Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1496177
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 MARCH 2022 OPINION 3 LETTERS & EDITORIAL maltatoday | SUNDAY • 2 APRIL 2023 Mikiel Galea Letters & Clarifications The 'Redeemer' myth AT his death in 1768, Hermann Reimarus, a professor of Oriental languages at the Hamburg Academy, left a 4,000 -page manuscript on the origins of Christianity. He argued that Jesus, the Jewish reformer, had no intention of establishing a new religion. No one dared to publish the man- uscript until Lessing, regarded by Goethe as "the father of the German Enlightenment", published seven portions of it (Fragments from Rei- marus). In the seventh fragment, 'On the aim of Jesus and his disciples', Rei- marus not only rejected the miracles and resurrection of Jesus but pic- tured him as a deluded young Jew who was faithful to Judaism to the end, and who accepted the belief of some Jews that the world was soon to be destroyed. Albert Schweitzer observed that Reimarus was "the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was essentially eschatological," based on a theory of an imminent end of the world. In his book entitled 'The quest of the historical Jesus', Schweitzer ob- served that, "The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any exist- ence. This image has not been de- stroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after anoth- er." John Guillaumier St Julian's Comino development In an interview with this newspa- per last Sunday, Prime Minister Rob- ert Abela referred to the proposed redevelopment of the Comino hotel and bungalows and said the footprint of the development should not be larger than what is there at present. HV Hospitality would like to clar- ify that the proposed development's footprint is, in fact, 5,122sq.m small- er than the current built site. HV Hospitality Marsa Artist's impression of the proposed development on Comino