Jesus Project fellow Robert Eisenman writes of the Luedemann case that it has a deep roots in the German educational system, going back to the Enlightenment itself:
“….Allow me to express a last follow-up example from Gerd’s own homeland and this two centuries earlier in the 1780’s when Moses Mendelssohn was wrestling with similar issues under circumstances relating to his nascent and growing Jewish Community in Germany and his own anomalous position concerning issues of ‘faith’ and ‘faithlessness’ which were on the rise and front-and-center in it — namely, the example he cited in Jerusalem, which might have helped Gerd’s case if his lawyers had been aware of it (though I doubt it), and that was the situation of ‘the mohel’ or circumcisor who had lost his faith and whose position and, therefore, the payment of his salary had come into question.
Mendelssohn’s conclusion after a certain amount of argumentation, brilliant as it was, was so simple in its clarity that picturesquely it might have helped in the staid atmosphere of courtroom Germany; and that was, as Mendelssohn put it in his own inimitable way: “A foreskin was cut” whatever the faith of faithlessness of the individual doing the cutting (Paul might have appreciated this one). For him, that was all of the matter a given Community had a right to concern itself with and no more, which was in this case Mendelssohn standing up for Mendelssohn against similar Communal religious authorities demanding like-minded conformity — certainly not the private beliefs of the individual — in Gerd’s case, this would be as long as the courses were taught to the standard of scholarly excellence for which Gerd is known. An example such as this from such an alien source, but still in the Germany of two centuries ago before the tragic events of more recent history, might have really got the Courtroom’s attention; but as they say hindsight is twenty-twenty and in cases, such as this, when a Court is intent on a given decision, as I have personally had occasion to notice, nothing is going to help.
I don’t know if any of this might prove helpful, but it does at least indicate the fellow-feeling one shares against such shallow parochialism and that these kinds of situations actually are not new in Germany, but even can go back several hundred years to the situation of guest communities desperately trying to deal with the challenges of modern intellectual life there.
With all kind regards, I remain
Robert Eisenman
February 26, 2009 at 12:25 pm