Albert Kalthoff was a German Protestant theologian, who along with Emil Felden, Oscar Mauritz, Moritz Schwalb and Friedrich Steudel formed a group in Bremen, named the Deutscher Monistenbund who no longer believed in Jesus as a historical figure.
Career
Kalthoff criticized what he regarded as the romanticist and sentimental image of Jesus as a "great personality" of history developed by German liberal theologians, including Albert Schweitzer who noted Kalthoff in his work The Quest of the Historical Jesus. (Per Arthur Drews, The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present - see the section on Kalthoff) Arthur Drews was influenced by Kalthoff. (1809–1882) was the first academic theologian to affirm the non-historicity of Jesus.
Kalthoff revived "s Christ Myth thesis in his A Son of God, Lord of the World, born of a virgin, and rising again after death, and the son of a small builder with revolutionary notions, are two totally different beings.
If one was the historical Jesus, the other certainly was not.
Views
Quotations:
1904: "Was There An Historical Jesus?", How Christianity arose: New contributions to the Christ-problem
A Son of God, Lord of the World, born of a virgin, and rising again after death, and the son of a small builder with revolutionary notions, are two totally different beings. If one was the historical Jesus, the other certainly was not. The real question of the historicity of Jesus is not merely whether there ever was a Jesus among the numerous claimants of a Messiahship in Judea, but whether we are to recognise the historical character of this Jesus in the Gospels, and whether he is to be regarded as the founder of Christianity.