Note on a Review of E. Renan's L'anti-christ

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Renan’s book LAntéchrist (Paris, 1873) was the fourth volume of his comprehensive Histoire des origines du christianisme, Vols I-VIII, Paris, 1863-1883. A review of this book was included in an anonymous report marked “Paris, June 26” and published in Kölnische Zeitung, No. 181, Supplement 3, July 2, 1873. Engels’ note on the review was freely translated into Serbo-Croat by an anonymous author in the Belgrade Church journal npaeocjiaejbe (Orthodoxy),No. 9, September 1873. The author referred to the Kölnische Zeitung and mentioned Engels.

Engels mentions Prof. Ferdinand Benary’s lectures, which he attended at Berlin University as an external student when he did military service as a volunteer in Berlin from September 1841 to October 1842.

Engels examined in detail the problem of the dating and composition of the last book in the New Testament, the Revelation of St. John the Divine or the Apocalypse (from Greek apokâlypsis, revelation), in his articles “The Book of Revelation” and “On the History of Early Christianity”, written in 1883 and 1894.

I heard Renan’s alleged discoveries, e.g., with regard to the exact dating, to the month, of the composition of the so-called Revelation of St. John, the solution of the mystical number 666=Népo)v Kaûrap and its confirmation by the variant 616=Nero Caesar, etc., etc., in Berlin in the winter term of 1841-42 at Professor Ferdinand Benary’s lecture on the Apocalypse. Only Benary, the real solver of the mystical number, was honest enough to admit how much he owed to his predecessors, while Mr. Renan, here as elsewhere, simply appropriates for himself the results of a protracted development in German science.