3. On the Function of Mystification in Lessing’s

Painting of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by Anton Graff (1771), Kunstsammlung der Universität Leipzig, Photograph by Liberal Freemason (2007), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gotthold_Ephraim_Lessing_Kunstsammlung_Uni_Leipzig.jpg In his late work The Education of the Human Race, Lessing suggests that the time may now have come in which the New Testament has outlived its usefulness as a guidebook—at least for the more farsighted among his contemporaries. .