The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling

A MARTYR'S CROWN 75
outwit the Pharisees. After the fashion of rationalist attacks on
the Bible, the Evangelium directed attention to its many anach­
ronisms, contradictions, and inconsistencies; and the book of
Revelation was disposed of summarily as a mere confusion of
words, in which "whatever is intelligible ... is not worth pre­
serving."
The next section of the book was the most important, for it
purported to elucidate the "true doctrine" of Jesus. From a wealth
of citations and quotations which revealed extraordinary knowl­
edge of the Scriptures, Weitling pictured the kingdom of heaven
as an ideal human society founded in brotherhood and maintained
by good works. He directed special attention to Jesus' compassion
for the poor and to his strictures on the rich who lay up treasures
on earth. He apparently took delight in pointing out that Jesus
was an "illegitimate child" and, drawing on his own experience, re­
ferred to the "bitter ridicule" which he must have had to endure
through life on that account. On the subject of marriage, however,
he found the founder of Christianity too vague to be satisfying,
and he restated his own favorite thesis that family and marriage
relations would improve when property was abolished, and "man­
kind as a whole" would become more important than individual
families. He apparently felt it necessary specifically to repudiate
all theories suggesting community of wives.
Weitling concluded that communism, coupled with the new
medium of exchange which he advocated, would usher in an ideal
society in which men would seek their own well-being only
through the well-being of all, and good will would be as impor­
tant as intelligence. Like other writers before and after his time,
Weitling speculated on whether Jesus actually had belonged to
the Essenes, the religious community of Jews which developed
apart from the main stem of Jewish life, and, according to Jose¬
phus, "despised riches," considered commerce the source of all
greed, and prescribed that "every one's possessions [be] inter­
mingled with every other's possessions" in "one patrimony among