II. Hermann Samuel Reimarus
“Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger.” Noch ein Fragment des Wolfenbüttelschen Ungenannten. Herausgegeben von Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Braunschweig, 1778, 276 pp. (The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples. A further Instalment of the anonymous Wolfenbüttel Fragments. Published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Brunswick, 1778.)
Johann Salomo Semler. Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten insbesondere vom Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger. (Reply to the anonymous Fragments, especially to that entitled “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples.”) Halle, 1779, 432 pp.
Before Reimarus, no one had attempted to form a historical conception of the life of Jesus. Luther had not so much as felt that he cared to gain a clear idea of the order of the recorded events. Speaking of the chronology of the cleansing of the Temple, which in John falls at the beginning, in the Synoptists near the close, of Jesus' public life, he remarks: “The Gospels follow no order in recording the acts and miracles of Jesus, and the matter is not, after all, of much importance. If a difficulty arises in regard to the Holy Scripture and we cannot solve it, we must just let it alone.” When the Lutheran theologians began to consider the question of harmonising the events, things were still worse. Osiander (1498-1552), in his “Harmony of the Gospels,” maintained the principle that if an event is recorded more than once in the Gospels, in different connexions, it happened more than once and in different connexions. The daughter of Jairus was therefore raised from the dead several times; on one occasion Jesus allowed the devils whom He cast out of a single demoniac to enter into a herd of swine, on another occasion, those whom He cast out of two demoniacs; there were two cleansings of the Temple, and so forth.[13] The correct view of the Synoptic Gospels as being interdependent was first formulated by Griesbach.
The only Life of Jesus written prior to the time of Reimarus which has any interest for us, was composed by a Jesuit in the [pg 014] Persian language. The author was the Indian missionary Hieronymus Xavier, nephew of Francis Xavier, and it was designed for the use of Akbar, the Moghul Emperor, who, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had become the most powerful potentate in Hindustan. In the seventeenth century the Persian text was brought to Europe by a merchant, and was translated into Latin by Louis de Dieu, a theologian of the Reformed Church, whose intention in publishing it was to discredit Catholicism.[14] It is a skilful falsification of the life of Jesus in which the omissions, and the additions taken from the Apocrypha, are inspired by the sole purpose of presenting to the open-minded ruler a glorious Jesus, in whom there should be nothing to offend him.
Thus there had been nothing to prepare the world for a work of such power as that of Reimarus. It is true, there had appeared earlier, in 1768, a Life of Jesus by Johann Jakob Hess[15] (1741-1828), written from the standpoint of the older rationalism, but it retains so much supernaturalism and follows so much the lines of a paraphrase of the Gospels, that there was nothing to indicate to the world what a master-stroke the spirit of the time was preparing.
Not much is known about Reimarus. For his contemporaries he had no existence, and it was Strauss who first made his name known in literature.[16] He was born in Hamburg on the 22nd of December, 1694, and spent his life there as a professor of Oriental Languages. He died in 1768. Several of his writings appeared during his lifetime, all of them asserting the claims of rational religion as against the faith of the Church; one of them, for example, being an essay on “The Leading Truths of Natural Religion.” His magnum opus, however, which laid the historic basis of his attacks, was only circulated, during his lifetime, among his acquaintances, as an anonymous manuscript. In 1774 Lessing began to publish the most important portions of it, and up to 1778 had published seven fragments, thereby involving himself in a quarrel with Goetze, the Chief Pastor of Hamburg. The manuscript of the whole, which runs to 4000 pages, is preserved in the Hamburg municipal library.
The following are the titles of Fragments which he published:
The Toleration of the Deists.
The Decrying of Reason in the Pulpit.
The impossibility of a Revelation which all men should have good grounds for believing.
The Passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea.
Showing that the books of the Old Testament were not written to reveal a Religion.
Concerning the story of the Resurrection.
The Aims of Jesus and His disciples.
The monograph on the passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one of the ablest, wittiest, and most acute which has ever been written. It exposes all the impossibilities of the narrative in the Priestly Codex, and all the inconsistencies which arise from the combination of various sources; although Reimarus has not the slightest inkling that the separation of these sources would afford the real solution of the problem.
To say that the fragment on “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples” is a magnificent piece of work is barely to do it justice. This essay is not only one of the greatest events in the history of criticism, it is also a masterpiece of general literature. The language is as a rule crisp and terse, pointed and epigrammatic—the language of a man who is not “engaged in literary composition” but is wholly concerned with the facts. At times, however, it rises to heights of passionate feeling, and then it is as though the fires of a volcano were painting lurid pictures upon dark clouds. Seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, so lofty a scorn; but then it is seldom that a work has been written in the just consciousness of so absolute a superiority to contemporary opinion. And withal, there is dignity and serious purpose; Reimarus's work is no pamphlet.
Lessing could not, of course, accept its standpoint. His idea of revelation, and his conception of the Person of Jesus, were much deeper than those of the Fragmentist. He was a thinker; Reimarus only a historian. But this was the first time that a really historical mind, thoroughly conversant with the sources, had undertaken the criticism of the tradition. It was Lessing's greatness that he grasped the significance of this criticism, and felt that it must lead either to the destruction or to the re-casting of the idea of revelation. He recognised that the introduction of the historical element would transform and deepen rationalism. Convinced that the fateful moment had arrived, he disregarded the scruples of Reimarus's family and the objections of Nicolai and Mendelssohn, and, though inwardly trembling for that which he himself held sacred, he flung the torch with his own hand.
Semler, at the close of his refutation of the fragment, ridicules its editor in the following apologue. “A prisoner was once brought before the Lord Mayor of London on a charge of arson. He had been seen coming down from the upper story of the burning house. ‘Yesterday,’ so ran his defence, ‘about four o'clock I went into my neighbour's store-room and saw there a burning candle which the servants had carelessly forgotten. In [pg 016] the course of the night it would have burned down, and set fire to the stairs. To make sure that the fire should break out in the day-time, I threw some straw upon it. The flames burst out at the sky-light, the fire-engines came hurrying up, and the fire, which in the night might have been dangerous, was promptly extinguished.’ ‘Why did you not yourself pick up the candle and put it out?’ asked the Lord Mayor. ‘If I had put out the candle the servants would not have learned to be more careful; now that there has been such a fuss about it, they will not be so careless in future.’ ‘Odd, very odd,’ said the Lord Mayor, ‘he is not a criminal, only a little weak in the head.’ So he had him shut up in the mad-house, and there he lies to this day.”
The story is extraordinarily apposite—only that Lessing was not mad; he knew quite well what he was doing. His object was to show how an unseen enemy had pushed his parallels up to the very walls, and to summon to the defence “some one who should be as nearly the ideal defender of religion as the Fragmentist was the ideal assailant.” Once, with prophetic insight into the future, he says: “The Christian traditions must be explained by the inner truth of Christianity, and no written traditions can give it that inner truth, if it does not itself possess it.”
Reimarus takes as his starting-point the question regarding the content of the preaching of Jesus. “We are justified,” he says, “in drawing an absolute distinction between the teaching of the Apostles in their writings and what Jesus Himself in His own lifetime proclaimed and taught.” What belongs to the preaching of Jesus is clearly to be recognised. It is contained in two phrases of identical meaning, “Repent, and believe the Gospel,” or, as it is put elsewhere, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”
The Kingdom of Heaven must however be understood “according to Jewish ways of thought.” Neither Jesus nor the Baptist ever explain this expression; therefore they must have been content to have it understood in its known and customary sense. That means that Jesus took His stand within the Jewish religion, and accepted its Messianic expectations without in any way correcting them. If He gives a new development to this religion it is only in so far that He proclaims as near at hand the realisation of ideals and hopes which were alive in thousands of hearts.
There was thus no need for detailed instruction regarding the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven; the catechism and confession of the Church at its commencement consisted of a single phrase. Belief was not difficult: “they need only believe the Gospel, namely that Jesus was about to bring in the Kingdom of God.”[17]
As there were many among the Jews who were already waiting for the Kingdom of God, it was no wonder that in a few days, nay in a few hours, some thousands believed, although they had been told only that Jesus was the promised prophet.
This was the sum total of what the disciples knew about the Kingdom of God when they were sent out by their Master to proclaim its coming. Their hearers would naturally think of the customary meaning of the term and the hopes which attached themselves to it. “The purpose of sending out such propagandists could only be that the Jews who groaned under the Roman yoke and had long cherished the hope of deliverance should be stirred up all over Judaea and assemble themselves in their thousands.”
Jesus must have known, too, that if the people believed His messengers they would look about for an earthly deliverer and turn to Him for this purpose. The Gospel, therefore, meant nothing more or less to all who heard it than that, under the leadership of Jesus, the Kingdom of Messiah was about to be brought in. For them there was no difficulty in accepting the belief that He was the Messiah, the Son of God, for this belief did not involve anything metaphysical. The nation was the Son of God; the kings of the covenant-people were Sons of God; the Messiah was in a pre-eminent sense the Son of God. Thus even in His Messianic claims Jesus remained “within the limits of humanity.”
The fact that He did not need to explain to His contemporaries what He meant by the Kingdom of God constitutes a difficulty for us. The parables do not enlighten us, for they presuppose a knowledge of the conception. “If we could not gather from the writings of the Jews some further information as to what was understood at that time by the Messiah and the Kingdom of God, these points of primary importance would be very obscure and incomprehensible.”
“If, therefore, we desire to gain a historical understanding of Jesus' teaching, we must leave behind what we learned in our catechism regarding the metaphysical Divine Sonship, the Trinity, and similar dogmatic conceptions, and go out into a wholly Jewish world of thought. Only those who carry the teachings of the catechism back into the preaching of the Jewish Messiah will arrive at the idea that He was the founder of a new religion. To all unprejudiced persons it is manifest that Jesus had not the slightest intention of doing away with the Jewish religion and putting another in its place.”
From Matt. v. 18 it is evident that Jesus did not break with the Law, but took His stand upon it unreservedly. If there was anything at all new in His preaching, it was the righteousness which was requisite for the Kingdom of God. The righteousness of the Law will no longer suffice in the time of the coming Kingdom; a [pg 018] new and deeper morality must come into being. This demand is the only point in which the preaching of Jesus went beyond the ideas of His contemporaries. But this new morality does not do away with the Law, for He explains it as a fulfilment of the old commandments. His followers, no doubt, broke with the Law later on. They did so, however, not in pursuance of a command of Jesus, but under the pressure of circumstances, at the time when they were forced out of Judaism and obliged to found a new religion.
Jesus shared the Jewish racial exclusiveness wholly and unreservedly. According to Matt. x. 5 He forbade His disciples to declare to the Gentiles the coming of the Kingdom of God. Evidently, therefore, His purpose did not embrace them. Had it been otherwise, the hesitation of Peter in Acts x. and xi., and the necessity of justifying the conversion of Cornelius, would be incomprehensible.
Baptism and the Lord's Supper are no evidence that Jesus intended to found a new religion. In the first place the genuineness of the command to baptize in Matt. xxviii. 19 is questionable, not only as a saying ascribed to the risen Jesus, but also because it is universalistic in outlook, and because it implies the doctrine of the Trinity and, consequently, the metaphysical Divine Sonship of Jesus. In this it is inconsistent with the earliest traditions regarding the practice of baptism in the Christian community, for in the earliest times, as we learn from the Acts and from Paul, it was the custom to baptize, not in the name of the Trinity, but in the name of Jesus, the Messiah.
But, furthermore, it is questionable whether Baptism really goes back to Jesus at all. He Himself baptized no one in His own lifetime, and never commanded any of His converts to be baptized. So we cannot be sure about the origin of Baptism, though we can be sure of its meaning. Baptism in the name of Jesus signified only that Jesus was the Messiah. “For the only change which the teaching of Jesus made in their religion was that whereas they had formerly believed in a Deliverer of Israel who was to come in the future, they now believed in a Deliverer who was already present.”
The “Lord's Supper,” again, was no new institution, but merely an episode at the last Paschal Meal of the Kingdom which was passing away, and was intended “as an anticipatory celebration of the Passover of the New Kingdom.” A Lord's Supper in our sense, “cut loose from the Passover,” would have been inconceivable to Jesus, and not less so to His disciples.
It is useless to appeal to the miracles, any more than to the “Sacraments,” as evidence for the founding of a new religion. In the first place, we have to remember what happens in the case of miracles handed down by tradition. That Jesus effected cures, [pg 019] which in the eyes of His contemporaries were miraculous, is not to be denied. Their purpose was to prove Him to be the Messiah. He forbade these miracles to be made known, even in cases where they could not possibly be kept hidden, “with the sole purpose of making people more eager to talk of them.” Other miracles, however, have no basis in fact, but owe their place in the narrative to the feeling that the miracle-stories of the Old Testament must be repeated in the case of Jesus, but on a grander scale. He did no really miraculous works; otherwise, the demands for a sign would be incomprehensible. In Jerusalem when all the people were looking eagerly for an overwhelming manifestation of His Messiahship, what a tremendous effect a miracle would have produced! If only a single miracle had been publicly, convincingly, undeniably, performed by Jesus before all the people on one of the great days of the Feast, such is human nature that all the people would at once have flocked to His standard.
For this popular uprising, however, He waited in vain. Twice He believed that it was near at hand. The first time was when He was sending out the disciples and said to them: “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matt. x. 23). He thought that, at the preaching of the disciples, the people would flock to Him from every quarter and immediately proclaim Him Messiah; but His expectation was disappointed.
The second time, He thought to bring about the decisive issue in Jerusalem. He made His entry riding on an ass's colt, that the Messianic prophecy of Zechariah might be fulfilled. And the people actually did cry “Hosanna to the Son of David!” Relying on the support of His followers He might now, He thought, bid defiance to the authorities. In the temple He arrogates to Himself supreme power, and in glowing words calls for an open revolt against the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees, on the ground that they have shut the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven and forbidden others to go in. There is no doubt, now, that He will carry the people with Him! Confident in the success of His cause, He closes the great incendiary harangue in Matt. xxiii. with the words “Truly from henceforth ye shall not see me again until ye shall say Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”; that is, until they should hail Him as Messiah.
But the people in Jerusalem refused to rise, as the Galilaeans had refused at the time when the disciples were sent out to rouse them. The Council prepared for vigorous action. The voluntary concealment by which Jesus had thought to whet the eagerness of the people became involuntary. Before His arrest He was overwhelmed with dread, and on the cross He closed His life with the words “My God! my God! why hast Thou forsaken me?” “This avowal cannot, without violence, be interpreted otherwise than as [pg 020] meaning that God had not aided Him in His aim and purpose as He had hoped. That shows that it had not been His purpose to suffer and die, but to establish an earthly kingdom and deliver the Jews from political oppression—and in that God's help had failed Him.”
For the disciples this turn of affairs meant the destruction of all the dreams for the sake of which they had followed Jesus. For if they had given up anything on His account, it was only in order to receive it again an hundredfold when they should openly take their places in the eyes of all the world as the friends and ministers of the Messiah, as the rulers of the twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus never disabused them of this sensuous hope, but, on the contrary, confirmed them in it. When He put an end to the quarrel about pre-eminence, and when He answered the request of the sons of Zebedee, He did not attack the assumption that there were to be thrones and power, but only addressed Himself to the question how men were in the present to establish their claims to that position of authority.
All this implies that the time of the fulfilment of these hopes was not thought of by Jesus and His disciples as at all remote. In Matt. xvi. 28, for example, He says: “Truly I say unto you there are some standing here who shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” There is no justification for twisting this about or explaining it away. It simply means that Jesus promises the fulfilment of all Messianic hopes before the end of the existing generation.
Thus the disciples were prepared for anything rather than that which actually happened. Jesus had never said a word to them about His dying and rising again, otherwise they would not have so played the coward at His death, nor have been so astonished at His “resurrection.” The three or four sayings referring to these events must therefore have been put into His mouth later, in order to make it appear that He had foreseen these events in His original plan.
How, then, did they get over this apparently annihilating blow? By falling back upon the second form of the Jewish Messianic hope. Hitherto their thoughts, like those of their Master, had been dominated by the political ideal of the prophets—the scion of David's line who should appear as the political deliverer of the nation. But alongside of that there existed another Messianic expectation which transferred everything to the supernatural sphere. Appearing first in Daniel, this expectation can still be traced in the Apocalypses, in Justin's “Dialogue with Trypho,” and in certain Rabbinic sayings. According to these—Reimarus makes use especially of the statements of Trypho—the Messiah is to appear twice; once in human lowliness, the second time upon the clouds of heaven. When the first [pg 021] systema, as Reimarus calls it, was annihilated by the death of Jesus, the disciples brought forward the second, and gathered followers who shared their expectation of a second coming of Jesus the Messiah. In order to get rid of the difficulty of the death of Jesus, they gave it the significance of a spiritual redemption—which had not previously entered their field of vision or that of Jesus Himself.
But this spiritual interpretation of His death would not have helped them if they had not also invented the resurrection. Immediately after the death of Jesus, indeed, such an idea was far from their thoughts. They were in deadly fear and kept close within doors. “Soon, however, one and another ventures to slip out. They learn that no judicial search is being made for them.” Then they consider what is to be done. They did not take kindly to the idea of returning to their old haunts; on their journeyings the companions of the Messiah had forgotten how to work. They had seen that the preaching of the Kingdom of God will keep a man. Even when they had been sent out without wallet or money they had not lacked. The women who are mentioned in Luke viii. 2, 3, had made it their business to make good provision for the Messiah and His future ministers.
Why not, then, continue this mode of life? They would surely find a sufficient number of faithful souls who would join them in directing their hopes towards a second coming of the Messiah, and while awaiting the future glory, would share their possessions with them. So they stole the body of Jesus and hid it, and proclaimed to all the world that He would soon return. They prudently waited, however, for fifty days before making this announcement, in order that the body, if it should be found, might be unrecognisable.
What was much in their favour was the complete disorganisation of the Jewish state. Had there been an efficient police administration the disciples would not have been able to plan this fraud and organise their communistic fellowship. But, as it was, the new society was not even subjected to any annoyance in consequence of the remarkable death of a married couple who were buried from the apostles' house, and the brotherhood was even allowed to confiscate their property to its own uses.
It appears, then, that the hope of the Parousia was the fundamental thing in primitive Christianity, which was a product of that hope much more than of the teaching of Jesus. Accordingly, the main problem of primitive dogmatics was the delay of the Parousia. Already in Paul's time the problem was pressing, and he had to set to work in 2 Thessalonians to discover all possible and impossible reasons why the Second Coming should be delayed. Reimarus mercilessly exposes the position of the apostle, who was obliged to fob people off somehow or other. The author of 2 Peter [pg 022] has a much clearer notion of what he would be at, and undertakes to restore the confidence of Christendom once for all with the sophism of the thousand years which are in the sight of God as one day, ignoring the fact that in the promise the reckoning was by man's years, not by God's. “Nevertheless it served the turn of the Apostles so well with those simple early Christians, that after the first believers had been bemused with it, and the period originally fixed had elapsed, the Christians of later generations, including Fathers of the Church, could continue ever after to feed themselves with empty hopes.” The saying of Christ about the generation which should not die out before His return clearly fixes this event at no very distant date. But since Jesus has not yet appeared upon the clouds of heaven “these words must be strained into meaning, not that generation, but the Jewish people. Thus by exegetical art they are saved for ever, for the Jewish race will never die out.”
In general, however, “the theologians of the present day skim lightly over the eschatological material in the Gospels because it does not chime in with their views, and assign to the coming of Christ upon the clouds quite a different purpose from that which it bears in the teaching of Christ and His apostles.” Inasmuch as the non-fulfilment of its eschatology is not admitted, our Christianity rests upon a fraud. In view of this fact, what is the evidential value of any miracle, even if it could be held to be authentic? “No miracle would prove that two and two make five, or that a circle has four angles; and no miracles, however numerous, could remove a contradiction which lies on the surface of the teachings and records of Christianity.” Nor is there any weight in the appeal to the fulfilment of prophecy, for the cases in which Matthew countersigns it with the words “that the Scripture might be fulfilled” are all artificial and unreal; and for many incidents the stage was set by Jesus, or His disciples, or the Evangelists, with the deliberate purpose of presenting to the people a scene from the fulfilment of prophecy.
The sole argument which could save the credit of Christianity would be a proof that the Parousia had really taken place at the time for which it was announced; and obviously no such proof can be produced.
Such is Reimarus' reconstruction of the history. We can well understand that his work must have given offence when it appeared, for it is a polemic, not an objective historical study. But we have no right simply to dismiss it in a word, as a Deistic production, as Otto Schmiedel, for example, does;[18] it is time that Reimarus came to his own, and that we should recognise a historical performance of no mean order in this piece of Deistic polemics. [pg 023] His work is perhaps the most splendid achievement in the whole course of the historical investigation of the life of Jesus, for he was the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was essentially eschatological. There is some justification for the animosity which flames up in his writing. This historical truth had taken possession of his mind with such overwhelming force that he could no longer understand his contemporaries, and could not away with their profession that their beliefs were, as they professed to be, directly derived from the preaching of Jesus.
What added to the offence was that he saw the eschatology in a wrong perspective. He held that the Messianic ideal which dominated the preaching of Jesus was that of the political ruler, the son of David. All his other mistakes are the consequence of this fundamental error. It was, of course, a mere makeshift hypothesis to derive the beginnings of Christianity from an imposture. Historical science was not at that time sufficiently advanced to lead even the man who had divined the fundamentally eschatological character of the preaching of Jesus onward to the historical solution of the problem; it needed more than a hundred and twenty years to fill in the chasm which Reimarus had been forced to bridge with that makeshift hypothesis of his.
In the light of the clear perception of the elements of the problem which Reimarus had attained, the whole movement of theology, down to Johannes Weiss, appears retrograde. In all its work the thesis is ignored or obscured that Jesus, as a historical personality, is to be regarded, not as the founder of a new religion, but as the final product of the eschatological and apocalyptic thought of Late Judaism. Every sentence of Johannes Weiss's Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892) is a vindication, a rehabilitation, of Reimarus as a historical thinker.
Even so the traveller on the plain sees from afar the distant range of mountains. Then he loses sight of them again. His way winds slowly upwards through the valleys, drawing ever nearer to the peaks, until at last, at a turn of the path, they stand before him, not in the shapes which they had seemed to take from the distant plain, but in their actual forms. Reimarus was the first, after eighteen centuries of misconception, to have an inkling of what eschatology really was. Then theology lost sight of it again, and it was not until after the lapse of more than a hundred years that it came in view of eschatology once more, now in its true form, so far as that can be historically determined, and only after it had been led astray, almost to the last, in all its historical researches by the sole mistake of Reimarus—the assumption that the eschatology was earthly and political in character. Thus theology shared at least the error of the man whom it knew only as a Deist, not as an [pg 024] historian, and whose true greatness was not recognised even by Strauss, though he raised a literary monument to him.
The solution offered by Reimarus may be wrong; the data of observation from which he starts out are, beyond question, right, because the primary datum of all is genuinely historical. He recognised that two systems of Messianic expectation were present side by side in Late Judaism. He endeavoured to bring them into mutual relations in order to represent the actual movement of the history. In so doing he made the mistake of placing them in consecutive order, ascribing to Jesus the political Son-of-David conception, and to the Apostles, after His death, the apocalyptic system based on Daniel, instead of superimposing one upon the other in such a way that the Messianic King might coincide with the Son of Man, and the ancient prophetic conception might be inscribed within the circumference of the Daniel-descended apocalyptic, and raised along with it to the supersensuous plane. But what matters the mistake in comparison with the fact that the problem was really grasped?
Reimarus felt that the absence in the preaching of Jesus of any definition of the principal term (the Kingdom of God), in conjunction with the great and rapid success of His preaching constituted a problem, and he formulated the conception that Jesus was not a religious founder and teacher, but purely a preacher.
He brought the Synoptic and Johannine narratives into harmony by practically leaving the latter out of account. The attitude of Jesus towards the law, and the process by which the disciples came to take up a freer attitude, was grasped and explained by him so accurately that modern historical science does not need to add a word, but would be well pleased if at least half the theologians of the present day had got as far.
Further, he recognised that primitive Christianity was not something which grew, so to speak, out of the teaching of Jesus, but that it came into being as a new creation, in consequence of events and circumstances which added something to that preaching which it did not previously contain; and that Baptism and the Lord's Supper, in the historical sense of these terms, were not instituted by Jesus, but created by the early Church on the basis of certain historical assumptions.
Again, Reimarus felt that the fact that the “event of Easter” was first proclaimed at Pentecost constituted a problem, and he sought a solution for it. He recognised, further, that the solution of the problem of the life of Jesus calls for a combination of the methods of historical and literary criticism. He felt that merely to emphasise the part played by eschatology would not suffice, but that it was necessary to assume a creative element in the tradition, to which he ascribed the miracles, the stories which turn on the [pg 025] fulfilment of Messianic prophecy, the universalistic traits and the predictions of the passion and the resurrection. Like Wrede, too, he feels that the prescription of silence in the case of miracles of healing and of certain communications to the disciples constitutes a problem which demands solution.
Still more remarkable is his eye for exegetical detail. He has an unfailing instinct for pregnant passages like Matt. x. 23, xvi. 28, which are crucial for the interpretation of large masses of the history. The fact is there are some who are historians by the grace of God, who from their mother's womb have an instinctive feeling for the real. They follow through all the intricacy and confusion of reported fact the pathway of reality, like a stream which, despite the rocks that encumber its course and the windings of its valley, finds its way inevitably to the sea. No erudition can supply the place of this historical instinct, but erudition sometimes serves a useful purpose, inasmuch as it produces in its possessors the pleasing belief that they are historians, and thus secures their services for the cause of history. In truth they are at best merely doing the preliminary spade-work of history, collecting for a future historian the dry bones of fact, from which, with the aid of his natural gift, he can recall the past to life. More often, however, the way in which erudition seeks to serve history is by suppressing historical discoveries as long as possible, and leading out into the field to oppose the one true view an army of possibilities. By arraying these in support of one another it finally imagines that it has created out of possibilities a living reality.
This obstructive erudition is the special prerogative of theology, in which, even at the present day, a truly marvellous scholarship often serves only to blind the eyes to elementary truths, and to cause the artificial to be preferred to the natural. And this happens not only with those who deliberately shut their minds against new impressions, but also with those whose purpose is to go forward, and to whom their contemporaries look up as leaders. It was a typical illustration of this fact when Semler rose up and slew Reimarus in the name of scientific theology.[19]
Reimarus had discredited progressive theology. Students—so Semler tells us in his preface—became unsettled and sought other callings. The great Halle theologian—born in 1725—the pioneer of the historical view of the Canon, the precursor of Baur in the reconstruction of primitive Christianity, was urged to do away with the offence. As Origen of yore with Celsus, so Semler takes Reimarus sentence by sentence, in such a way that if his work were lost it could be recovered from the refutation. The fact was that Semler had nothing in the nature of a complete or well-articulated [pg 026] argument to oppose to him; therefore he inaugurated in his reply the “Yes, but” theology, which thereafter, for more than three generations, while it took, itself, the most various modifications, imagined that it had finally got rid of Reimarus and his discovery.
Reimarus—so ran the watchword of the guerrilla warfare which Semler waged against him—cannot be right, for he is one-sided. Jesus and His disciples employed two methods of teaching: one sensuous, pictorial, drawn from the sphere of Jewish ideas, by which they adapted their meaning to the understanding of the multitude, and endeavoured to raise them to a higher way of thinking; and alongside of that a purely spiritual teaching which was independent of that kind of imagery. Both methods of teaching continued to be used side by side, because there were always contemporary representatives of the two degrees of capability and the two kinds of temperament. “This is historically so certain that the Fragmentist's attack must inevitably be defeated at this point, because he takes account only of the sensuous representation.” But his attack was not defeated. What happened was that, owing to the respect in which Semler was held, and the absolute incapacity of contemporary theology to overtake the long stride forward made by Reimarus, his work was neglected, and the stimulus which it was capable of imparting failed to take effect. He had no predecessors; neither had he any disciples. His work is one of those supremely great works which pass and leave no trace, because they are before their time; to which later generations pay a just tribute of admiration, but owe no gratitude. Indeed it would be truer to say that Reimarus hung a mill-stone about the neck of the rising theological science of his time. He avenged himself on Semler by shaking his faith in historical theology and even in the freedom of science in general. By the end of the eighth decade of the century the Halle professor was beginning to retrace his steps, was becoming more and more disloyal to the cause which he had formerly served; and he finally went so far as to give his approval to Wöllner's edict for the regulation of religion (1788). His friends attributed this change of front to senility—he died 1791.
Thus the magnificent overture in which are announced all the motifs of the future historical treatment of the life of Jesus breaks off with a sudden discord, remains isolated and incomplete, and leads to nothing further.
III. The Lives Of Jesus Of The Earlier Rationalism
Johann Jakob Hess. Geschichte der drei letzten Lebensjahre Jesu. (History of the Last Three Years of the Life of Jesus.) 3 vols., 1400 pp. Leipzig-Zurich, 1768-1772; 3rd ed., 1774 ff.; 7th ed., 1823 ff.
Franz Volkmar Reinhard. Versuch über den Plan, welchen der Stifter der christlichen Religion zum Besten der Menschheit entwarf. (Essay upon the Plan which the Founder of the Christian Religion adopted for the Benefit of Mankind.) 500 pp. 1781; 4th ed., 1798; 5th ed., 1830. Our account is based on the 4th ed. The 5th contains supplementary matter by Heubner.
Ernst August Opitz. Preacher at Zscheppelin. Geschichte und Characterzüge Jesu. (History of Jesus, with a Delineation of His Character.) Jena and Leipzig, 1812. 488 pp.
Johann Adolph Jakobi. Superintendent at Waltershausen. Die Geschichte Jesu für denkende und gemütvolle Leser, 1816. (The History of Jesus for thoughtful and sympathetic readers.) A second volume, containing the history of the apostolic age, followed in 1818.
Johann Gottfried Herder. Vom Erlöser der Menschen. Nach unsern drei ersten Evangelien. (The Redeemer of men, as portrayed in our first three Gospels.) 1796. Von Gottes Sohn, der Welt Heiland. Nach Johannes Evangelium. (The Son of God, the Saviour of the World, as portrayed by John's Gospel.) Accompanied by a rule for the harmonisation of our Gospels on the basis of their origin and order. Riga, published by Hartknoch, 1797. See Herder's complete works, ed. Suphan, vol. xix.
That thorough-going theological rationalism which accepts only so much of religion as can justify itself at the bar of reason, and which conceives and represents the origin of religion in accordance with this principle, was preceded by a rationalism less complete, as yet not wholly dissociated from a simple-minded supernaturalism. Its point of view is one at which it is almost impossible for the modern man to place himself. Here, in a single consciousness, orthodoxy and rationalism lie stratified in successive layers. Here, to change the metaphor, rationalism surrounds religion without touching it, and, like a lake surrounding some ancient castle, mirrors its image with curious refractions.
This half-developed rationalism was conscious of an impulse—it is the first time in the history of theology that this impulse [pg 028] manifests itself—to write the Life of Jesus; at first without any suspicion whither this undertaking would lead it. No rude hands were to be laid upon the doctrinal conception of Jesus; at least these writers had no intention of laying hands upon it. Their purpose was simply to gain a clearer view of the course of our Lord's earthly and human life. The theologians who undertook this task thought of themselves as merely writing an historical supplement to the life of the God-Man Jesus. These “Lives” are, therefore, composed according to the prescription of the “good old gentleman” who in 1829 advised the young Hase to treat first of the divine, and then of the human side of the life of Jesus.
The battle about miracle had not yet begun. But miracle no longer plays a part of any importance; it is a firmly established principle that the teaching of Jesus, and religion in general, hold their place solely in virtue of their inner reasonableness, not by the support of outward evidence.
The only thing that is really rationalistic in these older works is the treatment of the teaching of Jesus. Even those that retain the largest share of supernaturalism are as completely undogmatic as the more advanced in their reproduction of the discourses of the Great Teacher. All of them make it a principle to lose no opportunity of reducing the number of miracles; where they can explain a miracle by natural causes, they do not hesitate for a moment. But the deliberate rejection of all miracles, the elimination of everything supernatural which intrudes itself into the life of Jesus, is still to seek. That principle was first consistently carried through by Paulus. With these earlier writers it depends on the degree of enlightenment of the individual whether the irreducible minimum of the supernatural is larger or smaller.
Moreover, the period of this older rationalism, like every period when human thought has been strong and vigorous, is wholly unhistorical. What it is looking for is not the past, but itself in the past. For it, the problem of the life of Jesus is solved the moment it succeeds in bringing Jesus near to its own time, in portraying Him as the great teacher of virtue, and showing that His teaching is identical with the intellectual truth which rationalism deifies.
The temporal limits of this half-and-half rationalism are difficult to define. For the historical study of the life of Jesus the first landmark which it offers is the work of Hess, which appeared in 1768. But it held its ground for a long time side by side with rationalism proper, which failed to drive it from the field. A seventh edition of Hess's Life of Jesus appeared as late as 1823; while a fifth edition of Reinhard's work saw the light in 1830. And when Strauss struck the death-blow of out-and-out rationalism, the half-and-half rationalism did not perish with it, but allied itself [pg 029] with the neo-supernaturalism which Strauss's treatment of the life of Jesus had called into being; and it still prolongs an obscure existence in a certain section of conservative literature, though it has lost its best characteristics, its simple-mindedness and honesty.
These older rationalistic Lives of Jesus are, from the aesthetic point of view, among the least pleasing of all theological productions. The sentimentality of the portraiture is boundless. Boundless, also, and still more objectionable, is the want of respect for the language of Jesus. He must speak in a rational and modern fashion, and accordingly all His utterances are reproduced in a style of the most polite modernity. None of the speeches are allowed to stand as they were spoken; they are taken to pieces, paraphrased, and expanded, and sometimes, with the view of making them really lively, they are recast in the mould of a freely invented dialogue. In all these Lives of Jesus, not a single one of His sayings retains its authentic form.
And yet we must not be unjust to these writers. What they aimed at was to bring Jesus near to their own time, and in so doing they became the pioneers of the historical study of His life. The defects of their work in regard to aesthetic feeling and historical grasp are outweighed by the attractiveness of the purposeful, unprejudiced thinking which here awakens, stretches itself, and begins to move with freedom.
Johann Jakob Hess was born in 1741 and died in 1828. After working as a curate for seventeen years he became one of the assistant clergy at the Frauminster at Zurich, and later “Antistes,” president, of the cantonal synod. In this capacity he guided the destinies of the Church in Zurich safely through the troublous times of the Revolution. He was not a deep thinker, but was well read and not without ability. As a man, he did splendid work.
His Life of Jesus still keeps largely to the lines of a paraphrase of the Gospels; indeed, he calls it a paraphrasing history. It is based upon a harmonizing combination of the four Gospels. The matter of the Synoptic narratives is, as in all the Lives of Jesus prior to Strauss—with the sole exception of Herder's—fitted more or less arbitrarily into the intervals between the Passovers in the fourth Gospel.
In regard to miracles, he admits that these are a stumbling-block. But they are essential to the Gospel narrative and to revelation; had Jesus been only a moral teacher and not the Son of God they would not have been necessary. We must be careful, however, not to prize miracles for their own sake, but to look primarily to their ethical teaching. It was, he remarks, the mistake of the Jews to regard all the acts of Jesus solely from the point of view of their strange and miraculous character, and to forget their moral teaching; whereas we, from distaste for miracle as such, run the risk of [pg 030] excluding from the Gospel history events which are bound up with the Gospel revelation.
Above all, we must retain the supernatural birth and the bodily resurrection, because on the former depends the sinlessness of Jesus, on the latter the certainty of the general resurrection of the dead. The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness was a stratagem of Satan by which he hoped to discover “whether Jesus of Nazareth was really so extraordinary a person that he would have cause to fear Him.” The resurrection of Lazarus is authentic.
But the Gospel narrative is rationalised whenever it can be done. It was not the demons, but the Gadarene demoniacs themselves, who rushed among the swine. Alarmed by their fury the whole herd plunged over the precipice into the lake and were drowned; while by this accommodation to the fixed idea of the demoniacs, Jesus effected their cure. Perhaps, too, Hess conjectures, the Lord desired to test the Gadarenes, and to see whether they would attach greater importance to the good deed done to two of their number than to the loss of their swine. This explanation, reinforced by its moral, held its ground in theology for some sixty years and passed over into a round dozen Lives of Jesus.
This plan of “presenting each occurrence in such a way that what is valuable and instructive in it immediately strikes the eye” is followed out by Hess so faithfully that all clearness of impression is destroyed. The parables are barely recognisable, swathed, as they are, in the mummy-wrappings of his paraphrase; and in most cases their meaning is completely travestied by the ethical or historical allusions which he finds in them. The parable of the pounds is explained as referring to a man who went, like Archelaus, to Rome to obtain the kingship, while his subjects intrigued behind his back.
Of the peculiar beauty of the speech of Jesus not a trace remains. The parable of the Sower, for instance, begins: “A countryman went to sow his field, which lay beside a country-road, and was here and there rather rocky, and in some places weedy, but in general was well cultivated, and had a good sort of soil.” The beatitude upon the mourners appears in the following guise: “Happy are they who amid the adversities of the present make the best of things and submit themselves with patience; for such men, if they do not see better times here, shall certainly elsewhere receive comfort and consolation.” The question addressed by the Pharisees to John the Baptist, and his answer, are given dialogue-wise, in fustian of this kind:—The Pharisees: “We are directed to enquire of you, in the name of our president, who you profess to be? As people are at present expecting the Messiah, and seem not indisposed to accept you in that capacity, we are the more anxious that you should declare yourself with regard to your vocation and person.” [pg 031] John: “The conclusion might have been drawn from my discourses that I was not the Messiah. Why should people attribute such lofty pretensions to me?” etc. In order to give the Gospels the true literary flavour, a characterisation is tacked on to each of the persons of the narrative. In the case of the disciples, for instance, this runs: “They had sound common sense, but very limited insight; the capacity to receive teaching, but an incapacity for reflective thought; a knowledge of their own weakness, but a difficulty in getting rid of old prejudices; sensibility to right feeling, but weakness in following out a pre-determined moral plan.”
The simplest occurrences give occasion for sentimental portraiture. The saying “Except ye become as little children” is introduced in the following fashion: “Jesus called a boy who was standing near. The boy came. Jesus took his hand and told him to stand beside Him, nearer than any of His disciples, so that he had the foremost place among them. Then Jesus threw His arm round the boy and pressed him tenderly to His breast. The disciples looked on in astonishment, wondering what this meant. Then He explained to them,” etc. In these expansions Hess does not always escape the ludicrous. The saying of Jesus in John x. 9, “I am the door,” takes on the following form: “No one, whether he be sheep or shepherd, can come into the fold (if, that is to say, he follows the right way) except in so far as he knows me and is admitted by me, and included among the flock.”
Reinhard's work is on a distinctly higher level. The author was born in 1753. In 1792, after he had worked for fourteen years as Docent in Wittenberg, he was appointed Senior Court Chaplain at Dresden. He died in 1812.
“I am, as you know, a very prosaic person,” writes Reinhard to a friend, and in these words he has given an admirable characterisation of himself. The writers who chiefly appeal to him are the ancient moralists; he acknowledges that he has learned more from them than from a “collegium homileticum.” In his celebrated “System of Christian Ethics” (5 vols., 1788-1815) he makes copious use of them. His sermons—they fill thirty-five volumes, and in their day were regarded as models—show some power and depth of thought, but are all cast in the same mould. He seems to have been haunted by a fear that it might some time befall him to admit into his mind a thought which was mystical or visionary, not justifiable by the laws of logic and the canons of the critical reason. With all his philosophising and rationalising, however, certain pillars of the supernaturalistic view of history remain for him immovable.
At first sight one might be inclined to suppose that he frankly shared the belief in miracle. He mentions the raising of the [pg 032] widow's son, and of Lazarus, and accepts as an authentic saying the command of the risen Jesus to baptize all nations. But if we look more closely, we find that he deliberately brings very few miracles into his narrative, and the definition by which he disintegrates the conception of miracle from within leaves no doubt as to his own position. What he says is this: “All that which we call miraculous and supernatural is to be understood as only relatively so, and implies nothing further than an obvious exception to what can be brought about by natural causes, so far as we know them and have experience of their capacity. A cautious thinker will not venture in any single instance to pronounce an event to be so extraordinary that God could not have brought it about by the use of secondary causes, but must have intervened directly.”
The case stands similarly with regard to the divinity of Christ. Reinhard assumes it, but his “Life” is not directed to prove it; it leads only to the conclusion that the Founder of Christianity is to be regarded as a wonderful “divine” teacher. In order to prove His uniqueness, Reinhard has to show that His plan for the welfare of mankind was something incomparably higher than anything which hero or sage has ever striven for. Reinhard makes the first attempt to give an account of the teaching of Jesus which should be historical in the sense that all dogmatic considerations should be excluded. “Above all things, let us collect and examine the indications which we find in the writings of His companions regarding the designs which He had in view.”
The plan of Jesus shows its greatness above all in its universality. Reinhard is well aware of the difficulty raised in this connexion by those sayings which assert the prerogative of Israel, and he discusses them at length. He finds the solution in the assumption that Jesus in His own lifetime naturally confined Himself to working among His own people, and was content to indicate the future universal development of His plan.
With the intention “of introducing a universal change, tending to the benefit of the whole human race,” Jesus attaches His teaching to the Jewish eschatology. It is only the form of His teaching, however, which is affected by this, since He gives an entirely different significance to the terms Kingdom of Heaven and Kingdom of God, referring them to a universal ethical reorganisation of mankind. But His plan was entirely independent of politics. He never based His claims upon His Davidic descent. This was, indeed, the reason why He held aloof from His family. Even the entry into Jerusalem had no Messianic significance. His plan was so entirely non-political that He would, on the contrary, have welcomed the severance of all connexion between the state and religion, in order to avoid the risk of a conflict between these two powers. Reinhard explains the voluntary death of Jesus as due to [pg 033] this endeavour. “He quitted the stage of the world by so early and shameful a death because He wished to destroy at once and for ever the mistaken impression that He was aiming at the foundation of an earthly kingdom, and to turn the thoughts, wishes, and efforts of His disciples and companions into another channel.”
In order to make the Kingdom of God a practical reality, it was necessary for Him to dissociate it from all the forces of this world, and to bring morality and religion into the closest connexion. “The law of love was the indissoluble bond by which Jesus for ever united morality with religion.” “Moral instruction was the principal content and the very essence of all His discourses.” His efforts “were directed to the establishment of a purely ethical organisation.”
It was important, therefore, to overthrow superstition and to bring religion within the domain of reason. First of all the priesthood must be deprived for ever of its influence. Then an improvement of the social condition of mankind must be introduced, since the level of morality depends upon social conditions. Jesus was a social reformer. Through the attainment of “the highest perfection of which Society is capable, universal peace” was “gradually to be brought about.”
But the point of primary importance for Him was the alliance of religion with reason. Reason was to maintain its freedom by the aid of religion, and religion was not to be withdrawn from the critical judgment of reason: all things were to be tested, and only the best retained.
“From these data it is easy to determine the characteristics of a religion which is to be the religion of all mankind: it must be ethical, intelligible, and spiritual.”
After the plan of Jesus has been expounded on these lines, Reinhard shows, in the second part of his work, that, prior to Jesus, no great man of antiquity had devised a plan of beneficence of a scope commensurate with the whole human race. In the third part the conclusion is drawn that Jesus is the uniquely divine Teacher.
But before the author can venture to draw this conclusion, he feels it necessary first to show that the plan of Jesus was no chimera. If we were obliged to admit its impracticability Jesus would have to be ranked with the visionaries and enthusiasts; and these, however noble and virtuous, can only injure the cause of rational religion. “Visionary enthusiasm and enlightened reason—who that knows anything of the human mind can conceive these two as united in a single soul?” But Jesus was no visionary enthusiast. “With what calmness, self-mastery, and cool determination does He think out and pursue His divine purpose?” By the truths which He revealed and declared to be divine communications He [pg 034] did not desire to put pressure upon the human mind, but only to guide it. “It would be impossible to show a more conscientious respect and a more delicate consideration for the rights of human reason than is shown by Jesus. He will conquer only by convincing.” “He is willing to bear with contradiction, and condescends to meet the most irrational objections and the most ill-natured misrepresentations with the most incredible patience.”
It was well for Reinhard that he had no suspicion how full of enthusiasm Jesus was, and how He trod reason under His feet!
But what kind of relation was there between this rational religion taught by Jesus and the Christian theology which Reinhard accepted? How does he harmonise the symbolical view of Baptism and the Lord's Supper which he here expounds with ecclesiastical doctrine? How does he pass from the conception of the divine teacher to that of the Son of God?
This is a question which he does not feel himself obliged to answer. For him the one circle of thought revolves freely within the other, but they never come into contact with each other.
So far as concerns the presentation of the teaching, the Life of Jesus by Opitz follows the same lines as that of Reinhard. It is disfigured, however, by a number of lapses of taste, and by a crass supernaturalism in the description of the miracles and experiences of the Great Teacher.
Jakobi writes “for thoughtful and sympathetic readers.” He recognises that much of the miraculous is a later addition to the facts, but he has a rooted distrust of thoroughgoing rationalism, “whose would-be helpful explanations are often stranger than the miracles themselves.” A certain amount of miracle must be maintained, but not for the purpose of founding belief upon it: “the miracles were not intended to authenticate the teaching of Jesus, but to surround His life with a guard of honour.”[20]
Whether Herder, in his two Lives of Jesus, is to be classed with the older rationalists is a question to which the answer must be “Yes, and No,” as in the case of every attempt to classify those men of lonely greatness who stand apart from their contemporaries, but who nevertheless are not in all points in advance of them.
Properly speaking, he has really nothing to do with the rationalists, since he is distinguished from them by the depth of his insight and his power of artistic apprehension, and he is far from sharing their lack of taste. Further, his horizon embraces problems of which rationalism, even in its developed form, never [pg 035] came in sight. He recognises that all attempts to harmonise the Synoptists with John are unavailing; a conclusion which he had avowed earlier in his “Letters referring to the Study of Theology.”[21] He grasps this incompatibility, it is true, rather by the aid of poetic, than of critical insight. “Since they cannot be united,” he writes in his “Life of Jesus according to John,” “they must be left standing independently, each evangelist with his own special merit. Man, Ox, Lion, and Eagle, they advance together, supporting the throne of glory, but they refuse to coalesce into a single form, to unite into a Diatessaron.” But to him belongs the honour of being the first and the only scholar, prior to Strauss, to recognise that the life of Jesus can be construed either according to the Synoptists, or according to John, but that a Life of Jesus based on the four Gospels is a monstrosity. In view of this intuitive historical grasp, it is not surprising that the commentaries of the theologians were an abomination to him.
The fourth Gospel is, in his view, not a primitive historical source, but a protest against the narrowness of the “Palestinian Gospels.” It gives free play, as the circumstances of the time demanded, to Greek ideas. “There was need, in addition to those earlier, purely historical Gospels, of a Gospel at once theological and historical, like that of John,” in which Jesus should be presented, not as the Jewish Messiah, “but as the Saviour of the World.”
The additions and omissions of this Gospel are alike skilfully planned. It retains only those miracles which are symbols of a continuous permanent miracle, through which the Saviour of the World works constantly, unintermittently, among men. The Johannine miracles are not there for their own sakes. The cures of demoniacs are not even represented among them. These had no interest for the Graeco-Roman world, and the Evangelist was unwilling “that this Palestinian superstition should become a permanent feature of Christianity, to be a reproach of scoffers or a belief of the foolish.” His recording of the raising of Lazarus is, in spite of the silence of the Synoptists, easily explicable. The latter could not yet tell the story “without exposing a family which was still living near Jerusalem to the fury of that hatred which had sworn with an oath to put Lazarus to death.” John, however, could recount it without scruple, “for by this time Jerusalem was probably in ruins, and the hospitable family of Bethany were perhaps already with their Friend in the other world.” This most naïve of explanations is reproduced in a whole series of Lives of Jesus.
In dealing with the Synoptists, Herder grasps the problem with [pg 036] the same intuitive insight. Mark is no epitomist, but the creator of the archetype of the Synoptic representation. “The Gospel of Mark is not an epitome; it is an original Gospel. What the others have, and he has not, has been added by them, not omitted by him. Consequently Mark is a witness to an original, shorter Gospel-scheme, to which the additional matter of the others ought properly to be regarded as a supplement.”
Mark is the “unornamented central column, or plain foundation stone, on which the others rest.” The birth-stories of Matthew and Luke are “a new growth to meet new needs.” The different tendencies, also, point to a later period. Mark is still comparatively friendly towards the Jews, because Christianity had not yet separated itself from Judaism. Matthew is more hostile towards them because his Gospel was written at a time when Christians had given up the hope of maintaining amicable relations with the Jews and were groaning under the pressure of persecution. It is for that reason that the Jesus of the Matthaean discourses lays so much stress upon His second coming, and presupposes the rejection of the Jewish nation as something already in being, a sign of the approaching end.
Pure history, however, is as little to be looked for in the first three Gospels as in the fourth. They are the sacred epic of Jesus the Messiah, and model the history of their hero upon the prophetic words of the Old Testament. In this view, also, Herder is a precursor of Strauss.
In essence, however, Herder represents a protest of art against theology. The Gospels, if we are to find the life of Jesus in them, must be read, not with pedantic learning, but with taste. From this point of view, miracles cease to offend. Neither Old Testament prophecies, nor predictions of Jesus, nor miracles, can be adduced as evidence for the Gospel; the Gospel is its own evidence. The miracles stand outside the possibility of proof, and belong to mere “Church belief,” which ought to lose itself more and more in the pure Gospel. Yet miracles, in a limited sense, are to be accepted on the ground of the historic evidence. To refuse to admit this is to be like the Indian king who denied the existence of ice because he had never seen anything like it. Jesus, in order to help His miracle-loving age, reconciled Himself to the necessity of performing miracles. But, in any case, the reality of a miracle is of small moment in comparison with its symbolic value.
In this, therefore, Herder, though in his grasp of many problems he was more than a generation in advance of his time, belongs to the primitive rationalists. He allows the supernatural to intrude into the events of the life of Jesus, and does not feel that the adoption of the historical standpoint involves the necessity of doing away with miracle. He contributed much to the clearing up of [pg 037] ideas, but by evading the question of miracle he slurred over a difficulty which needed to be faced and solved before it should be possible to entertain the hope of forming a really historical conception of the life of Jesus. In reading Herder one is apt to fancy that it would be possible to pass straight on to Strauss. In reality, it was necessary that a very prosaic spirit, Paulus, should intervene, and should attack the question of miracle from a purely historical standpoint, before Strauss could give expression to the ideas of Herder in an effectual way, i.e. in such a way as to produce offence. The fact is that in theology the most revolutionary ideas are swallowed quite readily so long as they smooth their passage by a few small concessions. It is only when a spicule of bone stands out obstinately and causes choking that theology begins to take note of dangerous ideas. Strauss is Herder with just that little bone sticking out—the absolute denial of miracle on historical grounds. That is to say, Strauss is a Herder who has behind him the uncompromising rationalism of Paulus.
IV. The Earliest Fictitious Lives Of Jesus
Karl Friedrich Bahrdt. Briefe über die Bibel im Volkston. Eine Wochenschrift von einem Prediger auf dem Lande. (Popular Letters about the Bible. A weekly paper by a country clergyman.) J. Fr. Dost, Halle, 1782. 816 pp.
Ausführung des Plans und Zwecks Jesu. In Briefen an Wahrheit suchende Leser. (An Explanation of the Plans and Aims of Jesus. In letters addressed to readers who seek the truth.) 11 vols., embracing 3000 pp. August Mylius, Berlin, 1784-1792. This work is a sequel to the Popular Letters about the Bible.
Die sämtlichen Reden Jesu aus den Evangelisten ausgezogen. (The Whole of the Discourses of Jesus, extracted from the Gospels.) Berlin, 1786.
Karl Heinrich Venturini. Natürliche Geschichte des grossen Propheten von Nazareth. (A Non-supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth.) Bethlehem (Copenhagen), 1st ed., 1800-1802; 2nd ed., 1806. 4 vols., embracing 2700 pp. The work appeared anonymously. The description given below is based on the 2nd ed., which shows dependence, in some of the exegetical details, upon the then recently published commentaries of Paulus.
It is strange to notice how often in the history of our subject a few imperfectly equipped free-lances have attacked and attempted to carry the decisive positions before the ordered ranks of professional theology have pushed their advance to these decisive points.
Thus, it was the fictitious “Lives” of Bahrdt and Venturini which, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, first attempted to apply, with logical consistency, a non-supernatural interpretation to the miracle stories of the Gospel. Further, these writers were the first who, instead of contenting themselves with the simple reproduction of the successive sections of the Gospel narrative, endeavoured to grasp the inner connexion of cause and effect in the events and experiences of the life of Jesus. Since they found no such connexion indicated in the Gospels, they had to supply it for themselves. The particular form which their explanation takes—the hypothesis of a secret society of which Jesus is the tool—is, it is true, rather a sorry makeshift. Yet, in a sense, these Lives of Jesus, for all their colouring of fiction, are the first which deserve the name. The rationalists, and even Paulus, confine themselves to describing the teaching of Jesus; Bahrdt and Venturini make a bold attempt to paint the portrait of Jesus Himself. It is [pg 039] not surprising that their portraiture is at once crude and fantastic, like the earliest attempts of art to represent the human figure in living movement.
Karl Friedrich Bahrdt was born in 1741 at Bischofswerda. Endowed with brilliant abilities, he made, owing to a bad upbringing and an undisciplined sensuous nature, a miserable failure. After being first Catechist and afterwards Professor Extraordinary of Sacred Philology at Leipzig, he was, in 1766, requested to resign on account of scandalous life. After various adventures, and after holding for a time a professorship at Giessen, he received under Frederick's minister Zedlitz authorisation to lecture at Halle. There he lectured to nearly nine hundred students who were attracted by his inspiring eloquence. The government upheld him, in spite of his serious failings, with the double motive of annoying the faculty and maintaining the freedom of learning. After the death of Frederick the Great, Bahrdt had to resign his post, and took to keeping an inn at a vineyard near Halle. By ridiculing Wöllner's edict (1788), he brought on himself a year of confinement in a fortress. He died in disrepute, in 1792.
Bahrdt had begun as an orthodox cleric. In Halle he gave up his belief in revelation, and endeavoured to explain religion on the ground of reason. To this period belong the “Popular Letters about the Bible,” which were afterwards continued in the further series, “An Explanation of the Plans and Aims of Jesus.”
His treatment of the life of Jesus has been too severely censured. The work is not without passages which show a real depth of feeling, especially in the continually recurring explanations regarding the relation of belief in miracle to true faith, in which the actual description of the life of Jesus lies embedded. And the remarks about the teaching of Jesus are not always commonplace. But the paraphernalia of dialogues of portentous length make it, as a whole, formless and inartistic. The introduction of a galaxy of imaginary characters—Haram, Schimah, Avel, Limmah, and the like—is nothing less than bewildering.
Bahrdt finds the key to the explanation of the life of Jesus in the appearance in the Gospel narrative of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. They are not disciples of Jesus, but belong to the upper classes; what rôle, then, can they have played in the life of Jesus, and how came they to intercede on His behalf? They were Essenes. This Order had secret members in all ranks of society, even in the Sanhedrin. It had set itself the task of detaching the nation from its sensuous Messianic hopes and leading it to a higher knowledge of spiritual truths. It had the most widespread ramifications, extending to Babylon and to Egypt. In order to deliver the people from the limitations of the national faith, which could only lead to disturbance and insurrection, they must find a [pg 040] Messiah who would destroy these false Messianic expectations. They were therefore on the look-out for a claimant of the Messiahship whom they could make subservient to their aims.
Jesus came under the notice of the Order immediately after His birth. As a child He was watched over at every step by the Brethren. At the feasts at Jerusalem Alexandrian Jews, secret members of the Essene Order, put themselves into communication with Him, explained to Him the falsity of the priests, inspired Him with a horror of the bloody sacrifices of the Temple, and made him acquainted with Socrates and Plato. This is set forth in dialogues of a hundred pages long. At the story of the death of Socrates, the boy bursts into a tempest of sobs which His friends are unable to calm. He longs to emulate the martyr-death of the great Athenian.
On the market-place at Nazareth a mysterious Persian gives Him two sovereign remedies—one for affections of the eye, the other for nervous disorders.
His father does his best for Him, teaching Him, along with His cousin John, afterwards the Baptist, about virtue and immortality. A priest belonging to the Essene Order, who makes their acquaintance disguised as a shepherd, and takes part in their conversations, leads the lads deeper into the knowledge of wisdom. At twelve years old, Jesus is already so far advanced that He argues with the Scribes in the Temple concerning miracles, maintaining the thesis that they are impossible.
When they feel themselves ready to appear in public the two cousins take counsel together how they can best help the people. They agree to open the eyes of the people regarding the tyranny and hypocrisy of the priests. Through Haram, a prominent member of the Essene Order, Luke the physician is introduced to Jesus and places all his science at His disposal.
In order to produce any effect they were obliged to practise accommodation to the superstitions of the people, and introduce their wisdom to them under the garb of folly, in the hope that, beguiled by its attractive exterior, the people would admit into their minds the revelation of rational truth, and after a time be able to emancipate themselves from superstition. Jesus, therefore, sees Himself obliged to appear in the rôle of the Messiah of popular expectation, and to make up His mind to work by means of miracles and illusions. About this He felt the gravest scruples. He was obliged, however, to obey the Order; and His scruples were quieted by the reminder of the lofty end which was to be reached by these means. At last, when it is pointed out to Him that even Moses had followed the same plan, He submits to the necessity. The influential Order undertakes the duty of stage-managing the miracles, and that of maintaining His father. On the reception of Jesus into the number of the Brethren of the First [pg 041] Degree of the Order it is made known to Him that these Brethren are bound to face death in the cause of the Order; but that the Order, on its part, undertakes so to use the machinery and influence at its disposal that the last extremity shall always be avoided and the Brother mysteriously preserved from death.
Then begins the cleverly staged drama by means of which the people are to be converted to rational religion. The members of the Order are divided into three classes: The Baptized, The Disciples, The Chosen Ones. The Baptized receive only the usual popular teaching; the Disciples are admitted to further knowledge, but are not entrusted with the highest mysteries; the Chosen Ones, who in the Gospels are also spoken of as “Angels,” are admitted into all wisdom. As the Apostles were only members of the Second Degree, they had not the smallest suspicion of the secret machinery which was at work. Their part in the drama of the Life of Jesus was that of zealous “supers.” The Gospels which they composed therefore report, in perfect good faith, miracles which were really clever illusions produced by the Essenes, and they depict the life of Jesus only as seen by the populace from the outside.
It is therefore not always possible for us to discover how the events which they record as miracles actually came about. But whether they took place in one way or another—and as to this we can sometimes get a clue from a hint in the text—it is certain that in all cases the process was natural. With reference to the feeding of the five thousand, Bahrdt remarks: “It is more reasonable here to think of a thousand ways by which Jesus might have had sufficient supplies of bread at hand, and by the distribution of it have shamed the disciples' lack of courage, than to believe in a miracle.” The explanation which he himself prefers is that the Order had collected a great quantity of bread in a cave and this was gradually handed out to Jesus, who stood at the concealed entrance and took some every time the apostles were occupied in distributing the former supply to the multitude. The walking on the sea is to be explained by supposing that Jesus walked towards the disciples over the surface of a great floating raft; while they, not being able to see the raft, must needs suppose a miracle. When Peter tried to walk on the water he failed miserably. The miracles of healing are to be attributed to the art of Luke. He also called the attention of Jesus to remarkable cases of apparent death, which He then took in hand, and restored the apparently dead to their sorrowing friends. In such cases, however, the Lord never failed expressly to inform the disciples that the persons were not really dead. They, however, did not permit this assurance to deprive them of their faith in the miracle which they felt they had themselves witnessed.
In teaching, Jesus had two methods: one, exoteric, simple, for the world; the other, esoteric, mystic, for the initiate. “No attentive reader of the Bible,” says Bahrdt, “can fail to notice that Jesus made use of two different styles of speech. Sometimes He spoke so plainly and in such universally intelligible language, and declared truths so simple and so well adapted to the general comprehension of mankind that even the simplest could follow Him. At other times he spoke so mystically, so obscurely, and in so veiled a fashion that words and thoughts alike baffled the understandings of ordinary people, and even by more practised minds were not to be grasped without close reflection, so that we are told in John vi. 60 that ‘many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?’ And Jesus Himself did not deny it, but only told them that the reason of their not understanding His sayings lay in their prejudices, which made them interpret everything literally and materially, and overlook the ethical meaning which underlay His figurative language.” Most of these mystical discourses are to be found in John, who seems to have preserved for us the greater part of the secret teaching imparted to the initiate. The key to the understanding of this esoteric teaching is to be found, therefore, in the prologue to John's Gospel, and in the sayings about the new birth. “To be born again” is identical with the degree of perfection which was attained in the highest class of the Brotherhood.
The members of the Order met on appointed days in caves among the hills. When we are told in the Gospels that Jesus went alone into a mountain to pray, this means that He repaired to one of these secret gatherings, but the disciples, of course, knew nothing about that. The Order had its hidden caves everywhere; in Galilee as well as in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem.
“Only by sensuous means can sensuous ideas be overcome.” The Jewish Messiah must die and rise again, in order that the false conceptions of the Messiah which were cherished by the multitude might be destroyed in the moment of their fulfilment—that is, might be spiritualised. Nicodemus, Haram, and Luke met in a cave in order to take counsel how they might bring about the death of Jesus in a way favourable to their plans. Luke guaranteed that by the aid of powerful drugs which he would give Him the Lord should be enabled to endure the utmost pain and suffering and yet resist death for a long time. Nicodemus undertook so to work matters in the Sanhedrin that the execution should follow immediately upon the sentence, and the crucified remain only a short time upon the cross. At this moment Jesus rushed into the cave. He had scarcely had time to replace the stone which concealed the entrance, so closely had He been pursued over the rocks by hired assassins. He Himself is firmly resolved [pg 043] to die, but care must be taken that He shall not be simply assassinated, or the whole plan fails. If He falls by the assassin's knife, no resurrection will be possible.
In the end, the piece is staged to perfection. Jesus provokes the authorities by His triumphal Messianic entry. The unsuspected Essenes in the council urge on His arrest and secure His condemnation—though Pilate almost frustrates all their plans by acquitting Him. Jesus, by uttering a loud cry and immediately afterwards bowing His head, shows every appearance of a sudden death. The centurion has been bribed not to allow any of His bones to be broken. Then comes Joseph of Ramath, as Bahrdt prefers to call Joseph of Arimathea, and removes the body to the cave of the Essenes, where he immediately commences measures of resuscitation. As Luke had prepared the body of the Messiah by means of strengthening medicines to resist the fearful ill-usage which He had gone through—the being dragged about and beaten and finally crucified—these efforts were crowned with success. In the cave the most strengthening nutriment was supplied to Him. “Since the humours of the body were in a thoroughly healthy condition, His wounds healed very readily, and by the third day He was able to walk, in spite of the fact that the wounds made by the nails were still open.”
On the morning of the third day they forced away the stone which closed the mouth of the grave. As Jesus was descending the rocky slopes the watch awakened and took to flight in alarm. One of the Essenes appeared, in the garb of an angel, to the women and announced to them the resurrection of Jesus. Shortly afterwards the Lord appeared to Mary. At the sound of His voice she recognises Him. “Thereupon Jesus tells her that He is going to His Father (to heaven—in the mystic sense of the word—that is to say, to the Chosen Ones in their peaceful dwellings of truth and blessedness—to the circle of His faithful friends, among whom He continued to live, unseen by the world, but still working for the advancement of His purpose). He bade her tell His disciples that He was alive.”
From His place of concealment He appeared several times to His disciples. Finally He bade them meet Him at the Mount of Olives, near Bethany, and there took leave of them. After exhorting them, and embracing each of them in turn, He tore Himself away from them and walked away up the mountain. “There stood those poor men, amazed—beside themselves with sorrow—and looked after Him as long as they could. But as He mounted higher, He entered ever deeper into the cloud which lay upon the hill-top, until finally He was no longer to be seen. The cloud received Him out of their sight.”
From the mountain He returned to the chief lodge of the [pg 044] Brotherhood. Only at rare intervals did He again intervene in active life—as on the occasion when He appeared to Paul upon the road to Damascus. But, though unseen, He continued to direct the destinies of the community until His death.
Venturini's “Non-supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth” is related to Bahrdt's work as the finished picture to the sketch.
Karl Heinrich Venturini was born at Brunswick in 1768. On the completion of his theological studies he vainly endeavoured to secure a post as Docent in the theological faculty at Helmstadt, or as Librarian at Wolfenbüttel.
His life was blameless and his personal piety beyond reproach, but he was considered to be too free in his ideas. The Duke of Brunswick was personally well disposed towards him, but did not venture to give him a post on the teaching staff in face of the opposition of the consistories. He was reduced to earning a bare pittance by literary work, and finally in 1806 was thankful to accept a small living in Hordorf near Brunswick. He then abandoned theological writing and devoted his energies to recording the events of contemporary history, of which he published a yearly chronicle—a proceeding which under the Napoleonic régime was not always unattended with risk, as he more than once had occasion to experience. He continued this undertaking till 1841. In 1849 death released him from his tasks.
Venturini's fundamental assumption is that it was impossible, even for the noblest spirit of mankind, to make Himself understood by the Judaism of His time except by clothing His spiritual teaching in a sensuous garb calculated to please the oriental imagination, “and, in general, by bringing His higher spiritual world into such relations with the lower sensuous world of those whom He wished to teach as was necessary to the accomplishment of His aims.” “God's Messenger was morally bound to perform miracles for the Jews. These miracles had an ethical purpose, and were especially designed to counteract the impression made by the supposed miracles of the deceivers of the people, and thus to hasten the overthrow of the kingdom of Satan.”
For modern medical science the miracles are not miraculous. He never healed without medicaments and always carried His “portable medicine chest” with Him. In the case of the Syro-phoenician woman's daughter, for example, we can still detect in the narrative a hint of the actual course of events. The mother explains the case to Jesus. After enquiring where her dwelling was he made a sign to John, and continued to hold her in conversation. The disciple went to the daughter and gave her a sedative, and when the mother returned she found her child cured.
The raisings from the dead were cases of coma. The nature-miracles were due to a profound acquaintance with the powers of Nature and the order of her processes. They involve fore-knowledge rather than control.
Many miracle stories rest on obvious misunderstandings. Nothing could be simpler than the explanation of the miracle at Cana. Jesus had brought with Him as a wedding-gift some jars of good wine and had put them aside in another room. When the wine was finished and His mother became anxious, He still allowed the guests to wait a little, as the stone vessels for purification had not yet been filled with water. When that had been done He ordered the servants to pour out some of his wine, but to tell no one whence it came. When John, as an old man, wrote his Gospel, he got all this rather mixed up—had not indeed observed it very closely at the time, “had perhaps been the least thing merry himself,” says Venturini, and had believed in the miracle with the rest. Perhaps, too, he had not ventured to ask Jesus for an explanation, for he had only become His disciple a few days before.
The members of the Essene Order had watched over the child Jesus even in Egypt. As He grew older they took charge of His education along with that of His cousin, John, and trained them both for their work as deliverers of the people. Whereas the nation as a whole looked to an insurrection as the means of its deliverance, they knew that freedom could only be achieved by means of a spiritual renewal. Once Jesus and John met a band of insurgents: Jesus worked on them so powerfully by His fervid speech that they recognised the impiousness of their purpose. One of them sprang towards Him and laid down his arms; it was Simon, who afterwards became His disciple.
When Jesus was about thirty years old, and, owing to the deep experiences of His inner life, had really far outgrown the aims of the Essene Order, He entered upon His office by demanding baptism from John. Just as this was taking place a thunderstorm broke, and a dove, frightened by the lightning, fluttered round the head of Jesus. Both Jesus and John took this as a sign that the hour appointed by God had come.
The temptations in the wilderness, and upon the pinnacle of the Temple, were due to the machinations of the Pharisee Zadok, who pretended to enter into the plans of Jesus and feigned admiration for Him in order the more surely to entrap Him. It was Zadok, too, who stirred up opposition to Him in the Sanhedrin.
But Jesus did not succeed in destroying the old Messianic belief with its earthly aims. The hatred of the leading circles against Him grew, although He avoided everything “that could offend their prejudices.” It was for this reason that He even forbade His disciples to preach the Gospel beyond the borders of Jewish [pg 046] territory. He paid the temple-tax, also, although he had no fixed abode. When the collector went to Peter about it, the following dialogue took place.
Tax-collector (drawing Peter aside). Tell me, Simon, does the Rabbi pay the didrachma to the Temple treasury, or should we not trouble Him about it?
Peter. Why shouldn't He pay it? Why do you ask?
Tax-collector. It's been owing from both of you since last Nisan, as our books show. We did not like to remind your Master, out of reverence.
Peter. I'll tell Him at once. He will certainly pay the tax. You need have no fear about that.
Tax-collector. That's good. That will put everything straight, and we shall have no trouble over our accounts. Good-bye!
When Jesus hears of it He commands Peter to go and catch a fish, and to take care, in removing the hook, not to tear its mouth, that it may be fit for salting (!) In that case it will doubtless be worth a stater.
The time arrived when an important move must be made. In full conclave of the Secret Society it was resolved that Jesus should go up to Jerusalem and there publicly proclaim Himself as the Messiah. Then He was to endeavour to disabuse the people of their earthly Messianic expectations.
The triumphal entry succeeded. The whole people hailed Him with acclamations. But when He tried to substitute for their picture of the Messiah one of a different character, and spoke of times of severe trial which should come upon all, when He showed Himself but seldom in the Temple, instead of taking His place at the head of the people, they began to doubt Him.
Jesus was suddenly arrested and put to death. Here, then, the death is not, as in Bahrdt, a piece of play-acting, stage-managed by the Secret Society. Jesus really expected to die, and only to meet His disciples again in the eternal life of the other world. But when He so soon gave up the ghost, Joseph of Arimathea was moved by some vague premonition to hasten at once to Pontius Pilate and make request for His body. He offers the Procurator money. Pilate (sternly and emphatically): “Dost thou also mistake me? Am I, then, such an insatiable miser? Still, thou art a Jew—how could this people do me justice? Know, then, that a Roman can honour true nobility wherever he may find it. (He sits down and writes some words on a strip of parchment.) Give this to the captain of the guard. Thou shall be permitted to remove the body. I ask nothing for this. It is granted to thee freely.”
“A tender embrace from his wife rewarded the noble deed of the Roman, while Joseph left the Praetorium, and with Nicodemus, who was impatiently awaiting him, hastened to Golgotha.” There [pg 047] he received the body; he washed it, anointed it with spices, and laid it on a bed of moss in the rock-hewn grave. From the blood which was still flowing from the wound in the side, he ventured to draw a hopeful augury, and sent word to the Essene Brethren. They had a hold close by, and promised to watch over the body. In the first four-and-twenty hours no movement of life showed itself. Then came the earthquake. In the midst of the terrible commotion a Brother, in the white robes of the Order, was making his way to the grave by a secret path. When he, illumined by a flash of lightning, suddenly appeared above the grave, and at the same moment the earth shook violently, panic seized the watch, and they fled. In the morning the Brother hears a sound from the grave: Jesus is moving. The whole Order hastens to the spot, and Jesus is removed to their Lodge. Two brethren remain at the grave—these were the “angels” whom the women saw later. Jesus, in the dress of a gardener, is afterwards recognised by Mary Magdalene. Later, He comes out at intervals from the hiding-place, where He is kept by the Brethren, and appears to the disciples. After forty days He took His leave of them: His strength was exhausted. The farewell scene gave rise to the mistaken impression of His Ascension.
From the historical point of view these lives are not such contemptible performances as might be supposed. There is much penetrating observation in them. Bahrdt and Venturini are right in feeling that the connexion of events in the life of Jesus has to be discovered; the Gospels give only a series of occurrences, and offer no explanation why they happened just as they did. And if, in making Jesus subservient to the plans of a secret society, they represented Him as not acting with perfect freedom, but as showing a certain passivity, this assumption of theirs was to be brilliantly vindicated, a hundred years later, by the eschatological school, which asserts the same remarkable passivity on the part of Jesus, in that He allows His actions to be determined, not indeed by a secret society, but by the eschatological plan of God. Bahrdt and Venturini were the first to see that, of all Jesus' acts, His death was most distinctively His own, because it was by this that He purposed to found the kingdom.
Venturini's “Non-supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth” may almost be said to be reissued annually down to the present day, for all the fictitious “Lives” go back directly or indirectly to the type which he created. It is plagiarised more freely than any other Life of Jesus, although practically unknown by name.
V. Fully Developed Rationalism—Paulus
Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus. Das Leben Jesu als Grundlage einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums. Heidelberg, C. F. Winter. (The Life of Jesus as the Basis of a purely Historical Account of Early Christianity.) 1828. 2 vols., 1192 pp.
Freut euch mit Gottesandacht, wenn es gewährt euch ist,
Dem, so kurz er war, weltumschaffenden Lebensgang
Nach Jahrhunderten fern zu folgen,
Denket, glaubet, folget des Vorbildes Spur!
(Closing words of vol. ii.)
(Rejoice with grateful devotion, if unto you 'tis permitted,
After the lapse of centuries, still to follow afar off
That Life which, short as it was, changed the course of the ages;
Think ye well, and believe; follow the path of our Pattern.)
Paulus was not the mere dry-as-dust rationalist that he is usually represented to have been, but a man of very versatile abilities. His limitation was that, like Reinhard, he had an unconquerable distrust of anything that went outside the boundaries of logical thought. That was due in part to the experiences of his youth. His father, a deacon in Leonberg, half-mystic, half-rationalist, had secret difficulties about the doctrine of immortality, and made his wife promise on her death-bed that, if it were possible, she would appear to him after her death in bodily form. After she was dead he thought he saw her raise herself to a sitting posture, and again sink down. From that time onwards he firmly believed himself to be in communication with departed spirits, and he became so dominated by this idea that in 1771 he had to be removed from his office. His children suffered sorely from a régime of compulsory spiritualism, which pressed hardest upon Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, born in 1761, who, for the sake of peace, was obliged to pretend to his father that he was in communication with his mother's spirit.
He himself had inherited only the rationalistic side of his father's temperament. As a student at the Tübingen Stift (theological institute) he formed his views on the writings of [pg 049] Semler and Michaelis. In 1789 he was called to Jena as Professor of Oriental Languages, and succeeded in 1793 to the third ordinary professorship of theology. The naturalistic interpretation of miracles which he upheld in his commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, published in 1800-1802, aroused the indignation of the consistories of Meiningen and Eisenach. But their petition for his removal from the professorship was unsuccessful, since Herder, who was president of the consistorium, used his influence to protect him. In 1799 Paulus, as Pro-rector, used his influence on behalf of his colleague Fichte, who was attacked on the ground of atheism; but in vain, owing to the passionate conduct of the accused.
With Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland, Paulus and his wife, a lively lady of some literary talents, stood in the most friendly relations.
When the Jena circle began to break up, he accepted, in 1803, an invitation from the Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian Joseph II., to go to Würzburg as Konsistorialrat and professor. There the liberal minister, Montgelas, was desirous of establishing a university founded on the principles of illuminism—Schelling, Hufeland, and Schleiermacher were among those whom he contemplated appointing as Docents. Here the Catholic theological students were obliged to attend the lectures of the Protestant professor of theology, as there were no Protestants to form an audience. His first course was on “Encyclopädie” (i.e. introduction to the literature of theology).
The plan failed. Paulus resigned his professorship and became in 1807 a member of the Bavarian educational council (Schulrat). In this capacity he worked at the reorganisation of the Bavarian school system at the time when Hegel was similarly engaged. He gave four years to this task, which he felt to be laid upon him as a duty. Then, in 1811, he went to Heidelberg as professor of theology; and he remained there until his death, in 1851, at the age of ninety. One of his last sayings, a few hours before he died, was, “I am justified before God, through my desire to do right.” His last words were, “There is another world.”
The forty years of his Heidelberg period were remarkably productive; there was no department of knowledge on which he did not write. He expressed his views about homoeopathy, about the freedom of the Press, about academic freedom, and about the duelling nuisance. In 1831, he wrote upon the Jewish Question; and there the veteran rationalist showed himself a bitter anti-Semite, and brought upon himself the scorn of Heine. On politics and constitutional questions he fought for his opinions so openly and manfully that he had to be warned to be more discreet. In philosophy he took an especially keen interest. When in Jena he had, in conjunction with Schiller, busied himself in the study [pg 050] of Kant. He did a particularly meritorious service in preparing an edition of Spinoza's writings, with a biography of that thinker, in 1803, at the time when neo-Spinozism was making its influence felt in German philosophy. He constituted himself the special guardian of philosophy, and the moment he detected the slightest hint of mysticism, he sounded the alarm. His pet aversion was Schelling, who was born fourteen years later than he, in the very same house at Leonberg, and whom he had met as colleague at Jena and at Würzburg. The works, avowed and anonymous, which he directed against this “charlatan, juggler, swindler, and obscurantist,” as he designated him, fill an entire library.
In 1841, Schelling was called to the chair of philosophy in Berlin, and in the winter of 1841-1842 he gave his lectures on “The Philosophy of Revelation” which caused the Berlin reactionaries to hail him as their great ally. The veteran rationalist—he was eighty years old—was transported with rage. He had had the lectures taken down for him, and he published them with critical remarks under the title “The Philosophy of Revelation at length Revealed, and set forth for General Examination, by Dr. H. E. G. Paulus” (Darmstadt, 1842). Schelling was furious, and dragged “the impudent scoundrel” into a court of law on the charge of illicit publication. In Prussia the book was suppressed. But the courts decided in favour of Paulus, who coolly explained that “the philosophy of Schelling appeared to him an insidious attack upon sound reason, the unmasking of which by every possible means was a work of public utility, nay, even a duty.” He also secured the result at which he aimed; Schelling resigned his lectureship.
In his last days the veteran rationalist was an isolated survival from an earlier age into a period which no longer understood him. The new men reproached him for standing in the old ways; he accused them of a want of honesty. It was just in his immobility and his one-sidedness that his significance lay. By his consistent carrying through of the rationalistic explanation he performed a service to theology more valuable than those who think themselves so vastly his superiors are willing to acknowledge.
His Life of Jesus is awkwardly arranged. The first part gives a historical exposition of the Gospels, section by section. The second part is a synopsis interspersed with supplementary matter. There is no attempt to grasp the life of Jesus as a connected whole. In that respect he is far inferior to Venturini. Strictly regarded, his work is only a harmony of the gospels with explanatory comments, the ground plan of which is taken from the Fourth Gospel.[22]
The main interest centres in the explanations of the miracles, though the author, it must be admitted, endeavoured to guard against this. “It is my chief desire,” he writes in his preface, “that my views regarding the miracle stories should not be taken as by any means the principal thing. How empty would devotion or religion be if one's spiritual well-being depended on whether one believed in miracles or no!” “The truly miraculous thing about Jesus is Himself, the purity and serene holiness of His character, which is, notwithstanding, genuinely human, and adapted to the imitation and emulation of mankind.”
The question of miracle is therefore a subsidiary question. Two points of primary importance are certain from the outset: (1) that unexplained alterations of the course of nature can neither overthrow nor attest a spiritual truth, (2) that everything which happens in nature emanates from the omnipotence of God.
The Evangelists intended to relate miracles; of that there can be no doubt. Nor can any one deny that in their time miracles entered into the plan of God, in the sense that the minds of men were to be astounded and subdued by inexplicable facts. This effect, however, is past. In periods to which the miraculous makes less appeal, in view of the advance in intellectual culture of the nations which have been led to accept Christianity, the understanding must be satisfied if the success of the cause is to be maintained.
Since that which is produced by the laws of nature is really produced by God, the Biblical miracles consist merely in the fact that eyewitnesses report events of which they did not know the secondary causes. Their knowledge of the laws of nature was insufficient to enable them to understand what actually happened. For one who has discovered the secondary causes, the fact remains, as such, but not the miracle.
The question of miracle, therefore, does not really exist, or exists only for those “who are under the influence of the sceptical delusion that it is possible really to think any kind of natural powers as existing apart from God, or to think the Being of God apart from the primal potentialities which unfold themselves in the never-ceasing process of Becoming.” The difficulty arises from the “original sin” of dissolving the inner unity of God and nature, of denying the equivalence implied by Spinoza in his “Deus sive Natura.”
For the normal intelligence the only problem is to discover the secondary causes of the “miracles” of Jesus. It is true there is one miracle which Paulus retains—the miracle of the birth, or at least the possibility of it; in the sense that it is through holy [pg 052] inspiration that Mary receives the hope and the power of conceiving her exalted Son, in whom the spirit of the Messiah takes up its dwelling. Here he indirectly denies the natural generation, and regards the conception as an act of the self-consciousness of the mother.
With the miracles of healing, however, the case is very simple. Sometimes Jesus worked through His spiritual power upon the nervous system of the sufferer; sometimes He used medicines known to Him alone. The latter applies, for instance, to the cures of the blind. The disciples, too, as appears from Mark vi. 7 and 13, were not sent out without medicaments, for the oil with which they were to anoint the sick was, of course, of a medicinal character; and the casting out of evil spirits was effected partly by means of sedatives.
Diet and after-treatment played a great part, though the Evangelists say little about this because directions on these points would not be given publicly. Thus, the saying, “This kind goeth not out save by prayer and fasting,” is interpreted as an instruction to the father as to the way in which he could make the sudden cure of the epileptic into a permanent one, viz. by keeping him to a strict diet and strengthening his character by devotional exercises.
The nature miracles suggest their own explanation. The walking on the water was an illusion of the disciples. Jesus walked along the shore, and in the mist was taken for a ghost by the alarmed and excited occupants of the boat. When Jesus called to them, Peter threw himself into the water, and was drawn to shore by Jesus just as he was sinking. Immediately after taking Jesus into the boat they doubled a headland and drew clear of the storm centre; they therefore supposed that He had calmed the sea by His command. It was the same in the case where He was asleep during the storm. When they waked Him He spoke to them about the wind and the weather. At that moment they gained the shelter of a hill which protected them from the wind that swept down the valley; and they marvelled among themselves that even the winds and the sea obeyed their Messiah.
The feeding of the five thousand is explained in the following way. When Jesus saw the multitude all hungered, He said to His disciples, “We will set the rich people among them a good example, that they may share their supplies with the others,” and he began to distribute His own provisions, and those of the disciples, to the people who were sitting near them. The example had its effect, and soon there was plenty for every one.
The explanation of the transfiguration is somewhat more complicated. While Jesus was lingering with a few followers in this mountainous district He had an interview upon a high mountain at night with two dignified-looking men whom His three companions took for Moses and Elias. These unknown persons, [pg 053] as we learn from Luke ix. 31, informed Him of the fate which awaited Him at Jerusalem. In the early morning, as the sun was rising, the three disciples, only half awake, looked upwards from the hollow in which they had been sleeping and saw Jesus with the two strangers upon the higher part of the mountain, illuminated by the beams of the rising sun, and heard them speak, now of the fate which threatened Him in the capital, now of the duty of steadfastness and the hopes attached thereto, and finally heard an exhortation addressed to themselves, bidding them ever to hold Jesus to be the beloved Son of the Deity, whom they must obey.... Their drowsiness, and the clouds which in an autumnal sunrise float to and fro over those mountains,[23] left them no clear recollection of what had happened. This only added to the wonder of the vague undefined impression of having been in contact with apparitions from a higher sphere. The three who had been with Him on the mount never arrived at any more definite knowledge of the facts, because Jesus forbade them to speak of what they had seen until the end should come.
In dealing with the raisings from the dead the author is in his element. Here he is ready with the unfailing explanation taken over from Bahrdt that they were only cases of coma. These narratives should not be headed “raisings from the dead,” but “deliverances from premature burial.” In Judaea, interment took place three hours after death. How many seemingly dead people may have returned to consciousness in their graves, and then have perished miserably! Thus Jesus, owing to a presentiment suggested to Him by the father's story, saves the daughter of Jairus from being buried while in a cataleptic trance. A similar presentiment led Him to remove the covering of the bier which He met at the gate of Nain, and to discover traces of life in the widow's son. A similar instinct moved Him to ask to be taken to the grave of Lazarus. When the stone is rolled away He sees His friend standing upright and calls to him joyfully, “Come forth!”
The Jewish love of miracle “caused everything to be ascribed immediately to the Deity, and secondary causes to be overlooked; consequently no thought was unfortunately given to the question of how to prevent these horrible cases of premature burial from taking place!” But why does it not appear strange to Paulus that Jesus did not enlighten His countrymen as to the criminal character of over-hasty burial, instead of allowing even his closest followers to believe in miracle? Here the hypothesis condemns itself, although it has a foundation of fact, in so far as cases of premature burial are abnormally frequent in the East.
The resurrection of Jesus must be brought under the same category if we are to hold fast to the facts that the disciples saw Him in His natural body with the print of the nails in His hands, and that He took food in their presence. Death from crucifixion was in fact due to a condition of rigor, which extended gradually inwards. It was the slowest of all deaths. Josephus mentions in his Contra Apionem that it was granted to him as a favour by Titus, at Tekoa, that he might have three crucified men whom he knew taken down from the cross. Two of them died, but one recovered. Jesus, however, “died” surprisingly quickly. The loud cry which he uttered immediately before His head sank shows that His strength was far from being exhausted, and that what supervened was only a death-like trance. In such trances the process of dying continues until corruption sets in. “This alone proves that the process is complete and that death has actually taken place.”
In the case of Jesus, as in that of others, the vital spark would have been gradually extinguished, had not Providence mysteriously effected on behalf of its favourite that which in the case of others was sometimes effected in more obvious ways by human skill and care. The lance-thrust, which we are to think of rather as a mere surface wound, served the purpose of a phlebotomy. The cool grave and the aromatic unguents continued the process of resuscitation, until finally the storm and the earthquake aroused Jesus to full consciousness. Fortunately the earthquake also had the effect of rolling away the stone from the mouth of the grave. The Lord stripped off the grave-clothes and put on a gardener's dress which He managed to procure. That was what made Mary, as we are told in John xx. 15, take Him for the gardener. Through the women, He sends a message to His disciples bidding them meet Him in Galilee, and Himself sets out to go thither. At Emmaus, as the dusk was falling, He met two of His followers, who at first failed to recognise Him because His countenance was so disfigured by His sufferings. But His manner of giving thanks at the breaking of bread, and the nail-prints in His uplifted hands, revealed to them who He was. From them He learns where His disciples are, returns to Jerusalem, and appears unexpectedly among them. This is the explanation of the apparent contradiction between the message pointing to Galilee and the appearances in Jerusalem. Thomas was not present at this first appearance, and at a later interview was suffered to put his hand into the marks of the wounds. It is a misunderstanding to see a reproach in the words which Jesus addresses to him. What, then, is the meaning of “Blessed are they that have not seen and have believed”? It is a benediction upon Thomas for what he has done in the interests of later generations. “Now,” Jesus says, “thou, Thomas, art convinced because thou hast so unmistakably seen Me. It is [pg 055] well for those who now or in the future shall not see Me; for after this they can feel a firm conviction, because thou hast convinced thyself so completely that to thee, whose hands have touched Me, no possible doubt can remain of My corporeal reanimation.” Had it not been for Thomas's peculiar mental constitution we should not have known whether what was seen was a phantom or a real appearance of the reanimated Jesus.
In this way Jesus lived with them for forty days, spending part of that time with them in Galilee. In consequence of the ill-treatment which He had undergone, He was not capable of continuous exertion. He lived quietly and gathered strength for the brief moments in which He appeared among His own followers and taught them. When He felt his end drawing near He returned to Jerusalem. On the Mount of Olives, in the early sunlight, He assembled His followers for the last time. He lifted up His hands to bless them, and with hands still raised in benediction He moved away from them. A cloud interposes itself between them and Him, so that their eyes cannot follow Him. As he disappeared there stood before them, clothed in white, the two dignified figures whom the three disciples who were present at the transfiguration had taken for Moses and Elias, but who were really among the secret adherents of Jesus in Jerusalem. These men exhorted them not to stand waiting there but to be up and doing.
Where Jesus really died they never knew, and so they came to describe His departure as an ascension.
This Life of Jesus is not written without feeling. At times, in moments of exaltation, the writer even dashes into verse. If only the lack of all natural aesthetic feeling did not ruin everything! Paulus constantly falls into a style that sets the teeth on edge. The episode of the death of the Baptist is headed “Court-and-Priest intrigues enhance themselves to a judicial murder.” Much is spoiled by a kind of banality. Instead of “disciples,” he always says “pupils,” instead of “faith,” “sincerity of conviction.” The appeal which the father of the lunatic boy addresses to Jesus, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief,” runs “I am sincerely convinced; help me, even if there is anything lacking in the sincerity of my conviction.”
The beautiful saying in the story of Martha and Mary, “One thing is needful,” is interpreted as meaning that a single course will be sufficient for the meal.[24] The scene in the home at Bethany rejoices in the heading, “Geniality of Jesus among sympathetic friends in a hospitable family circle at Bethany. A Messiah with no stiff solemnity about Him.” The following is the explanation [pg 056] which Paulus discovers for the saying about the tribute-money: “So long as you need the Romans to maintain some sort of order among you,” says Jesus, “you must provide the means thereto. If you were fit to be independent you would not need to serve any one but God.”
Among the historical problems, Paulus is especially interested in the idea of the Messiahship, and in the motives of the betrayal. His sixty-five pages on the history of the conception of the Messiah are a real contribution to the subject. The Messianic idea, he explains, goes back to the Davidic kingdom; the prophets raised it to a higher religious plane; in the times of the Maccabees the ideal of the kingly Messiah perished and its place was taken by that of the super-earthly deliverer. The only mistake which Paulus makes is in supposing that the post-Maccabean period went back to the political ideal of the Davidic king. On the other hand, he rightly interprets the death of Jesus as the deed by which He thought to win the Messiahship proper to the Son of Man.
With reference to the question of the High Priest at the trial, he remarks that it does not refer to the metaphysical Divine Sonship, but to the Messiahship in the ancient Jewish sense, and accordingly Jesus answers by pointing to the coming of the Son of Man.
The importance of eschatology in the preaching of Jesus is clearly recognised, but Paulus proceeds to nullify this recognition by making the risen Lord cut short all the questions of the disciples in regard to this subject with the admonition “that in whatever way all this should come about, and whether soon or late, their business was to see that they had done their own part.”
How did Judas come to play the traitor? He believed in the Messiahship of Jesus and wanted to force Him to declare Himself. To bring about His arrest seemed to Judas the best means of rousing the people to take His side openly. But the course of events was too rapid for him. Owing to the Feast the news of the arrest spread but slowly. In the night “when people were sleeping off the effects of the Passover supper,” Jesus was condemned; in the morning, before they were well awake, He was hurried away to be crucified. Then Judas was overcome with despair, and went and hanged himself. “Judas stands before us in the history of the Passion as a warning example of those who allow their cleverness to degenerate into cunning, and persuade themselves that it is permissible to do evil that good may come—to seek good objects, which they really value, by intrigue and chicanery. And the underlying cause of their errors is that they have failed to overcome their passionate desire for self-advancement.”
Such was the consistently rationalistic Life of Jesus, which evoked so much opposition at the time of its appearance, and [pg 057] seven years later received its death-blow at the hands of Strauss. The method is doomed to failure because the author only saves his own sincerity at the expense of that of his characters. He makes the disciples of Jesus see miracles where they could not possibly have seen them; and makes Jesus Himself allow miracles to be imagined where He must necessarily have protested against such a delusion. His exegesis, too, is sometimes violent. But in this, who has the right to judge him? If the theologians dragged him before the Lord, He would command, as of old, “Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone at him,” and Paulus would go forth unharmed.
Moreover, a number of his explanations are right in principle. The feeding of the multitudes and the walking on the sea must be explained somehow or other as misunderstandings of something that actually happened. And how many of Paulus' ideas are still going about in all sorts of disguises, and crop up again and again in commentaries and Lives of Jesus, especially in those of the “anti-rationalists”! Nowadays it belongs to the complete duty of the well-trained theologian to renounce the rationalists and all their works; and yet how poor our time is in comparison with theirs—how poor in strong men capable of loyalty to an ideal, how poor, so far as theology is concerned, in simple commonplace sincerity!
VI. The Last Phase Of Rationalism—Hase And Schleiermacher
Karl August Hase. Das Leben Jesu zunächst für akademische Studien. (The Life of Jesus, primarily for the use of students.) 1829. 205 pp. This work contains a bibliography of the earliest literature of the subject. 5th ed., 1865.
Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher. Das Leben Jesu. 1864. Edited by Rütenik. The edition is based upon a student's note-book of a course of lectures delivered in 1832.
David Friedrich Strauss. Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte. Eine Kritik des Schleiermacher'schen Lebens Jesu. (The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History. A criticism of Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus.) 1865.
In their treatment of the life of Jesus, Hase and Schleiermacher are in one respect still wholly dominated by rationalism. They still cling to the rationalistic explanation of miracle; although they have no longer the same ingenuous confidence in it as their predecessors, and although at the decisive cases they are content to leave a question-mark instead of offering a solution. They might, in fact, be described as the sceptics of rationalism. In another respect, however, they aim at something beyond the range of rationalism, inasmuch as they endeavour to grasp the inner connexion of the events of Jesus' ministry, which in Paulus had entirely fallen out of sight. Their Lives of Jesus are transitional, in the good sense of the word as well as in the bad. In respect of progress, Hase shows himself the greater of the two.
Scarcely thirteen years have elapsed since the death of the great Jena professor, his Excellency von Hase, and already we think of him as a man of the past. Theology has voted to inscribe his name upon its records in letters of gold—and has passed on to the order of the day. He was no pioneer like Baur, and he does not meet the present age on the footing of a contemporary, offering it problems raised by him and still unsolved. Even his “Church History,” with its twelve editions, has already had its day, although it is still the most brilliantly written work in this department, and conceals beneath its elegance of form a massive erudition. He [pg 059] was more than a theologian; he was one of the finest monuments of German culture, the living embodiment of a period which for us lies under the sunset glow of the past, in the land of “once upon a time.”
His path in life was unembarrassed; he knew toil, but not disappointment. Born in 1800, he finished his studies at Tübingen, where he qualified as a Privat-Docent in 1823. In 1824-1825 he spent eleven months in the fortress of Hohenasperg, where he was confined for taking the part of the Burschenschaften,[25] and had leisure for meditation and literary plans. In 1830 he went to Jena, where, with a yearly visit to Italy to lay in a store of sunshine and renewed strength, he worked until 1890.
Not without a certain reverence does one take this little text-book of 205 pages into one's hands. This is the first attempt by a fully equipped scholar to reconstruct the life of Jesus on a purely historical basis. There is more creative power in it than in almost any of his later works. It manifests already the brilliant qualities of style for which he was distinguished—clearness, terseness, elegance. What a contrast with that of Bahrdt, Venturini, or Paulus!
And yet the keynote of the work is rationalistic, since Hase has recourse to the rationalistic explanation of miracles wherever that appears possible. He seeks to make the circumstances of the baptism intelligible by supposing the appearance of a meteor. In the story of the transfiguration, the fact which is to be retained is that Jesus, in the company of two unknown persons, appeared to the disciples in unaccustomed splendour. Their identification of His companions as Moses and Elias is a conclusion which is not confirmed by Jesus, and owing to the position of the eyewitnesses, is not sufficiently guaranteed by their testimony. The abrupt breaking off of the interview by the Master, and the injunction of silence, point to some secret circumstance in His history. By this hint Hase seems to leave room for the “secret society” of Bahrdt and Venturini.
He makes no difficulty about the explanation of the story of the stater. It is only intended to show “how the Messiah avoided offence in submitting Himself to the financial burdens of the community.” In regard to the stilling of the storm, it seems uncertain whether Jesus through His knowledge of nature was enabled to predict the end of the storm or whether He brought it about by the possession of power over nature. The “sceptic of rationalism” thus leaves open the possibility of miracle. He proceeds somewhat similarly in explaining the raisings from the dead. They can be made intelligible by supposing that they were cases of coma, but it is also possible to look upon them as [pg 060] supernatural. For the two great Johannine miracles, the change of the water into wine and the increase of the loaves, no naturalistic explanation can be admitted. But how unsuccessful is his attempt to make the increase of the bread intelligible! “Why should not the bread have been increased?” he asks. “If nature every year in the period between seed-time and harvest performs a similar miracle, nature might also, by unknown laws, bring it about in a moment.” Here crops up the dangerous anti-rationalistic intellectual supernaturalism which sometimes brings Hase and Schleiermacher very close to the frontiers of the territory occupied by the disingenuous reactionaries.
The crucial point is the explanation of the resurrection of Jesus. A stringent proof that death had actually taken place cannot, according to Hase, be given, since there is no evidence that corruption had set in, and that is the only infallible sign of death. It is possible, therefore, that the resurrection was only a return to consciousness after a trance. But the direct impression made by the sources points rather to a supernatural event. Either view is compatible with the Christian faith. “Both the historically possible views—either that the Creator gave new life to a body which was really dead, or that the latent life reawakened in a body which was only seemingly dead—recognise in the resurrection a manifest proof of the care of Providence for the cause of Jesus, and are therefore both to be recognised as Christian, whereas a third view—that Jesus gave Himself up to his enemies in order to defeat them by the bold stroke of a seeming death and a skilfully prepared resurrection—is as contrary to historical criticism as to Christian faith.”
Hase, however, quietly lightens the difficulty of the miracle question in a way which must not be overlooked. For the rationalists all miracles stood on the same footing, and all must equally be abolished by a naturalistic explanation. If we study Hase carefully, we find that he accepts only the Johannine miracles as authentic, whereas those of the Synoptists may be regarded as resting upon a misunderstanding on the part of the authors, because they are not reported at first hand, but from tradition. Thus the discrimination of the two lines of Gospel tradition comes to the aid of the anti-rationalists, and enables them to get rid of some of the greatest difficulties. Half playfully, it might almost be said, they sketch out the ideas of Strauss, without ever suspecting what desperate earnest the game will become, if the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel has to be given up.
Hase surrenders the birth-story and the “legends of the Childhood”—the expression is his own—almost without striking a blow. The same fate befalls all the incidents in which angels figure, and the miracles at the time of the death of Jesus. He [pg 061] describes these as “mythical touches.” The ascension is merely “a mythical version of His departure to the Father.”
Hase's conception even of the non-miraculous portion of the history of Jesus is not free from rationalistic traits. He indulges in the following speculations with regard to the celibacy of the Lord. “If the true grounds of the celibacy of Jesus do not lie hidden in the special circumstances of His youth, the conjecture may be permitted that He from whose religion was to go forth the ideal view of marriage, so foreign to the ideas of antiquity, found in His own time no heart worthy to enter into this covenant with Him.” It is on rationalistic lines also that Hase explains the betrayal by Judas. “A purely intellectual, worldly, and unscrupulous character, he desired to compel the hesitating Messiah to found His Kingdom upon popular violence.... It is possible that Judas in his terrible blindness took that last word addressed to him by Jesus, ‘What thou doest, do quickly,’ as giving consent to his plan.”
But Hase again rises superior to this rationalistic conception of the history when he refuses to explain away the Jewish elements in the plan and preaching of Jesus as due to mere accommodation, and maintains the view that the Lord really, to a certain extent, shared this Jewish system of ideas. According to Hase there are two periods in the Messianic activity of Jesus. In the first He accepted almost without reservation the popular ideas regarding the Messianic age. In consequence, however, of His experience of the practical results of these ideas, He was led to abandon this error, and in the second period He developed His own distinctive views. Here we meet for the first time the idea of two different periods in the life of Jesus, which, especially through the influence of Holtzmann and Keim, became the prevailing view, and down to Johannes Weiss, determined the plan of all Lives of Jesus. Hase created the modern historico-psychological picture of Jesus. The introduction of this more penetrating psychology would alone suffice to place him in advance of the rationalists.
Another interesting point is the thorough way in which he traces out the historical and literary consequences of this idea of development. The apostles, he thinks, did not understand this progress of thought on the part of Jesus, and did not distinguish between the sayings of the first and second periods. They remained wedded to the eschatological view. After the death of Jesus this view prevailed so strongly in the primitive community of disciples that they interpolated their expectations into the last discourses of Jesus. According to Hase, the apocalyptic discourse in Matt. xxiv. was originally only a prediction of the judgment upon and destruction of Jerusalem, but this was obscured later by the influx of the eschatological views of the apostolic community. Only John remained free from this error. Therefore the non-eschatological [pg 062] Fourth Gospel preserves in their pure form the ideas of Jesus in His second period.
Hase rightly observes that the Messiahship of Jesus plays next to no part in His preaching, at any rate at first, and that, before the incident at Caesarea Philippi, it was only in moments of enthusiastic admiration, rather than with settled conviction, that even the disciples looked on Him as the Messiah. This indication of the central importance of the declaration of the Messiahship at Caesarea Philippi is another sign-post pointing out the direction which the future study of the life of Jesus was to follow.
Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus introduces us to quite a different order of transitional ideas. Its value lies in the sphere of dogmatics, not of history. Nowhere, indeed, is it so clear that the great dialectician had not really a historical mind than precisely in his treatment of the history of Jesus.
From the first it was no favourable star which presided over this undertaking. It is true that in 1819 Schleiermacher was the first theologian who had ever lectured upon this subject. But his Life of Jesus did not appear until 1864. Its publication had been so long delayed, partly because it had to be reconstructed from students' note-books, partly because immediately after Schleiermacher, in 1832, had delivered the course for the last time, it was rendered obsolete by the work of Strauss. For the questions raised by the latter's Life of Jesus, published in 1835, Schleiermacher had no answer, and for the wounds which it made, no healing. When, in 1864, Schleiermacher's work was brought forth to view like an embalmed corse, Strauss accorded to the dead work of the great theologian a dignified and striking funeral oration.
Schleiermacher is not in search of the historical Jesus, but of the Jesus Christ of his own system of theology; that is to say, of the historic figure which seems to him appropriate to the self-consciousness of the Redeemer as he represents it. For him the empirical has simply no existence. A natural psychology is scarcely attempted. He comes to the facts with a ready-made dialectic apparatus and sets his puppets in lively action. Schleiermacher's dialectic is not a dialectic which generates reality, like that of Hegel, of which Strauss availed himself, but merely a dialectic of exposition. In this literary dialectic he is the greatest master that ever lived.
The limitations of the historical Jesus both in an upward and downward direction are those only which apply equally to the Jesus of dogma. The uniqueness of His Divine self-consciousness is not to be tampered with. It is equally necessary to avoid Ebionism which does away with the Divine in Him, and Docetism [pg 063] which destroys His humanity. Schleiermacher loves to make his hearers shudder by pointing out to them that the least false step entails precipitation into one or other of these abysses; or at least would entail it for any one who was not under the guidance of his infallible dialectic.
In the course of this dialectic treatment, all the historical questions involved in the life of Jesus come into view one after another, but none of them is posed or solved from the point of view of the historian; they are “moments” in his argument.
He is like a spider at work. The spider lets itself down from aloft, and after making fast some supporting threads to points below, it runs back to the centre and there keeps spinning away. You look on fascinated, and before you know it, you are entangled in the web. It is difficult even for a reader who is strong in the consciousness of possessing a sounder grasp of the history than Schleiermacher to avoid being caught in the toils of that magical dialectic.
And how loftily superior the dialectician is! Paulus had shown that, in view of the use of the title Son of Man, the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus must be interpreted in accordance with the passage in Daniel. On this Schleiermacher remarks: “I have already said that it is inherently improbable that such a predilection (sc. for the Book of Daniel) would have been manifested by Christ, because the Book of Daniel does not belong to the prophetic writings properly so-called, but to the third division of the Old Testament literature.”
In his estimate of the importance to be attached to the story of the baptism, too, he falls behind the historical knowledge of his day. “To lay such great stress upon the baptism,” he says, “leads either to the Gnostic view that it was only there that the λόγος united itself with Jesus, or to the rationalistic view that it was only at the baptism that He became conscious of His vocation.” But what does history care whether a view is gnostic or rationalistic if only it is historical!
This dialectic, so fatal often to sound historical views, might have been expressly created to deal with the question of miracle. Compared with Schleiermacher's discussions all that has been written since upon this subject is mere honest—or dishonest—bungling. Nothing new has been added to what he says, and no one else has succeeded in saying it with the same amazing subtlety. It is true, also, that no one else has shown the same skill in concealing how much in the way of miracle he ultimately retains and how much he rejects. His solution of the problem is, in fact, not historical, but dialectical, an attempt to transcend the necessity for a rationalistic explanation of miracle which does not really succeed in getting rid of it.
Schleiermacher arranges the miracles in an ascending scale of probability according to the degree in which they can be seen to depend on the known influence of spirit upon organic matter. The most easily explained are the miracles of healing “because we are not without analogies to show that pathological conditions of a purely functional nature can be removed by mental influence.” But where, on the other hand, the effect produced by Christ lies outside the sphere of human life, the difficulties involved become insoluble. To get rid, in some measure, of these difficulties he makes use of two expedients. In the first place, he admits that in particular cases the rationalistic method may have a certain limited application; in the second place he, like Hase, recognises a difference between the miracle stories themselves, retaining the Johannine miracles, but surrendering, more or less completely, the Synoptic miracles as not resting on evidence of the same certainty and exactness.
That he is still largely under the sway of rationalism can be seen in the fact that he admits on an equal footing, as conceptions of the resurrection of Jesus, a return to consciousness from a trance-state, or a supernatural restoration to life, thought of as a resurrection. He goes so far as to say that the decision of this question has very little interest for him. He fully accepts the principle of Paulus that apart from corruption there is no certain indication of death.
“All that we can say on this point,” he concludes, “is that even to those whose business it was to ensure the immediate death of the crucified, in order that the bodies might at once be taken down, Christ appeared to be really dead, and this, moreover, although it was contrary to their expectations, for it was a subject of astonishment. It is no use going any further into the matter, since nothing can be ascertained in regard to it.”
What is certain is that Jesus in His real body lived on for a time among His followers; that the Fourth Gospel requires us to believe. The reports of the resurrection are not based upon “apparitions.” Schleiermacher's own opinion is what really happened was reanimation after apparent death. “If Christ had only eaten to show that He could eat, while He really had no need of nourishment, it would have been a pretence—something docetic. This gives us a clue to all the rest, teaching us to hold firmly to the way in which Christ intends Himself to be represented, and to put down all that is miraculous in the accounts of the appearances to the prepossessions of the disciples.”
When He revealed himself to Mary Magdalene He had no certainty that He would frequently see her again. “He was conscious that His present condition was that of genuine human life, but He had no confidence in its continuance.” He bade His [pg 065] disciples meet Him in Galilee because He could there enjoy greater privacy and freedom from observation in His intercourse with them. The difference between the present and the past was only that He no longer showed Himself to the world. “It was possible that a movement in favour of an earthly Messianic Kingdom might break out, and we need only take this possibility into account in order to explain completely why Jesus remained in such close retirement.” “It was the premonition of the approaching end of this second life which led Him to return from Galilee to Jerusalem.”
Of the ascension he says: “Here, therefore, something happened, but what was seen was incomplete, and has been conjecturally supplemented.” The underlying rationalistic explanation shows through!
But if the condition in which Jesus lived on after His crucifixion was “a condition of reanimation,” by what right does Schleiermacher constantly speak of it as a “resurrection,” as if resurrection and reanimation were synonymous terms? Further, is it really true that faith has no interest whatever in the question whether it was as risen from the dead, or merely as recovered from a state of suspended animation, that Jesus showed Himself to His disciples? In regard to this, it might seem, the rationalists were more straightforward.
The moment one tries to take hold of this dialectic it breaks in one's fingers. Schleiermacher would not indeed have ventured to play so risky a game if he had not had a second position to retire to, based on the distinction between the Synoptic and the Johannine miracle stories. In this respect he simplified matters for himself, as compared with the rationalists, even more than Hase. The miracle at the baptism is only intelligible in the narrative of the Fourth Gospel, where it is not a question of an external occurrence, but of a purely subjective experience of John, with which we have nothing to do. The Synoptic story of the temptation has no intelligible meaning. “To change stones into bread, if there were need for it, would not have been a sin.” “A leap from the Temple could have had no attraction for any one.”
The miracles of the birth and childhood are given up without hesitation; they do not belong to the story of the life of Jesus; and it is the same with the miracles at His death. One might fancy it was Strauss speaking when Schleiermacher says: “If we give due consideration to the fact that we have certainly found in these for the most part simple narratives of the last moments of Christ two incidents, such as the rending of the veil of the Temple and the opening of the graves, in reference to which we cannot possibly suppose that they are literal descriptions of actual facts, then we are bound to ask the question whether the same does not apply to many other points. Certainly the mention of [pg 066] the sun's light failing and the consequent great darkness looks very much as if it had been imported by poetic imagination into the simple narrative.”
A rebuke could have no possible effect upon the wind and sea. Here we must suppose either an alteration of the facts or a different causal connexion.
In this way Schleiermacher—and it was for this reason that these lectures on the life of Jesus became so celebrated—enabled dogmatics, though not indeed history, to take a flying leap over the miracle question.
What is chiefly fatal to a sound historical view is his one-sided preference for the Fourth Gospel. It is, according to him, only in this Gospel that the consciousness of Jesus is truly reflected. In this connexion he expressly remarks that of a progress in the teaching of Jesus, and of any “development” in Him, there can be no question. His development is the unimpeded organic unfolding of the idea of the Divine Sonship.
For the outline of the life of Jesus, also, the Fourth Gospel is alone authoritative. “The Johannine representation of the way in which the crisis of His fate was brought about is the only clear one.” The same applies to the narrative of the resurrection in this Gospel. “Accordingly, on this point also,” so he concludes his discussion, “I take it as established that the Gospel of John is the narrative of an eyewitness and forms an organic whole. The first three Gospels are compilations formed out of various narratives which had arisen independently; their discourses are composite structures, and their presentation of the history is such that one can form no idea of the grouping of events.” The “crowded days,” such as that of the sermon on the mount and the day of the parables, exist only in the imagination of the Evangelists. In reality there were no such days. Luke is the only one of them who has some semblance of historical order. His Gospel is compiled with much insight and critical tact out of a number of independent documents, as Schleiermacher believed himself to have shown convincingly in his critical study of Luke's Gospel, published in 1817.
It is only on the ground of such a valuation of the sources that we can arrive at a just estimate of the different representations of the locality of the life of Jesus. “The contradictions,” Schleiermacher proceeds, “could not be explained if all our Gospels stood equally close to Jesus. But if John stands closer than the others, we may perhaps find the key in the fact that John, too, mentions it as a prevailing opinion in Jerusalem that Jesus was a Galilaean, and that Luke, when he has got to the end of the sections which show skilful arrangement and are united by similarity of subject, gathers all the rest into the framework of a journey to Jerusalem. Following this analogy, and not remembering that Jesus had occasion to go [pg 067] several times a year to Jerusalem, the other two gathered into one mass all that happened there on various occasions. This could only have been done by Hellenists.”[26]
Schleiermacher is quite insensible to the graphic realism of the description of the last days at Jerusalem in Mark and Matthew, and has no suspicion that if only a single one of the Jerusalem sayings in the Synoptists is true Jesus had never before spoken in Jerusalem.
The ground of Schleiermacher's antipathy to the Synoptists lies deeper than a mere critical view as to their composition. The fact is that their “picture of Christ” does not agree with that which he wishes to insert into the history. When it serves his purpose, he does not shrink from the most arbitrary violence. He abolishes the scene in Gethsemane because he infers from the silence of John that it cannot have taken place. “The other Evangelists,” he explains, “give us an account of a sudden depression and deep distress of spirit which fell upon Jesus, and which He admitted to His disciples, and they tell us how He sought relief from it in prayer, and afterwards recovered His serenity and resolution. John passes over this in silence, and his narrative of what immediately precedes is not consistent with it.” It is evidently a symbolical story, as the thrice-repeated petition shows. “If they speak of such a depression of spirit, they have given the story that form in order that the example of Christ might be the more applicable to others in similar circumstances.”
On these premises it is possible to write a Life of Christ; it is not possible to write a Life of Jesus. It is, therefore, not by accident that Schleiermacher regularly speaks, not of Jesus, but of Christ.
VII. David Friedrich Strauss—The Man And His Fate
In order to understand Strauss one must love him. He was not the greatest, and not the deepest, of theologians, but he was the most absolutely sincere. His insight and his errors were alike the insight and the errors of a prophet. And he had a prophet's fate. Disappointment and suffering gave his life its consecration. It unrolls itself before us like a tragedy, in which, in the end, the gloom is lightened by the mild radiance which shines forth from the nobility of the sufferer.
Strauss was born in 1808 at Ludwigsburg. His father was a merchant, whose business, however, was unsuccessful, so that his means steadily declined. The boy took his ability from his mother, a good, self-controlled, sensible, pious woman, to whom he raised a monument in his “Memorial of a Good Mother” written in 1858, to be given to his daughter on her confirmation-day.
From 1821 to 1825 he was a pupil at the “lower seminary” at Blaubeuren, along with Friedrich Vischer, Pfizer, Zimmermann, Märklin, and Binder. Among their teachers was Ferdinand Christian Baur, whom they were to meet with again at the university.
His first year at the university was uninteresting, as it was only in the following year that the reorganisation of the theological faculty took place, in consequence of the appointment of Baur. The instruction in the philosophical faculty was almost equally unsatisfactory, so that the friends would have gained little from the two years of philosophical propaedeutic which formed part of the course prescribed for theological students, if they had not combined to prosecute their philosophical studies for themselves. The writings of Hegel began to exercise a powerful influence upon them. For the philosophical faculty, Hegel's philosophy was as yet non-existent.
These student friends were much addicted to poetry. Two [pg 069] journeys which Strauss made along with his fellow-student Binder to Weinsberg to see Justinus Kerner made a deep impression upon him. He had to make a deliberate effort to escape from the dream-world of the “Prophetess of Prevorst.” Some years later, in a Latin note to Binder, he speaks of Weinsberg as “Mecca nostra.”[27]
According to Vischer's picture of him, the tall stripling made an impression of great charm, though he was rather shy except with intimates. He attended lectures with pedantic regularity.
Baur was at that time still immersed in the prolegomena to his system; but Strauss already suspected the direction which the thoughts of his young teacher were to take.
When Strauss and his student friends entered on their duties as clergymen, the others found great difficulty in bringing their theological views into line with the popular beliefs which they were expected to preach. Strauss alone remained free from inner struggles. In a letter to Binder[28] of the year 1831, he explains that in his sermons—he was then assistant at Klein-Ingersheim near Ludwigsburg—he did not use “representative notions” (Vorstellungen, used as a philosophical technicality) such as that of the Devil, which the people were already prepared to dispense with; but others which still appeared to be indispensable, such as those of an eschatological character, he merely endeavoured to present in such a way that the “intellectual concept” (Begriff) which lay behind, might so far as possible shine through. “When I consider,” he continues, “how far even in intellectual preaching the expression is inadequate to the true essence of the concept, it does not seem to me to matter much if one goes even a step further. I at least go about the matter without the least scruple, and cannot ascribe this to a mere want of sincerity in myself.”
That is Hegelian logic.
After being for a short time Deputy-professor at Maulbronn, he took his doctor's degree with a dissertation on the ἀποκατάστασις πάντων (restoration of all things, Acts iii. 21). This work is lost. From his letters it appears that he treated the subject chiefly from the religious-historical point of view.[29]
When Binder took his doctorate with a philosophical thesis on the immortality of the soul, Strauss, in 1832, wrote to him expressing the opinion that the belief in personal immortality could not properly be regarded as a consequence of the Hegelian system, since according [pg 070] to Hegel, it was not the subjective spirit of the individual person, but only the objective Spirit, the self-realising Idea which constantly embodies itself in new creations, to which immortality belongs.[30]
In October 1831 he went to Berlin to hear Hegel and Schleiermacher. On the 14th of November Hegel, whom he had visited shortly before, was carried off by cholera. Strauss heard the news in Schleiermacher's house, from Schleiermacher himself, and is said to have exclaimed, with a certain want of tact, considering who his informant was: “And it was to hear him that I came to Berlin!”
There was no satisfactory basis for a relationship between Schleiermacher and Strauss. They had nothing in common. That did not prevent Strauss's Life of Jesus being sometimes described by opponents of Schleiermacher as a product of the latter's philosophy of religion. Indeed, as late as the 'sixties, Tholuck thought it necessary to defend the memory of the great theologian against this reproach.
As a matter of fact, the plan of the Life of Jesus arose during Strauss's intercourse with Vatke, to whom he felt himself strongly drawn. Moreover, what was first sketched out was not primarily the plan of a Life of Jesus, but that of a history of the ideas of primitive Christianity, intended to serve as a standard by which to judge ecclesiastical dogma. The Life of Jesus was originally designed, it might almost be said, as a mere prologue to this work, the plan of which was subsequently carried out under the title, “Christian Theology in its Historical Development and in its Antagonism with Modern Scientific Knowledge” (published in 1840-1841).
When in the spring of 1832 he returned to Tübingen to take up the position of “Repetent”[31] in the theological college (Stift), these plans were laid on the shelf in consequence of his pre-occupation with philosophy, and if things had gone according to Strauss's wishes, they would perhaps never have come to fulfilment. The “Repetents” had the right to lecture upon philosophy. Strauss felt himself called upon to come forward as an apostle of Hegel, and lectured upon Hegel's logic with tremendous success. Zeller, who attended these lectures, records the unforgettable impression which they made on him. Besides championing Hegel, Strauss also lectured upon Plato, and upon the history of modern philosophy. These were three happy semesters.
“In my theology,” he writes in a letter of 1833,[32] “philosophy occupies such a predominant position that my theological views can only be worked out to completeness by means of a more thorough study of philosophy, and this course of study I am now [pg 071] going to prosecute uninterruptedly and without concerning myself whether it leads me back to theology or not.” Further on he says: “If I know myself rightly, my position in regard to theology is that what interests me in theology causes offence, and what does not cause offence is indifferent to me. For this reason I have refrained from delivering lectures on theology.”
The philosophical faculty was not altogether pleased at the success of the apostle of Hegel, and wished to have the right of the “Repetents” to lecture on philosophy curtailed. The latter, however, took their stand upon the tradition. Strauss was desired to intermit his lectures until the matter should be settled. He would have liked best to end the situation by entering the philosophical faculty. The other “Repetents,” however, begged him not to do so, but to continue to champion their rights. It is possible also that obstacles were placed in the way of his plan by the philosophical faculty. However that may be, it was in any case not carried through. Strauss was forced back upon theology.
According to Hase,[33] Strauss began his studies for the Life of Jesus by writing a detailed critical review of his (Hase's) text-book. He sent this to Berlin to the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, which, however, refused it. His resolve to publish first, instead of the general work on the genesis of Christian doctrine, a critical study on the life of Jesus was doubtless determined by Schleiermacher's lectures on this subject. When in Berlin he had procured a copy of a lecture note-book, and the reading of it incited him to opposition.
Considering its character, the work was rapidly produced. He wrote it sitting at the window of the Repetents' room, which looks out upon the gateway-arch. When its two volumes appeared in 1835 the name of the author was wholly unknown, except for some critical studies upon the Gospels. This book, into which he had poured his youthful enthusiasm, rendered him famous in a moment—and utterly destroyed his prospects. Among his opponents the most prominent was Steudel, a member of the theological faculty, who, as president of the Stift, made representations against him to the Ministry, and succeeded in securing his removal from the post of “Repetent.” The hopes which Strauss had placed upon his friends were disappointed. Only two or three at most dared to publish anything in his defence.
He first accepted a transfer to the post of Deputy-professor at Ludwigsburg, but in less than a year he was glad to give it up, and he then returned to Stuttgart. There he lived for several years, busying himself in the preparation of new editions [pg 072] of the Life of Jesus, and in writing answers to the attacks which were made upon him.
Towards the end of the 'thirties he became conscious of a growing impulse towards more positive views. The criticisms of his opponents had made some impression upon him. The second volume of polemics was laid aside. In its place appeared the third edition of the Life of Jesus, 1838-1839, containing a series of amazing concessions. Strauss explains that in consequence of reading de Wette's commentary and Neander's Life of Jesus he had begun to feel some hesitation about his former doubts regarding the genuineness and credibility of the Fourth Gospel. The historic personality of Jesus again began to take on intelligible outlines for him. These inconsistencies he removed in the next edition, acknowledging that he did not know how he could so have temporarily vacillated in his point of view. The matter admits, however, of a psychological explanation. He longed for peace, for he had suffered more than his enemies suspected or his friends knew. The ban of the outlaw lay heavy upon his soul. In this spirit he composed in 1839 the monologues entitled Vergängliches und Bleibendes im Christentum (“Transient and Permanent Elements in Christianity”), which appeared again in the following year under the title Friedliche Blätter (“Leaves of Peace”).
For a moment it seemed as though his rehabilitation would be accomplished. In January 1839 the noble-minded Hitzig succeeded in getting him appointed to the vacant chair of dogmatics in Zurich. But the orthodox and pietist parties protested so vehemently that the Government was obliged to revoke the appointment. Strauss was pensioned off, without ever entering on his office.
About that time his mother died. In 1841 he lost his father. When the estate came to be settled up, it was found that his affairs were in a less unsatisfactory condition than had been feared. Strauss was secure against want. The success of his second great work, his “Christian Theology” (published in 1840-41), compensated him for his disappointment at Zurich. In conception it is perhaps even greater than the Life of Jesus; and in depth of thought it is to be classed with the most important contributions to theology. In spite of that it never attracted so much attention as the earlier work. Strauss continued to be known as the author of the Life of Jesus. Any further ground of offence which he might give was regarded as quite subsidiary.
And the book contains matter for offence in no common degree. The point to which Strauss applies his criticism is the way in which the Christian theology which grew out of the ideas of the ancient world has been brought into harmony with [pg 073] the Christianity of rationalism and of speculative philosophy. Either, to use his own expression, both are so finely pulverised in the process—as in the case of Schleiermacher's combination of Spinozism with Christianity—that it needs a sharp eye to rediscover the elements of the mixture; or the two are shaken together like water and oil, in which case the semblance of combination is only maintained so long as the shaking continues. For this crude procedure he desires to substitute a better method, based upon a preliminary historical criticism of dogma, in order that thought may no longer have to deal with the present form of Church theology, but with the ideas which worked as living forces in its formation.
This is brilliantly worked out in detail. The result is not a positive, but a negative Hegelian theology. Religion is not concerned with supra-mundane beings and a divinely glorious future, but with present spiritual realities which appear as “moments” in the eternal being and becoming of Absolute Spirit. At the end of the second volume, where battle is joined on the issue of personal immortality, all these ideas play their part in the struggle. Personal immortality is finally rejected in every form, for the critical reasons which Strauss had already set forth in the letters of 1832. Immortality is not something which stretches out into the future, but simply and solely the present quality of the spirit, its inner universality, its power of rising above everything finite to the Idea. Here the thought of Hegel coincides with that of Schleiermacher. “The saying of Schleiermacher, ‘In the midst of finitude to be one with the Infinite, and to be eternal in a moment,’ is all that modern thought can say about immortality.” But neither Schleiermacher nor Hegel was willing to draw the natural inferences from their ultimate position, or at least they did not give them any prominence.
It is not the application of the mythological explanation to the Gospel history which irrevocably divides Strauss from the theologians, but the question of personal immortality. It would be well for them if they had only to deal with the Strauss of the Life of Jesus, and not with the thinker who posed this question with inexorable trenchancy. They might then face the future more calmly, relieved of the anxiety lest once more Hegel and Schleiermacher might rise up in some pious but critical spirit, not to speak smooth things, but to ask the ultimate questions, and might force theology to fight its battle with Strauss all over again.
At the very time when Strauss was beginning to breathe freely once more, had turned his back upon all attempts at compromise, and reconciled himself to giving up teaching; and when, after settling his father's affairs, he had the certainty of being secure [pg 074] against penury; at that very time he sowed for himself the seeds of a new, immitigable suffering by his marriage with Agnese Schebest, the famous singer.
They were not made for one another. He could not look to her for any sympathy with his plans, and she on her part was repelled by the pedantry of his disposition. Housekeeping difficulties and the trials of a limited income added another element of discord. They removed to Sontheim near Heilbronn with the idea of learning to adapt themselves to one another far from the distractions of the town; but that did not better matters. They lived apart for a time, and after some years they procured a divorce, custody of the children being assigned to the father. The lady took up her residence in Stuttgart, and Strauss paid her an allowance up to her death in 1870.
What he suffered may be read between the lines in the passage in “The Old Faith and the New” where he speaks of the sacredness of marriage and the admissibility of divorce. The wound bled inwardly. His mental powers were disabled. At this time he wrote little. Only in the apologue “Julian the Apostate, or the Romanticist on the throne of the Caesars”—that brilliant satire upon Frederic William IV., written in 1847—is there a flash of the old spirit.
But in spite of his antipathy to the romantic disposition of the King of Prussia he entered the lists in 1848 on behalf of the efforts of the smaller German states to form a united Germany, apart from Austria, under the hegemony of Prussia. He did not suffer his political acumen to be blunted either by personal antipathies or by particularism. The citizens of Ludwigsburg wished to have him as their representative in the Frankfort parliament, but the rural population, who were pietistic in sympathies, defeated his candidature. Instead, his native town sent him to the Würtemberg Chamber of Deputies. But here his philistinism came to the fore again. The phrase-mongering revolutionary party in the chamber disgusted him. He saw himself more and more forced to the “right,” and was obliged to act politically with men whose reactionary sympathies he was far from sharing. His constituents, meanwhile, were thoroughly discontented with his attitude. In the end the position became intolerable. It was also painful to him to have to reside in Stuttgart, where he could not avoid meeting the woman who had brought so much misery into his life. Further—he himself mentions this point in his memoirs—he had no practice in speaking without manuscript, and cut a poor figure as a debater. Then came the “Blum Case.” Robert Blum, a revolutionary, had been shot by court martial in Vienna. The Würtemberg Chamber desired to vote a public celebration of his funeral. [pg 075] Strauss did not think there was any ground for making a hero of this agitator, merely because he had been shot, and was not inclined to blame the Austrian Government very severely for meting out summary justice to a disturber of the peace. His attitude brought on him a vote of censure from his constituents. When, subsequently, the President of the Chamber called him to order for asserting that a previous speaker had “concealed by sleight of hand” (wegeskamotiert, “juggled away”) an important point in the debate, he refused to accept the vote of censure, resigned his membership, and ceased to attend the diets. As he himself put it, he “jumped out of the boat.” Then began a period of restless wandering, during which he beguiled his time with literary work. He wrote, inter alia, upon Lessing, Hutten, and Reimarus, rediscovering the last-named for his fellow-countrymen.
At the end of the 'sixties he returned once more to theology. His “Life of Jesus adapted for the German People” appeared in 1864. In the preface he refers to Renan, and freely acknowledges the great merits of his work.
The Prusso-Austrian war placed him in a difficult position. His historical insight made it impossible for him to share the particularism of his friends; on the contrary, he recognised that the way was now being prepared for the realisation of his dream of 1848—an alliance of the smaller German States under the hegemony of Prussia. As he made no secret of his opinions, he had the bitter experience of receiving the cold shoulder from men who had hitherto loyally stood by him.
In the year 1870 it was granted to him to become the spokesman of the German people; through a publication on Voltaire which had appeared not long before he had become acquainted with Renan. In a letter to Strauss, written after the first battles, Renan made a passing allusion to these great events. Strauss seized the opportunity to explain to him, in a vigorous “open letter” of the 12th of August, Germany's reason and justification for going to war. Receiving an answer from Renan, he then, in a second letter, of the 29th of September, took occasion to defend Germany's right to demand the cession of Alsace, not on the ground of its having formerly been German territory, but for the defence of her natural frontiers. The resounding echo evoked by these words, inspired, as they were, by the enthusiasm of the moment, compensated him for much of the obloquy which he had had to bear.
His last work, “The Old Faith and the New,” appeared in 1872. Once more, as in the work on theology published in 1840-1841, he puts to himself the question, What is there of permanence in this artificial compound of theology and philosophy, faith and thought? [pg 076] But he puts the question with a certain bitterness, and shows himself too much under the influence of Darwinism, by which his mind was at that time dominated. The Hegelian system of thought, which served as a firm basis for the work of 1840, has fallen in ruins. Strauss is alone with his own thoughts, endeavouring to raise himself above the new scientific world-view. His powers of thought, never, for all his critical acumen, strong on the creative side, and now impaired by age, were unequal to the task. There is no force and no greatness in the book.
To the question, “Are we still Christians?” he answers, “No.” But to his second question, “Have we still a religion?” he is prepared to give an affirmative answer, if the assumption is granted that the feeling of dependence, of self-surrender, of inner freedom, which has sprung from the pantheistic world-view, can be called religion. But instead of developing the idea of this deep inner freedom, and presenting religion in the form in which he had experienced it, he believes himself obliged to offer some new construction based upon Darwinism, and sets himself to answer the two questions, “How are we to understand the world?” and “How are we to regulate our lives?”—the form of the latter is somewhat lacking in distinction—in a quite impersonal way. It is only the schoolmaster and pedant in him—who was always at the elbow of the thinker even in his greatest works—that finds expression here.
It was a dead book, in spite of the many editions which it went through, and the battle which raged over it was, like the fiercest of the Homeric battles, a combat over the dead.
The theologians declared Strauss bankrupt, and felt themselves rich because they had made sure of not being ruined by a similar unimaginative honesty. Friedrich Nietzsche, from the height of his would-be Schopenhauerian pessimism, mocked at the fallen hero.
Before the year was out Strauss began to suffer from an internal ulcer. For many months he bore his sufferings with quiet resignation and inner serenity, until on the 8th of February 1874, in his native town of Ludwigsburg, death set him free.
A few weeks earlier, on the 29th of December 1873, his sufferings and his thoughts received illuminating expression in the following poignant verses:—
Wem ich dieses klage,
Weiss, ich klage nicht;
Der ich dieses sage,
Fühlt, ich zage nicht.
Heute heisst's verglimmen,
Wie ein Licht verglimmt,
In die Luft verschwimmen,
Wie ein Ton verschwimmt.
Möge schwach wie immer,
Aber hell und rein,
Dieser letzte Schimmer
Dieser Ton nur sein.[34]
He was buried on a stormy February day.
VIII. Strauss's First “Life Of Jesus”
First edition, 1835 and 1836. 2 vols. 1480 pp.
The second edition was unaltered.
Third edition, with alterations, 1838-1839.
Fourth edition, agreeing with the first, 1840.
Considered as a literary work, Strauss's first Life of Jesus is one of the most perfect things in the whole range of learned literature. In over fourteen hundred pages he has not a superfluous phrase; his analysis descends to the minutest details, but he does not lose his way among them; the style is simple and picturesque, sometimes ironical, but always dignified and distinguished.
In regard to the application of the mythological explanation to Holy Scripture, Strauss points out that De Wette, Eichhorn, Gabler, and others of his predecessors had long ago freely applied it to the Old Testament, and that various attempts had been made to portray the life of Jesus in accordance with the critical assumptions upon which his undertaking was based. He mentions especially Usteri as one who had helped to prepare the way for him. The distinction between Strauss and those who had preceded him upon this path consists only in this, that prior to him the conception of myth was neither truly grasped nor consistently applied. Its application was confined to the account of Jesus' coming into the world and of His departure from it, while the real kernel of the evangelical tradition—the sections from the Baptism to the Resurrection—was left outside the field of its application. Myth formed, to use Strauss's illustration, the lofty gateways at the entrance to, and at the exit from, the Gospel history; between these two lofty gateways lay the narrow and crooked streets of the naturalistic explanation.
The principal obstacle, Strauss continues, which barred the way to a comprehensive application of myth, consisted in the supposition that two of our Gospels, Matthew and John, were reports of eyewitnesses; and a further difficulty was the offence caused by [pg 079] the word myth, owing to its associations with the heathen mythology. But that any of our Evangelists was an eyewitness, or stood in such relations with eyewitnesses as to make the intrusion of myth unthinkable, is a thesis which there is no extant evidence sufficient to prove. Even though the earthly life of the Lord falls within historic times, and even if only a generation be assumed to have elapsed between His death and the composition of the Gospels; such a period would be sufficient to allow the historical material to become intermixed with myth. No sooner is a great man dead than legend is busy with his life.
Then, too, the offence of the word myth disappears for any one who has gained an insight into the essential character of religious myth. It is nothing else than the clothing in historic form of religious ideas, shaped by the unconsciously inventive power of legend, and embodied in a historic personality. Even on a priori grounds we are almost compelled to assume that the historic Jesus will meet us in the garb of old Testament Messianic ideas and primitive Christian expectations.
The main distinction between Strauss and his predecessors consisted in the fact that they asked themselves anxiously how much of the historical life of Jesus would remain as a foundation for religion if they dared to apply the conception of myth consistently, while for him this question had no terrors. He claims in his preface that he possessed one advantage over all the critical and learned theologians of his time without which nothing can be accomplished in the domain of history—the inner emancipation of thought and feeling in regard to certain religious and dogmatic prepossessions which he had early attained as a result of his philosophic studies. Hegel's philosophy had set him free, giving him a clear conception of the relationship of idea and reality, leading him to a higher plane of Christological speculation, and opening his eyes to the mystic interpenetration of finitude and infinity, God and man.
God-manhood, the highest idea conceived by human thought, is actually realised in the historic personality of Jesus. But while conventional thinking supposes that this phenomenal realisation must be perfect, true thought, which has attained by genuine critical reasoning to a higher freedom, knows that no idea can realise itself perfectly on the historic plane, and that its truth does not depend on the proof of its having received perfect external representation, but that its perfection comes about through that which the idea carries into history, or through the way in which history is sublimated into idea. For this reason it is in the last analysis indifferent to what extent God-manhood has been realised in the person of Jesus; the important thing is that the idea is now alive in the common consciousness of those who have been [pg 080] prepared to receive it by its manifestation in sensible form, and of whose thought and imagination that historical personality took such complete possession, that for them the unity of Godhood and manhood assumed in Him enters into the common consciousness, and the “moments” which constitute the outward course of His life reproduce themselves in them in a spiritual fashion.
A purely historical presentation of the life of Jesus was in that first period wholly impossible; what was operative was a creative reminiscence acting under the impulse of the idea which the personality of Jesus had called to life among mankind. And this idea of God-manhood, the realisation of which in every personality is the ultimate goal of humanity, is the eternal reality in the Person of Jesus, which no criticism can destroy.
However far criticism may go in proving the reaction of the idea upon the presentment of the historical course of the life of Jesus, the fact that Jesus represented that idea and called it to life among mankind is something real, something that no criticism can annul. It is alive thenceforward—to this day, and for ever more.
It is in this emancipation of spirit, and in the consciousness that Jesus as the creator of the religion of humanity is beyond the reach of criticism, that Strauss goes to work, and batters down the rubble, assured that his pick can make no impression on the stone. He sees evidence that the time has come for this undertaking in the condition of exhaustion which characterised contemporary theology. The supernaturalistic explanation of the events of the life of Jesus had been followed by the rationalistic, the one making everything supernatural, the other setting itself to make all the events intelligible as natural occurrences. Each had said all that it had to say. From their opposition now arises a new solution—the mythological interpretation. This is a characteristic example of the Hegelian method—the synthesis of a thesis represented by the supernaturalistic explanation with an antithesis represented by the rationalistic interpretation.
Strauss's Life of Jesus is, therefore, like Schleiermacher's, the product of antithetic conceptions. But whereas in the latter the antitheses Docetism and Ebionism are simply limiting conceptions, between which his view is statically suspended, the synthesis with which Strauss operates represents a composition of forces, of which his view is the dynamic resultant. The dialectic is in the one case descriptive, in the other creative. This Hegelian dialectic determines the method of the work. Each incident of the life of Jesus is considered separately; first as supernaturally explained, and then as rationalistically explained, and the one explanation is refuted by the other. “By this means,” says Strauss in his preface, “the incidental advantage is secured that [pg 081] the work is fitted to serve as a repertory of the leading views and discussions of all parts of the Gospel history.”
In every case the whole range of representative opinions is reviewed. Finally the forced interpretations necessitated by the naturalistic explanation of the narrative under discussion drives the reader back upon the supernaturalistic. That had been recognised by Hase and Schleiermacher, and they had felt themselves obliged to make a place for inexplicable supernatural elements alongside of the historic elements of the life of Jesus. Contemporaneously there had sprung up in all directions new attempts to return by the aid of a mystical philosophy to the supernaturalistic point of view of our forefathers. But in these Strauss recognises only the last desperate efforts to make the past present and to conceive the inconceivable; and in direct opposition to the reactionary ineptitudes by means of which critical theology was endeavouring to work its way out of rationalism, he sets up the hypothesis that these inexplicable elements are mythical.
In the stories prior to the baptism, everything is myth. The narratives are woven on the pattern of Old Testament prototypes, with modifications due to Messianic or messianically interpreted passages. Since Jesus and the Baptist came into contact with one another later, it is felt necessary to represent their parents as having been connected. The attempts to construct Davidic genealogies for Jesus, show us that there was a period in the formation of the Gospel History during which the Lord was simply regarded as the son of Joseph and Mary, otherwise genealogical studies of this kind would not have been undertaken. Even in the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, there is scarcely more than a trace of historical material.
In the narrative of the baptism we may take it as certainly unhistorical that the Baptist received a revelation of the Messianic dignity of Jesus, otherwise he could not later have come to doubt this. Whether his message to Jesus is historical must be left an open question; its possibility depends on whether the nature of his confinement admitted of such communication with the outer world. Might not a natural reluctance to allow the Baptist to depart this life without at least a dawning recognition of the Messiahship of Jesus have here led to the insertion of a legendary trait into the tradition? If so, the historical residuum would be that Jesus was for a time one of the adherents of the Baptist, and was baptized by him, and that He soon afterwards appeared in Galilee with the same message which John had proclaimed, and even when He had outgrown his influence, never ceased to hold John in high esteem, as is shown by the eulogy which He pronounced upon him. But if the baptism of John was a baptism of [pg 082] repentance with a view to “him who was to come,” Jesus cannot have held Himself to be sinless when He submitted to it. Otherwise we should have to suppose that He did it merely for appearance' sake. Whether it was in the moment of the baptism that the consciousness of His Messiahship dawned upon Him, we cannot tell. This only is certain, that the conception of Jesus as having been endowed with the Spirit at His baptism, was independent of, and earlier than, that other conception which held Him to have been supernaturally born of the Spirit. We have, therefore, in the Synoptists several different strata of legend and narrative, which in some cases intersect and in some are superimposed one upon the other.
The story of the temptation is equally unsatisfactory, whether it be interpreted as supernatural, or as symbolical either of an inward struggle or of external events (as for example in Venturini's interpretation of it, where the part of the Tempter is played by a Pharisee); it is simply primitive Christian legend, woven together out of Old Testament suggestions.
The call of the first disciples cannot have happened as it is narrated, without their having known anything of Jesus beforehand; the manner of the call is modelled upon the call of Elisha by Elijah. The further legend attached to it—Peter's miraculous draught of fishes—has arisen out of the saying about “fishers of men,” and the same idea is reflected, at a different angle of refraction, in John xxi. The mission of the seventy is unhistorical.
Whether the cleansing of the temple is historical, or whether it arose out of a Messianic application of the text, “My house shall be called a house of prayer,” cannot be determined. The difficulty of forming a clear idea of the circumstances is not easily to be removed. How freely the historical material has been worked up, is seen in the groups of stories which have grown out of a single incident; as, for example, the anointing of Jesus at Bethany by an unknown woman, out of which Luke has made an anointing by a penitent sinner, and John an anointing by Mary of Bethany.
As regards the healings, some of them are certainly historical, but not in the form in which tradition has preserved them. The recognition of Jesus as Messiah by the demons immediately arouses suspicion. It is doubtless rather to be ascribed to the tendency which grew up later to represent Him as receiving, in His Messianic character, homage even from the world of evil spirits, than to any advantage in respect of clearness of insight which distinguished the mentally deranged, in comparison with their contemporaries. The cure of the demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum may well be historical, but, in other cases, the procedure is so often raised into the region of the miraculous that a psychical influence of Jesus upon the sufferer no longer suffices [pg 083] to explain it; the creative activity of legend must have come in to confuse the account of what really happened.
One cure has sometimes given rise to three or four narratives. Sometimes we can still recognise the influences which have contributed to mould a story. When, for example, the disciples are unable to heal the lunatic boy during Jesus' absence on the Mount of Transfiguration, we are reminded of 2 Kings iv., where Elisha's servant Gehazi tries in vain to bring the dead boy to life by using the staff of the prophet. The immediate healing of leprosy has its prototype in the story of Naaman the Syrian. The story of the ten lepers shows so clearly a didactic tendency that its historic value is thereby rendered doubtful.
The cures of blindness all go back to the case of the blind man at Jericho. But who can say how far this is itself historical? The cures of paralytics, too, belong rather to the equipment of the Messiah than to history. The cures through touching clothes, and the healings at a distance, have myth written on their foreheads. The fact is, the Messiah must equal, nay, surpass, the deeds of the prophets. That is why raisings from the dead figure among His miracles.
The nature miracles, over a collection of which Strauss puts the heading “Sea-Stories and Fish-Stories,” have a much larger admixture of the mythical. His opponents took him severely to task for this irreverent superscription.
The repetition of the story of the feeding of the multitude arouses suspicion regarding the credibility of what is narrated, and at once invalidates the hypothesis of the apostolic authorship of the Gospel of Matthew. Moreover, the incident was so naturally suggested by Old Testament examples that it would have been a miracle if such a story had not found its way into the Life of Jesus. An explanation on the analogy of an expedited process of nature, is here, as in the case of the miracle at Cana also, to be absolutely rejected. Strauss allows it to be laughed out of court. The cursing of the fig-tree and its fulfilment go back in some way or other to a parable of Jesus, which was afterwards made into history.
More important than the miracles heretofore mentioned are those which have to do with Jesus Himself and mark the crises of His history. The transfiguration had to find a place in the life of Jesus, because of the shining of Moses' countenance. In dealing with the narratives of the resurrection it is evident that we must distinguish two different strata of legend, an older one, represented by Matthew, which knew only of appearances in Galilee, and a later, in which the Galilaean appearances are excluded in favour of appearances in Jerusalem. In both cases, however, the narratives are mythical. In any attempt to explain [pg 084] them we are forced on one horn of the dilemma or the other—if the resurrection was real, the death was not real, and vice versa. That the ascension is a myth is self-evident.
Such, and so radical, are the results at which Strauss's criticism of the supernaturalistic and the rationalistic explanations of the life of Jesus ultimately arrives.
In reading Strauss's discussions one is not so much struck with their radical character, because of the admirable dialectic skill with which he shows the total impossibility of any explanation which does not take account of myth. On the whole, the supernaturalistic explanation, which at least represents the plain sense of the narratives, comes off much better than the rationalistic, the artificiality of which is everywhere remorselessly exposed.
The sections which we have summarised are far from having lost their significance at the present day. They marked out the ground which is now occupied by modern critical study. And they filled in the death-certificates of a whole series of explanations which, at first sight, have all the air of being alive, but are not really so. If these continue to haunt present-day theology, it is only as ghosts, which can be put to flight by simply pronouncing the name of David Friedrich Strauss, and which would long ago have ceased to “walk,” if the theologians who regard Strauss's book as obsolete would only take the trouble to read it.
The results so far considered do not represent the elements of the life of Jesus which Strauss was prepared to accept as historical. He sought to make the boundaries of the mythical embrace the widest possible area; and it is clear that he extended them too far.
For one thing, he overestimates the importance of the Old Testament motives in reference to the creative activity of the legend. He does not see that while in many cases he has shown clearly enough the source of the form of the narrative in question, this does not suffice to explain its origin. Doubtless, there is mythical material in the story of the feeding of the multitude. But the existence of the story is not explained by referring to the manna in the desert, or the miraculous feeding of a multitude by Elisha.[35] The story in the Gospel has far too much individuality for that, and stands, moreover, in much too closely articulated an historical connexion. It must have as its basis some historical fact. It is not a myth, though there is myth in it. Similarly with the account of the transfiguration. The substratum of historical fact in the life of Jesus is much more extensive than Strauss is prepared to admit. Sometimes he fails to see the foundations, because he proceeds like an explorer who, in working on the ruins of an Assyrian city, should cover up the most valuable [pg 085] evidence with the rubbish thrown out from another portion of the excavations.
Again, he sometimes rules out statements by assuming their impossibility on purely dialectical grounds, or by playing off the narratives one against another. The Baptist's message to Jesus is a case in point. This is connected with the fact that he often fails to realise the strong confirmation which the narratives derive from their connexion with the preceding and following context.
That, however, was only to be expected. Who ever discovered a true principle without pressing its application too far?
What really alarmed his contemporaries was not so much the comprehensive application of the mythical theory, as the general mining and sapping operations which they were obliged to see brought to bear upon the Gospels.
In section after section Strauss cross-examines the reports on every point, down to the minutest detail, and then pronounces in what proportion an alloy of myth enters into each of them. In every case the decision is unfavourable to the Gospel of John. Strauss was the first to take this view. It is true that, at the end of the eighteenth century, many doubts as to the authenticity of this Gospel had been expressed, and Bretschneider, the famous General Superintendent at Gotha (1776-1848), had made a tentative collection of them in his Probabilia.[36] The essay made some stir at the time. But Schleiermacher threw the aegis of his authority over the authenticity of the Gospel, and it was the favourite Gospel of the rationalists because it contained fewer miracles than the others. Bretschneider himself declared that he had been brought to a better opinion through the controversy.
After this episode the Johannine question had been shelved for fifteen years. The excitement was, therefore, all the greater when Strauss reopened the discussion. He was opposing a dogma of critical theology, which, even at the present day, is wont to defend its dogmas with a tenacity beyond that of the Church itself.
The luminous haze of apparent circumstantiality which had hitherto prevented men from recognising the true character of this Gospel is completely dissipated. Strauss shows that the Johannine representation of the life of Jesus is dominated by a theory, and that its portraiture shows the further development of the tendencies which are perceptible even in the Synoptists. He shows this, for example, in the case of the Johannine narrative of the baptism of Jesus, in which critics had hitherto seen the most credible account of what occurred, pointing out that it is just in this pseudo-simplicity that the process of bringing Jesus and the Baptist into the closest possible relations reaches its limit. [pg 086] Similarly, in regard to the call of the first disciples, it is, according to Strauss, a later postulate that they came from the Baptist's following and were brought by him to the Lord. Strauss does not scruple even to assert that John introduces imaginary characters. If this Gospel relates fewer miracles, the miracles which it retains are proportionately greater; so great, indeed, that their absolutely miraculous character is beyond the shadow of doubt; and, moreover, a moral or symbolical significance is added.
Here, therefore, it is no longer the unconscious action of legend which selects, creates, or groups the incidents, but a clearly-determined apologetic and dogmatic purpose.
The question regarding the different representations of the locality and chronology of the life of Jesus, had always been decided, prior to Strauss, in favour of the Fourth Gospel. De Wette makes it an argument against the genuineness of Matthew's Gospel that it mistakenly confines the ministry of Jesus to Galilee. Strauss refuses to decide the question by simply weighing the chronological and geographical statements one against the other, lest he should be as one-sided in his own way as the defenders of the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel were in theirs. On this point, he contents himself with remarking that if Jesus had really taught in Jerusalem on several occasions, it is absolutely unintelligible how all knowledge of this could have so completely disappeared from the Synoptic tradition; for His going up to the Passover at which He met His death is there represented as His sole journey to Jerusalem. On the other hand, it is quite conceivable that if Jesus had only once been in Jerusalem there would be a tendency for legend gradually to make several journeys out of this one, on the natural assumption that He regularly went up to the Feasts, and that He would proclaim His Gospel not merely in the remote province, but also in the capital.
From the triumphal entry to the resurrection, the difference between the Synoptic and Johannine narratives is so great that all attempts to harmonise them are to be rejected. How are we to reconcile the statement of the Synoptists that the ovation at the triumphal entry was offered by Galilaeans who accompanied him, with that of John, according to which it was offered by a multitude from Jerusalem which came out to welcome Jesus—who, moreover, according to John, was not coming from Galilee and Jericho—and escorted Him into the city. To suppose that there were two different triumphal entries is absurd.
But the decision between John and the Synoptists is not based solely upon their representation of the facts; the decisive consideration is found in the ideas by which they are respectively dominated. John represents a more advanced stage of the mythopoeic process, inasmuch as he has substituted for the Jewish Messianic conception, [pg 087] the Greek metaphysical conception of the Divine Sonship, and, on the basis of his acquaintance with the Alexandrian Logos doctrine, even makes Jesus apply to Himself the Greek speculative conception of pre-existence. The writer is aware of an already existing danger from the side of a Gnostic docetism, and has himself an apologetic Christology to propound, thus fighting the Gnostics as a Gnostic of another kind. That he is free from eschatological conceptions is not, from the historical point of view, an advantage, but very much the reverse. He is not unacquainted with eschatology, but deliberately transforms it, endeavouring to substitute for the expectation of the Second Coming of Christ, as an external event of the future, the thought of His inward presence.
The most decisive evidence of all is found in the farewell discourses and in the absence of all mention of the spiritual struggle in Gethsemane. The intention here is to show that Jesus not only had a foreknowledge of His death, but had long overcome it in anticipation, and went to meet His tragic fate with perfect inward serenity. That, however, is no historical narrative, but the final stage of reverent idealisation.
The question is decided. The Gospel of John is inferior to the Synoptics as a historical source just in proportion as it is more strongly dominated than they by theological and apologetic interests. It is true that the assignment of the dominant motives is for Strauss's criticism mainly a matter of conjecture. He cannot define in detail the attitude and tendency of this Gospel, because the development of dogma in the second century was still to a great extent obscure. He himself admits that it was only subsequently, through the labours of Baur, that the positions which he had taken up in 1835 were rendered impregnable. And yet it is true to say that Johannine study has added in principle nothing new to what was said by Strauss. He recognised the decisive point. With critical acumen he resigned the attempt to base a decision on a comparison of the historical data, and allowed the theological character of the two lines of tradition to determine the question. Unless this is done the debate is endless, for an able man who has sworn allegiance to John will always find a thousand ways in which the Johannine data can be reconciled with those of the Synoptists, and is finally prepared to stake his life upon the exact point at which the missing account of the institution of the Lord's Supper must be inserted into the narrative.
This changed estimate of John carries with it a reversal of the order in which the Gospels are supposed to have originated. Instead of John, Luke, Matthew, we have Matthew, Luke, and John—the first is last, and the last first. Strauss's unsophisticated instinct freed Matthew from the humiliating vassalage to which [pg 088] Schleiermacher's aesthetic had consigned him. The practice of differentiating between John and the Synoptists, which in the hands of Schleiermacher and Hase had been an elegant amusement, now received unexpected support, and it at last became possible for the study of the life of Jesus to go forward.
But no sooner had Strauss opened up the way than he closed it again, by refusing to admit the priority of Mark. His attitude towards this Gospel at once provokes opposition. For him Mark is an epitomising narrator, a mere satellite of Matthew with no independent light. His terse and graphic style makes on Strauss an impression of artificiality. He refuses to believe this Evangelist when he says that on the first day at Capernaum “the whole town” (Mark i. 33) came together before Peter's door, and that, on other occasions (Mark iii. 20, vi. 31), the press was so great that Jesus and His disciples had no leisure so much as to eat. “All very improbable traits,” he remarks, “the absence of which in Matthew is entirely to his advantage, for what else are they than legendary exaggerations?” In this criticism he is at one with Schleiermacher, who in his essay on Luke[37] speaks of the unreal vividness of Mark “which often gives his Gospel an almost apocryphal aspect.”
This prejudice against Mark has a twofold cause. In the first place, this Gospel with its graphic details had rendered great service to the rationalistic explanation of miracle. Its description of the cure of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark viii. 22-26)—whose eyes Jesus first anointed with spittle, whereupon he at first saw things dimly, and then, after he had felt the touch of the Lord's hand upon his eyes a second time, saw more clearly—was a veritable treasure-trove for rationalism. As Strauss is disposed to deal much more peremptorily with the rationalists than with the supernaturalists, he puts Mark upon his trial, as their accessory before the fact, and pronounces upon him a judgment which is not entirely unprejudiced. Moreover, it is not until the Gospels are looked at from the point of view of the plan of the history and the inner connexion of events that the superiority of Mark is clearly realised. But this way of looking at the matter does not enter into Strauss's purview. On the contrary, he denies that there is any traceable connexion of events at all, and confines his attention to determining the proportion of myth in the content of each separate narrative.
Of the Synoptic question he does not, strictly speaking, take any account. That was partly due to the fact that when he wrote it was in a thoroughly unsatisfactory position. There was a confused welter of the most various hypotheses. The priority of Mark, [pg 089] which had had earlier champions in Koppe,[38] Storr,[39] Gratz,[40] and Herder,[41] was now maintained by Credner and Lachmann, who saw in Matthew a combination of the logia-document with Mark. The “primitive Gospel” hypothesis of Eichhorn, according to which the first three Gospels went back to a common source, not identical with any of them, had become somewhat discredited. There had been much discussion and various modifications of Griesbach's “dependence theory,” according to which Mark was pieced together out of Matthew and Luke, and Schleiermacher's Diegesentheorie,[42] which saw the primary material not in a gospel, but in unconnected notes; from these, collections of narrative passages were afterwards formed, which in the post-apostolic period coalesced into continuous descriptions of the life of Jesus such as the three which have been preserved in our Synoptic Gospels.
In this matter Strauss is a sceptical eclectic. In the main he may be said to combine Griesbach's theory of the secondary origin of Mark with Schleiermacher's Diegesentheorie, the latter answering to his method of treating the sections separately. But whereas Schleiermacher had used the plan of John's Gospel as a framework into which to fit the independent narratives, Strauss's rejection of the Fourth Gospel left him without any means of connecting the sections. He makes a point, indeed, of sharply emphasising this want of connexion; and it was just this that made his work appear so extreme.
The Synoptic discourses, like the Johannine, are composite structures, created by later tradition out of sayings which originally belonged to different times and circumstances, arranged under certain leading ideas so as to form connected discourses. The sermon on the mount, the discourse at the sending forth of the twelve, the great parable-discourse, the polemic against the Pharisees, have all been gradually formed like geological deposits. So far as the original juxtaposition may be supposed to have been here and there preserved, Matthew is doubtless the most trustworthy authority for it. “From the comparison which we have been making,” says Strauss in one passage, “we can already see that the hard grit of these sayings of Jesus (die körnigen Reden Jesu) has not indeed been dissolved by the flood of oral tradition, but they have often been washed away from their original position and like rolling pebbles (Gerölle) have been deposited in places to which [pg 090] they do not properly belong.”[43] And, moreover, we find this distinction between the first three Evangelists, viz. that Matthew is a skilful collector who, while he is far from having been able always to give the original connexion, has at least known how to bring related passages aptly together, whereas in the other two many fragmentary sayings have been left exactly where chance had deposited them, which was generally in the interstices between the larger masses of discourse. Luke, indeed, has in some cases made an effort to give them an artistic setting, which is, however, by no means a satisfactory substitute for the natural connexion.
It is in his criticism of the parables that Strauss is most extreme. He starts out from the assumption that they have mutually influenced one another, and that those which may possibly be genuine have only been preserved in a secondary form. In the parable of the marriage supper of the king's son, for example, he confidently assumes that the conduct of the invited guests, who finally ill-treated and slew the messengers, and the question why the guest is not wearing a wedding-garment are secondary features.
How external he supposes the connexion of the narratives to be is clear from the way in which he explains the juxtaposition of the story of the transfiguration with the “discourse while descending the mountain.” They have, he says, really nothing to do with one another. The disciples on one occasion asked Jesus about the coming of Elijah as forerunner; Elijah also appears in the story of the transfiguration: accordingly tradition simply grouped the transfiguration and the discourse together under the heading “Elijah,” and, later on, manufactured a connexion between them.
The tendency of the work to purely critical analysis, the ostentatious avoidance of any positive expression of opinion, and not least, the manner of regarding the Synoptists as mere bundles of narratives and discourses, make it difficult—indeed, strictly speaking, impossible—to determine Strauss's own distinctive conception of the life of Jesus, to discover what he really thinks is moving behind the curtain of myth. According to the view taken in regard to this point his work becomes either a negative or a positive life of Jesus. There are, for instance, a number of incidental remarks which contain the suggestion of a positive construction of the life of Jesus. If they were taken out of their context and brought together they would yield a picture which would have points of contact with the latest eschatological view. Strauss, however, deliberately restricts his positive suggestions to these few detached remarks. He follows out no line to its conclusion. Each separate problem is indeed considered, and light is thrown upon it from various quarters with much critical [pg 091] skill. But he will not venture on a solution of any of them. Sometimes, when he thinks he has gone too far in the way of positive suggestion, he deliberately wipes it all out again with some expression of scepticism.
As to the duration of the ministry he will not even offer a vague conjecture. As to the connexion of certain events, nothing can, according to him, be known, since the Johannine outline cannot be accepted and the Synoptists arrange everything with an eye to analogies and association of ideas, though they flattered themselves that they were giving a chronologically arranged narrative. From the contents of the narratives, however, and from the monotonous recurrence of certain formulae of connexion, it is evident that no clear view of an organically connected whole can be assumed to be present in their work. We have no fixed points to enable us to reconstruct even in a measure the chronological order.
Especially interesting is his discussion of the title “Son of Man.” In the saying “the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath day” (Matt. xii. 8), the expression might, according to Strauss, simply denote “man.” In other passages one gets the impression that Jesus spoke of the Son of Man as a supernatural person, quite distinct from Himself, but identified with the Messiah. This is the most natural explanation of the passage in Matt. x. 23, where he promises the disciples, in sending them forth, that they shall not have gone over the cities of Israel before the Son of Man shall come. Here Jesus speaks of the Messiah as if He Himself were his forerunner. These sayings would, therefore, fall in the first period, before He knew Himself to be the Messiah. Strauss does not suspect the significance of this incidental remark; it contains the germ of the solution of the problem of the Son of Man on the lines of Johannes Weiss. But immediately scepticism triumphs again. How can we tell, asks Strauss, where the title Son of Man is genuine in the sayings of Jesus, and where it has been inserted without special significance, merely from habit?
Not less insoluble, in his opinion, is the question regarding the point of time at which Jesus claimed the Messianic dignity for Himself. “Whereas in John,” Strauss remarks, “Jesus remains constant in His avowal, his disciples and followers constant in their conviction, that He is the Messiah; in the Synoptics, on the other hand, there are, so to speak, relapses to be observed; so that, in the case of the disciples and the people generally, the conviction of Jesus' Messiahship expressed on earlier occasions, sometimes, in the course of the narrative, disappears again and gives place to a much lower view of Him; and even Jesus Himself, in comparison with His earlier unambiguous declaration, is more reserved on later occasions.” The account of the confession of the Messiahship at Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus pronounces Peter blessed because of [pg 092] his confession, and at the same time forbids the Twelve to speak of it, is unintelligible, since according to this same Gospel His Messiahship had been mooted by the disciples on several previous occasions, and had been acknowledged by the demoniacs. The Synoptists, therefore, contradict themselves. Then there are the further cases in which Jesus forbids the making known of His Messiahship, without any reason whatever. It would, no doubt, be historically possible to assume that it only gradually dawned upon Him that He was the Messiah—in any case not until after His baptism by John, as otherwise He would have to be supposed to have made a pretence upon that occasion—and that as often as the thought that He might be the Messiah was aroused in others by something that occurred, and was suggested to Him from without, He was immediately alarmed at hearing spoken, aloud and definitely, that which He Himself had scarcely dared to cherish as a possibility, or in regard to which He had only lately attained to a clear conviction.
From these suggestions one thing is evident, namely, that for Strauss the Messianic consciousness of Jesus was an historical fact, and is not to be referred, as has sometimes been supposed, to myth. To assert that Strauss dissolved the life of Jesus into myth is, in fact, an absurdity which, however often it may be repeated by people who have not read his book, or have read it only superficially, does not become any the less absurd by repetition.
To come to detail, Jesus thought of His Messiahship, according to Strauss, in the form that He, although of human parentage, should after His earthly life be taken up into heaven, and thence should come again to bring in His Kingdom. “As, moreover, in the higher Jewish theology, immediately after the time of Jesus, the idea of the pre-existence of the Messiah was present, the conjecture naturally suggests itself that it was also present at the time when Jesus' thoughts were being formed, and that consequently, if He once began to think of Himself as the Messiah, He might also have referred to Himself this feature of the Messianic conception. Whether Jesus had been initiated, as Paul was, into the wisdom of the schools in such a way that He could draw this conception from it, is no doubt open to question.”
In his treatment of the eschatology Strauss makes a valiant effort to escape from the dilemma “either spiritual or political” in regard to the Messianic plans of Jesus, and to make the eschatological expectation intelligible as one which did not set its hopes upon human aid, but on Divine intervention. This is one of the most important contributions to a real understanding of the eschatological problem. Sometimes one almost seems to be reading Johannes Weiss; as, for example, when Strauss explains that Jesus could promise His followers that they should sit on thrones without [pg 093] thinking of a political revolution, because He expected a reversal of present conditions to be brought about by God, and referred this judicial authority and kingly rule to the time of the παλιγγενεσία. “Jesus, therefore, certainly expected to restore the throne of David, and, with His disciples, to rule over a people freed from political bondage, but in this expectation He did not set His hopes on the sword of human followers (Luke xxii. 38, Matt. xxvi. 52), but upon the legions of angels which His heavenly Father could give Him (Matt. xxvi. 53). When He speaks of the coming of His Messianic glory, it is with angels and heavenly powers that He surrounds Himself (Matt. xvi. 27, xxiv. 30 ff., xxv. 31). Before the majesty of the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven the nations will submit without striking a blow, and at the sound of the angel's trumpet-blast will, with the dead who shall then arise, range themselves before Him and His disciples for judgment. All this Jesus did not purpose to bring about by any arbitrary action of His own, but left it to His heavenly Father, who alone knew the right moment for this catastrophic change (Mark xiii. 32), to give Him the signal of its coming; and He did not waver in His faith even when death came upon Him before its realisation. Any one who shrinks from adopting this view of the Messianic background of Jesus' plans, because he fears by so doing to make Jesus a visionary enthusiast, must remember how exactly these hopes corresponded to the long-cherished Messianic expectation of the Jews; and how easily, on the supernaturalistic assumptions of the period and among a people which preserved so strict an isolation as the Jews, an ideal which was in itself fantastic, if it were the national ideal and had some true and good features, could take possession of the mind even of one who was not inclined to fanaticism.”
One of the principal proofs that the preaching of Jesus was eschatologically conditioned is the Last Supper. “When,” says Strauss, “He concluded the celebration with the saying, ‘I will not drink henceforth of the fruit of the vine until I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom,’ He would seem to have expected that in the Messianic kingdom the Passover would be celebrated with peculiar solemnity. Therefore, in assuring them that they shall next partake of the Feast, not in the present age, but in the new era, He evidently expects that within a year's time the pre-Messianic dispensation will have come to an end and the Messianic age will have begun.” But it must be admitted, Strauss immediately adds, that the definite assurance which the Evangelists put into His mouth may after all only have been in reality an expression of pious hope. In a similar way he qualifies his other statements regarding the eschatological ideas of Jesus by recalling that we cannot determine the part which the expectations of primitive Christianity may have had in moulding these sayings.
Thus, for example, the opinions which he expresses on the great Parousia discourse in Matt. xxiv. are extremely cautious. The detailed prophecies regarding the Second Coming which the Synoptists put into the mouth of Jesus cannot be derived from Jesus Himself. The question suggests itself, however, whether He did not cherish the hope, and make the promise, that He would one day appear in glory as the Messiah? “If in any period of His life He held Himself to be the Messiah—and that there was a period when He did so there can be no doubt—and if He described Himself as the Son of Man, He must have expected the coming in the clouds which Daniel had ascribed to the Son of Man; but it may be questioned whether He thought of this as an exaltation which should take place even in His lifetime, or as something which was only to take place after His death. Utterances like Matt. x. 23, xvi. 28 rather suggest the former, but the possibility remains that later, when he had begun to feel that His death was certain, his conception took the latter form, and that Matt. xxvi. 64 was spoken with this in view.” Thus, even for Strauss, the problem of the Son of Man is already the central problem in which are focused all the questions regarding the Messiahship and eschatology.
From all this it may be seen how strongly he had been influenced by Reimarus, whom, indeed, he frequently mentions. It would be still more evident if he had not obscured his historical views by constantly bringing the mythological explanation into play.
The thought of the supernatural realisation of the Kingdom of God must also, according to Strauss, be the starting-point of any attempt to understand Jesus' attitude towards the Law and the Gentiles, so far as that is possible in view of the conflicting data. The conservative passages must carry most weight. They need not necessarily fall at the beginning of His ministry, because it is questionable whether the hypothesis of a later period of increasing liberality in regard to the law and the Gentiles can be made probable. There would be more chance of proving that the conservative sayings are the only authentic ones, for unless all the indications are misleading the terminus a quo for this change of attitude is the death of Jesus. He no doubt looked forward to the abolition of the Law and the removal of the barriers between Jew and Gentile, but only in the future Kingdom. “If that be so,” remarks Strauss, “the difference between the views of Jesus and of Paul consisted only in this, that while Jesus expected these limitations to fall away when, at His second coming, the earth should be renewed, Paul believed himself justified in doing away with them in consequence of the first coming of the Messiah, upon the still unregenerated earth.”
The eschatological passages are therefore the most authentic of all. If there is anything historic about Jesus, it is His assertion [pg 095] of the claim that in the coming kingdom He would be manifested as the Son of Man.
On the other hand, in the predictions of the passion and resurrection we are on quite uncertain ground. The detailed statements regarding the manner of the catastrophe place it beyond doubt that we have here vaticinia ex eventu. Otherwise the despair of the disciples when the events occurred could not be explained. Yet it is possible that Jesus had a prevision of His death. Perhaps the resolve to die was essential to His conception of the Messiahship and He was not forced thereto by circumstances. This we might be able to determine with certainty if we had more exact information regarding the conception of the suffering Messiah in contemporary Jewish theology; which is, however, not available. We do not even know whether the conception had ever existed in Judaism. “In the New Testament it almost looks as if no one among the Jews had ever thought of a suffering or dying Messiah.” The conception can, however, certainly be found in later passages of Rabbinic literature.
The question is therefore insoluble. We must be content to work with possibilities. The result of a full discussion of the resolve to suffer and the significance attached to the suffering is summed up by Strauss in the following sentences. “In view of these considerations it is possible that Jesus might, by a natural process of thought, have come to see how greatly such a catastrophe would contribute to the spiritual development of His disciples, and in accordance with national conceptions, interpreted in the light of some Old Testament passages, might have arrived at the idea of an atoning power in His Messianic death. At the same time the explicit utterance which the Synoptists attribute to Jesus describing His death as an atoning sacrifice, might well belong rather to the system of thought which grew up after the death of Jesus, and the saying which the Fourth Gospel puts into His mouth regarding the relation of His death to the coming of the Paraclete might seem to be prophecy after the event. So that even in these sayings of Jesus regarding the purpose of His death, it is necessary to distinguish between the particular and the general.”
Strauss's “Life of Jesus” has a different significance for modern theology from that which it had for his contemporaries. For them it was the work which made an end of miracle as a matter of historical belief, and gave the mythological explanation its due.
We, however, find in it also an historical aspect of a positive character, inasmuch as the historic Personality which emerges from the mist of myth is a Jewish claimant of the Messiahship, whose world of thought is purely eschatological. Strauss is, therefore, no mere destroyer of untenable solutions, but also the prophet of a coming advance in knowledge.
It was, however, his own fault that his merit in this respect was not recognised in the nineteenth century, because in his “Life of Jesus for the German People” (1864), where he undertook to draw a positive historic picture of Jesus, he renounced his better opinions of 1835, eliminated eschatology, and, instead of the historic Jesus, portrayed the Jesus of liberal theology.
IX. Strauss's Opponents And Supporters
David Friedrich Strauss. Streitschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schrift über das Leben-Jesu und zur Charakteristik der gegenwärtigen Theologie. (Replies to criticisms of my work on the Life of Jesus; with an estimate of present-day theology.) Tübingen, 1837.
Das Leben-Jesu, 3te verbesserte Auflage (3rd revised edition). 1838-1839, Tübingen.
August Tholuck. Die Glaubwürdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte, zugleich eine Kritik des Lebens Jesu von Strauss. (The Credibility of the Gospel History, with an incidental criticism of Strauss's “Leben-Jesu.”) Hamburg, 1837.
Aug. Wilh. Neander. Das Leben Jesu-Christi. Hamburg, 1837.
Dr. Neanders auf höhere Veranlassung abgefasstes Gutachten über das Buch des Dr. Strauss' “Leben-Jesu” und das in Beziehung auf die Verbreitung desselben zu beachtende Verfahren. (Dr. Neander's report, drawn up at the request of the authorities, upon Dr. Strauss's “Leben-Jesu” and the measures to be adopted in regard to its circulation.) 1836.
Leonhard Hug. Gutachten über das Leben-Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet von D. Fr. Strauss. (Report on D. Fr. Strauss's critical work upon the Life of Jesus.) Freiburg, 1840.
Christian Gottlob Wilke. Tradition und Mythe. Ein Beitrag zur historischen Kritik der kanonischen Evangelien überhaupt, wie insbesondere zur Würdigung des mythischen Idealismus im Leben-Jesu von Strauss. (Tradition and Myth. A Contribution to the General Historical Criticism of the Gospels; with special reference to the mythical idealism of Strauss's “Leben-Jesu.”) Leipzig, 1837.
August Ebrard. Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte. (Scientific Criticism of the Gospel History.) Frankfort, 1842.
Georg Heinr. Aug. Ewald. Geschichte Christus' und seiner Zeit. (History of Christ and His Times.) 1855. Fifth volume of the “Geschichte des Volkes Israel.”
Christoph Friedrich von Ammon. Die Geschichte des Lebens Jesu mit steter Rücksicht auf die vorhandenen Quellen. (History of the Life of Jesus with constant reference to the extant sources.) 3 vols. 1842-1847.
Scarcely ever has a book let loose such a storm of controversy; and scarcely ever has a controversy been so barren of immediate result. The fertilising rain brought up a crop of toad-stools. Of the forty or fifty essays on the subject which appeared in the next [pg 098] five years, there are only four or five which are of any value, and even of these the value is very small.
Strauss's first idea was to deal with each of his opponents separately, and he published in 1837 three successive Streitschriften.[44] In the preface to the first of these he states that he has kept silence for two years from a rooted objection to anything in the nature of reply or counter-criticism, and because he had little expectation of any good results from such controversy. These essays are able, and are often written with biting scorn, especially that directed against his inveterate enemy, Steudel of Tübingen, the representative of intellectual supernaturalism, and that against Eschenmayer, a pastor, also of Tübingen. To a work of the latter, “The Iscariotism of our Days” (1835), he had referred in the preface to the second volume of his Life of Jesus in the following remark: “This offspring of the legitimate marriage between theological ignorance and religious intolerance, blessed by a sleep-walking philosophy, succeeds in making itself so completely ridiculous that it renders any serious reply unnecessary.”
But for all his sarcasm Strauss does not show himself an adroit debater in this controversy, any more than in later times in the Diet.
It is indeed remarkable how unskilled in polemics is this man who had produced a critical work of the first importance with almost playful ease. If his opponents made no effort to understand him rightly—and many of them certainly wrote without having carefully studied the fourteen hundred pages of his two volumes—Strauss on his part seemed to be stricken with a kind of uncertainty, lost himself in a maze of detail, and failed to keep continually re-formulating the main problems which he had set up for discussion, and so compelling his adversaries to face them fairly.
Of these problems there were three. The first was composed of the related questions regarding miracle and myth; the second concerned the connexion of the Christ of faith with the Jesus of [pg 099] history; the third referred to the relation of the Gospel of John to the Synoptists.
It was the first that attracted most attention; more than half the critics devoted themselves to it alone. Even so they failed to get a thorough grasp of it. The only thing that they clearly see is that Strauss altogether denies the miracles; the full scope of the mythological explanation as applied to the traditional records of the life of Jesus, and the extent of the historical material which Strauss is prepared to accept, is still a riddle to them. That is in some measure due, it must in fairness be said, to the arrangement of Strauss's own work, in which the unconnected series of separate investigations makes the subject unnecessarily difficult even for one who wishes to do the author justice.
The attitude towards miracle assumed in the anti-Strauss literature shows how far the anti-rationalistic reaction had carried professedly scientific theology in the direction of supernaturalism. Some significant symptoms had begun to show themselves even in Hase and Schleiermacher of a tendency towards the overcoming of rationalism by a kind of intellectual gymnastic which ran some risk of falling into insincerity. The essential character of this new kind of historical theology first came to light when Strauss put it to the question, and forced it to substitute a plain yes or no for the ambiguous phrases with which this school had only too quickly accustomed itself to evade the difficulties of the problem of miracle. The mottoes with which this new school of theology adorned the works which it sent forth against the untimely troubler of their peace manifest its complete perplexity, and display the coquettish resignation with which the sacred learning of the time essayed to cover its nakedness, after it had succumbed to the temptation of the serpent insincerity. Adolf Harless of Erlangen chose the melancholy saying of Pascal: “Tout tourne bien pour les élus, jusqu'aux obscurités de l'écriture, car ils les honorent à cause des clartés divines qu'ils y voient; et tout tourne en mal aux reprouvés, jusqu'aux clartés, car ils les blasphèment à cause des obscurités qu'ils n'entendent pas.”[45]
Herr Wilhelm Hoffmann,[46] deacon at Winnenden, selected Bacon's aphorism: “Animus ad amplitudinem mysteriorum pro modulo suo dilatetur, non mysteria ad angustias animi constringantur.” (Let the mind, so far as possible, be expanded to the greatness of the mysteries, not the mysteries contracted to the compass of the mind.)
Professor Ernst Osiander,[47] of the seminary at Maulbronn, appeals to Cicero: “O magna vis veritatis, quae contra hominum ingenia, calliditatem, sollertiam facillime se per ipsam defendit.” (O mighty power of truth, which against all the ingenious devices, the craft and subtlety, of men, easily defends itself by its own strength!)
Franz Baader, of Munich,[48] ornaments his work with the reflection: “Il faut que les hommes soient bien loin de toi, ô Vérité! puisque tu supporte (sic!) leur ignorance, leurs erreurs, et leurs crimes.” (Men must indeed be far from thee, O Truth, since thou art able to bear with their ignorance, their errors, and their crimes!)
Tholuck[49] girds himself with the Catholic maxim of Vincent of Lerins: “Teneamus quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est.” (Let us hold that which has been believed always, everywhere, by all.)
The fear of Strauss had, indeed, a tendency to inspire Protestant theologians with catholicising ideas. One of the most competent reviewers of his book, Dr. Ullmann in the Studien und Kritiken, had expressed the wish that it had been written in Latin to prevent its doing harm among the people.[50] An anonymous dialogue of the period shows us the schoolmaster coming in distress to the clergyman. He has allowed himself to be persuaded into reading the book by his acquaintance the Major, and he is now anxious to get rid of the doubts which it has aroused in him. When his cure has been safely accomplished, the reverend gentleman dismisses him with the following exhortation: “Now I hope that after the experience which you have had you will for the future refrain from reading books of this kind, which are not written for you, and of which there is no necessity for you to take any notice; and for the refutation of which, should that be needful, you have no [pg 101] equipment. You may be quite sure that anything useful or profitable for you which such books may contain will reach you in due course through the proper channel and in the right way, and, that being so, you are under no necessity to jeopardise any part of your peace of mind.”
Tholuck's work professedly aims only at presenting a “historical argument for the credibility of the miracle stories of the Gospels.” “Even if we admit,” he says in one place, “the scientific position that no act can have proceeded from Christ which transcends the laws of nature, there is still room for the mediating view of Christ's miracle-working activity. This leads us to think of mysterious powers of nature as operating in the history of Christ—powers such as we have some partial knowledge of, as, for example, those magnetic powers which have survived down to our own time, like ghosts lingering on after the coming of day.” From the standpoint of this spurious rationalism he proceeds to take Strauss to task for rejecting the miracles. “Had this latest critic been able to approach the Gospel miracles without prejudice, in the Spirit of Augustine's declaration, ‘dandum est deo, eum aliquid facere posse quod nos investigare non possumus,’ he would certainly—since he is a man who in addition to the acumen of the scholar possesses sound common sense—have come to a different conclusion in regard to these difficulties. As it is, however, he has approached the Gospels with the conviction that miracles are impossible; and on that assumption, it was certain before the argument began that the Evangelists were either deceivers or deceived.”
Neander, in his Life of Jesus,[51] handles the question with more delicacy of touch, rather in the style of Schleiermacher. “Christ's miracles,” he explains, “are to be understood as an influencing of nature, human or material.” He does not, however, give so much [pg 102] prominence as Schleiermacher had done to the difficulty involved in the supposition of an influence exercised upon material nature. He repeats Schleiermacher's assertions, but without the imposing dialectic which in Schleiermacher's hands almost commands assent. In regard to the miracle at Cana he remarks: “We cannot indeed form any clear conception of an effect brought about by the introduction of a higher creative principle into the natural order, since we have no experience on which to base such a conception, but we are by no means compelled to take this extreme view as to what happened; we may quite well suppose that Christ by an immediate influence upon the water communicated to it a higher potency which enabled it to produce the effects of strong wine.” In the case of all the miracles he makes a point of seeking not only the explanation, but the higher symbolical significance. The miracle of the fig-tree—which is sui generis—has only this symbolical significance, seeing that it is not beneficent and creative but destructive. “It can only be thought of as a vivid illustration of a prediction of the Divine judgment, after the manner of the symbolic actions of the Old Testament prophets.”
With reference to the ascension and the resurrection he writes: “Even though we can form no clear idea of the exact way in which the exaltation of Christ from the earth took place—and indeed there is much that is obscure in regard to the earthly life of Christ after His resurrection—yet, in its place in the organic unity of the Christian faith, it is as certain as the resurrection, which apart from it cannot be recognised in its true significance.”
That extract is typical of Neander's Life of Jesus, which in its time was hailed as a great achievement, calculated to provide a learned refutation of Strauss's criticism, and of which a seventh edition appeared as late as 1872. The real piety of heart with which it is imbued cannot conceal the fact that it is a patchwork of unsatisfactory compromises. It is the child of despair, and has perplexity for godfather. One cannot read it without pain.
Neander, however, may fairly claim to be judged, not by this work, but by his personal attitude in the Strauss controversy. And here he appears as a magnanimous and dignified representative of theological science. Immediately after the appearance of Strauss's book, which, it was at once seen, would cause much offence, the Prussian Government asked Neander to report upon it, with a view to prohibiting the circulation, should there appear to be grounds for doing so. He presented his report on the 15th of November 1835, and, an inaccurate account of it having appeared in the Allgemeine Zeitung, subsequently published it.[52] In it he censures the work as being written from a too purely rationalistic point of view, but strongly urges the Government not to suppress it by an edict. He [pg 103] describes it as “a book which, it must be admitted, constitutes a danger to the sacred interests of the Church, but which follows the method of endeavouring to produce a reasoned conviction by means of argument. Hence any other method of dealing with it than by meeting argument with argument will appear in the unfavourable light of an arbitrary interference with the freedom of science.”
In holding that scientific theology will be able by its own strength to overthrow whatever in Strauss's Life of Jesus deserves to be overthrown, Neander is at one with the anonymous writer of “Aphorisms in Defence of Dr. Strauss and his Work,”[53] who consoles himself with Goethe's saying—
Das Tüchtige, auch wenn es falsch ist,
Wirkt Tag für Tag, von Haus zu Haus;
Das Tüchtige, wenn's wahrhaftig ist,
Wirkt über alle Zeiten hinaus.[54]
(Strive hard, and though your aim be wrong,
Your work shall live its little day;
Strive hard, and for the truth be strong,
Your work shall live and grow for aye.)
“Dr. Strauss,” says this anonymous writer, “does not represent the author's views, and he on his part cannot undertake to defend Dr. Strauss's conclusions. But it is clear to him that Dr. Strauss's work considered as a scientific production is more scientific than the works opposed to it from the side of religion are religious. Otherwise why are they so passionate, so apprehensive, so unjust?”
This confidence in pure critical science was not shared by Herr Privat-Docent Daniel Schenkel of Basle, afterwards Professor at Heidelberg. In a dreary work dedicated to his Göttingen teacher Lücke, on “Historical Science and the Church,”[55] he looks for future salvation towards that middle region where faith and science interpenetrate, and hails the new supernaturalism which approximates to a scientific treatment of these subjects “as a hopeful phenomenon.” He rejoices in the violent opposition at Zurich which led to the cancelling of Strauss's appointment, regarding it as likely to exercise an elevating influence. A similarly lofty position is taken up by the anonymous author of “Dr. Strauss and the Zurich Church,”[56] to which De Wette contributed a preface. [pg 104] Though professing great esteem for Strauss, and admitting that from the purely historical point of view he is in the right, the author feels bound to congratulate the Zurichers on having refused to admit him to the office of teacher.
The pure rationalists found it much more difficult than did the mediating theologians, whether of the older or younger school, to adjust their attitude to the new solution of the miracle question. Strauss himself had made it difficult for them by remorselessly exposing the absurd and ridiculous aspects of their method, and by refusing to recognise them as allies in the battle for truth, as they really were. Paulus would have been justified in bearing him a grudge. But the inner greatness of that man of hard exterior comes out in the fact that he put his personal feelings in the background, and when Strauss became the central figure in the battle for the purity and freedom of historical science he ignored his attacks on rationalism and came to his defence. In a very remarkable letter to the Free Canton of Zurich, on “Freedom in Theological Teaching and in the Choice of Teachers for Colleges,”[57] he urges the council and the people to appoint Strauss because of the principle at stake, and in order to avoid giving any encouragement to the retrograde movement in historical science. It is as though he felt that the end of rationalism had come, but that, in the person of the enemy who had defeated it, the pure love of truth, which was the only thing that really mattered, would triumph over all the forces of reaction.
It would not, however, be true to say that Strauss had beaten rationalism from the field. In Ammon's famous Life of Jesus,[58] in which the author takes up a very respectful attitude towards Strauss, there is a vigorous survival of a peculiar kind of rationalism inspired by Kant. For Ammon, a miraculous event can only exist when its natural causes have been discovered. “The sacred history is subject to the same laws as all other narratives of antiquity.” Lücke, in dealing with the raising of Lazarus, had thrown out the question whether Biblical miracles could be thought of historically at all, and in so doing supposed that he was putting their absolute character on a firmer basis. “We,” says Ammon, “give the opposite answer from that which is expected; only historically conceivable miracles can be admitted.” He cannot away with the constant confusion of faith and knowledge found in [pg 105] so many writers “who swim in an ocean of ideas in which the real and the illusory are as inseparable as salt and sea-water in the actual ocean.” In every natural process, he explains, we have to suppose, according to Kant, an interpenetration of natural and supernatural. For that very reason the purely supernatural does not exist for our experience. “It is no doubt certain,” so he lays it down on the lines of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, “that every act of causation which goes forth from God must be immediate, universal, and eternal, because it is thought as an effect of His will, which is exalted above space and time and interpenetrates both of them, but without abolishing them, leaving them undisturbed in their continuity and succession. For us men, therefore, all action of God is mediate, because we are completely surrounded by time and space, as the fish is by the sea or the bird by the air, and apart from these relations we should be incapable of apperception, and therefore of any real experience. As free beings we can, indeed, think of miracle as immediately Divine, but we cannot perceive it as such, because that would be impossible without seeing God, which for wise reasons is forbidden to us.” “In accordance with these principles, we shall hold it to be our duty in what follows to call attention to the natural side even of the miracles of Jesus, since apart from this no fact can become an object of belief.”
It is only in this intelligible sense that the cures of Jesus are to be thought of as “miracles.” The magnetic force, with which the mediating theology makes play, is to be rejected. “The cure of psychical diseases by the power of the word and of faith is the only kind of cure in which the student of natural science can find any basis for a conjecture regarding the way in which the cures of Jesus were effected.”
In the case of the other miracles Ammon assumes a kind of Occasionalism, in the sense that it may have pleased the Divine Providence “to fulfil in fact the confidently spoken promises of Jesus, and in that way to confirm His personal authority, which was necessary to the establishment of His doctrine of the Divine salvation.”
In most cases, however, he is content to repeat the rationalistic explanation, and portrays a Jesus who makes use of medicines, allows the demoniac himself to rush upon the herd of swine, helps a leper, whom he sees to be suffering only from one of the milder forms of the disease, to secure the public recognition of his being legally clean, and who exerts himself to prevent by word and act the premature burial of persons in a state of trance. The story of the feeding of the multitude is based on some occasion when there was “a bountiful display of hospitality, a generous sharing of provisions, inspired by Jesus' prayer of thanksgiving and the [pg 106] example which He set when the disciples were inclined selfishly to hold back their own supply.” The story of the miracle at Cana rests on a mere misunderstanding, those who report it not having known that the wine which Jesus caused to be secretly brought forth was the wedding-gift which he was presenting in the name of the family. As a disciple of Kant, however, Ammon feels obliged to refute the imputation that Jesus could have done anything to promote excess, and calculates that the present of wine which Jesus had intended to give the bridal pair may be estimated as equivalent to not more than eighteen bottles.[59] He explains the walking on the sea by claiming for Jesus an acquaintance with “the art of treading water.”
Only in regard to the explanation of the resurrection does Ammon break away from rationalism. He decides that the reality of the death of Jesus is historically proved. But he does not venture to suppose a real reawakening to life, and remains at the standpoint of Herder.
But the way in which, in spite of the deeper view of the conception of miracle which he owes to Kant, he constantly falls back upon the most pedestrian naturalistic explanations, and his failure to rid himself of the prejudice that an actual, even if not a miraculous fact must underlie all the recorded miracles, is in itself sufficient to prove that we have here to do with a mere revival of rationalism: that is, with an untenable theory which Strauss's refutation of Paulus had already relegated to the past.
It was an easier task for pure supernaturalism than for pure rationalism to come to terms with Strauss. For the former Strauss was only the enemy of the mediating theology—there was nothing to fear from him and much to gain. Accordingly Hengstenberg's Evangelische Kirchenzeitung hailed Strauss's book as “one of the most gratifying phenomena in the domain of recent theological literature,” and praises the author for having carried out with logical consistency the application of the mythical theory which had formerly been restricted to the Old Testament and certain parts only of the Gospel tradition. “All that Strauss has done is to bring the spirit of the age to a clear consciousness of itself and of the necessary consequences which flow from its essential [pg 107] character. He has taught it how to get rid of foreign elements which were still present in it, and which marked an imperfect stage of its development.”
He has been the most influential factor in the necessary process of separation. There is no one with whom Hengstenberg feels himself more in agreement than with the Tübingen scholar. Had he not shown with the greatest precision how the results of the Hegelian philosophy, one may say, of philosophy in general, reacted upon Christian faith? “The relation of speculation to faith has now come clearly to light.”
“Two nations,” writes Hengstenberg in 1836, “are struggling in the womb of our time, and two only. They will be ever more definitely opposed to one another. Unbelief will more and more cast off the elements of faith to which it still clings, and faith will cast off its elements of unbelief. That will be an inestimable advantage. Had the Time-spirit continued to make concessions, concessions would constantly have been made to it in return.” Therefore the man who “calmly and deliberately laid hands upon the Lord's anointed, undeterred by the vision of the millions who have bowed the knee, and still bow the knee, before His appearing,” has in his own way done a service.
Strauss on his part escaped with relief from the musty atmosphere of the study—beloved by theology in carpet-slippers—to the bracing air of Hengstenberg's Kirchenzeitung. In his “Replies” he devotes to it some fifty-four pages. “I must admit,” he says, “that it is a satisfaction to me to have to do with the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung. In dealing with it one knows where one is and what one has to expect. If Herr Hengstenberg condemns, he knows why he condemns, and even one against whom he launches his anathema must admit that the attitude becomes him. Any one who, like the editor of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, has taken upon him the yoke of confessional doctrine with all its implications, has paid a price which entitles him to the privilege of condemning those who differ from his opinions.”[60]
Hengstenberg's only complaint against Strauss is that he does not go far enough. He would have liked to force upon him the rôle of the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist, and considers that if Strauss did not, like the latter, go so far as to suppose the apostles guilty of deliberate deceit, that is not so much from any regard for the historical kernel of Christianity as in order to mask his attack.
Even in Catholic theology Strauss's work caused a great sensation. Catholic theology in general did not at that time take up an attitude of absolute isolation from Protestant scholarship; [pg 108] it had adopted from the latter numerous rationalistic ideas, and had been especially influenced by Schleiermacher. Thus, Catholic scholars were almost prepared to regard Strauss as a common enemy, against whom it was possible to make common cause with Protestants. In 1837 Joseph Mack, one of the Professors of the Catholic faculty at Tübingen, published his “Report on Herr Dr. Strauss's Historical Study of the Life of Jesus.”[61] In 1839 appeared “Dr. Strauss's Life of Jesus, considered from the Catholic point of view,”[62] by Dr. Maurus Hagel, Professor of Theology at the Lyceum at Dillingen; in 1840 that lover of hypotheses and doughty fighter, Johann Leonhard Hug,[63] presented his report upon the work.[64]
Even French Catholicism gave some attention to Strauss's work. This marks an epoch—the introduction of the knowledge of German critical theology into the intellectual world of the Latin nations. In the Revue des deux mondes for December 1838, Edgar Quinet gave a clear and accurate account of the influence of the Hegelian philosophy upon the religious ideas of cultured Germany.[65] In an eloquent peroration he lays bare the danger which was menacing the Church from the nation of Strauss and Hegel. His countrymen need not think that it could be charmed away by some ingenious formula; a mighty effort of the Catholic spirit was necessary, if it was to be successfully opposed. “A new barbarian invasion was rolling up against sacred Rome. The barbarians were streaming from every quarter of the horizon, bringing their strange gods with them and preparing to beleaguer the holy city. As, of yore, Leo went forth to meet Attila, so now let the Papacy put on its purple and come forth, while yet there is time, to wave back with an authoritative gesture the devastating hordes into that moral wilderness which is their native home.”
Quinet might have done better still if he had advised the Pope to issue, as a counterblast to the unbelieving critical work of [pg 109] Strauss, the Life of Jesus which had been revealed to the faith of the blessed Anna Katharina Emmerich.[66] How thoroughly this refuted Strauss can be seen from the fragment issued in 1834, “The Bitter Sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” where even the age of Jesus on the day of His death is exactly given. On that Maundy Thursday the 13th Nisan, it was exactly thirty-three years and eighteen weeks less one day. The “pilgrim” Clement Brentano would certainly have consented, had he been asked, to allow his note-books to be used in the sacred cause, and to have given to the world the Life of Jesus as it was revealed to him by this visionary from the end of July 1820 day by day for three years, instead of allowing this treasure to remain hidden for more than twenty years longer. He himself ascribed to these visions the most strictly historical character, and insisted on considering them not merely as reflections on what had happened, but as the immediate reflex of the facts themselves, so that the picture of the life of Jesus is given in them as in a mirror. Hug, it may be mentioned, in his lectures, called attention to the exact agreement of the topography of the passion story in Katharina's vision with the description of the locality in Josephus. If he had known her complete Life of Jesus he would doubtless have expressed his admiration for the way in which she harmonises John and the Synoptists; and with justice, for the harmony is really ingenious and skilfully planned.
Apart from these merits, too, this Life of Jesus, written, it should be observed, earlier than Strauss's, contains a wealth of interesting information. John at first baptized at Aenon, but later was directed to remove to Jericho. The baptisms took place in “baptismal springs.”
Peter owned three boats, of which one was fitted up especially [pg 110] for the use of Jesus, and carried a complement of ten persons. Forward and aft there were covered-in spaces where all kinds of gear could be kept, and where also they could wash their feet; along the sides of the boat were hung receptacles for the fish.
When Judas Iscariot became a disciple of Jesus he was twenty-five years old. He had black hair and a red beard, but could not be called really ugly. He had had a stormy past. His mother had been a dancing-woman, and Judas had been born out of wedlock, his father being a military tribune in Damascus. As an infant he had been exposed, but had been saved, and later had been taken charge of by his uncle, a tanner at Iscariot. At the time when he joined the company of Jesus' disciples he had squandered all his possessions. The disciples at first liked him well enough because of his readiness to make himself useful; he even cleaned the shoes.
The fish with the stater in its mouth was so large that it made a full meal for the whole company.
A work to which Jesus devoted special attention—though this is not mentioned in the Gospels—was the reconciliation of unhappy married couples. Another matter which is not mentioned in the Gospels is the voyage of Jesus to Cyprus, upon which He entered after a farewell meal with His disciples at the house of the Canaanitish woman. This voyage took place during the war between Herod and Aretas while the disciples were making their missionary journey in Palestine. As they could not give an eyewitness report of it they were silent; nor did they make any mention of the feast to which the Proconsul at Salamis invited the Saviour. In regard to another journey, also, which Jesus made to the land of the wise men of the East, the “pilgrim's” oracle has the advantage of knowing more than the Evangelists.
In spite of these additional traits a certain monotony is caused by the fact that the visionary, in order to fill in the tale of days in the three years, makes the persons known to us from the Gospel history meet with the Saviour on several occasions previous to the meeting narrated in the Gospels. Here the artificial character of the composition comes out too clearly, though in general a lively imagination tends to conceal this. And yet these naïve embellishments and inventions have something rather attractive about them; one cannot handle the book without a certain reverence when one thinks amid what pains these revelations were received. If Brentano had published his notes at the time of the excitement produced by Strauss's Life of Jesus, the work would have had a tremendous success. As it was, when the first two volumes appeared at the end of the 'fifties, there were sold in one year three thousand and several hundred copies, without reckoning the French edition which appeared contemporaneously.
In the end, however, all the efforts of the mediating theology, of rationalism and supernaturalism, could do nothing to shake Strauss's conclusion that it was all over with supernaturalism as a factor to be reckoned with in the historical study of the Life of Jesus, and that scientific theology, instead of turning back from rationalism to supernaturalism, must move straight onward between the two and seek out a new path for itself. The Hegelian method had proved itself to be the logic of reality. With Strauss begins the period of the non-miraculous view of the Life of Jesus; all other views exhausted themselves in the struggle against him, and subsequently abandoned position after position without waiting to be attacked. The separation which Hengstenberg had hailed with such rejoicing was really accomplished; but in the form that supernaturalism practically separated itself from the serious study of history. It is not possible to date the stages of this process. After the first outburst of excitement everything seems to go on as quietly as before; the only difference is that the question of miracle constantly falls more and more into the background. In the modern period of the study of the Life of Jesus, which begins about the middle of the 'sixties, it has lost all importance.
That does not mean that the problem of miracle is solved. From the historical point of view it is really impossible to solve it, since we are not able to reconstruct the process by which a series of miracle stories arose, or a series of historical occurrences were transformed into miracle stories, and these narratives must simply be left with a question mark standing against them. What has been gained is only that the exclusion of miracle from our view of history has been universally recognised as a principle of criticism, so that miracle no longer concerns the historian either positively or negatively. Scientific theologians of the present day who desire to show their “sensibility,” ask no more than that two or three little miracles may be left to them—in the stories of the childhood, perhaps, or in the narratives of the resurrection. And these miracles are, moreover, so far scientific that they have at least no relation to those in the text, but are merely spiritless, miserable little toy-dogs of criticism, flea-bitten by rationalism, too insignificant to do historical science any harm, especially as their owners honestly pay the tax upon them by the way in which they speak, write, and are silent about Strauss.
But even that is better than the delusive fashion in which some writers of the present day succeed in discussing the narratives of the resurrection “as pure historians” without betraying by a single word whether they themselves believe it to be possible or not. But the reason modern theology can allow itself these liberties is that the foundation laid by Strauss is unshakable.
Compared with the problem of miracle, the question regarding [pg 112] the mythical explanation of the history takes a very subordinate place in the controversy. Few understood what Strauss's real meaning was; the general impression was that he entirely dissolved the life of Jesus into myth.
There appeared, indeed, three satires ridiculing his method. One showed how, for the historical science of the future, the life of Luther would also become a mere myth,[67] the second treated the life of Napoleon in the same way;[68] in the third, Strauss himself becomes a myth.[69]
M. Eugène Mussard, “candidat au saint ministère,” made it his business to set at rest the minds of the premier faculty at Geneva by his thesis, Du système mythique appliqué à l'histoire de la vie de Jésus, 1838, which bears the ingenious motto οὐ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις (not ... in cunningly devised myths, 2 Peter i. 16). He certainly did not exaggerate the difficulties of his task, but complacently followed up an “Exposition of the Mythical Theory,” with a “Refutation of the Mythical Theory as applied to the Life of Jesus.”
The only writer who really faced the problem in the form in which it had been raised by Strauss was Wilke in his work “Tradition and Myth.”[70] He recognises that Strauss had given an exceedingly valuable impulse towards the overcoming of rationalism and supernaturalism and to the rejection of the abortive [pg 113] mediating theology. “A keener criticism will only establish the truth of the Gospel, putting what is tenable on a firmer basis, sifting out what is untenable, and showing up in all its nakedness the counterfeit theology of the new evangelicalism with its utter lack of understanding and sincerity.” Again, “the approval which Strauss has met with, and the excitement which he has aroused, sufficiently show what an advantage rationalistic speculation possesses over the theological second-childishness of the new evangelicals.” The time has come for a rational mysticism, which shall preserve undiminished the honesty of the old rationalism, making no concessions to supernaturalism, but, on the other hand, overcoming the “truculent rationalism of the Kantian criticism” by means of a religious conception in which there is more warmth and more pious feeling.
This rational mysticism makes it a reproach against the “mythical idealism” of Strauss that in it philosophy does violence to history, and the historic Christ only retains His significance as a mere ideal. A new examination of the sources is necessary to decide upon the extent of the mythical element.
The Gospel of Matthew cannot, Wilke agrees, have been the work of an eyewitness. “The principal argument against its authenticity is the absence of the characteristic marks of an eyewitness, which must necessarily have been present in a gospel actually composed by a disciple of the Lord, and which are not present here. The narrative is lacking in precision, fragmentary and legendary, tradition everywhere manifest in its very form.” There are discrepancies in the legends of the first and second chapters, as well as elsewhere, e.g. the stories of the baptism, the temptation, and the transfiguration. In other cases, where there is a basis of historic fact, there is an admixture of legendary material, as in the narratives of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
In the Gospel of Mark, Wilke recognises the pictorial vividness of many of the descriptions, and conjectures that in some way or other it goes back to the Petrine tradition. The author of the Fourth Gospel is not an eyewitness; the κατά (according to) only indicates the origin of the tradition; the author received it, either directly or indirectly, from the Apostle, but he gave to it the gnosticising dialectical form of the Alexandrian theology.
As against the Diegesentheorie[71] Wilke defends the independence and originality of the individual Gospels. “No one of the Evangelists knew the writing of any of the others, each produced an independent work drawn from a separate source.”
In the remarks on points of detail in this work of Wilke's there is evidence of a remarkable grasp of the critical data; we already get a hint of the “mathematician” of the Synoptic problem, [pg 114] who, two years later, was to work out convincingly the literary argument for the priority of Mark. But the historian is quite subordinated to the literary critic, and, when all is said, Wilke takes up no clearly defined position in regard to Strauss's main problem, as is evident from his seeking to retain, on more or less plausible grounds, a whole series of miracles, among them the miracle of Cana and the resurrection.
For most thinkers of that period, however, the question “myth or history” yielded in interest to the philosophical question of the relation of the historical Jesus to the ideal Christ. That was the second problem raised by Strauss. Some thought to refute him by showing that his exposition of the relation of the Jesus of history to the ideal Christ was not justified even from the point of view of the Hegelian philosophy, arguing that the edifice which he had raised was not in harmony with the ground-plan of the Hegelian speculative system. He therefore felt it necessary, in his reply to the review in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, to expound “the general relationship of the Hegelian philosophy to theological criticism,”[72] and to express in more precise form the thoughts upon speculative and historical Christology which he had suggested at the close of the second volume of his “Life of Jesus.”
He admits that Hegel's philosophy is ambiguous in this matter, since it is not clear “whether the evangelical fact as such, not indeed in its isolation, but together with the whole series of manifestations of the idea (of God-manhood) in the history of the world, is the truth; or whether the embodiment of the idea in that single fact is only a formula of which consciousness makes use in forming its concept.” The Hegelian “right,” he says, represented by Marheineke and Göschel, emphasises the positive side of the master's religious philosophy, implying that in Jesus the idea of God-manhood was perfectly fulfilled and in a certain sense intelligibly realised. “If these men,” Strauss explains, “appeal to Hegel and declare that he would not have recognised my book as an expression of his meaning, they say nothing which is not in accordance with my own convictions. Hegel was personally no friend to historical criticism. It annoyed him, as it annoyed Goethe, to see the historic figures of antiquity, on which their thoughts were accustomed lovingly to dwell, assailed by critical doubts. Even if it was in some cases wreaths of mist which they took for pinnacles of rock, they did not want to have this forced upon their attention, nor to [pg 115] be disturbed in the illusion from which they were conscious of receiving an elevating influence.”
But though prepared to admit that he had added to the edifice of Hegel's religious philosophy an annexe of historical criticism, of which the master would hardly have approved, Strauss is convinced that he is the only logical representative of Hegel's essential view. “The question which can be decided from the standpoint of the philosophy of religion is not whether what is narrated in the Gospels actually happened or not, but whether in view of the truth of certain conceptions it must necessarily have happened. And in regard to this, what I assert is that from the general system of the Hegelian philosophy it by no means necessarily follows that such an event must have happened, but that from the standpoint of the system the truth of that history from which actually the conception arose is reduced to a matter of indifference; it may have happened, but it may just as well not have happened, and the task of deciding on this point may be calmly handed over to historical criticism.”
Strauss reminds us that, even according to Hegel, the belief in Jesus as God-made-man is not immediately given with His appearing in the world of sense, but only arose after His death and the removal of His sensible presence. The master himself had acknowledged the existence of mythical elements in the Life of Jesus; in regard to miracle he had expressed the opinion that the true miracle was “Spirit.” The conception of the resurrection and ascension as outward facts of sense was not recognised by him as true.
Hegel's authority may, no doubt, fairly be appealed to by those who believe, not only in an incarnation of God in a general sense, “but also that this manifestation of God in flesh has taken place in this man (Jesus) at this definite time and place.”... “In making the assertion,” concludes Strauss, “that the truth of the Gospel narrative cannot be proved, whether in whole or in part, from philosophical considerations, but that the task of inquiring into its truth must be left to historical criticism, I should like to associate myself with the ‘left wing’ of the Hegelian school, were it not that the Hegelians prefer to exclude me altogether from their borders, and to throw me into the arms of other systems of thought—only, it must be admitted, to have me tossed back to them like a ball.”
In regard to the third problem which Strauss had offered for discussion, the relation of the Synoptists to John, there was practically no response. The only one of his critics who understood what was at stake was Hengstenberg. He alone perceived the significance of the fact that critical theology, having admitted mythical elements first in the Old Testament, and then in the beginning and [pg 116] end of the Gospel history, and having, in consequence of the latter admission, felt obliged to give up the first three Gospels, retaining only the fourth, was now being besieged by Strauss in its last stronghold. “They withdrew,” says the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, “into the Gospel of John as into a fortress, and boasted that they were safe there, though they could not suppress a secret consciousness that they only held it at the enemy's pleasure; now the enemy has appeared before it; he is using the same weapons with which he was formerly victorious; the Gospel of John is in as desperate case as formerly the Synoptists. The time has come to make a bold resolve, a decisive choice; either they must give up everything, or else they must successively re-occupy the more advanced positions which at an earlier date they had successively abandoned.” It would be impossible to give a more accurate picture of the desperate position into which Hase and Schleiermacher had brought the mediating theology by their ingenious expedient of giving up the Synoptics in favour of the Gospel of John. Before any danger threatened, they had abandoned the outworks and withdrawn into the citadel, oblivious of the fact that they thereby exposed themselves to the danger of having their own guns turned upon them from the positions they had abandoned, and being obliged to surrender without striking a blow the position of which they had boasted as impregnable. It is impossible to emphasise strongly enough the fact that it was not Strauss, but Hase and Schleiermacher, who had brought the mediating theology into this hopeless position, in which the fall of the Fourth Gospel carried with it the surrender of the historical tradition as a whole.
But there is no position so desperate that theology cannot find a way out of it. The mediating theologians simply ignored the problem which Strauss had raised. As they had been accustomed to do before, so they continued to do after, taking the Gospel of John as the authentic framework, and fitting into it the sections of the Synoptic narrative wherever place could best be found for them. The difference between the Johannine and Synoptic representations of Jesus' method of teaching, says Neander, is only apparently irreconcilable, and he calls out in support of this assertion all the reserves of old worn-out expedients and artifices, among others the argument that the Pauline Christology is only explicable as a combination of the Synoptic and Johannine views. Other writers who belong to the same apologetic school, such as Tholuck, Ebrard,[73] [pg 117] Wieseler,[74] Lange,[75] and Ewald,[76] maintain the same point of view, only that their defence is usually much less skilful.
The only writer who really in some measure enters into the difficulties is Ammon. He, indeed, is fully conscious of the difference, and thinks we cannot rest content with merely recognising it, but must find a solution, even if rather a forced one, “by subordinating the indefinite chronological data of the Synoptists, of whom, after all, only one was, or could have been, an eyewitness, to the ordered narrative of John.” The fourth Evangelist makes so brief a reference to the Galilaean period because it was in accordance with his plan to give more prominence to the discourses of Jesus in the Temple and His dialogues with the Scribes as compared to the parables and teaching given to the people. The cleansing of the Temple falls at the outset of Jesus' ministry; Jesus begins His Messianic work in Jerusalem by this action of making an end of the unseemly chaffering in the court of the Temple. The question regarding the relative authenticity of the reports is decisively settled by a comparison of the two accounts of [pg 118] the triumphal entry, because there it is quite evident that “Matthew, the chief authority among the Synoptists, adapts his narrative to his special Jewish-Messianic standpoint.” According to Ammon's rationalistic view, the work of Jesus consisted precisely in the transformation of this Jewish-Messianic idea into the conception of a “Saviour of the world.” In this lies the explanation of the fate of Jesus: “The mass of the Jewish people were not prepared to receive a Christ so spiritual as Jesus was, since they were not ripe for so lofty a view of religion.”
Ammon here turns his Kantian philosophy to account. It serves especially to explain to him the consciousness of pre-existence avowed by the Jesus of the Johannine narrative as something purely human. We, too, he explains, can “after the spirit” claim an ideal existence prior to the spatial creation without indulging any delusion, and without, on the other hand, thinking of a real existence. In this way Jesus is for Himself a Biblical idea, with which He has become identified. “The purer and deeper a man's self-consciousness is, the keener may his consciousness of God become, until time disappears for him, and his partaking in the Divine nature fills his whole soul.”
But Ammon's support of the authenticity of John's Gospel is, even from a purely literary point of view, not so unreserved as in the case of the other opponents of Strauss. In the background stands the hypothesis that our Gospel is only a working-over of the authentic John, a suggestion in regard to which Ammon can claim priority, since he had made it as early as 1811,[77] nine years before the appearance of Bretschneider's Probabilia. Were it not for the ingenuous fashion in which he works the Synoptic material into the Johannine plan, we might class him with Alexander Schweizer and Weisse, who in a similar way seek to meet the objections of Strauss by an elaborate theory of editing.[78]
The first stage of the discussion regarding the relation of John to the Synoptists passed without result. The mediating theology continued to hold its positions undisturbed—and, strangest of all, Strauss himself was eager for a suspension of hostilities.
It is as though history took the trouble to countersign the [pg 119] genuineness of the great critical discoveries by letting the discoverers themselves attempt to cancel them. As Kant disfigures his critical idealism by making inconsistent additions in order to refute a reviewer who had put him in the same category with Berkeley, so Strauss inserts additions and retractations in the third edition of his Life of Jesus in deference to the uncritical works of Tholuck and Neander! Wilke, the only one of his critics from whom he might have learned something, he ignores. “From the lofty vantage ground of Tholuck's many-sided knowledge I have sometimes, in spite of a slight tendency to vertigo, gained a juster point of view from which to look at one matter or another,” is the avowal which he makes in the preface to this ill-starred edition.
It would, indeed, have done no harm if he had confined himself to stating more exactly here and there the extent of the mythical element, had increased the number of possible cures, had inclined a little less to the negative side in examining the claims of reported facts to rank as historical, and had been a little more circumspect in pointing out the factors which produced the myths; the serious thing was that he now began to hesitate in his denial of the historical character of the Fourth Gospel—the very foundation of his critical view.
A renewed study of it, aided by De Wette's commentary and Neander's Life of Jesus, had made him “doubtful about his doubts regarding the genuineness and credibility of this Gospel.” “Not that I am convinced of its genuineness,” he admits, “but I am no longer convinced that it is not genuine.”
He feels bound, therefore, to state whatever makes in its favour, and to leave open a number of possibilities which formerly he had not recognised. The adhesion of the first disciples may, he now thinks, have happened essentially in the form in which it is reported in the Fourth Gospel; in transferring the cleansing of the Temple to the first period of Jesus' ministry, John may be right as against the Synoptic tradition “which has no decisive evidence in its favour”; in regard to the question whether Jesus had been only once, or several times, in Jerusalem, his opinion now is that “on this point the superior circumstantiality of the Fourth Gospel cannot be contested.”
As regards the prominence allowed to the eschatology also all is toned down and softened. Everywhere feeble compromises! But what led Strauss to place his foot upon this shelving path was the essentially just perception that the Synoptists gave him no clearly ordered plan to set against that of the Fourth Gospel; consequently he felt obliged to make some concessions to its strength in this respect.
Yet he recognised almost immediately that the result was a mere patchwork. Even in the summer of 1839 he complained [pg 120] to Hase in conversation that he had been deafened by the clamour of his opponents, and had conceded too much to them.[79] In the fourth edition he retracted all his concessions. “The Babel of voices of opponents, critics, and supporters,” he says in his preface, “to which I had felt it my duty to listen, had confused me in regard to the idea of my work; in my diligent comparison of various views I had lost sight of the thing itself. In this way I was led to make alterations which, when I came to consider the matter calmly, surprised myself; and in making which it was obvious that I had done myself an injustice. In all these passages the earlier text has been restored, and my work has therefore consisted, it might be said, in removing from my good sword the notches which had not so much been hewn in it by the enemy as ground into it by myself.”
Strauss's vacillation had, therefore, not even been of any indirect advantage to him. Instead of endeavouring to find a purposeful connexion in the Synoptic Gospels by means of which he might test the plan of the Fourth Gospel, he simply restores his former view unaltered, thereby showing that in the decisive point it was incapable of development. In the very year in which he prepared his improved edition, Weisse, in his Evangelische Geschichte, had set up the hypothesis that Mark is the ground-document, and had thus carried criticism past the “dead-point” which Strauss had never been able to overcome. Upon Strauss, however, the new suggestion made no impression. He does, it is true, mention Weisse's book in the preface to his third edition, and describes it as “in many respects a very satisfactory piece of work.” It had appeared too late for him to make use of it in his first volume; but he did not use it in his second volume either. He had, indeed, a distinct antipathy to the Marcan hypothesis.
It was unfortunate that in this controversy the highly important suggestions in regard to various historical problems which had been made incidentally in the course of Strauss's work were never discussed at all. The impulse in the direction of progress which might have been given by his treatment of the relation of Jesus to the law, of the question regarding His particularism, of the eschatological conception, the Son of Man, and the Messiahship of Jesus, wholly failed to take effect, and it was only after long and circuitous wanderings that theology again came in sight of these problems from an equally favourable point of view. In this respect Strauss shared the fate of Reimarus; the positive solutions of which the outlines were visible behind their negative criticism escaped observation in consequence of the offence caused by the negative side of their work; and even the authors themselves failed to realise their full significance.