Paul-Louis Couchoud
He became well known as an adapter of Japanese haiku into French, an editor of Reviews, a translator, and a writer promoting the German thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus Christ.
The French degree is not directly comparable to an American one, as it is granted to a few dozens of top-ranked students in a national competition held once a year.
They published their work anonymously in a limited edition (30 copies) of Au fil de l'eau (Along the waterways), a collection of free-verse tercets which was well received.
Couchoud also studied and translated Japanese Haijin (Yosa Buson in particular) in Les Épigrammes lyriques du Japon (Lyrical Epigrams of Japan, 1906).
Couchoud made later two more trips to Japan and China, from which resulted his collection Sages et poètes d’Asie (published as Japanese Impressions, 1920).
In 1955, Marguerite Yourcenar wrote: "I have never met P. L. Couchoud, but one of his books, Sages et poètes d’Asie, which I still have in a hardback edition on my bookshelves in Northeast Harbor, may have been the first work through which I encountered Asian poetry and thought.
Couchoud took part in the sessions of the "Salon" organized by Leontine Lippmann, Anatole France's friend and "muse", known after her marriage as "Madame Arman de Caillavet".
He was so aggrieved when I confessed that I didn’t understand them that, in the end, I made him believe that I could at least speak Latin and Greek ..."[6] Couchoud presented in Paris his doctorate thesis on primitive asthenia (1911).
When the French writer Jules Romains started conducting experiments on "extra-retinal vision" (1917), criticisms of this pseudo-science obliged him to interrupt his "research" until 1922.
Couchoud became intrigued by the German Christ Myth Theory after reading Orpheus (1909), a history of religions by Salomon Reinach (1858–1932), another graduate of the "ENS".
"[10] Couchoud presented his thesis in a first article published in the literary review Mercure de France: "The Enigma of Jesus", (March 1923), and developed it in his first book, The Enigma of Jesus (1923), which carried an introduction by the Scottish anthropologist James G. Frazer, the famous author of The Golden Bough (1890), a pioneering study of primitive mythology and comparative religion.
Frazer had initially strongly rejected the Jesus myth thesis, but he modified his original view while giving credit to Couchoud for his calm and reasoned analysis without adopting his hypothesis: "[W]hether Dr. Couchoud be right or wrong [in denying the historicity of Jesus]...he appears to have laid his finger on a weak point in the chain of evidence on which hangs the religious faith of a great part of civilized mankind."
The magazine published various articles popularizing Couchoud's thesis that Jesus was not a historic figure—to the objection of the French writer Romain Rolland.
Couchoud had the advantage of the advanced research published by three elite scholars: the independent historian Charles Guignebert, the Protestant theologian Maurice Goguel, and the excommunicated critic of the Catholic Church Alfred Loisy.
Couchoud displayed no acrimony against Christianity, and always showed respect and appreciation for it, occasionally using poetic language to describe Jesus and his influence.
He dedicated the book "to the memory of that most noble man", John Mackinnon Robertson (1856–1933),[15] accepting his idea that a myth and a cult must have preceded the development of the figure of Christ and of the Christian religion.
Couchoud believed that the figure of Jesus Christ had been originally conceived by Jews as a purely 'heavenly Man' who announced a cosmic transformation.
It consists of three parts, with 22 chapters and 2 Appendices: Couchoud's thesis was received with passionate reactions in France, a culture traditionally dominated by Catholicism, and he became subjected to a wave of criticisms from various quarters.
Like Alfred Loisy, Guignebert objected to the apologetic use of historical criticism, as it tends to confuse history with theology, a literary genre characterizing the works of a whole group of French Catholic writers carefully identified in his book.
These conjectures arise generally from persons who have arrived late at the problem of Jesus, and who have not previously made any profound study of the history of Israel and of Christianity...With us P.L Couchoud... postulating a pre-Christian myth of the Suffering Jahve, which a vision of Simon Peter suddenly transformed into a living religion."
Loisy, after a long silence, felt the need to speak out publicly in an article in the Hibbert Journal, "Was Jesus a Historical Person?
He dismissed "Couchoud's central point being the metamorphosis into history, through the initiative of Marcion, of a myth that sprang from Jewish apocalyptic.
Myth is easily derogatory; it explains a natural fact, a rite, or an idea as a "narrative", to help the mind grasp, and remember rules or beliefs.
If I were younger, I should be tempted to write a companion volume, or counterblast, to my Idea of Christ in the Gospel, in the form of Probabilities about Jesus in the Real World.
"[23] Couchoud, as a psychiatrist, accepted the idea that a religious movement could originate with psychological events such as visions, interpreted by imagination, very close to the symptoms of some psychiatric diseases.
As a matter of psychiatric interest, he wanted to visit a French female "mystic" (mystique), Marthe Robin (1902–1981),[24] not far from Vienne, where he had retired.
She was a female peasant, paralyzed since 1928 following undocumented mental traumas, and spending her life in bed, in a dark room, reportedly without food.
[26] Guitton interceded with the local archbishop to overcome the resistance of the mystic's Catholic priest who was her "spiritual director" and allow visits by Couchoud.
[29] The reliability of this account has been disputed by those who doubt that the philosopher/psychiatrist, who had been an admirer of Spinoza, a skeptical rationalist all his life, and a standard-bearer of the Christ Myth thesis, would have reversed his lifetime convictions during a short unverified conversation on his deathbed.
The thesis denying the historicity of Jesus has been abandoned by French academic studies since 1933, thanks to the critical work of the secular historian Charles Guignebert.
