ABSTRACT
In 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain published his massive Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, hundreds of pages purporting to track and explain both the triumphs and tragedies of Europe of the 1800s. In the course of his treatment, Chamberlain was required to address and evaluate the vicissitudes of Christian influence on European culture. Chamberlain explains that the greatness of the Christian message owes nothing to Judaism, or, indeed, to individuals tainted by Jewish ethnicity. In the case of critical scholarship on the New Testament, earliest Christianity, and especially the historical Jesus, things have been improving for the last thirty years or so. It is not especially difficult to condemn overt Nazism and its ideology. But it should be stressed that the matter of Christian and scholarly complicity with Nazi anti-Semitism and thus, directly or indirectly, with the Holocaust, does not begin or end with Grundmann. Grundmann's agenda, like Chamberlain's, clearly was motivated not simply by an anti-Jewish animus, but by a genuinely anti-Semitic ideology.
