Emperor. The equivalent of millions of dollars were spent, one should say "wasted", purely for the sake of what we would call today "conspicuous consumption". One made his mark on society by proving that one could throw away more money than the next man. And to support this decadent, degraded, purposeless and shameful lifestyle, tens of millions of slaves toiled, often in unspeakable conditions.

Kautsky saw early Christianity as a response to this rather disgusting society. It was an attempt to assert human dignity and moral values against mindless greed and rapacity. He also believed that, as Christianity grew in power and influence, it was inevitably subjected to attempts to subvert its message and turn it to use in support of the ruling class.

The book is dated. Much has been learned about the historical Jesus and the history of that period that was not known in Kautsky's time. But it is a very interesting analysis. Whether you agree or disagree with that analysis, you may find a lot of insightful ideas in it.

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Who (If Anyone) Was Jesus of Nazareth? And What is Religion?

September 29, 2013

Format: Paperback

I read this many years ago, but I keep remembering it every time I see a TV documentary or read a review of a new book on the topic. What is now widely accepted, Kautsky said first. Is there more known today. Yes, research continues, but no one else doing it has a Marxist perspective.

(It's absurd to claim, as one of these reviews does, that Kautsky was never a Marxist. Up until World War I, Lenin, and most others in the left wing of the Social Democracy, looked to Kautsky for leadership. Having a closer view, Rosa Luxemburg was more skeptical, but Lenin still made a definitive break earlier. Kautsky equivocated on World War I, and didn't support the Russian Revolution, but it was precisely the fact that he wasn't one of the worst traitors, that he still had some credibility with the working class which led Bolshevik leaders to pay so much attention to polemics against him: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.;Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Revolutions).)

Kautsky starts out with the fact that there is no proof that Jesus existed, but as a materialist, he shows that even myths have a basis in reality, and that it's much easier to explain Christianity if he did exist. Contrast this with some former Christian fundamentalists, now born again atheists, who in a film on religion insist that Jesus never existed. Being an atheist doesn't make one a materialist, although one must be an atheist to be a totally consistent materialist.

Kautsky's view is that Jesus of Nazareth and his followers were utopian communists. He explains how a religion of poor Jews who were hostile to the Romans and to the wealthy became a religion of rich Romans who hated Jews. One should follow this up with the essay "Socialism and the churches" in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks.

Look at Richard Dawkins, who in The God Delusion claims that religion is the source of all the problems of the world. He may be a scientific materialist, but he certainly isn't a historical materialist. Religion isn't something eternal written in a book. It's a form that politics and culture take, which is why in different times and different places, these books keep getting reinterpreted. Religion does not exist outside the class struggle; that's what Kautsky shows in this book.

Two other historical works by Kautsky are worth reading today: Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation (Classic Reprint) and Thomas More and His Utopia. His book Are the Jews a Race? was extremely important at the time, but what is still useful in it you will find in The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation.

I also recommend several books by George Novack: The Origins of Materialism: The Evolution of a Scientific View of the World ;Humanism and Socialism and Understanding History: Marxist Essays.

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For people who want to know the truth about Christianity

I am a follower of Marxism, and Kautsky is definitely NOT a Marxist. His brand of "socialism" has been long dead, as is Bernstein's, Stalin's, Bakunin's, Lasalle's and...Read more

Published on December 5, 2004 by Mikee

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