A Rejoinder

A defence of the Easter stories gets a lawyer's reply, and with it Lessing's choice between truth and the search for it.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing141 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Eine Duplik
First published: 1778(aged 49)
Original language: German

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Overview

A Duplik, in the language of the law courts, is the defendant's answer to the plaintiff's reply, and Lessing chose the word in January 1778 for his answer to Johann Heinrich Ress, a Lutheran theologian in Wolfenbüttel. Ress had published a book the year before defending the Gospel accounts of the resurrection against the fragment in which Lessing's anonymous author had set those accounts against one another. Lessing's reply opens with courtesy and a barb, comparing the pious defender to old Nestor stepping out to face Hector because no younger Greek would; Ress was in fact three years younger than Lessing. Then comes the paragraph the pamphlet is remembered for. A person's worth lies not in the truth he possesses, or believes he possesses, but in the honest effort he has spent trying to reach it, because possession makes people idle and proud. If God held all truth in his right hand, and in his left only the restless drive toward it, on condition of erring forever, Lessing would humbly take the left and leave pure truth to God alone. The rest takes Ress at his word and works through the contradictions in the Easter narratives one at a time, mocking every harmony that reconciles the evangelists only by making them cleverer conspirators. Lessing's own position is not the fragment's. He grants the contradictions and denies that they settle anything about the resurrection itself — just as no one doubts that the temple of Diana stood at Ephesus merely because the ancient reports disagree about the charcoal laid under its foundations. It was the only reply Lessing ever made to Ress. The paragraph on truth outlived the quarrel: in 1940 Albert Einstein, crediting Lessing, summed it up in a sentence of his own, and that sentence has circulated ever since as a quotation from Lessing.

Key concepts

What is the "restless drive" toward truth?

The urge to keep searching for truth even though it can never be fully reached. Lessing ranks it above possessing truth, because searching stretches a person's powers while possession makes people calm, idle and proud. In his image, God holds all truth in his right hand and this drive in his left, and the humble choice is the left.

What is a Gospel harmony?

An attempt to weave the four Gospel accounts into one consistent story by explaining away every apparent contradiction. Ress offered one for the Easter morning. Lessing argues that such harmonies save the evangelists' agreement by inventing extra visits, timings and movements the texts never mention, until the witnesses look less like honest reporters and more like a well-rehearsed team.

What kind of contradictions does Lessing find in the Easter accounts?

Disagreements about who came to the tomb, when, and what they found there. In one account an angel rolls the stone away and sits on it before the women arrive; elsewhere Mary sees from afar that the stone has been moved. Lessing works through such points one by one, asking whether each harmonizing explanation removes a contradiction or only adds a new story to hide it.

Does Lessing reject the resurrection in this pamphlet?

No. He grants the contradictions between the Gospel accounts but denies that they decide anything about the resurrection itself. A historian can be sure that something happened while doubting how it was told. Lessing's quarrel is with Ress's way of defending the stories, which stakes the event on the agreement of the reports, and not with the event the stories report.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Search Over the Possession

Is truth worth more than the effort to reach it? Lessing's famous paragraph says no, and makes the restless search the measure of a person.

The paragraph comes near the start, before a single contradiction is weighed. A person's worth lies not in the truth possessed, or believed possessed, but in the honest effort spent to reach it, because only the search widens the powers in which human perfection consists. Possession makes people idle and proud. Offered all truth in God's right hand or the restless drive toward it in his left, on condition of erring forever, Lessing takes the left. Pure truth, he says, is for God alone.

epistemology
religious belief
argumentation
logic
polemics
rhetoric
irony

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Contradictions in the Easter Story

Do contradictions between the witnesses undermine the event they report? Lessing grants every contradiction and still denies that conclusion.

Ress had defended the four Easter narratives against the anonymous fragment that set them against one another. Lessing takes him at his word, works through the contradictions one at a time, and mocks every harmony that reconciles the evangelists only by making them cleverer conspirators. Yet his own position is not the fragment's. Contradictory reports, he argues, do not settle whether an event occurred: no one doubts that the temple of Diana stood at Ephesus because ancient writers disagree about the charcoal laid beneath it.

biblical interpretation
hermeneutics
gospel harmonization
biblical criticism
scriptural interpretation
historical criticism
historical evidence
contradiction
gospel harmony
scriptural contradiction
scriptural harmonization
textual criticism
historical testimony
evidence
testimony
interpretation
gospel narratives
historical method
biblical chronology
biblical hermeneutics
divine inspiration
narrative structure
religion

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Within this work

passages held: 141
distinct concepts: 130
by passages held, corpus-wide: #431

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “biblical interpretation” and “hermeneutics”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
biblical interpretation	hermeneutics	35
biblical interpretation	gospel harmonization	20
biblical interpretation	historical criticism	11
argumentation	biblical interpretation	10
biblical interpretation	irony	10
hermeneutics	historical criticism	9
biblical criticism	scriptural interpretation	8
gospel harmonization	hermeneutics	5
gospel harmonization	irony	5
argumentation	hermeneutics	3
gospel harmonization	scriptural interpretation	3
argumentation	historical criticism	2
argumentation	scriptural interpretation	2
biblical criticism	irony	2
biblical interpretation	scriptural interpretation	2
gospel harmonization	historical criticism	2
hermeneutics	irony	2
hermeneutics	scriptural interpretation	2
irony	scriptural interpretation	2
biblical criticism	gospel harmonization	1
historical criticism	irony	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1755 Pope ein Metaphysiker!
Written jointly with Moses Mendelssohn early in their friendship, this pamphlet first drew the line between poet and philosopher that Laocoön would later redraw between poet and painter.
DE
1757 Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel
The workshop of Lessing's dramatic theory: here, against Mendelssohn and Nicolai, he first tested the account of pity that he later rebuilt for the Hamburg Dramaturgy.
DE
1766 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie)
Prepared in Breslau, where Lessing served a Prussian general from 1760 to 1765, this is the one part Lessing published of a larger planned study, and it carries over the poet–philosopher divide of his Pope essay into the arts.
DE
1767 Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie)
A periodical before it was a book, written week by week for a theatre that did not last, this became Lessing's principal work on the theory of drama.
DE
1777 Kleine Schriften zum Fragmentenstreit
Short pamphlets from 1777 and 1778, written as the fragments controversy moved from courteous replies to Schumann toward the open feud with Goeze.
DE
1778 A Rejoinder (Eine Duplik) you are here DE
1778 Anti-Goeze
The centre of the fragments controversy; after the duke's ban the same argument moved into Nathan the Wise.
DE
1778 Axioms (Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt)
Argued point by point rather than fought, this answer to Goeze sets out in compact form the distinction between the Bible and religion that the Anti-Goeze letters defend with ridicule.
DE
1778 Ernst and Falk: Dialogues for Freemasons (Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freimäurer)
Dialogue rather than treatise, and written for Freemasons rather than about them, this is where Lessing carried the tolerance argument of his theological quarrels into a theory of civil society.
DE
1780 The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts)
Its hundred numbered paragraphs, begun inside the fragments controversy and finished after it, turn the quarrel over scripture into a single picture of religious history.
DE
1784 Gotthold Ephraim Leßings theologischer Nachlaß (Theologischer Nachlass)
An editorial title for papers Lessing kept to himself: two of them come from his early twenties in Berlin, decades before the fragments controversy made his religious views public.
DE
1795 Philosophischer Nachlass
Working notes on metaphysics that Lessing kept to himself, from his Breslau years onward; at least one reached print only after Jacobi's report had made his Spinozism a public question.
DE

— or open another of their works