Is David Drewes' existence
an empirical fact?

Anonymous Research Collective · 13 September 2026

Arthur Drews is an inconveniently early witness to the Drewes tradition. His Die Christusmythe appeared in 1909. In the preface to its English translation, he objects to scholars who recover from the Gospels a Jesus resembling their own preferred moral teacher. The reconstructed founder has already been selected by the assumptions supposedly awaiting investigation. This objection would eventually find employment in Buddhist studies.^[D1]

The older Drews also undertook a substantial reconstruction of his own. He explained Christianity through the development of religious ideas, drawing together Jewish messianic expectations and the surrounding world of saviour cults. In his account, Paul's Christ belonged to this religious formation; the Gospel life could not simply be read backwards into Paul as the biography of a recently deceased teacher. A founder's disappearance therefore left Drews with considerable historical work to do. He still needed to explain how a particular religion acquired its particular shape.

David Drewes adopts a more guarded position. In The Idea of the Historical Buddha, he challenges the grounds for treating the Buddha as an established historical person. He leaves open the possibility that someone lived behind the tradition and allows suspension of judgment about Buddhism's origins. His discussion of E. J. Thomas is especially revealing: a choice between a historical founder and a reconstructed myth can be declined altogether.^[D2]

Here the history-of-religions approach exposes a question about the scope of that suspension. How much must be recoverable before a historical inference becomes legitimate? We may lack the evidence to reconstruct a teacher's career while retaining reasons to think that a movement developed around a teacher. Conversely, showing that religious communities can create founders does not establish that a particular community did so. The competing explanations have to answer to the surviving evidence. Their bare possibility gives us no measure of their relative strength.

Our Department of Textual Criticism offers a manageable case: Drews → Drew[e]s. An explanatory e, perhaps standing for “empirical,” entered the margin and was subsequently incorporated into the name. The first name underwent replacement; the disputed founder moved east. The later recension acquired a university affiliation and began publishing in journals. What appears to be a contemporary scholar may thus be the final stage of a much older controversy.

This transmission accounts for differences as editorial development. It accounts for similarities as fidelity to the earlier witness. The move from Christ to Buddha demonstrates adaptation to a new audience, while the retreat from mythic reconstruction to agnosticism marks a refinement of doctrine. No surviving document records the transition. That absence would be a serious problem for anyone claiming to have established the transmission. It is much less troublesome if the transmission is offered only as something that could have happened, sufficient to keep the competing scholar hypothesis under suspicion.

The resulting difficulty is methodological. A demand for evidence can expose a weak historical reconstruction; it can also shelter an alternative from comparison if that alternative never has to become more than conceivable. The Project would like to know when its interpolated-vowel theory must face the documents. Until then, every publication under “Drewes” can be entered as a further stage in the tradition whose independent author remains unestablished.

Provisional finding: the extra e is an empirical fact. The person conventionally attached to it has been referred to textual criticism.

1. D1

   Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth, trans. C. Delisle Burns (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910), preface, pp. 13–17; “The Pauline Jesus,” especially pp. 180–184 and 207–208.

2. D2

   David Drewes, “The Idea of the Historical Buddha,” JIABS 40 (2017), pp. 1–25, especially p. 13 on E. J. Thomas and suspension of judgment. The question of comparative explanatory strength is pursued here as an objection to the scope of that suspension.

Anonymous Research Collective · 13 September 2026

Piprahwa supplies an empirical fact with an awkward physical presence. In 1898, William Claxton Peppé excavated a stone coffer containing reliquaries and offerings. An inscription on one vessel identifies its contents as bodily relics of the Buddha. Alexander Wynne, discussing Harry Falk's reading, dates the reliquary to the late third century BCE or shortly afterwards. The wording connects the deposit with the Śākyas, although the precise relation of that expression to the Buddha and to the donors requires interpretation.^[P1]

Archaeological reasoning begins with the object's circumstances. A modern label attached to loose bones would have very little evidentiary value. An ancient inscription belonging to a documented deposit presents a different problem. Its date constrains when the attribution existed. The deposit gives the attribution a material setting, and its treatment as bodily remains tells us something about what the people responsible thought they possessed. Each conclusion has to be justified at the appropriate level; the evidence does not become useless because it cannot deliver the entire biography of the deceased.

The enshrinement makes a claim about continuity with a human past. Someone had lived and died; parts of that person's body were understood to remain available to a later community. These donors were committing resources to the preservation of what they presented as a specific person's remains. Their act implies an interest in whose remains these were. To describe this as a religious practice still leaves that interest to be explained.

This bears directly on Drewes's 2023 argument that an intention to keep an accurate record of events was absent from the early Indian setting he discusses, and that ancient Buddhists understood a supernatural Buddha rather than a historical figure in the modern sense.^[P2] The reliquary belongs to a later period than the Buddha's conventionally assigned lifetime. It cannot disclose the intentions of every earlier composer. It does, however, make a sweeping opposition between sacred tradition and concern with a person's actual past difficult to maintain. A community can believe that a teacher possessed extraordinary powers and care whether a deposit really contains his remains.

The inference to the individual Buddha requires further work. The inscription might preserve a mistaken attribution; the deposit could depend on the same tradition as literary accounts. Its physical form does not automatically make it an independent witness. We nevertheless have evidence to assess: how the attribution arose, how early it can be followed, and whether the surrounding circumstances favour continuity with a deceased teacher. “Tradition” names the medium through which the claim reached us. It supplies no verdict on its truth.

Suppose a future historian uncovered a burial securely associated with David Drewes through its context and independent records. There would be grounds to infer a person behind the name even if a commemorative inscription credited him with having dispelled centuries of darkness. Disbelief in the achievement would leave the burial requiring explanation. A critical historian could reject the eulogy without concluding that the occupant had been generated by it.

The Project has therefore opened a reliquary file. No authenticated Drewes remains have been entered. Supporters of the historical Drewes explain this by appealing to his continued existence, a hypothesis that places the desired conclusion conspicuously early in the argument. They ask us to admit a living person before the material evidence has completed its funerary preparation.

Current archaeological status: existence awaits excavation. The proposed subject continues to delay the production of evidence.

1. P1

   John Guy, “673. Relics from the Piprahwa Stupa,” Tree & Serpent, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2023), audio transcript. Alexander Wynne, “Did the Buddha exist?” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 16 (2019), pp. 98–148, especially pp. 113–114, discussing Harry Falk, “Ashes of the Buddha,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 27 (2013 [2017]), pp. 43–75, especially pp. 59–60.

2. P2

   David Drewes, “A Historical Buddha After All?” JIABS 46 (2023), pp. 401–416, especially pp. 404–405.

Anonymous Research Collective · 13 September 2026

The École des Annales made the range of admissible historical questions considerably wider. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded their journal in 1929 with an ambition to move beyond the predominance of political narrative. Social arrangements and the ways people understood their world became central objects of inquiry. Later work associated with Fernand Braudel gave particular weight to structures that persisted across generations. A ruler's reign could occupy one scale of explanation while the conditions within which people lived moved at a different pace.^[A1]

The history of mentalités pursues the assumptions through which a society experienced reality. Febvre's study of Rabelais and sixteenth-century unbelief asked whether the intellectual world of the period permitted the atheism later readers attributed to him. Reconstructing that world required investigation of its available concepts and habits of thought. A modern reader's sense of what was obvious could itself be the obstacle to understanding.^[A3]

Bloch's Les Rois thaumaturges offers a particularly useful case for the present inquiry. It studies the belief that kings could heal scrofula through their touch. The historian can investigate the ceremony and the authority it sustained without accepting that royal fingers possessed the required medical properties.^[A2] The kings do not become unhistorical when the cure fails examination. Their sacred representation belongs to the historical problem. An account of what people believed about a ruler may also preserve information about what they did in his presence.

Drewes gives this approach something more specific to examine than a general preference for empirical facts. On page 404 of his 2023 reply, he says that the very idea of maintaining an accurate record of events “was not there” in the early Indian context under discussion. On the following page, he treats the contrast between a historical Buddha and a supernatural Buddha as a modern conception.^[A4] This is a substantial historical judgment about other people's understanding of the past. It calls for precisely the contextual investigation of mental life that the Annales tradition developed.

There is a difficulty within the judgment. If the modern opposition was unavailable to ancient Buddhists, why should their supernatural conception tell us that they lacked concern for an actual teacher's past? Within their own understanding, a person could have lived among earlier generations and performed acts we find impossible. The mental world has to be reconstructed before its claims can be sorted. Measuring an ancient account against a modern secular biography and finding the biography absent does not establish the absence of historical reference.

Belief alone cannot establish its object. Annales does not oblige historians to accept every founder whom a community revered. It obliges them to distinguish the claims a tradition makes and investigate the practices that carried those claims. For the Buddha, that would include asking what mattered about remembered places or the attribution of remains. The categorical proposition that there was no intention to preserve an accurate past cannot be inferred simply from the presence of miracles. It needs evidence of its own.

Our investigation of Drewes consequently encounters a person at several historical levels. His name organises a body of scholarship and draws responses from readers. We can study this reception while continuing to debate the evidentiary threshold for the author. The difficulty begins when “historical” changes its meaning midway through the inquiry: the figure is admitted into the history of scholarship as an effective presence, then held outside history when the question turns to who produced the papers. The papers persist throughout this procedure and continue to require an explanation.

Schrödinger's historian is now fully active in the history of mentalities, while his admission to the history of persons remains pending. The committee has requested separate filing cabinets.

1. A1

   Peter Burke, “The Annales in Global Context,” International Review of Social History 35 (1990), pp. 421–432, especially pp. 421 and 428. See also the journal's history and editorial scope.

2. A2

   Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges (1924); English translation, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France.

3. A3

   Lucien Febvre, Le Problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais (1942); trans. Beatrice Gottlieb, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (Harvard University Press, 1982), ISBN 9780674708266. See Burke, p. 428, on Febvre and the history of mentalities.

4. A4

   Drewes, “A Historical Buddha After All?” (2023), pp. 404–405. The argument here concerns the inference from supernatural representation to the absence of historical intention.

Anonymous Research Collective · 13 September 2026

How much explanatory work must a founder perform before a historian will admit him? Drewes questions the inference from humanly composed Buddhist teachings to one identifiable teacher behind them. In his later discussion of possible origins, he allows for processes in which existing religious materials acquired a common attribution.^[C5] Such possibilities raise a problem in historical explanation: showing how a movement could develop without a particular founder does not determine what part particular people actually played in its development.

Raymond Aron approached causation through the problem of understanding actions under historical conditions. In his account of Max Weber, circumstances make certain conduct more likely; the explanation still has room for accident and for the purposes of the people involved. One can investigate the conditions that made a decision possible and ask what difference the decision made. No law of universal history is needed to connect an action with its consequences. Aron's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire examines the limits of historical objectivity from this setting, where the investigator also occupies a historical position.^[C1]

His later L'Opium des intellectuels attacks the authority granted to supposedly necessary historical development, especially when a political movement claims to act on History's behalf.^[C4] A deterministic version of Marxism can turn an interpretation of social change into a warrant for whatever the alleged agent of that change does. Aron's objection concerns this promotion of an account into a necessity. An economic explanation of an action need not make the action unavoidable.

Popper's The Poverty of Historicism presses the difficulty with predicting history through laws of its development. Future knowledge will affect what people do, yet we cannot already possess the discoveries that will constitute that future knowledge. The promise of comprehensive historical prediction fails at this point. Popper also rejects the picture of inquiry beginning with wholly uninterpreted observations. Problems guide observation; proposed answers remain exposed to criticism. His account gives empirical inquiry a demanding task without offering the historian an unconditioned view of the past.^[C2]

Berlin brings the person back into focus. In Historical Inevitability, he considers the consequences of treating conduct as the necessary outcome of forces beyond an actor's control. Ordinary judgments of responsibility would then require extensive revision. Historical understanding also involves recovering the reasons through which an action made sense to its agent.^[C3] To say that someone acted within a social world does not yet explain the particular choice. The circumstances in which an argument became available and the reasons for accepting it are connected questions, with different explanatory demands.

Applied to the founder problem, these approaches expose the gap between a possible account of a process and evidence about who took part in it. A teacher can inherit nearly all his conceptual materials and still be a historical agent. His existence would not require an achievement inexplicable through his surroundings. Drewes's agnosticism concerns our warrant for identifying such an agent; it does not itself assert determinism. The pressure on his argument falls where the availability of a founderless process is made to carry evidentiary weight against the founder. That process needs comparative historical assessment too.

The same assessment can be applied to a modern article. Its language has a long history. Academic institutions supply the conditions of its production, and earlier controversies help explain why its question arose. With enough patience, our committee could produce a contextual account in which the author's contribution grows progressively smaller. The final step would be to declare the author unnecessary and treat this as a discovery about whether he existed. Meanwhile, the journal would still be waiting for someone to approve the proofs.

The article has been provisionally attributed to historical conditions. The conditions have declined responsibility for its conclusions.

1. C1

   Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire. Essai sur les limites de l'objectivité historique (1938); see Sylvie Mesure's discussion in her introduction to the 1986 edition, p. V. For Aron's account of Weber, German Sociology (1957), pp. 79–81 and 99–101, see the passages reproduced and discussed by Elias Forneris, “Raymond Aron's Sociology of Collaborators, 1940–1944,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 38 (2025), pp. 339–361, section “Sociological Underpinnings.”

2. C2

   Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (1957), preface and introduction. See also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's account of Popper, especially §§3–5 and §9, on observation, critical testing, and historical prediction.

3. C3

   Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (1954), originally delivered as “History as an Alibi.” See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, §§2.3–2.4, on historical understanding and the dispute about determinism.

4. C4

   Raymond Aron, L'Opium des intellectuels (1955); English translation, The Opium of the Intellectuals, part II, “The Idolatry of History.”

5. C5

   Drewes, “A Historical Buddha After All?” (2023), discussion of human authorship and the founder inference; “Toward Blue Skies Ahead,” JIABS 46 (2023), pp. 431–437, especially pp. 431–432. These possible origins are presented by Drewes as possibilities, not as an established reconstruction.

Anonymous Research Collective · 13 September 2026

The empirical fact arrives at school carrying a national curriculum. Marc Ferro's Comment on raconte l'histoire aux enfants à travers le monde entier (1981), published in English as The Use and Abuse of History, asks what happens to the past when societies teach it to children. The lesson supplies a position from which events become intelligible. Its starting point determines what looks like an interruption; its choice of protagonists determines whose actions require explanation. A narrative called universal history can turn out to be a local account with unusually large geographical ambitions.^[F1]

Ferro's comparison makes the problem concrete. The history of Algeria taught through a French national account could be reversed in an Algerian account of the same relationship. What one narration incorporated into its country's story became, in the other, the experience of being subjected to someone else's. Ferro also examined history teaching organised around the divinity of the Japanese emperor. Political and sacred authority entered the lesson as premises of the historical account.^[F2]

These cases do not require the date of an event to change at a border. They show how an event becomes a particular kind of historical fact through selection and explanation. A textbook may accurately record an annexation while treating the annexing state's right to act as self-evident. A rival account may restore the experience of the governed, yet introduce omissions of its own. Comparison makes those choices visible and gives the historian further questions to put to the evidence. Contradictory claims still require adjudication.

For the Drewes dispute, the example of sacred authority is especially troublesome. A historical account can assign divine qualities to an emperor who was also a person with a recoverable life. The supernatural description does not tell us, by itself, whether the subject existed. Drewes's distinction between a supernatural Buddha and the modern historical Buddha therefore cannot settle the evidentiary question on its own.^[F3] The relevant inquiry concerns the sources and their relationship to the person they describe. A category applied to the representation cannot substitute for that inquiry.

Ferro also turns attention towards the historian who decides which traditions contain historical thought. Drewes's judgment that an intention to record events accurately was absent from the early Indian setting makes his own definition of that intention consequential. What would a society have to do to qualify? If the answer requires it to separate religion from accounts of the past in a recognisably modern fashion, the assessment has already selected the cultural form it expects to find. A history of historical consciousness must investigate other forms of remembering before pronouncing the relevant consciousness absent.

The point extends to our treatment of a scholarly corpus. A future textbook might introduce David Drewes as the critic who exposed an inherited assumption about the Buddha. Another might make the controversy an example of an evidentiary standard whose reach was disputed. The publication dates could agree exactly. Readers would nevertheless learn different things about what counted as a historical problem and which party needed to defend its premises. Neither class would have encountered an uninterpreted empirical fact labelled “Drewes.”

An efficient examination board could resolve the disagreement by removing the controversy from the syllabus. A generation later, pupils would know nothing of Drewes; the next edition could cite that lack of knowledge as evidence that he had never been historically established. Our Project is interested in the interval between the editorial decision and the ontological conclusion. It appears to be the period during which an omitted person becomes an absent person.

Drewes has been removed from the curriculum pending evidence of his existence. Future investigators are advised to consult the curriculum.

1. F1

   Marc Ferro, Comment on raconte l'histoire aux enfants à travers le monde entier (Paris: Payot, 1981); English edition, The Use and Abuse of History. Rainer Riemenschneider, review of Ferro, Histoire de l'éducation 14 (1982), pp. 122–127, especially p. 122 on competing centres of universal histories.

2. F2

   Beverley Southgate, review of The Use and Abuse of History, Reviews in History 441 (2005), discussing Ferro's treatment of French and Algerian histories (p. 106 of the 2003 English edition) and imperial divinity in Japanese history teaching. The examples refer to the historical curricula examined in those editions.

3. F3

   Drewes, “A Historical Buddha After All?” (2023), pp. 404–405. The comparison asks what his categories allow a historian to infer from a religious representation.