The Quest of the Historical Jesus / A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede

by Albert Schweitzer

X. The Marcan Hypothesis

Christian Hermann Weisse. Die evangelische Geschichte kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet. (A Critical and Philosophical Study of the Gospel History.) 2 vols. Leipzig, Breitkopf and Härtel, 1838. Vol. i. 614 pp. Vol. ii. 543 pp.

Christian Gottlob Wilke. Der Urevangelist. (The Earliest Evangelist.) 1838. Dresden and Leipzig. 694 pp.

Christian Hermann Weisse. Die Evangelienfrage in ihrem gegenwärtigen Stadium. (The Present Position of the Problem of the Gospels.) Leipzig, 1856.

The “Gospel History” of Weisse was written, like Strauss's Life of Jesus, by a philosopher who had been driven out of philosophy and forced back upon theology. Weisse was born in 1801 at Leipzig, and became Professor Extraordinary of Philosophy in the university there in 1828. In 1837, finding his advance to the Ordinary Professorship barred by the Herbartians, he withdrew from academic teaching and gave himself to the preparation of this work, the plan of which he had had in mind for some time. Having brought it to a satisfactory completion, he began again in 1841 as a Privat-Docent in Philosophy, and became Ordinary Professor in 1845. From 1848 onwards he lectured on Theology also. His work on “Philosophical Dogmatics, or the Philosophy of Christianity,”[80] is well known. He died in 1866, of cholera. Lotze and Lipsius were both much influenced by him.

Weisse admired Strauss and hailed his Life of Jesus as a forward step towards the reconciliation of religion and philosophy. He expresses his gratitude to him for clearing the ground of the primeval forest of theology, thus rendering it possible for him (Weisse) to develop his views without wasting time upon polemics, “since most of the views which have hitherto prevailed may be regarded as having received the coup de grâce from Strauss.” He is at one with Strauss also in his general view of the relations of philosophy and religion, holding that it is only if philosophy, by following its own path, attains independently to the conviction of the truth of Christianity that its alliance with theology and religion [pg 122] can be welcomed as advantageous.[81] His work, therefore, like that of Strauss, leads up finally to a philosophical exposition in which he shows how for us the Jesus of history becomes the Christ of faith.[82]

Weisse is the direct continuator of Strauss. Standing outside the limitations of the Hegelian formulae, he begins at the point where Strauss leaves off. His aim is to discover, if possible, some thread of general connexion in the narratives of the Gospel tradition, which, if present, would represent a historically certain element in the Life of Jesus, and thus serve as a better standard by which to determine the extent of myth than can possibly be found in the subjective impression upon which Strauss relies. Strauss, by way of gratitude, called him a dilettante. This was most unjust, for if any one deserved to share Strauss's place of honour, it was certainly Weisse.

The idea that Mark's Gospel might be the earliest of the four, first occurred to Weisse during the progress of his work. In March 1837, when he reviewed Tholuck's “Credibility of the Gospel History,” he was as innocent of this discovery as Wilke was at the same period. But when once he had observed that the graphic details of Mark, which had hitherto been regarded as due to an attempt to embellish an epitomising narrative, were too insignificant to have been inserted with this purpose, it became clear to him that only one other possibility remained open, viz., that their absence in Matthew and Luke was due to omission. He illustrates this from the description of the first day of Jesus' ministry at Capernaum. “The relation of the first Evangelist to Mark,” he avers, “in those portions of the Gospel which are common to both is, with few exceptions, mainly that of an epitomiser.”

The decisive argument for the priority of Mark is, even more than his graphic detail, the composition and arrangement of the whole. “It is true, the Gospel of Mark shows very distinct traces of having arisen out of spoken discourses, which themselves were by no means ordered and connected, but disconnected and fragmentary”—being, he means, in its original form based on notes of the incidents related by Peter. “It is not the work of an eyewitness, nor even of one who had had an opportunity of questioning eyewitnesses thoroughly and carefully; nor even of deriving assistance from inquirers who, on their part, had made a connected [pg 123] study of the subject, with a view to filling up the gaps and placing each individual part in its right position, and so articulating the whole into an organic unity which should be neither merely inward, nor on the other hand merely external.” Nevertheless the Evangelist was guided in his work by a just recollection of the general course of the life of Jesus. “It is precisely in Mark,” Weisse explains, “that a closer study unmistakably reveals that the incidental remarks (referring for the most part to the way in which the fame of Jesus gradually extended, the way the people began to gather round Him and the sick to besiege Him), far from shutting off and separating the different narratives, tend rather to unite them with each other, and so give the impression not of a series of anecdotes fortuitously thrown together, but of a connected history. By means of these remarks, and by many other connecting links which he works into the narration of the individual stories, Mark has succeeded in conveying a vivid impression of the stir which Jesus made in Galilee, and from Galilee to Jerusalem, of the gradual gathering of the multitudes to Him, of the growing intensity of loyalty in the inner circle of disciples, and as the counterpart of all this, of the growing enmity of the Pharisees and Scribes—an impression which mere isolated narratives, strung together without any living connexion, would not have sufficed to produce.” A connexion of this kind is less clearly present in the other Synoptists, and is wholly lacking in John. The Fourth Gospel, by itself, would give us a completely false conception of the relation of Jesus to the people. From the content of its narratives the reader would form the impression that the attitude of the people towards Jesus was hostile from the very first, and that it was only in isolated occasions, for a brief moment, that Jesus by His miraculous acts inspired the people with astonishment rather than admiration; that, surrounded by a little company of disciples he contrived for a time to defy the enmity of the multitude, and that, having repeatedly provoked it by intemperate invective, he finally succumbed to it.

The simplicity of the plan of Mark is, in Weisse's opinion, a stronger argument for his priority than the most elaborate demonstration; one only needs to compare it with the perverse design of Luke, who makes Jesus undertake a journey through Samaria. “How,” asks Weisse, “in the case of a writer who does things of this kind can it be possible at this time of day to speak seriously of historical exactitude in the use of his sources?”

To come down to detail, Weisse's argument for the priority of Mark rests mainly on the following propositions:—

1. In the first and third Gospels, traces of a common plan are found only in those parts which they have in common [pg 124] with Mark, not in those which are common to them, but not to Mark also.

2. In those parts which the three Gospels have in common, the “agreement” of the other two is mediated through Mark.

3. In those sections which the First and Third Gospels have, but Mark has not, the agreement consists in the language and incidents, not in the order. Their common source, therefore, the “Logia” of Matthew, did not contain any type of tradition which gave an order of narration different from that of Mark.

4. The divergences of wording between the two other Synoptists is in general greater in the parts where both have drawn on the Logia document than where Mark is their source.

5. The first Evangelist reproduces this Logia-document more faithfully than Luke does; but his Gospel seems to have been of later origin.

This historical argument for the priority of Mark was confirmed in the year in which it appeared by Wilke's work, “The Earliest Gospel,”[83] which treated the problem more from the literary side, and, to take an illustration from astronomy, supplied the mathematical confirmation of the hypothesis.

In regard to the Gospel of John, Weisse fully shared the negative views of Strauss. What is the use, he asks, of keeping on talking about the plan of this Gospel, seeing that no one has yet succeeded in showing what that plan is? And for a very good reason: there is none. One would never guess from the Gospel of John that Jesus, until His departure from Galilee, had experienced almost unbroken success. It is no good trying to explain the want of plan by saying that John wrote with the purpose of supplementing and correcting his predecessors, and that his omissions and additions were determined by this purpose. Such a purpose is betrayed by no single word in the whole Gospel.

The want of plan lies in the very plan itself. “It is a fixed idea, one may say, with the author of this Gospel, who had heard that Jesus had fallen a victim in Jerusalem to the hatred of the Jewish rulers, especially the Scribes, that he must represent Jesus as engaged, from His first appearance onward, in an unceasing struggle with ‘the Jews’—whereas we know that the mass of the people, even to the last, in Jerusalem itself, were on the side of Jesus; so much so, indeed, that His enemies were only able to get Him into their power by means of a secret betrayal.”

In regard to the graphic descriptions in John, of which so much has been made, the case is no better. It is the graphic detail of a writer who desires to work up a vivid picture, not the natural touches of an eyewitness, and there are, moreover, actual inconsistencies, as in the case of the healing at the pool of Bethesda. The circumstantiality is due to the care of the author not to assume an acquaintance, on the part of his readers, with Jewish usages or the topography of Palestine. “A considerable proportion of the details are of such a character as inevitably to suggest that the narrator inserts them because of the trouble which it has cost him to orientate himself in regard to the scene of the action and the dramatis personae, his object being to spare his readers a similar difficulty; though he does not always go about it in the way best calculated to effect his purpose.”

The impossibility also that the historic Jesus can have preached the doctrine of the Johannine Christ, is as clear to Weisse as to Strauss. “It is not so much a picture of Christ that John sets forth, as a conception of Christ; his Christ does not speak in His own Person, but of His own Person.”

On the other hand, however, “the authority of the whole Christian Church from the second century to the nineteenth” carries too much weight with Weisse for him to venture altogether to deny the Johannine origin of the Gospel; and he seeks a [pg 126] middle path. He assumes that the didactic portions really, for the most part, go back to John the Apostle. “John,” he explains, “drawn on by the interest of a system of doctrine which had formed itself in his mind, not so much as a direct reflex of the teaching of his Master, as on the basis of suggestions offered by that teaching in combination with a certain creative activity of his own, endeavoured to find this system also in the teaching of his Master.”

Accordingly, with this purpose, and originally for himself alone, not with the object of communicating it to others, he made an effort to exhibit, in the light of this system of thought, what his memory still retained of the discourses of the Lord. “The Johannine discourses, therefore, were recalled by a laborious effort of memory on the part of the disciple. When he found that his memory-image of his Master was threatening to dissolve into a mist-wraith, he endeavoured to impress the picture more firmly in his recollection, to connect and define its rapidly disappearing features, reconstructing it by the aid of a theory evolved by himself or drawn from elsewhere regarding the Person and work of the Master.” For the portrait of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels the mind of the disciples who describe Him is a neutral medium; for the portrait in John it is a factor which contributes to the production of the picture. The same portrait is outlined by the apostle in the first epistle which bears his name.

These tentative “essays,” not originally intended for publication, came, after the death of the apostle, into the hands of his adherents and disciples, and they chose the form of a complete Life of Jesus as that in which to give them to the world. They, therefore, added narrative portions, which they distributed here and there among the speeches, often doing some violence to the latter in the process. Such was the origin of the Fourth Gospel.

Weisse is not blind to the fact that this hypothesis of a Johannine basis in the Gospel is beset with the gravest—one might almost say with insuperable—difficulties. Here is a man who was an immediate disciple of the Lord, one who, in the Synoptic Gospels, in Acts, and in the Pauline letters, appears in a character which gives no hint of a coming spiritual metamorphosis, one, moreover, who at a relatively late period, when it might well have been supposed that his development was in all essentials closed (at the time of Paul's visit to Jerusalem, which falls at least fourteen years after Paul's conversion), was chosen, along with James and Peter, and in contrast with the apostles of the Gentiles, Paul and Barnabas, as an apostle of the Jews—“how is it possible,” asks Weisse, “to explain and make it intelligible, that a man of these antecedents displays in his thought and speech, in fact in his whole mental attitude, a thoroughly Hellenistic stamp? How came he, the beloved disciple, who, according to this very Gospel which [pg 127] bears his name, was admitted more intimately than any other into the confidence of Jesus, how came he to clothe his Master in this foreign garb of Hellenistic speculation, and to attribute to Him this alien manner of speech? But, however difficult the explanation may be, whatever extreme of improbability may seem to us to be involved in the assumption of the Johannine authorship of the Epistle and of these essential elements of the Gospel, it is better to assent to the improbability, to submit to the burden of being forced to explain the inexplicable, than to set ourselves obstinately against the weight of testimony, against the authority of the whole Christian Church from the second century to the present day.”

There could be no better argument against the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel than just such a defence of its genuineness as this. In this form the hypothesis may well be destined to lead a harmless and never-ending life. What matters for the historical study of the Life of Jesus is simply that the Fourth Gospel should be ruled out. And that Weisse does so thoroughly that it is impossible to imagine its being done more thoroughly. The speeches, in spite of their apostolic authority, are unhistorical, and need not be taken into account in describing Jesus' system of thought. As for the unhappy redactor, who by adding the narrative pictures created the Gospel, all possibility of his reports being accurate is roundly denied, and as if that was not enough, he must put up with being called a bungler into the bargain. “I have, to tell the truth, no very high opinion of the literary art of the editor of the Johannine Gospel-document,” says Weisse in his “Problem of the Gospels” of 1856, which is the best commentary upon his earlier work.

His treatment of the Fourth Gospel reminds us of the story that Frederic the Great once appointed an importunate office-seeker to the post of “Privy Councillor for War,” on condition that he would never presume to offer a syllable of advice!

---

The hypothesis which was brought forward about the same time by Alexander Schweizer,[84] with the intention of saving the genuineness of the Gospel of John, did not make any real contribution to the subject. The reading of the facts which form his starting-point is almost the exact converse of that of Weisse, since he regards, not the speeches, but certain parts of the narrative as Johannine. That which it is possible, in his opinion, to refer [pg 128] to the apostle is an account, not involving any miracles, of the ministry of Jesus at Jerusalem, and the discourses which He delivered there. The more or less miraculous events which occur in the course of it—such as, that Jesus had seen Nathanael under the fig-tree, knew the past life of the Samaritan woman, and healed the sick man at the Pool of Bethesda—are of a simple character, and contrast markedly with those which are represented to have occurred in Galilee, where Jesus turned water into wine and fed a multitude with a few crusts of bread. We must, therefore, suppose that this short, authentic, spiritual Jerusalem-Gospel has had a Galilaean Life of Jesus worked into it, and this explains the inconsistencies of the representation and the oscillation between a sensuous and a spiritual point of view.

This distinction, however, cannot be made good. Schweizer was obliged to ascribe the reports of a material resurrection to the Galilaean source, whereas these, since they exclude the Galilaean appearances of Jesus, must belong to the Jerusalem Gospel; and accordingly, the whole distinction between a spiritual and material Gospel falls to the ground. Thus this hypothesis at best preserves the nominal authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, only to deprive it immediately of all value as a historical source.

---

Had Strauss calmly examined the bearing of Weisse's hypothesis, he would have seen that it fully confirmed the line he had taken in leaving the Fourth Gospel out of account, and he might have been less unjust towards the hypothesis of the priority of Mark, for which he cherished a blind hatred, because, in its fully developed form, it first met him in conjunction with seemingly reactionary tendencies towards the rehabilitation of John. He never in the whole course of his life got rid of the prejudice that the recognition of the priority of Mark was identical with a retrograde movement towards an uncritical orthodoxy.

This is certainly not true as regards Weisse. He is far from having used Mark unreservedly as a historical source. On the contrary, he says expressly that the picture which this Gospel gives of Jesus is drawn by an imaginative disciple of the faith, filled with the glory of his subject, whose enthusiasm is consequently sometimes stronger than his judgment. Even in Mark the mythopoeic tendency is already actively at work, so that often the task of historical criticism is to explain how such myths could have been accepted by a reporter who stands as near the facts as Mark does.

Of the miracula[85]—so Weisse denominates the “non-genuine” miracles, in contradistinction to the “genuine”—the feeding of [pg 129] the multitude is that which, above all others, cries aloud for an explanation. Its historical strength lies in its being firmly interwoven with the preceding and following context; and this applies to both the Marcan narratives. It is therefore impossible to regard the story, as Strauss proposes to do, as pure myth; it is necessary to show how, growing out of some incident belonging to that context, it assumed its present literary form. The authentic saying about the leaven of the Pharisees, which, in Mark viii. 14 and 15, is connected with the two miracles of feeding the multitude, gives ground for supposing that they rest upon a parabolic discourse repeated on two occasions, in which Jesus spoke, perhaps with allusion to the manna, of a miraculous food given through Him. These discourses were later transformed by tradition into an actual miraculous giving of food. Here, therefore, Weisse endeavours to substitute for Strauss's “unhistorical” conception of myth a different conception, which in each case seeks to discover a sufficient historical cause.

The miracles at the baptism of Jesus are based upon His account of a vision which He experienced in that moment. The present form of the story of the transfiguration has a twofold origin. In the first place, it is partly based on a real experience shared by the three disciples. That there is an historical fact here is evident from the way in which it is connected with the context by a definite indication of time. The six days of Mark ix. 2 cannot really be connected, as Strauss would have us suppose, with Ex. xxiv. 16;[86] the meaning is simply that between the previously reported discourse of Jesus and the event described there was an interval of six days. The three disciples had a waking, spiritual vision, not a dream-vision, and what was revealed in this vision was the Messiahship of Jesus. But at this point comes in the second, the mythico-symbolical element. The disciples see Jesus accompanied, according to the Jewish Messianic expectations, by those whom the people thought of as His forerunners. He, however, turns away from them, and Moses and Elias, for whom the disciples were about to build tabernacles, for them to abide in, disappear. The mythical element is a reflection of the teaching which Jesus imparted to them on that occasion, in consequence of which there dawned on them the spiritual “significance of those expectations and predictions, which they were to recognise as no longer pointing forward to a future fulfilment, but as already fulfilled.” The high mountain upon which, according to Mark, the event took place is not to be understood in a literal sense, but as symbolical of the sublimity of the revelation; it is to be sought not on the map of Palestine, but in the recesses of the spirit.

The most striking case of the formation of myth is the story of the resurrection. Here, too, myth must have attached itself to an historical fact. The fact in question is not, however, the empty grave. This only came into the story later, when the Jews, in order to counteract the Christian belief in the resurrection, had spread abroad the report that the body had been stolen from the grave. In consequence of this report the empty grave had necessarily to be taken up into the story, the Christian account now making use of the fact that the body of Jesus was not found as a proof of His bodily resurrection. The emphasis laid on the identity of the body which was buried with that which rose again, of which the Fourth Evangelist makes so much, belongs to a time when the Church had to oppose the Gnostic conception of a spiritual, incorporeal immortality. The reaction against Gnosticism is, as Weisse rightly remarks, one of the most potent factors in the development of myth in the Gospel history. As an additional instance of this he might have cited the anti-gnostic form of the Johannine account of the baptism of Jesus.

What, then, is the historical fact in the resurrection? “The historical fact,” replies Weisse, “is only the existence of a belief—not the belief of the later Christian Church in the myth of the bodily resurrection of the Lord—but the personal belief of the Apostles and their companions in the miraculous presence of the risen Christ in the visions and appearances which they experienced.” “The question whether those extraordinary phenomena which, soon after the death of the Lord, actually and undeniably took place within the community of His disciples, rest upon fact or illusion—that is, whether in them the departed spirit of the Lord, of whose presence the disciples supposed themselves to be conscious, was really present, or whether the phenomena were produced by natural causes of a different kind, spiritual and psychical, is a question which cannot be answered without going beyond the confines of purely historical criticism.” The only thing which is certain is “that the resurrection of Jesus is a fact which belongs to the domain of the spiritual and psychic life, and which is not related to outward corporeal existence in such a way that the body which was laid in the grave could have shared therein.” When the disciples of Jesus had their first vision of the glorified body of their Lord, they were far from Jerusalem, far from the grave, and had no thought of bringing that spiritual corporeity into any kind of relation with the dead body of the Crucified. That the earliest appearances took place in Galilee is indicated by the genuine conclusion of Mark, according to which the angel charges the women with the message that the disciples were to await Jesus in Galilee.

Strauss's conception of myth, which failed to give it any point [pg 131] of vital connexion with the history, had not provided any escape from the dilemma offered by the rationalistic and supernaturalistic views of the resurrection. Weisse prepared a new historical basis for a solution. He was the first to handle the problem from a point of view which combined historical with psychological considerations, and he is fully conscious of the novelty and the far-reaching consequences of his attempt. Theological science did not overtake him for sixty years; and though it did not for the most part share his one-sidedness in recognising only the Galilaean appearances, that does not count for much, since it was unable to solve the problem of the double tradition regarding the appearances. His discussion of the question is, both from the religious and from the historical point of view, the most satisfying treatment of it with which we are acquainted; the pompous and circumspect utterances of the very latest theology in regard to the “empty grave” look very poor in comparison. Weisse's psychology requires only one correction—the insertion into it of the eschatological premise.

It is not only the admixture of myth, but the whole character of the Marcan representation, which forbids us to use it without reserve as a source for the life of Jesus. The inventor of the Marcan hypothesis never wearies of repeating that even in the Second Gospel it is only the main outline of the Life of Jesus, not the way in which the various sections are joined together, which is historical. He does not, therefore, venture to write a Life of Jesus, but begins with a “General Sketch of the Gospel History” in which he gives the main outlines of the Life of Jesus according to Mark, and then proceeds to explain the incidents and discourses in each several Gospel in the order in which they occur.[87]

He avoids the professedly historical forced interpretation of detail, which later representatives of the Marcan hypothesis, Schenkel in particular, employ in such distressing fashion that Wrede's book, by making an end of this inquisitorial method of extracting the Evangelist's testimony, may be said to have released the Marcan hypothesis from the torture-chamber. Weisse is free from these over-refinements. He refuses to divide the Galilaean ministry of Jesus into a period of success and a period of failure and gradual falling off of adherents, divided by the controversy [pg 132] about legal purity in Mark vii.; he does not allow this episode to counterbalance the general evidence that Jesus' public work was accompanied by a constantly growing success. Nor does it occur to him to conceive the sojourn of the Lord in Phoenician territory, and His journey to the neighbourhood of Caesarea Philippi, as a compulsory withdrawal from Galilee, an abandonment of His cause in that district, and to head the chapter, as was usual in the second period of the exegesis of Mark, “Flights and Retirements.” He is content simply to state that Jesus once visited those regions, and explicitly remarks that while the Synoptists speak of the Pharisees and Scribes as working actively against Him, there is nowhere any hint of a hostile movement on the part of the people, but that, on the contrary, in spite of the Scribes and Pharisees the people are always ready to approve Him and take His part; so much so that His enemies can only hope to get Him into their power by a secret betrayal.

Weisse does not admit any failure in Jesus' work, nor that death came upon Him from without as an inevitable necessity. He cannot, therefore, regard the thought of suffering as forced upon Jesus by outward events. Later interpreters of Mark have often held that the essential thing in the Lord's resolve to die was that by His voluntary acceptance of a fate which was more and more clearly revealing itself as inevitable, He raised it into the sphere of ethico-religious freedom: this was not Weisse's view. Jesus, according to him, was not moved by any outward circumstances when He set out for Jerusalem in order to die there. He did it in obedience to a supra-rational higher necessity. We can at most venture to conjecture that a cessation of His miracle-working power, of which He had become aware, revealed to Him that the hour appointed by God had come. He did, in fact, no further miracle in Jerusalem.

How far Isaiah liii. may have contributed to suggest the conception of such a death being a necessary part of Messiah's work, it is impossible to discover. In the popular expectation there was no thought of the Messiah as suffering. The thought was conceived by Jesus independently, through His deep and penetrating spiritual insight. Without any external suggestion whatever He announces to His disciples that He is to die at Jerusalem, and that He is going thither with that end in view. He journeyed, not to the Passover, but to His death. The fact that it took place at the time of the Feast was, so far as Jesus was concerned, accidental. The circumstances of His entry were such as to suggest anything rather than the fulfilment of His predictions; but though the jubilant multitude surrounded Him day by day, as with a wall of defence, He did not let that make Him falter in His purpose; rather He forced the authorities to arrest Him; He preserved silence [pg 133] before Pilate with the deliberate purpose of rendering His death inevitable. The theory of later defenders of the Marcan hypothesis that Jesus, giving up His cause in Galilee for lost, went up to Jerusalem to conquer or die, is foreign to Weisse's conception. In his view, Jesus, breaking off His Galilaean work while the tide of success was still flowing strongly, journeyed to Jerusalem, in the scorn of consequence, with the sole purpose of dying there.

It is true there are some premonitions of the later course of Marcan exegesis. The Second Gospel mentions no Passover journeys as falling in the course of the public ministry of Jesus; consequently the most natural conclusion would be that no Passover journeys fall within that period; that is, that Jesus' ministry began after one Passover and closed with the next, thus lasting less than a full year. Weisse thinks, however, that it is impossible to understand the success of His teaching unless we assume a ministry of several years, of more than three years, indeed. Mark does not mention the Feasts simply because Jesus did not go up to Jerusalem. “Intrinsic probability is, in our opinion, so strongly in favour of a duration of a considerable number of years, that we are at a loss to explain how it is that at least a few unprejudiced investigators have not found in this a sufficient reason for departing from the traditional opinion.”

The account of the mission of the Twelve is also, on the ground of “intrinsic probability,” explained in a way which is not in accordance with the plain sense of the words. “We do not think,” says Weisse, “that it is necessary to understand this in the sense that He sent all the twelve out at one time, two and two, remaining alone in the meantime; it is much more natural to suppose that He only sent them out two at a time, keeping the others about Him. The object of this mission was less the immediate spreading abroad of His teaching than the preparation of the disciples themselves for the independent activity which they would have to exercise after His death.” These are, however, the only serious liberties which he takes with the statements of Mark.

When did Jesus begin to think of Himself as the Messiah? The baptism seems to have marked an epoch in regard to His Messianic consciousness, but that does not mean that He had not previously begun to have such thoughts about Himself. In any case He did not on that occasion arrive all at once at that point of His inward journey which He had reached at the time of His first public appearance. We must assume a period of some duration between the baptism and the beginning of His ministry—a longer period than we should suppose from the Synoptists—during which Jesus cast off the Messianic ideas of Judaism and attained to a spiritual conception of the Messiahship. When He began to [pg 134] teach, His “development” was already closed. Later interpreters of Mark have generally differed from Weisse in assuming a development in the thought of Jesus during His public ministry.

His conception of the Messiahship was therefore fully formed when He began to teach in Capernaum; but He did not allow the people to see that He held Himself to be the Messiah until His triumphal entry. It was in order to avoid declaring His Messiahship that He kept away from Jerusalem. “It was only in Galilee and not in the Jewish capital that an extended period of teaching and work was possible for Him without being obliged to make an explicit declaration whether He were the Messiah or no. In Jerusalem itself the High Priests and Scribes would soon have put this question to Him in such a way that He could not have avoided answering it, whereas in Galilee He doubtless on more than one occasion cut short such attempts to question Him too closely by the incisiveness of His replies.” Like Strauss, Weisse recognises that the key to the explanation of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus lies in the self-designation “Son of Man.” “We are most certainly justified,” he says, with almost prophetic insight, in his “Problem of the Gospels,” published in 1856, “in regarding the question, what sense the Divine Saviour desired to attach to this predicate?—what, in fact, He intended to make known about Himself by using the title Son of Man—as an essential question for the right understanding of His teaching, and not of His teaching only, but also of the very heart and inmost essence of His personality.”

But at this point Weisse lets in the cloven hoof of that fatal method of interpretation, by the aid of which the defenders of the Marcan hypothesis who succeeded him were to wage war, with a kind of dull and dogged determination, against eschatology, in the interests of an original and “spiritual” conception of the Messiahship supposed to be held by Jesus. Under the obsession of the fixed idea that it was their mission to defend the “originality” of Jesus by ascribing to Him a modernising transformation and spiritualisation of the eschatological system of ideas, the defenders of the Marcan hypothesis have impeded the historical study of the Life of Jesus to an almost unbelievable extent.

The explanation of the name Son of Man had, Weisse explains, hitherto oscillated between two extremes. Some had held the expression to be, even in the mouth of Jesus, equivalent to “man” in general, an interpretation which cannot be carried through; others had connected it with the Son of Man in Daniel, and supposed that in using the term Jesus was employing a Messianic title understood by and current among the Jews. But how came He to employ only this unusual periphrastic name for the Messiah? Further, if this name were really a Messianic title, how could He [pg 135] repeatedly have refused Messianic salutations, and not until the triumphal entry suffered the people to hail Him as Messiah?

The questions are rightly asked; it is therefore the more pity that they are wrongly answered. It follows, Weisse says, from the above considerations that Jesus did not assume an acquaintance on the part of His hearers with the Old Testament Messianic significance of the expression. “It was therefore incontestably the intention of Jesus—and any one who considers it unworthy betrays thereby his own want of insight—that the designation should have something mysterious about it, something which would compel His hearers to reflect upon His meaning.” The expression Son of Man was calculated to lead them on to higher conceptions of His nature and origin, and therefore sums up in itself the whole spiritualisation of the Messiahship.

Weisse, therefore, passionately rejects any suggestion, however modest, that Jesus' self-designation, Son of Man, implies any measure of acceptance of the Jewish apocalyptic system of ideas. Ewald had furnished forth his Life of Jesus[88] with a wealth of Old Testament learning, and had made some half-hearted attempts to show the connexion of Jesus' system of thought with that of post-canonical Judaism, but without taking the matter seriously and without having any suspicion of the real character of the eschatology of Jesus. But even these parade-ground tactics excite Weisse's indignation; in his book, published in 1856, he reproaches Ewald with failing to understand his task.

The real duty of criticism is, according to Weisse, to show that Jesus had no part in those fantastic errors which are falsely attributed to Him when a literal Jewish interpretation is given to His great sayings about the future of the Son of Man, and to remove all the obstacles which seem to have prevented hitherto the recognition of the novel character and special significance of the expression, Son of Man, in the mouth of Him who, of His own free choice, applied this name to Himself. “How long will it be,” he cries, “before theology at last becomes aware of the deep importance of its task? Historical criticism, exercised with all the thoroughness and impartiality which alone can produce a genuine conviction, must free the Master's own teaching from the imputation that lies upon it—the imputation of sharing the errors and false expectations in which, as we cannot deny, owing to imperfect or mistaken understanding of the suggestions of the Master, the Apostles, and with them the whole early Christian Church, became involved.”

This fundamental position determines the remainder of Weisse's views. Jesus cannot have shared the Jewish particularism. He [pg 136] did not hold the Law to be binding. It was for this reason that He did not go up to the Feasts. He distinctly and repeatedly expressed the conviction that His doctrine was destined for the whole world. In speaking of the parousia of the Son of Man He was using a figure—a figure which includes in a mysterious fashion all His predictions of the future. He did not speak to His disciples of His resurrection, His ascension, and His parousia as three distinct acts, since the event to which He looked forward is not identical with any of the three, but is composed of them all. The resurrection is, at the same time, the ascension and parousia, and in the parousia the resurrection and the ascension are also included. “The one conclusion to which we believe we can point with certainty is that Jesus spoke of the future of His work and His teaching in a way that implied the consciousness of an influence to be continued after His death, whether unbrokenly or intermittently, and the consciousness that by this influence His work and teaching would be preserved from destruction and the final victory assured to it.”

The personal presence of Jesus which the disciples experienced after His death was in their view only a partial fulfilment of that general promise. The parousia appeared to them as still awaiting fulfilment. Thought of thus, as an isolated event, they could only conceive it from the Jewish apocalyptic standpoint, and they finally came to suppose that they had derived these fantastic ideas from the Master Himself.

In his determined opposition to the recognition of eschatology in Strauss's first Life of Jesus, Weisse here lays down the lines which were to be followed by the “liberal” Lives of Jesus of the 'sixties and following years, which only differ from him, not always to their advantage, in their more elaborate interpretation of the detail of Mark. The only work, therefore, which was a conscious continuation of Strauss's, takes, in spite of its just appreciation of the character of the sources, a wrong path, led astray by the mistaken idea of the “originality” of Jesus, which it exalts into a canon of historical criticism. Only after long and devious wanderings did the study of the subject find the right road again. The whole struggle over eschatology is nothing else than a gradual elimination of Weisse's ideas. It was only with Johannes Weiss that theology escaped from the influence of Christian Hermann Weisse.

---

XI. Bruno Bauer. The First Sceptical Life Of Jesus

Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes. (Criticism of the Gospel History of John.) Bremen, 1840. 435 pp.

Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. (Criticism of the Gospel History of the Synoptics.) 3 vols., Leipzig, 1841-1842; vol. i. 416 pp.; vol. ii. 392 pp.; vol. iii. 341 pp.

Kritik der Evangelien. (Criticism of the Gospels.) 2 vols., 1850-1851, Berlin.

Kritik der Apostelgeschichte. (Criticism of Acts.) 1850.

Kritik der Paulinischen Briefe. Berlin, 1850-1852. In three parts.

Philo, Strauss, Renan und das Urchristentum. (P., S., R., and Primitive Christianity.) Berlin, 1874. 155 pp.

Christus und die Cäsaren. Der Ursprung des Christentums aus dem römischen Griechentum. (The Origin of Christianity from Graeco-Roman Civilisation.) Berlin, 1877. 387 pp.

Bruno Bauer was born in 1809 at Eisenberg, in the duchy of Sachsen-Altenburg. In philosophy, he was at first associated entirely with the Hegelian “right.” Like Strauss, he received a strong impulse from Vatke. At this stage of his development he reviewed, in 1835 and 1836, Strauss's Life of Jesus in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, and wrote in 1838 a “Criticism of the History of Revelation.”[89]

In 1834 he had become Privat-Docent in Berlin, but in 1839 he removed to Bonn. He was then in the midst of that intellectual crisis of which the evidence appeared in his critical works on John and the Synoptics. In August 1841 the Minister, Eichhorn, requested the Faculties of the Prussian Universities to report on the question whether Bauer should be allowed to retain the venia docendi. Most of them returned an evasive answer, Königsberg replied in the affirmative, and Bonn in the negative. In March 1842 Bauer was obliged to cease lecturing, and retired to Rixdorf near Berlin. In the first heat of his furious indignation over this treatment he wrote a work with the title “Christianity [pg 138] Exposed,”[90] which, however, was cancelled before publication at Zurich in 1843.

He then turned his attention to secular history and wrote on the French Revolution, on Napoleon, on the Illuminism of the Eighteenth Century, and on the party struggles in Germany during the years 1842-1846. At the beginning of the 'fifties he returned to theological subjects, but failed to exercise any influence. His work was simply ignored.

Radical though he was in spirit, Bauer found himself fighting, at the end of the 'fifties and beginning of the 'sixties, in the ranks of the Prussian Conservatives—we are reminded how Strauss in the Würtemberg Chamber was similarly forced to side with the reactionaries. He died in 1882. His was a pure, modest, and lofty character.

At the time of his removal from Berlin to Bonn he was just at the end of the twenties, that critical age when pupils often surprise their teachers, when men begin to find themselves and show what they are, not merely what they have been taught.

In approaching the investigation of the Gospel history, Bauer saw, as he himself tells us, two ways open to him. He might take as his starting-point the Jewish Messianic conception, and endeavour to answer the question how the intuitive prophetic idea of the Messiah became a fixed reflective conception. That was the historical method; he chose, however, the other, the literary method. This starts from the opposite side of the question, from the end instead of the beginning of the Gospel history. Taking first the Gospel of John, in which it is obvious that reflective thought has fitted the life of the Jewish Messiah into the frame of the Logos conception, he then, starting as it were from the embouchure of the stream, works his way upwards to the high ground in which the Gospel tradition takes its rise. The decision in favour of the latter view determined the character of Bauer's life-work; it was his task to follow out, to its ultimate consequences, the literary solution of the problem of the life of Jesus.

How far this path would lead him he did not at first suspect. But he did suspect how strong was the influence upon the formation of history of a dominant idea which moulds and shapes it with a definite artistic purpose. His interest was especially arrested by Philo, who, without knowing or intending it, contributed to the fulfilment of a higher task than that with which he was immediately engaged. Bauer's view is that a speculative principle such as Philo's, when it begins to take possession of men's minds, influences them in the first glow of enthusiasm which it evokes [pg 139] with such overmastering power that the just claims of that which is actual and historical cannot always secure the attention which is their due. In Philo's pupil, John, we must look, not for history, but for art.

The Fourth Gospel is in fact a work of art. This was now for the first time appreciated by one who was himself an artist. Schleiermacher, indeed, had at an earlier period taken up the aesthetic standpoint in considering this Gospel. But he had used it as an apologist, proceeding to exalt the artistic truth which he rightly recognised into historic reality, and his critical sense failed him, precisely because he was an aesthete and an apologist, when he came to deal with the Fourth Gospel. Now, however, there comes forward a true artist, who shows that the depth of religious and intellectual insight which Tholuck and Neander, in opposing Strauss, had urged on behalf of the Fourth Gospel, is—Christian art.

In Bauer, however, the aesthete is at the same time a critic. Although much in the Fourth Gospel is finely “felt,” like the opening scenes referring to the Baptist and to Jesus, which Bauer groups together under the heading “The Circle of the Expectant,” yet his art is by no means always perfect. The author who conceived those discourses, of which the movement consists in a kind of tautological return upon itself, and who makes the parables trail out into dragging allegories, is no perfect artist. “The parable of the Good Shepherd,” says Bauer, “is neither simple, nor natural, nor a true parable, but a metaphor, which is, nevertheless, much too elaborate for a metaphor, is not clearly conceived, and, finally, in places shows much too clearly the skeleton of reflection over which it is stretched.”

Bauer treats, in his work of 1840,[91] the Fourth Gospel only. The Synoptics he deals with only in a quite incidental fashion, “as opposing armies make demonstrations in order to provoke the enemy to a decisive conflict.”

He breaks off at the beginning of the story of the passion, because here it would be necessary to bring in the Synoptic parallels. “From the distant heights on which the Synoptic forces have taken up a menacing position, we must now draw them down into the plain; now comes the pitched battle between them and the Fourth Gospel, and the question regarding the historical character of that which we have found to be the ultimate basis of the last Gospel, can now at length be decided.”

If, in the Gospel of John, no smallest particle could be found which was unaffected by the creative reflection of the author, how will it stand with the Synoptists?

When Bauer broke off his work upon John in this abrupt way—for [pg 140] he had not originally intended to conclude it at this point—how far did he still retain a belief in the historical character of the Synoptics? It looks as if he had intended to treat then as the solid foundation, in contrast with the fantastic structure raised upon it by the Fourth Gospel. But when he began to use his pick upon the rock, it crumbled away. Instead of a difference of kind he found only a difference of degree. The “Criticism of the Gospel History of the Synoptists” of 1841 is built on the site which Strauss had levelled. “The abiding influence of Strauss,” says Bauer, “consists in the fact that he has removed from the path of subsequent criticism the danger and trouble of a collision with the earlier orthodox system.”

Bauer finds his material laid ready to his hand by Weisse and Wilke. Weisse had divined in Mark the source from which criticism—becoming barren in the work of Strauss—might draw a new spring of vigorous life; and Wilke, whom Bauer places above Weisse, had raised this happy conjecture to the level of a scientifically assured result. The Marcan hypothesis was no longer on its trial.

But its bearing upon the history of Jesus had still to be determined. What position do Weisse and Wilke take up towards the hypothesis of a tradition lying behind the Gospel of Mark? If it be once admitted that the whole Gospel tradition, so far as concerns its plan, goes back to a single writer, who has created the connexion between the different events—for neither Weisse nor Wilke regards the connexion of the sections as historical—does not the possibility naturally suggest itself that the narrative of the events themselves, not merely the connexion in which they appear in Mark, is to be set down to the account of the author of the Gospel? Weisse and Wilke had not suspected how great a danger arises when, of the three witnesses who represent the tradition, only one is allowed to stand, and the tradition is recognised and allowed to exist in this one written form only. The triple embankment held; will a single one bear the strain?

The following considerations have to be taken into account. The criticism of the Fourth Gospel compels us to recognise that a Gospel may have a purely literary origin. This discovery dawned upon Bauer at a time when he was still disinclined to accept Wilke's conclusions regarding Mark. But when he had recognised the truth of the latter he felt compelled by the combination of the two to accept the idea that Mark also might be of purely literary origin. For Weisse and Wilke the Marcan hypothesis had not implied this result, because they continued to combine with it the wider hypothesis of a general tradition, holding that Matthew and Luke used the collection of “Logia,” [pg 141] and also owed part of their supplementary matter to a free use of floating tradition, so that Mark, it might almost be said, merely supplied them with the formative principle by means of which they might order their material.

But what if Papias's statement about the collection of “Logia” were worthless, and could be shown to be so by the literary data? In that case Matthew and Luke would be purely literary expansions of Mark, and like him, purely literary inventions.

In this connexion Bauer attaches decisive importance to the phenomena of the birth-stories. If these had been derived from tradition they could not differ from each other as they do. If it is suggested that tradition had produced a large number of independent, though mutually consistent, stories of the childhood, out of which the Evangelists composed their opening narratives, this also is found to be untenable, for these narratives are not composite structures. The separate stories of which each of these two histories of the childhood consists could not have been formed independently of one another; none of them existed by itself; each points to the others and is informed by a view which implies the whole. The histories of the childhood are therefore not literary versions of a tradition, but literary inventions.

If we go on to examine the discourse and narrative material, additional to that of Mark, which is found in Matthew and Luke, a similar result appears. The same standpoint is regulative throughout, showing that the additions do not consist of oral or written traditional material which has been worked into the Marcan plan, but of a literary development of certain fundamental ideas and suggestions found in the first author. These developments, as is shown by the accounts of the Sermon on the Mount and the charge to the Twelve, are not carried as far in Luke as in Matthew. The additional material in the latter seems indeed to be worked up from suggestions in the former. Luke thus forms the transition stage between Mark and Matthew. The Marcan hypothesis, accordingly, now takes on the following form. Our knowledge of the Gospel history does not rest upon any basis of tradition, but only upon three literary works. Two of these are not independent, being merely expansions of the first, and the third, Matthew, is also dependent upon the second. Consequently there is no tradition of the Gospel history, but only a single literary source.

But, if so, who is to assure us that this Gospel history, with its assertion of the Messiahship of Jesus, was already a matter of common knowledge before it was fixed in writing, and did not first become known in a literary form? In the latter case, one man would have created out of general ideas the definite historical tradition in which these ideas are embodied. [pg 142] The only thing that could be set against this literary possibility, as a historical counter-possibility, would be a proof that at the period when the Gospel history is supposed to take place a Messianic expectation really existed among the Jews, so that a man who claimed to be the Messiah and was recognised as such, as Mark represents Jesus to have been, would be historically conceivable. This presupposition had hitherto been unanimously accepted by all writers, no matter how much opposed in other respects. They were all satisfied “that before the appearance of Jesus the expectation of a Messiah prevailed among the Jews”; and were even able to explain its precise character.

But where—apart from the Gospels—did they get their information from? Where is the documentary evidence of the Jewish Messianic doctrine on which that of the Gospels is supposed to be based? Daniel was the last of the prophets. Everything tends to suggest that the mysterious content of his work remained without influence in the subsequent period. Jewish literature ends with the Wisdom writings, in which there is no mention of a Messiah. In the LXX there is no attempt to translate in accordance with a preconceived picture of the Messiah. In the Apocalypses, which are of small importance, there is reference to a Messianic Kingdom; the Messiah Himself, however, plays a quite subordinate part, and is, indeed, scarcely mentioned. For Philo He has no existence; the Alexandrian does not dream of connecting Him with his Logos speculation. There remain, therefore, as witnesses for the Jewish Messianic expectations in the time of Tiberius, only Mark and his imitators. This evidence, however, is of such a character that in certain points it contradicts itself.

In the first place, if at the time when the Christian community was forming its view of history and the religious ideas which we find in the Gospels, the Jews had already possessed a doctrine of the Messiah, there would have been already a fixed type of interpretation of the Messianic passages in the Old Testament, and it would have been impossible for the same passages to be interpreted in a totally different way, as referring to Jesus and His work, as we find them interpreted in the New Testament. Next, consider the representation of the Baptist's work. We should have expected him to connect his baptism with the preaching of “Him who was to come”—if this were really the Messiah—by baptizing in the name of this “Coming One.” He, however, keeps them separate, baptizing in preparation for the Kingdom, though referring in his discourses to “Him who was to come.”

The earliest Evangelist did not venture openly to carry back into the history the idea that Jesus had claimed to be the [pg 143] Messiah, because he was aware that in the time of Jesus no general expectation of the Messiah had prevailed among the people. When the disciples in Mark viii. 28 report the opinions of the people concerning Jesus they cannot mention any who hold Him to be the Messiah. Peter is the first to attain to the recognition of His Messiahship. But as soon as the confession is made the Evangelist makes Jesus forbid His disciples to tell the people who He is. Why is the attribution of the Messiahship to Jesus made in this surreptitious and inconsistent way? It is because the writer who gave the history its form well knew that no one had ever come forward publicly on Palestinian soil to claim the Messiahship, or had been recognised by the people as Messiah.

The “reflective conception of the Messiah” was not, therefore, taken over ready-made from Judaism; that dogma first arose along with the Christian community, or rather the moment in which it arose was the same in which the Christian community had its birth.

Moreover, how unhistorical, even on a priori grounds, is the mechanical way in which Jesus at this first appearance at once sets Himself up as the Messiah and says, “Behold I am He whom ye have expected.” In essence, Bauer thinks, there is not so much difference between Strauss and Hengstenberg. For Hengstenberg the whole life of Jesus is the living embodiment of the Old Testament picture of the Messiah; Strauss, a less reverent counterpart of Hengstenberg, made the image of the Messiah into a mask which Jesus Himself was obliged to assume, and which legend afterwards substituted for His real features.

“We save the honour of Jesus,” says Bauer, “when we restore His Person to life from the state of inanition to which the apologists have reduced it, and give it once more a living relation to history, which it certainly possessed—that can no longer be denied. If a conception was to become dominant which should unite heaven and earth, God and man, nothing more and nothing less was necessary as a preliminary condition, than that a Man should appear, the very essence of whose consciousness should be the reconciliation of these antitheses, and who should manifest this consciousness to the world, and lead the religious mind to the sole point from which its difficulties can be solved. Jesus accomplished this mighty work, but not by prematurely pointing to His own Person. Instead He gradually made known to the people the thoughts which filled and entered into the very essence of His mind. It was only in this indirect way that His Person—which He freely offered up in the cause of His historical vocation and of the idea for which He lived—continued to live on in so far as this idea was accepted. When, in the belief of His followers, He rose again and lived on in the [pg 144] Christian community, it was as the Son of God who had overcome and reconciled the great antithesis. He was that in which alone the religious consciousness found rest and peace, apart from which there was nothing firm, trustworthy, and enduring.”

“It was only now that the vague, ill-defined, prophetic representations were focused into a point; were not only fulfilled, but were also united together by a common bond which strengthened and gave greater value to each of them. With His appearance and the rise of belief in Him, a clear conception, a definite mental picture of the Messiah became possible; and thus it was that a Christology[92] first arose.”

While, therefore, at the close of Bauer's first work it might have seemed that it was only the Gospel of John which he held to be a literary creation, here the same thing is said of the original Gospel. The only difference is that we find more primitive reflection in the Synoptics, and later work in the representation given by the Fourth Evangelist; the former is of a more practical character, the latter more dogmatic.

Nevertheless it is false to assert that according to Bauer the earliest Evangelist invented the Gospel history and the personality of Jesus. That is to carry back the ideas of a later period and a further stage of development into the original form of his view. At the moment when, having disposed of preliminaries, he enters on his investigation, he still assumes that a great, a unique Personality, who so impressed men by His character that it lived on among them in an ideal form, had awakened into life the Messianic idea; and that what the original Evangelist really did was to portray the life of this Jesus—the Christ of the community which He founded—in accordance with the Messianic view of Him, just as the Fourth Evangelist portrayed it in accordance with the presupposition that Jesus was the revealer of the Logos. It was only in the course of his investigations that Bauer's opinion became more radical. As he goes on, his writing becomes ill-tempered, and takes the form of controversial dialogues with “the theologians,” whom he apostrophises in a biting and injurious fashion, and whom he continually reproaches with not daring, owing to their apologetic prejudices, to see things as they really are, and with declining to face the ultimate results of criticism from fear that the tradition might suffer more loss of historic value than religion could bear. In spite of this hatred of the theologians, which is pathological in character, like his meaningless punctuation, his critical analyses are always exceedingly acute. One has the impression of walking alongside a man who is reasoning quite intelligently, but who talks [pg 145] to himself as though possessed by a fixed idea. What if the whole thing should turn out to be nothing but a literary invention—not only the incidents and discourses, but even the Personality which is assumed as the starting-point of the whole movement? What if the Gospel history were only a late imaginary embodiment of a set of exalted ideas, and these were the only historical reality from first to last? This is the idea which obsesses his mind more and more completely, and moves him to contemptuous laughter. What, he mocks, will these apologists, who are so sure of everything, do then with the shreds and tatters which will be all that is left to them?

But at the outset of his investigations Bauer was far from holding such views. His purpose was really only to continue the work of Strauss. The conception of myth and legend of which the latter made use is, Bauer thinks, much too vague to explain this deliberate “transformation” of a personality. In the place of myth Bauer therefore sets “reflection.” The life which pulses in the Gospel history is too vigorous to be explained as created by legend; it is real “experience,” only not the experience of Jesus, but of the Church. The representation of this experience of the Church in the Life of a Person is not the work of a number of persons, but of a single author. It is in this twofold aspect—as the composition of one man, embodying the experience of many—that the Gospel history is to be regarded. As religious art it has a profound truth. When it is regarded from this point of view the difficulties which are encountered in the endeavour to conceive it as real immediately disappear.

We must take as our point of departure the belief in the sacrificial death and the resurrection of Jesus. Everything else attaches itself to this as to its centre. When the need arose to fix definitely the beginning of the manifestation of Jesus as the Saviour—to determine the point of time at which the Lord issued forth from obscurity—it was natural to connect this with the work of the Baptist; and Jesus comes to his baptism. While this is sufficient for the earliest Evangelist, Matthew and Luke feel it to be necessary, in view of the important consequences involved in the connexion of Jesus with the Baptist, to bring them into relation once more by means of the question addressed by the Baptist to Jesus, although this addition is quite inconsistent with the assumptions of the earliest Evangelist. If he had conceived the story of the baptism with the idea of introducing the Baptist again on a later occasion, and this time, moreover, as a doubter, he would have given it a different form. This is a just observation of Bauer's; the story of the baptism with the miracle which took place at it, and the Baptist's question, understood as implying a doubt of the Messiahship of Jesus, mutually exclude one another.

The story of the temptation embodies an experience of the early Church. This narrative represents her inner conflicts under the form of a conflict of the Redeemer. On her march through the wilderness of this world she has to fight with temptations of the devil, and in the story composed by Mark and Luke, and artistically finished by Matthew, she records a vow to build only on the inner strength of her constitutive principle. In the sermon on the mount also, Matthew has carried out with greater completeness that which was more vaguely conceived by Luke. It is only when we understand the words of Jesus as embodying experiences of the early Church that their deeper sense becomes clear and what would otherwise seem offensive disappears. The saying, “Let the dead bury their dead,” would not have been fitting for Jesus to speak, and had He been a real man, it could never have entered into His mind to create so unreal and cruel a collision of duties; for no command, Divine or human, could have sufficed to make it right for a man to contravene the ethical obligations of family life. So here again, the obvious conclusion is that the saying originated in the early Church, and was intended to inculcate renunciation of a world which was felt to belong to the kingdom of the dead, and to illustrate this by an extreme example.

The mission of the Twelve, too, is, as an historical occurrence, simply inconceivable. It would have been different if Jesus had given them a definite teaching, or form of belief, or positive conception of any kind, to take with them as their message. But how ill the charge to the Twelve fulfils its purpose as a discourse of instruction! What the disciples needed to learn, namely, what and how they were to teach, they are not told; and the discourse which Matthew has composed, working on the basis of Luke, implies quite a different set of circumstances. It is concerned with the struggles of the Church with the world and the sufferings which it must endure. This is the explanation of the references to suffering which constantly recur in the discourses of Jesus, in spite of the fact that His disciples were not enduring any sufferings, and that the Evangelist cannot even make it conceivable as a possibility that those before whose eyes Jesus holds up the way of the Cross could ever come into such a position. The Twelve, at any rate, had no sufferings to encounter during their mission, and if they were merely being sent by Jesus into the surrounding districts they were not very likely to meet with kings and rulers there.

That it is a case of invented history is also shown by the fact that nothing is said about the doings of the disciples, and they seem to come back again immediately, though the earliest Evangelist, it is true, to prevent this from being too apparent, inserts at this point the story of the execution of the Baptist.

All this is just and acute criticism. The charge to the Twelve [pg 147] is not a discourse of instruction. What Jesus there sets before the disciples they could not at that time have understood, and the promises which He makes to them are not appropriate to their circumstances.

Many of the discourses are mere bundles of heterogeneous sayings, though this is not so much the case in Mark as in the others. He has not forgotten that effective polemic consists of short, pointed, incisive arguments. The others, as advanced theologians, are of opinion that it is fitting to indulge in arguments which have nothing to do with the matter in hand, or only the most distant connexion with it. They form the transition to the discourses of the Fourth Gospel, which usually degenerate into an aimless wrangle. In the same connexion it is rightly observed that the discourses of Jesus do not advance from point to point by the logical development of an idea, the thoughts are merely strung together one after another, the only connexion, if connexion there is, being due to a kind of conventional mould in which the discourse is cast.

The parables, Bauer continues, present difficulties no less great. It is an ineptitude on the part of the apologists to suggest that the parables are intended to make things clear. Jesus Himself contradicts this view by saying bluntly and unambiguously to His disciples that to them it was given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to the people all His teaching must be spoken as parables, that “seeing they might see and not perceive, and hearing they might hear and not understand.” The parables were therefore intended only to exercise the intelligence of the disciples; and so far from being understood by the people, mystified and repelled them; as if it would not have been much better to exercise the minds of the disciples in this way when He was alone with them. The disciples, however, do not even understand the simple parable of the Sower, but need to have it interpreted to them, so that the Evangelist once more stultifies his own theory.

Bruno Bauer is right in his observation that the parables offer a serious problem, seeing that they were intended to conceal and not to make plain, and that Jesus nevertheless taught only in parables. The character of the difficulty, however, is such that even literary criticism has no explanation ready. Bruno Bauer admits that he does not know what was in the mind of the Evangelist when he composed these parables, and thinks that he had no very definite purpose, or at least that the suggestions which were floating in his mind were not worked up into a clearly ordered whole.

Here, therefore, Bauer's method broke down. He did not, however, allow this to shake his confidence in his reading of the facts, and he continued to maintain it in the face of a new difficulty [pg 148] which he himself brought clearly to light. Mark, according to him, is an artistic unity, the offspring of a single mind. How then is it to be explained that in addition to other less important doublets it contains two accounts of the feeding of the multitude? Here Bauer has recourse to the aid of Wilke, who distinguishes our Mark from an Ur-Markus,[93] and ascribes these doublets to later interpolation. Later on he became more and more doubtful about the artistic unity of Mark, despite the fact that this was the fundamental assumption of his theory, and in the second edition of his “Criticism of the Gospels,” of 1851, he carried through the distinction between the canonical Mark and the Ur-Markus.

But even supposing the assumption of a redaction were justified, how could the redactor have conceived the idea of adding to the first account of the feeding of the multitude a second which is identical with it almost to the very wording? In any case, on what principle can Mark be distinguished from Ur-Markus? There are no fundamental differences to afford a ready criterion. The distinction is purely one of subjective feeling, that is to say, it is arbitrary. As soon as Bauer admits that the artistic unity of Mark, on which he lays so much stress, has been tampered with, he cannot maintain his position except by shutting his eyes to the fact that it can only be a question of the weaving in of fragments of tradition, not of the inventions of an imitator. But if he once admits the presence of traditional materials, his whole theory of the earliest Evangelist's having created the Gospel falls to the ground.

For the moment he succeeds in laying the spectre again, and continues to think of Mark as a work of art, in which the interpolation alters nothing.

Bauer discusses with great thoroughness those sayings of Jesus in which He forbids those whom He had healed to noise abroad their cure. In the form in which they appear these cannot, he argues, be historical, for Jesus imposes this prohibition in some cases where it is quite meaningless, since the healing had taken place in the presence of a multitude. It must therefore be derived from the Evangelist. Only when it is recognised as a free creation can its meaning be discerned. It finds its explanation in the inconsistent views regarding miracle which were held side by side in the early Church. No doubt was felt that Jesus had performed miracles, and by these miracles had given evidence of His Divine mission. On the other hand, by the introduction of the Christian principle, the Jewish demand for a sign had been so far limited, and the other, the spiritual line of evidence, had become so important, or at least so indispensable, that it was no longer possible to build on the miracles only, or to regard Jesus merely as a [pg 149] wonder-worker; so in some way or other the importance ascribed to miracle must be reduced. In the graphic symbolism of the Gospel history this antithesis takes the form that Jesus did miracles—there was no getting away from that—but on the other hand Himself declared that He did not wish to lay any stress upon such acts. As there are times when miracles must hide their light under a bushel, Jesus, on occasion, forbids that they should be made known. The other Synoptists no longer understood this theory of the first Evangelist, and introduced the prohibition in passages where it was absurd.

The way in which Jesus makes known His Messiahship is based on another theory of the original Evangelist. The order of Mark can give us no information regarding the chronology of the life of Jesus, since this Gospel is anything rather than a chronicle. We cannot even assert that there is a deliberate logic in the way in which the sections are connected. But there is one fundamental principle of arrangement which comes quite clearly to light, viz. that it was only at Caesarea Philippi, in the closing period of His life, that Jesus made Himself known as the Messiah, and that, therefore, He was not previously held to be so either by His disciples or by the people. This is clearly shown in the answers of the disciples when Jesus asked them whom men took Him to be. The implied course of events, however, is determined by art, not history—as history it would be inconceivable.

Could there indeed be a more absurd impossibility? “Jesus,” says Bauer, “must perform these innumerable, these astounding miracles because, according to the view which the Gospels represent, He is the Messiah; He must perform them in order to prove Himself to be the Messiah—and yet no one recognises Him as the Messiah! That is the greatest miracle of all, that the people had not long ago recognised the Messiah in this wonder-worker. Jesus could only be held to be the Messiah in consequence of doing miracles; but He only began to do miracles when, in the faith of the early Church, He rose from the dead as Messiah, and the facts that He rose as Messiah and that He did miracles, are one and the same fact.”

Mark, however, represents a Jesus who does miracles and who nevertheless does not thereby reveal Himself to be the Messiah. He was obliged so to represent Him, because he was conscious that Jesus was not recognised and acknowledged as Messiah by the people, nor even by His immediate followers, in the unhesitating fashion in which those of later times imagined Him to have been recognised. Mark's conception and representation of the matter carried back into the past the later developments by which there finally arose a Christian community for which Jesus had become the Messiah. “Mark is also influenced by an artistic instinct which [pg 150] leads him to develop the main interest, the origin of the faith, gradually. It is only after the ministry of Jesus has extended over a considerable period, and is, indeed, drawing towards its close, that faith arises in the circle of the disciples; and it is only later still, when, in the person of the blind man at Jericho, a prototype of the great company of believers that was to be has hailed the Lord with a Messianic salutation, that, at the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the faith of the people suddenly ripens and finds expression.”

It is true, this artistic design is completely marred when Jesus does miracles which must have made Him known to every child as the Messiah. We cannot, therefore, blame Matthew very much if, while he retains this plan in its external outlines in a kind of mechanical way, he contradicts it somewhat awkwardly by making Jesus at an earlier point clearly designate Himself as Messiah and many recognise Him as such. And the Fourth Evangelist cannot be said to be destroying any very wonderful work of art when he gives the impression that from the very first any one who wished could recognise Jesus as the Messiah.

Mark himself does not keep strictly to his own plan. He makes Jesus forbid His disciples to make known His Messiahship; how then does the multitude at Jerusalem recognise it so suddenly, after a single miracle which they had not even witnessed, and which was in no way different from others which He had done before? If that “chance multitude” in Jerusalem was capable of such sudden enlightenment it must have fallen from heaven!

The following remarks of Bauer, too, are nothing less than classical. The incident at Caesarea Philippi is the central fact of the Gospel history; it gives us a fixed point from which to group and criticise the other statements of the Gospel. At the same time it introduces a complication into the plan of the life of Jesus, because it necessitates the carrying through of the theory—often in the face of the text—that previously Jesus had never been regarded as the Messiah; and lays upon us the necessity of showing not only how Peter had come to recognise His Messiahship, but also how He subsequently became Messiah for the multitude—if indeed He ever did become Messiah for them. But the very fact that it does introduce this complication is in itself a proof that in this scene at Caesarea Philippi we have the one ray of light which history sheds upon the life of Jesus. It is impossible to explain how any one could come to reject the simple and natural idea that Jesus claimed from the first to be the Messiah, if that had been the fact, and accept this complicated representation in its place. The latter, therefore, must be the original version. In pointing this out, Bauer gave for the first time the real proof, from internal evidence, of the priority of Mark.

The difficulty involved in the conception of miracle as a proof of the Messiahship of Jesus is another discovery of Bauer's. Only here, instead of probing the question to the bottom, he stops half-way. How do we know, he should have gone on to ask, that the Messiah was expected to appear as an earthly wonder-worker? There is nothing to that effect in Jewish writings. And do not the Gospels themselves prove that any one might do miracles without suggesting to a single person the idea that he might be the Messiah? Accordingly the only inference to be drawn from the Marcan representation is that miracles were not among the characteristic marks of the Messiah, and that it was only later, in the Christian community, which made Jesus the miracle-worker into Jesus the Messiah, that this connexion between miracles and Messiahship was established. In dealing with the question of the triumphal entry, too, Bauer halts half-way. Where do we read that Jesus was hailed as Messiah upon that occasion? If He had been taken by the people to be the Messiah, the controversy in Jerusalem must have turned on this personal question; but it did not even touch upon it, and the Sanhedrin never thinks of setting up witnesses to Jesus' claim to be the Messiah. When once Bauer had exposed the historical and literary impossibility of Jesus' being hailed by the people as Messiah, he ought to have gone on to draw the conclusion that Jesus did not, according to Mark, make a Messianic entry into Jerusalem.

It was, however, a remarkable achievement on Bauer's part to have thus set forth clearly the historical difficulties of the life of Jesus. One might suppose that between the work of Strauss and that of Bauer there lay not five, but fifty years—the critical work of a whole generation.

The stereotyped character of the thrice-repeated prediction of the passion, which, according to Bauer, betrays a certain poverty and feebleness of imagination on the part of the earliest Evangelist, shows clearly, he thinks, the unhistorical character of the utterance recorded. The fact that the prediction occurs three times, its definiteness increasing upon each occasion, proves its literary origin.

It is the same with the transfiguration. The group in which the heroic representatives of the Law and the Prophets stand as supporters of the Saviour, was modelled by the earliest Evangelist. In order to place it in the proper light and to give becoming splendour to its great subject, he has introduced a number of traits taken from the story of Moses.

Bauer pitilessly exposes the difficulties of the journey of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem, and exults over the perplexities of the “apologists.” “The theologian,” he says, “must not boggle at this journey, he must just believe it. He must in faith follow the footsteps of his Lord! Through the midst of Galilee and Samaria—and [pg 152] at the same time, for Matthew also claims a hearing, through Judaea on the farther side of Jordan! I wish him Bon voyage!”

The eschatological discourses are not history, but are merely an expansion of those explanations of the sufferings of the Church of which we have had a previous example in the charge to the Twelve. An Evangelist who wrote before the destruction of Jerusalem would have referred to the Temple, to Jerusalem, and to the Jewish people, in a very different way.

The story of Lazarus deserves special attention. Did not Spinoza say that he would break his system in pieces if he could be convinced of the reality of this event? This is the decisive point for the question of the relation between the Synoptists and John. Vain are all the efforts of the apologists to explain why the Synoptists do not mention this miracle. The reason they ignore it is that it originated after their time in the mind of the Fourth Evangelist, and they were unacquainted with his Gospel. And yet it is the most valuable of all, because it shows clearly the concentric circles of progressive intensification by which the development of the Gospel history proceeds. “The Fourth Gospel,” remarks Bauer, “represents a dead man as having been restored to life after having been four days under the power of death, and having consequently become a prey to corruption; Luke represents the young man at Nain as being restored to life when his body was being carried to the grave; Mark, the earliest Evangelist, can only tell us of the restoration of a dead person who had the moment before succumbed to an illness. The theologians have a great deal to say about the contrast between the canonical and the apocryphal writings, but they might have found a similar contrast even within the four Gospels, if the light had not been so directly in their eyes.”

The treachery of Judas, as described in the Gospels, is inexplicable.

The Lord's Supper, considered as an historic scene, is revolting and inconceivable. Jesus can no more have instituted it than He can have uttered the saying, “Let the dead bury their dead.” In both cases the objectionableness arises from the fact that a tenet of the early Church has been cast into the form of an historical saying of Jesus. A man who was present in person, corporeally present, could not entertain the idea of offering others his flesh and blood to eat. To demand from others that they should, while he was actually present, imagine the bread and wine which they were eating to be his body and blood, would be for an actual man wholly impossible. It was only when Jesus' actual bodily presence had been removed, and only when the Christian community had existed for some time, that such a conception as is expressed in that formula could have arisen. A point which clearly betrays the [pg 153] later composition of the narrative is that the Lord does not turn to the disciples sitting with Him at table and say, “This is my blood which is shed for you,” but, since the words were invented by the early Church, speaks of the “many” for whom He gives Himself. The only historical fact is that the Jewish Passover was gradually transformed by the Christian community into a feast which had reference to Jesus.

As regards the scene in Gethsemane, Mark, according to Bauer, held it necessary that in the moment when the last conflict and final catastrophe were coming upon Jesus, He should show clearly by His actions that He met this fate of His own free will. The reality of His choice could only be made clear by showing Him first engaged in an inner struggle against the acceptance of His vocation, before showing how He freely submitted to His fate.

The last words ascribed to Jesus by Mark, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” were written without thinking of the inferences that might be drawn from them, merely with the purpose of showing that even to the last moment of His passion Jesus fulfilled the rôle of the Messiah, the picture of whose sufferings had been revealed to the Psalmist so long beforehand by the Holy Spirit.

It is scarcely necessary now, Bauer thinks, to go into the contradictions in the story of the resurrection, for “the doughty Reimarus, with his thorough-going honesty, has already fully exposed them, and no one has refuted him.”

The results of Bauer's analysis may be summed up as follows:—

The Fourth Evangelist has betrayed the secret of the original Gospel, namely, that it too can be explained on purely literary grounds. Mark has “loosed us from the theological lie.” “Thanks to the kindly fate,” cries Bauer, “which has preserved to us this writing of Mark by which we have been delivered from the web of deceit of this hellish pseudo-science!”

In order to tear this web of falsehood the critic and historian must, despite his repugnance, once more take up the pretended arguments of the theologians in favour of the historicity of the Gospel narratives and set them on their feet, only to knock them down again. In the end Bauer's only feeling towards the theologians was one of contempt. “The expression of his contempt,” he declares, “is the last weapon which the critic, after refuting the arguments of the theologians, has at his disposal for their discomfiture; it is his right to use it; that puts the finishing touch upon his task and points forward to the happy time when the arguments of the theologians shall no more be heard of.”

These outbreaks of bitterness are to be explained by the feeling of repulsion which German apologetic theology inspired in every genuinely honest and thoughtful man by the methods which it adopted in opposing Strauss. Hence the fiendish joy with which [pg 154] he snatches away the crutches of this pseudo-science, hurls them to a distance, and makes merry over its helplessness. A furious hatred, a fierce desire to strip the theologians absolutely bare, carried Bauer much farther than his critical acumen would have led him in cold blood.

Bauer hated the theologians for still holding fast to the barbarous conception that a great man had forced himself into a stereotyped and unspiritual system, and in that way had set in motion great ideas, whereas he held that that would have signified the death of both the personality and the ideas; but this hatred is only the surface symptom of another hatred, which goes deeper than theology, going down, indeed, to the very depths of the Christian conception of the world. Bruno Bauer hates not only the theologians, but Christianity, and hates it because it expresses a truth in a wrong way. It is a religion which has become petrified in a transitional form. A religion which ought to have led on to the true religion has usurped the place of the true religion, and in this petrified form it holds prisoner all the real forces of religion.

Religion is the victory over the world of the self-conscious ego. It is only when the ego grasps itself in its antithesis to the world as a whole, and is no longer content to play the part of a mere “walking gentleman” in the world-drama, but faces the world with independence and reserve, that the necessary conditions of universal religion are present. These conditions came into being with the rise of the Roman Empire, in which the individual suddenly found himself helpless and unarmed in face of a world in which he could no longer find free play for his activities, but must stand prepared at any moment to be ground to powder by it.

The self-conscious ego, recognising this position, found itself faced by the necessity of breaking loose from the world and standing alone, in order in this way to overcome the world. Victory over the world by alienation from the world—these were the ideas out of which Christianity was born. But it was not the true victory over the world; Christianity remained at the stage of violent opposition to the world.

Miracle, to which the Christian religion has always appealed, and to which it gives a quite fundamental importance, is the appropriate symbol of this false victory over the world. There are some wonderfully deep thoughts scattered through Bauer's critical investigations. “Man's realisation of his personality,” he says, “is the death of Nature, but in the sense that he can only bring about this death by the knowledge of Nature and its laws, that is to say from within, being himself essentially the annihilation and negation of Nature.... Spirit honours and recognises the worth of the very thing which it negates.... Spirit does not fume and bluster, and rage and rave against Nature, as it is supposed to do [pg 155] in miracle, for that would be the denial of its inner law, but quietly works its way through the antithesis. In short the death of Nature implied in the conscious realisation of personality is the resurrection of Nature in a nobler form, not the maltreatment, mockery, and insult to which it would be exposed by miracle.” Not only miracle, however, but the portrait of Jesus Christ as drawn in the Gospels, is a stereotyping of that false idea of victory over the world. The Christ of the Gospel history, thought of as a really historic figure, would be a figure at which humanity would shudder, a figure which could only inspire dismay and horror. The historical Jesus, if He really existed, can only have been One who reconciled in His own consciousness the antithesis which obsessed the Jewish mind, namely the separation between God and Man; He cannot in the process of removing this antithesis have called into existence a new principle of religious division and alienation; nor can He have shown the way of escape, by the principle of inwardness, from the bondage of the Law only to impose a new set of legal fetters.

The Christ of the Gospel history, on the other hand, is Man exalted by the religious consciousness to heaven, who, even if He comes down to earth to do miracles, to teach, and to suffer, is no longer true man. The Son of Man of religion, even though His mission be to reconcile, is man as alienated from himself. This Christ of the Gospel history, the ego exalted to heaven and become God, overthrew antiquity, and conquered the world in the sense that He exhausted it of all its vitality. This magnified ego would have fulfilled its historical vocation if, by means of the terrible disorganisation into which it threw the real spirit of mankind, it had compelled the latter to come to a knowledge of itself, to become self-conscious with a thoroughness and decisiveness which had not been possible to the simple spirit of antiquity. It was disastrous that the figure which stood for the first emancipation of the ego, remained alive. That transformation of the human spirit which was brought about by the encounter of the world-power of Rome with philosophy was represented by the Gospels, under the influence of the Old Testament, as realised in a single historic Personality; and the strength of the spirit of mankind was swallowed up by the omnipotence of the pure absolute ego, an ego which was alien from actual humanity. The self-consciousness of humanity finds itself reflected in the Gospels, a self, indeed, in alienation from itself, and therefore a grotesque parody of itself, but, after all, in some sense, itself; hence the magical charm which attracted mankind and enchained it, and, so long as it had not truly found itself, urged it to sacrifice everything to grasp the image of itself, to prefer it to all other and all else, counting all, as the apostle says, but “dung” in comparison with it.

Even when the Roman world was no more, and a new world [pg 156] had come into being, the Christ so created did not die. The magic of His enchantment became only more terrible, and as new strength came flooding into the old world, the time arrived when it was to accomplish its greatest work of destruction. Spirit, in its abstraction, became a vampire, the destroyer of the world. Sap and strength, blood and life, it sucked, to the last drop, out of humanity. Nature and art, family, nation, state, all were destroyed by it; and in the ruins of the fallen world the ego, exhausted by its efforts, remained the only surviving power.

Having made a desert all about it, the ego could not immediately create anew, out of the depths of its inner consciousness, nature and art, nation and state; the awful process which now went on, the only activity of which it was now capable, was the absorption into itself of all that had hitherto had life in the world. The ego was now everything; and yet it was a void. It had become the universal power, and yet as it brooded over the ruins of the world it was filled with horror at itself and with despair at all that it had lost. The ego which had devoured all things and was still a void now shuddered at itself.

Under the oppression of this awful power the education of mankind has been going on; under this grim task-master it has been preparing for true freedom, preparing to rouse itself from the depths of its distress, to escape from its opposition to itself and cast out that alien ego which is wasting its substance. Odysseus has now returned to his home, not by favour of the gods, not laid on the shore in sleep, but awake, by his own thought and his own strength. Perchance, as of yore, he will have need to fight with the suitors who have devoured his substance and sought to rob him of all he holds most dear. Odysseus must string the bow once more.

The baleful charm of the self-alienated ego is broken the moment any one proves to the religious sense of mankind that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels is its creation and ceases to exist as soon as this is recognised. The formation of the Church and the arising of the idea that the Jesus of the Gospels is the Messiah are not two different things, they are one and the same thing, they coincide and synchronise; but the idea was only the imaginative conception of the Church, the first movement of its life, the religious expression of its experience.

The question which has so much exercised the minds of men—whether Jesus was the historic Christ (= Messiah)—is answered in the sense that everything that the historical Christ is, everything that is said of Him, everything that is known of Him, belongs to the world of imagination, that is, of the imagination of the Christian community, and therefore has nothing to do with any man who belongs to the real world.

The world is now free, and ripe for a higher religion in which the ego will overcome nature, not by self-alienation, but by penetrating it and ennobling it. To the theologian we may fling as a gift the shreds of his former science, when we have torn it to pieces; that will be something to occupy himself with, that time may not hang heavy upon his hands in the new world whose advent is steadily drawing nearer.

Thus the task which Bauer had set himself at the beginning of his criticism of the Gospel history, turned, before he had finished, into something different. When he began, he thought to save the honour of Jesus and to restore His Person from the state of inanition to which the apologists had reduced it, and hoped by furnishing a proof that the historical Jesus could not have been the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, to bring Him into a living relation with history. This task, however, was given up in favour of the larger one of freeing the world from the domination of the Judaeo-Roman idol, Jesus the Messiah, and in carrying out this endeavour the thesis that Jesus Christ is a product of the imagination of the early Church is formulated in such a way that the existence of a historic Jesus becomes problematical, or, at any rate, quite indifferent.

At the end of his study of the Gospels, Bauer is inclined to make the decision of the question whether there ever was a historic Jesus depend on the result of a further investigation which he proposed to make into the Pauline Epistles. It was not until ten years later (1850-1851) that he accomplished this task,[94] and applied the result in his new edition of the “Criticism of the Gospel History.”[95] The result is negative: there never was any historical Jesus. While criticising the four great Pauline Epistles, which the Tübingen school fondly imagined to be beyond the reach of criticism, Bauer shows, however, his inability to lay a positive historic foundation for his view of the origin of Christianity. The transference of the Epistles to the second century is effected in so arbitrary a fashion that it refutes itself. However, this work professes to be only a preliminary study for a larger one in which the new theory was to be fully worked out. This did not appear until 1877; it was entitled “Christ and the Caesars; How Christianity originated from Graeco-Roman Civilisation.”[96] The historical basis for his theory, which he here offers, is even more unsatisfactory than that suggested in the preliminary work on the Pauline Epistles. There is no longer any pretence of following [pg 158] an historical method, the whole thing works out into an imaginary picture of the life of Seneca. Nero's tutor had, Bauer thinks, already in his inmost consciousness fully attained to inner opposition to the world. There are expressions in his works which, in their mystical emancipation from the world, prelude the utterances of Paul. The same thoughts, since they belong not to Seneca only, but to his time, are found also in the works of the three poets of the Neronian period, Persius, Lucan, and Petronius. Though they had but a feeble breath of the divine afflatus, they are interesting witnesses to the spiritual condition of the time. They, too, contributed to the making of Christianity.

But Seneca, in spite of his inner alienation from the world, remained in active relations with the world. He desired to found a kingdom of virtue upon earth. At the courts of Claudius and Nero he used the arts of intrigue to further his ends, and even quietly approved deeds of violence which he thought likely to serve his cause. Finally, he grasped at the supreme power; and paid the supreme penalty. Stoicism had made an attempt to reform the world, and had failed. The great thinkers began to despair of exercising any influence upon history, the Senate was powerless, all public bodies were deprived of their rights. Then a spirit of resignation came over the world. The alienation from the world, which in Seneca had still been only half serious, was come in earnest. The time of Nero and Domitian was a great epoch in that hidden spiritual history which goes silently forward side by side with the noisy outward history of the world. When Stoicism, in this development, had been deepened by the introduction of neo-Platonic ideas, it was on its way to become the Gospel.

But by itself it would not have given birth to that new thing. It attached itself as a formative principle to Judaism, which was then just breaking loose from the limitations of nationality. Bauer points to Josephus as a type of this new Roman Judaism. This “neo-Roman” lived in the conviction that his God, who had withdrawn from His Temple, would take possession of the world, and make the Roman Empire submit to His law. Josephus realised in his life that for which the way had been spiritually prepared by Philo. The latter did not merely effect a fusion of Jewish ideas with Greek speculations; he took advantage of the universal dominion established by the Romans to found upon it his spiritual world. Bauer had already pictured him in this rôle in his work “Philo, Strauss, and Renan, and Primitive Christianity.”

Thus was the new religion formed. The spirit of it came from the west, the outward frame was furnished by Judaism. The new movement had two foci, Rome and Alexandria. Philo's “Therapeutae” were real people; they were the forerunners of Christianity. Under Trajan the new religion began to be known. [pg 159] Pliny's letter asking for instructions as to how to deal with the new movement is its certificate of birth—the original form of the letter, it must be understood, not the present form, which has undergone editing at the hands of Christians.

The literary process by which the origin of the movement was thrown back to an earlier date in history lasted about fifty years.

When this latest work of Bauer's appeared he had long been regarded by theologians as an extinct force; nay, more, had been forgotten. And he had not even kept his promise. He had not succeeded in showing what that higher form of victory over the world was, which he declared superior to Christianity; and in place of the personality of Jesus he had finally set up a hybrid thing, laboriously compounded out of two personalities of so little substance as those of Seneca and Josephus. That was the end of his great undertaking.

But it was a mistake to bury, along with the Bauer of the second period, also the Bauer of the first period, the critic—for the latter was not dead. It was, indeed, nothing less than a misfortune that Strauss and Bauer appeared within so short a time of one another. Bauer passed practically unnoticed, because every one was preoccupied with Strauss. Another unfortunate thing was that Bauer overthrew with his powerful criticism the hypothesis which attributed real historical value to Mark, so that it lay for a long time disregarded, and there ensued a barren period of twenty years in the critical study of the Life of Jesus.

The only critic with whom Bauer can be compared is Reimarus. Each exercised a terrifying and disabling influence upon his time. No one else had been so keenly conscious as they of the extreme complexity of the problem offered by the life of Jesus. In view of this complexity they found themselves compelled to seek a solution outside the confines of verifiable history. Reimarus, by finding the basis of the story of Jesus in a deliberate imposture on the part of the disciples; Bauer, by postulating an original Evangelist who invented the history. On this ground it was just that they should lose their case. But in dismissing the solutions which they offered, their contemporaries also dismissed the problems which had necessitated such solutions; they dismissed them because they were as little able to grasp as to remove these difficulties.

But the time is past for pronouncing judgment upon Lives of Christ on the ground of the solutions which they offer. For us the great men are not those who solved the problems, but those who discovered them. Bauer's “Criticism of the Gospel History” is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.

Unfortunately, by the independent, the too loftily independent way in which he developed his ideas, he destroyed the possibility of their influencing contemporary theology. The shaft which he had driven into the mountain broke down behind him, so that it needed the work of a whole generation to lay bare once more the veins of ore which he had struck. His contemporaries could not suspect that the abnormality of his solutions was due to the intensity with which he grasped the problems as problems, and that he had become blind to history by examining it too microscopically. Thus for his contemporaries he was a mere eccentric.

But his eccentricity concealed a penetrating insight. No one else had as yet grasped with the same completeness the idea that primitive Christianity and early Christianity were not merely the direct outcome of the preaching of Jesus, not merely a teaching put into practice, but more, much more, since to the experience of which Jesus was the subject there allied itself the experience of the world-soul at a time when its body—humanity under the Roman Empire—lay in the throes of death. Since Paul, no one had apprehended so powerfully the mystic idea of the super-sensible σῶμα Χριστοῦ. Bauer transferred it to the historical plane and found the “body of Christ” in the Roman Empire.

---

XII. Further Imaginative Lives Of Jesus

Charles Christian Hennell. Untersuchungen über den Ursprung des Christentums. (An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity.) 1840. With a preface by David Friedrich Strauss. English edition, 1838.

Wichtige Enthüllungen über die wirkliche Todesart Jesu. Nach einem alten zu Alexandria gefundenen Manuskripte von einem Zeitgenossen Jesu aus dem heiligen Orden der Essäer. (Important Disclosures concerning the Manner of Jesus' Death. From an ancient MS. found at Alexandria, written by a contemporary of Jesus belonging to the sacred Order of the Essenes.) 1849. 5th ed., Leipzig. (Anonymous.)

Historische Enthüllungen über die wirklichen Ereignisse der Geburt und Jugend Jesu. Als Fortsetzung der zu Alexandria aufgefundenen alten Urkunden aus dem Essäerorden. (Historical Disclosures concerning the real circumstances of the Birth and Youth of Jesus. A Continuation of the ancient Essene MS. discovered at Alexandria.) 1849. 2nd ed., Leipzig.

August Friedrich Gfrörer. Kritische Geschichte des Urchristentums. (Critical History of Primitive Christianity.)

Vol. i. 1st ed., 1831; 2nd, 1835. Part i. 543 pp.; Part ii. 406 pp. Vol. ii. 1838. Part i. 452 pp.; Part ii. 417 pp.

Richard von der Alm. (Pseudonym of Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany.) Theologische Briefe an die Gebildeten der deutschen Nation, 1863. (Theological Letters to the Cultured Classes of the German People, 1863.) Vol. i. 929 pp.; Vol. ii. 656 pp.; Vol. iii. 802 pp.

Ludwig Noack. Die Geschichte Jesu auf Grund freier geschichtlicher Untersuchungen über das Evangelium und die Evangelien. (The History of Jesus on the Basis of a free Historical Inquiry regarding the Gospel and the Gospels.) 2nd ed., 1876, Mannheim. Book i. 251 pp.; Book ii. 187 pp.; Book iii. 386 pp.; Book iv. 285 pp.

Strauss can hardly be said to have done himself honour by contributing a preface to the translation of Hennell's work, which is nothing more than Venturini's “Non-miraculous History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth” tricked out with a fantastic paraphernalia of learning.[97]

The two series of “Important Disclosures” also are really “conveyed” with no particular ability from that classic romance of [pg 162] the Life of Jesus, but that did not prevent their making something of a sensation at the time when they appeared.[98] Jesus, according to his narrative, was the son of a member of the Essene Order. The child was watched over by the Order and prepared for His future mission. He entered on His public ministry as a tool of the Essenes, who after the crucifixion took Him down from the cross and resuscitated Him.

These “Disclosures” only preserve the more external features of Venturini's representation. His Life of Jesus had been more than a mere romance, it had been an imaginative solution of problems which he had intuitively perceived. It may be regarded as the Forerunner of rationalistic criticism. The problems which Venturini had intuitively perceived were not solved either by the rationalists, or by Strauss, or by Weisse. These writers had not succeeded in providing that of which Venturini had dreamed—a living purposeful connexion between the events of the life of Jesus—or in explaining His Person and Work as having a relation, either positive or negative, to the circumstances of Late Judaism. Venturini's plan, however fantastic, connects the life of Jesus with Jewish history and contemporary thought much more closely than any other Life of Jesus, for that connexion is of course vital to the plot of the romance. In Weisse's “Gospel History” criticism had deliberately renounced the attempt to explain Jesus directly from Judaism, finding itself unable to establish any connexion between His teachings and contemporary Jewish ideas. The way was therefore once more open to the imagination. Accordingly several imaginative Lives preluded a new era in the study of the subject, in so far as they endeavoured to understand Jesus on the basis of purely Jewish ideas, in some cases as affirming these, in others as opposing them in favour of a more spiritual conception. In Gfrörer, Richard von der Alm, and Noack, begins the skirmishing preparatory to the future battle over eschatology.[99]

August Friedrich Gfrörer, born in 1803 at Calw, was “Repetent” at the Tübingen theological seminary at the time when Strauss was studying there. After being curate at the principal church in Stuttgart for a year he gave up, in 1830, the clerical profession in order to devote himself wholly to his clerical studies.

By that time he had abandoned Christianity. In the preface to the first edition of the first volume of his work, he describes Christianity as a system which now only maintains itself by the force of custom, after having commended itself to antiquity “by the hope of the mystic Kingdom of the future world and having ruled the middle ages by the fear of the same future.” By enunciating this view he has made an end, he thinks, of all high-flying Hegelian ideas, and being thus freed from all speculative prejudices he feels himself in a position to approach his task from a purely historical standpoint, with a view to showing how much of Christianity is the creation of one exceptional Personality, and how much belongs to the time in which it arose. In the first volume he describes how the transformation of Jewish theology in Alexandria reacted upon Palestinian theology, and how it came to its climax in Philo. The great Alexandrian anticipated, according to Gfrörer, the ideas of Paul. His “Therapeutae” are identical with the Essenes. At the same period Judaea was kept in a ferment by a series of risings, to all of which the incentive was found in Messianic expectations. Then Jesus appeared. The three points to be investigated in His history are: what end He had in view; why He died; and what modifications His work underwent at the hands of the Apostles.

The second volume, entitled “The Sacred Legend,” does not, however, carry out this plan. The works of Strauss and Weisse necessitated a new method of treatment. The fame of Strauss's achievement stirred Gfrörer to emulation, and Weisse, with his priority of Mark and rejection of John, must be refuted. The work is therefore almost a polemic against Weisse for his “want of historic sense,” and ends in setting up views which had not entered into Gfrörer's mind at the time when he wrote his first volume.

The statements of Papias regarding the Synoptists, which Weisse followed, are not deserving of credence. For a whole generation and more the tradition about Jesus had passed from mouth to mouth, and it had absorbed much that was legendary. Luke was the first—as his preface shows—who checked that process, and undertook to separate what was genuine from what was not. He is the most trustworthy of the Evangelists, for he keeps closely to his sources and adds nothing of his own, in contrast with Matthew who, writing at a later date, used sources of less value and invented matter of his own, which Gfrörer finds especially in the story of the passion in this Gospel. The lateness of Matthew is also evident [pg 164] from his tendency to carry over the Old Testament into the New. In Luke, on the other hand, the sources are so conscientiously treated that Gfrörer finds no difficulty in analysing the narrative into its component parts, especially as he always has a purely instinctive feeling “whenever a different wind begins to blow.”

Both Gospels, however, were written long after the destruction of the holy city, since they do not draw their material from the Jerusalem tradition, but “from the Christian legends which had grown up in the neighbourhood of the Sea of Tiberias,” and in consequence “mistakenly transferred the scene of Jesus' ministry to Galilee.” For this reason it is not surprising “that even down into the second century many Christians had doubts about the truth of the Synoptics and ventured to express their doubts.” Such doubts only ceased when the Church became firmly established and began to use its authority to suppress the objections of individuals. Mark is the earliest witness to doubts within the primitive Christian community regarding the credibility of his predecessors. Luke and Matthew are for him not yet sacred books; he desires to reconcile their inconsistencies, and at the same time to produce “a Gospel composed of materials of which the authenticity could be maintained even against the doubters.” For this reason he omits most of the discourses, ignores the birth-story, and of the miracles retains only those which were most deeply embedded in the tradition. His Gospel was probably produced between 110 and 120. The “non-genuine” conclusion was a later addition, but by the Evangelist himself. Thus Mark proves that the Synoptists contain legendary matter even though they are separated from the events which they relate only by a generation and a half, or at most two generations. To show that there is nothing strange in this, Gfrörer gives a long catalogue of miracles found in historians who were contemporaries of the events which they describe, and in some cases were concerned in them—in this connexion Cortez affords him a rich storehouse of material. On the other hand, all objections against the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel collapse miserably. It is true that, like the others, it offers no historically accurate report of the discourses of Jesus. It pictures Him as the Logos-Christ and makes Him speak in this character; which Jesus certainly did not do. Inadvertently the author makes John the Baptist speak in the same way. That does not matter, however, for the historical conditions are rightly represented; rightly, because Jerusalem was the scene of the greater part of the ministry, and the five Johannine miracles are to be retained. The healing of the nobleman's son, that of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda, and that of the man blind from birth happened just as they are told. The story of the miracle at Cana rests on a misunderstanding, for the wine which Jesus provided was really the wedding-gift which He had brought [pg 165] with Him. In the raising of Lazarus a real case of apparent death is combined with a polemical exaggeration of it, the restoration to life becoming, in the course of controversy with the Jews, an actual resurrection. Having thus won free, dragging John along with him, from the toils of the Hegelian denial of miracle—only, it is true, by the aid of Venturini—and being prepared to explain the feeding of the multitude on the most commonplace rationalistic lines, he may well boast that he has “driven the doubt concerning the Fourth Gospel into a very small corner.”

“The miserable era of negation,” cries Gfrörer, “is now at an end; affirmation begins. We are ascending the eastern mountains from which the pure airs of heaven breathe upon the spirit. Our guide shall be historical mathematics, a science which is as yet known to few, and has not been applied by any one to the New Testament.” This “mathematic” of Gfrörer's consists in developing his whole argument out of a single postulate. Let it be granted to him that all other claimants of the Messiahship—Gfrörer, in defiance of the evidence of Josephus, makes all the leaders of revolt in Palestine claimants of the Messiahship—were put to death by the Romans, whereas Jesus was crucified by His own people: it follows that the Messiahship of Jesus was not political, but spiritual. He had declared Himself to be in a certain sense the longed-for Messiah, but in another sense He was not so. His preaching moved in the sphere of Philonian ideas; although He did not as yet explicitly apply the Logos doctrine, it was implicit in His thought, so that the discourses of the Fourth Gospel have an essential truth. All Messianic conceptions, the Kingdom of God, the judgment, the future world, are sublimated into the spiritual region. The resurrection of the dead becomes a present eternal life. The saying in John v. 24, “He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath eternal life and cometh not into judgment; but is passed from death into life,” is the only authentic part of that discourse. The reference which follows to the coming judgment and the resurrection of the dead is a Jewish interpolation. Jesus did not believe that He Himself was to rise from the dead. Nevertheless, the “resurrection” is historic; Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Essene Order, whose tool Jesus unconsciously was, had bribed the Romans to make the crucifixion of Jesus only a pretence, and to crucify two others with Him in order to distract attention from Him. After He was taken down from the cross, Joseph removed Him to a tomb of his own which had been hewn out for the purpose in the neighbourhood of the cross, and succeeded in resuscitating Him. The Christian Church grew out of the Essene Order by giving a further development to its ideas, and it is impossible to explain the organisation of the Church without taking account of the regulations of the Order. [pg 166] The work closes with a rhapsody on the Church and its development into the Papal system.

Gfrörer thus works into Venturini's plan a quantity of material drawn from Philo. His first volume would have led one to expect a more original and scientific result. But the author is one of those “epileptics of criticism” for whom criticism is not a natural and healthy means of arriving at a result, but who, in consequence of the fits of criticism to which they are subject, and which they even endeavour to intensify, fall into a condition of exhaustion, in which the need for some fixed point becomes so imperative that they create it for themselves by self-suggestion—as they previously did their criticism—and then flatter themselves that they have really found it.

This need for a fixed point carried the former rival of Strauss into Catholicism, for which his “General History of the Church” (1841-1846) already shows a strong admiration. After the appearance of this work Gfrörer became Professor of History in the University of Freiburg. In 1848 he was active in the German Parliament in endeavouring to promote a reunion of the Protestants with the Catholics. In 1853 he went over to the Roman Church. His family had already gone over, at Strassburg, during the revolutionary period. In the conflict of the church with the Baden Government he vehemently supported the claims of the Pope. He died in 1861.

---

Incomparably better and more thorough is the attempt to write a Life of Jesus embodied in the “Theological Letters to the Cultured Classes of the German Nation.” Their writer takes Gfrörer's studies as his starting-point, but instead of spiritualising unjustifiably he ventures to conceive the Jewish world of thought in which Jesus lived in its simple realism. He was the first to place the eschatology recognised by Strauss and Reimarus in an historical setting—that of Venturini's plan—and to write a Life of Jesus entirely governed by the idea of eschatology.

The author, Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany, was born in 1807 at Erlangen. His first studies were in theology. His rationalistic views, however, compelled him to abandon the clerical profession. He became librarian at Nuremberg in 1841 and engaged in controversial writing of an anti-orthodox character, but distinguished himself also by historical work of outstanding merit. A year after the publication of the “Theological Letters,” which he issued under the pseudonym of Richard von der Alm, he published a collection of “The Opinions of Heathen and Christian Writers of the first Christian Centuries about Jesus Christ” (1864), a work which gives evidence of a remarkable range of reading. In 1855 he removed to Munich in the hope of obtaining a post in the diplomatic [pg 167] service, but in spite of his solid acquirements he did not succeed. No one would venture to appoint a man of such outspoken anti-ecclesiastical views. He died in 1876.

As regards the question of the sources, Ghillany occupies very nearly the Tübingen standpoint, except that he holds Matthew to be later than Luke, and Mark to be extracted, not from these Gospels in their present form, but from their sources. John is not authentic.

The worship offered to Jesus after His death by the Christian community is, according to Ghillany, not derived from pure Judaism, but from a Judaism influenced by oriental religions. The influence of the cult of Mithra, for example, is unmistakable. In it, as in Christianity, we find the virgin-birth, the star, the wise men, the cross, and the resurrection. Were it not for the human sacrifice of the Mithra cult, the idea which is operative in the Supper, of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, would be inexplicable.

The whole Eastern world was at that time impregnated with Gnostic ideas, which centred in the revelation of the Divine in the human. In this way there arose, for example, a Samaritan Gnosis, independent of the Christian. Christianity itself is a species of Gnosis. In any case the metaphysical conception of the Divine Sonship of Jesus is of secondary origin. If He was in any sense the Son of God for the disciples, they can only have thought of this sonship in a Gnostic fashion, and supposed that the “highest angel,” the Son of God, had taken up His abode in Him.

John the Baptist had probably come forth from among the Essenes, and he preached a spiritualised Kingdom of Heaven. He held himself to be Elias. Jesus' aims were originally similar; He came forward “in the cause of sound religious teaching for the people.” He made no claim to Davidic descent; that is to be credited to dogmatic theology. Similarly Papias is wrong in ascribing to Jesus the crude eschatological expectations implied in the saying about the miraculous vine in the Messianic Kingdom.

It is certain, however, that Jesus held Himself to be Messiah and expected the early coming of the Kingdom. His teaching is Rabbinic; all His ideas have their source in contemporary Judaism, whose world of thought we can reconstruct from the Rabbinic writings; for even if these only became fixed at a later period, the thoughts on which they are based were already current in the time of Jesus. Another source of great importance is Justin's “Dialogue with the Jew Trypho.”

The starting-point in interpreting the teaching of Jesus is the idea of repentance. In the tractate “Sanhedrin” we find: “The set time of the Messiah is already here; His coming depends now upon repentance and good works. Rabbi Eleazer says, ‘When the [pg 168] Jews repent they shall be redeemed.’ ” The Targum of Jonathan observes, on Zech. x. 3, 4,[100] “The Messiah is already born, but remains in concealment because of the sins of the Hebrews.” We find the same thoughts put into the mouth of Trypho in Justin. In the same Targum of Jonathan, Isa. liii. is interpreted with reference to the sufferings of the Messiah. Judaism, therefore, was not unacquainted with the idea of a suffering Messiah. He was not identified, however, with the heavenly Messiah of Daniel. The Rabbis distinguished two Messiahs, one of Israel and one of Judah. First the Messiah of the Kingdom of Israel, denominated the Son of Joseph, was to come from Galilee to suffer death at the hands of the Gentiles in order to make atonement for the sins of the Hebrew nation. Only after that would the Messiah predicted by Daniel, the son of David, of the tribe of Judah, appear in glory upon the clouds of heaven. Finally, He also, after two-and-sixty weeks of years, should be taken away, since the Messianic Kingdom, even as conceived by Paul, was only a temporary supernatural condition of the world.

The Messianic expectation, being directed to supernatural events, had no political character, and one who knew Himself to be the Messiah could never dream of using earthly means for the attainment of His ends; He would expect all things to be brought about by the Divine intervention. In this respect Ghillany grasps clearly the character of the eschatology of Jesus—more clearly than any one had ever done before.

The rôle of the Messiah, who prior to His supernatural manifestation remains in concealment upon earth, is therefore passive. He who is conscious of a Messianic vocation does not seek to found a Kingdom among men. He waits with confidence. He issues forth from His passivity with the sole purpose of making atonement, by vicarious suffering, for the sins of the people, in order that it may be possible for God to bring about the new condition of things. If, in spite of the repentance of the people and the occurrence of the signs which pointed to its being at hand, the coming of the Kingdom should be delayed, the man who is conscious of a Messianic vocation must, by His death, compel the intervention of God. His vocation in this world is to die.

Brought within the lines of these reflections the Life of Jesus shapes itself as follows.

Jesus was the tool of a mystical sect allied to the Essenes, the head of which was doubtless that Joseph of Arimathea who makes so sudden and striking an appearance in the Gospel narrative. This party desired to bring about the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven by mystical means, whereas the mass of the people, led astray by the Pharisees, thought to force on its coming by means [pg 169] of a rising. In the preacher of a spiritual Kingdom of Heaven, who was resolved to go to death for His cause, the mystical party discovered Messiah the son of Joseph, and they recognised that His death was necessary to make possible the coming of the heavenly Messiah predicted by Daniel. That Jesus Himself was the Messiah of Daniel, that He would immediately rise again in order to ascend to His heavenly throne, and would come thence with the hosts of heaven to establish the Kingdom of Heaven, these people did not themselves believe. But they encouraged Him in this belief, thinking that He would hardly commit Himself to a sacrificial death from which there was to be no resurrection. It was left uncertain to His mind whether Jehovah would be content with the repentance of the people, in so far as it had taken place, as realising the necessary condition for the bringing in of the Kingdom of Heaven, or whether an atonement by blood, offered by the death of Messiah the son of Joseph, would be needful. It had been explained to Him that when the calculated year of grace arrived, He must go up to Jerusalem and endeavour to rouse the Jews to Messianic enthusiasm in order to compel Jehovah to come to their aid with His heavenly hosts. From the action of Jehovah it could then be discovered whether the preaching of repentance and baptism would suffice to make atonement for the people before God or not. If Jehovah did not appear, a deeper atonement must be made; Jesus must pay the penalty of death for the sins of the Jews, but on the third day would rise again from the dead and ascend to the throne of God and come again thence to found the Kingdom of Heaven. “Any one can see,” concludes Ghillany, “that our view affords a very natural explanation of the anxiety of the disciples, the suspense of Jesus Himself, and the prayer, ‘If it be possible let this cup pass from me.’ ”

“It was apparently only towards the close of His life that Jesus revealed to the disciples the possibility that the Son of Man might have to suffer and die before He could found the Messianic Kingdom.”

With this possibility before Him, He came to Jerusalem and there awaited the Divine intervention. Meanwhile Joseph of Arimathea lent his aid towards securing His condemnation in the Sanhedrin. He must die on the day of the Passover; on the day of the Preparation He must be at hand and ready in Jerusalem. He held, with His disciples, a love-feast after the Essene custom, not a Paschal meal, and in doing so associated thoughts of His death with the breaking of bread and the pouring out of the wine. “He did not lay upon His disciples any injunction to continue the celebration of a feast of this kind until the time of His return, because He thought of His resurrection and His heavenly glory as about to take place after three days. But when His return was [pg 170] delayed the early Christians attached these sayings of His about the bread and wine to their Essene love-feast, and explained this common meal of the community as a commemoration of the Last Supper of Jesus and His disciples, a memorial Feast in honour of their Saviour, the celebration of which must be continued until His coming.”

When the armed band came to arrest Him, Jesus surrendered to His fate. Pilate almost set Him free, holding Him to be a mere enthusiast who placed His hopes only in the Divine intervention. Joseph of Arimathea, however, succeeded in averting this danger. “Even on the cross Jesus seems to have continued to hope for the Divine intervention, as is evidenced by the cry, ‘My God! My God! why hast thou forsaken me?’ ” Joseph of Arimathea provided for His burial.

The belief in His resurrection rests upon the visions of the disciples, which are to be explained by their intense desire for the Parousia, of which He had given them the promise. After setting their affairs in order in Galilee they returned at the Feast of Pentecost to Jerusalem, which they had left in alarm, in order there to await the Parousia in company with other Galilaean believers.

The confession of faith of the primitive Christian community was the simplest conceivable: Jesus the Messiah had come, not as a temporal conqueror, but as the Son of Man foretold by Daniel, and had died for the sins of the people. In other respects they were strict Jews, kept the Law, and were constantly in the Temple. Only the community of goods and the brotherhood-meal are of an Essene character.

“The Christianity of the original community in Jerusalem was thus a mixture of Zealotism and Mysticism which did not include any wholly new element, and even in its conception of the Messiah had nothing peculiar to itself except the belief that the Son of Man predicted by Daniel had already come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth ... that He was now enthroned at the right hand of God, and would again appear as the expected Son of Man upon the clouds of heaven according to Daniel's prophecy.” Jesus, therefore, had triumphed over the mystical party who desired to make use of Him in the character of Messiah the son of Joseph—their Messiah, the heavenly Son of Man, had not come. Jesus, in virtue of what He had done, had taken His place both in heaven and in earth.

How much of Venturini's plan is here retained? Only the “mystical part” which serves the purpose of setting the action of the drama in motion. All the rest of it, the rationalistic part, has been transmuted into an historical conception. Miracle and trickery, along with the stage-play resurrection, have been purged [pg 171] away in the fires of Strauss's criticism. There remains only a fundamental conception which has a certain greatness—a brotherhood which looks for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven appoints one of its members to undergo as Messiah an atoning death, that the coming of the Kingdom, for which the time is at hand, may not be delayed. This brotherhood is the only fictitious element in the whole construction—much as in the primitive steam-engine the valves were still worked by hand while the rest of the machinery was actuated by its own motive-power. So in this Life of Jesus the motive-power is drawn entirely from historical sources, and the want of an automatic starting arrangement is a mere anachronism. Strike out the superfluous rôle of Joseph of Arimathea, and the distinction of the two Messiahs, which is not clear even in the Rabbis, and substitute the simple hypothesis that Jesus, in the course of His Messianic vocation, when He thinks the time for the coming of the Kingdom has arrived, goes freely to Jerusalem, and, as it were, compels the secular power to put Him to death, in order by this act of atonement to win for the world the immediate coming of the Kingdom, and for Himself the glory of the Son of Man—make these changes, and you have a life of Jesus in which the motive-power is a purely historical force. It is impossible to indicate briefly all the parts of which the seemingly complicated, but in reality impressively simple, mechanism of this Life of Jesus is composed. The conduct of Jesus, alike in its resolution and in its hesitation, becomes clear, and not less so that of the disciples. All far-fetched historical ingenuity is dispensed with. Jesus acts “because His hour is come.” This decisive placing of the Life of Jesus in the “last time” (cf. 1 Peter i. 20 φανερωθέντος δὲ ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτων τῶν χρόνων δἰ ὑμᾶς) is an historical achievement without parallel. Not less so is the placing of the thought of the passion in its proper eschatological setting as an act of atonement. Where had the character and origin of the primitive community ever been brought into such clear connexion with the death of Jesus? Who had ever before so earnestly considered the problem why the Christian community arose in Jerusalem and not in Galilee? “But the solution is too simple, and, moreover, is not founded on a severely scientific chain of reasoning, but on historical intuition and experiment, the simple experiment of introducing the Life of Jesus into the Jewish eschatological world of thought”—so the theologians replied, or so, at least, they might have replied if they had taken this curious work seriously, if, indeed, they had read it at all. But how were they to suspect that in a book which seemed to aim at founding a new Deistic Church, and which went out with the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist into the desert of the most barren natural religion, a valuable historical conception might be found? It is true that [pg 172] no one suspected at that time that in the forgotten work of Reimarus there lay a dangerous historical discovery, a kind of explosive material such as can only be collected by those who stand free from every responsibility towards historical Christianity, who have abandoned every prejudice, in the good sense as well as in the bad—and whose one desire in regard to the Gospel history is to be “spirits that constantly deny.”[101] Such thinkers, if they have historical gifts, destroy artificial history in the cause of true history and, willing evil, do good—if it be admitted that the discovery of truth is good. If this negative work is a good thing, the author of the “Letters to the German People” performed a distinguished service, for his negation is radical. The new Church which was to be founded on this historic overcoming of historic Christianity was to combine “only what was according to reason in Judaism and Christianity.” From Judaism it was to take the belief in one sole, spiritual, perfect God; from Christianity the requirement of brotherly love to all men. On the other hand, it was to eliminate what was contrary to reason in each: from Judaism the ritual system and the sacrifices; from Christianity the deification of Jesus and the teaching of redemption through His blood. How comes so completely unhistorical a temperament to be combined with so historical an intellect? His Jesus, after all, has no individuality; He is a mere eschatological machine.

In accordance with the confession of faith of the new Church of which Ghillany dreamed, the calendar of the Feasts is to be transformed as follows:—

1. Feast of the Deity, the first and second of January.

2. Feast of the Dignity of Man and Brotherly Love, first and second of April.

3. Feast of the Divine Blessing in Nature, first and second of July.

4. Feast of Immortality, first and second of October.

Apart from these eight Feast days, and the Sundays, all the other days of the year are working days.

From the order of divine service we may note the following: “The sermon, which should begin with instruction and exhortation and close with consolation and encouragement, must not last longer than half an hour.”

---

The series of Lives of Jesus which combine criticism with fiction is closed by Noack's Story of Jesus. A freethinker like Ghillany, but lacking the financial independence which a kindly fate had conferred upon the latter, Noack led a life which may properly be described as a constant martyrdom, lightened only by his intense love of theological studies, which nevertheless were [pg 173] responsible for all his troubles. Born in 1819, of a clerical family in Hesse, he became in 1842 Pastor's assistant and teacher of religion at Worms in the Hessian Palatinate. The Darmstadt reactionaries drove him out of this position in 1844 without his having given any ground of offence. In 1849 he became “Repetent” in Philosophy at the University of Giessen at a salary of four hundred gulden. In 1855 he was promoted to be Professor Extraordinary without having his salary raised. In 1870, at the age of 51, he was appointed assistant at the University Library and received at the same time the title of Ordinary Professor. He died in 1885. He was an extremely prolific writer, always ingenious, and possessed of wide knowledge, but he never did anything of real permanent value either in philosophy or theology. He was not without critical acumen, but there was too much of the poet in him; a critical discovery was an incitement to an imaginative reconstruction of the history. In 1870-1871 he published, after many preliminary studies, his chief work, “From the Jordan Uplands to Golgotha; four books on the Gospel and the Gospels.”[102] It passed unnoticed. Attributing its failure to the excitement aroused by the war, which ousted all other interests, he issued a revised edition in 1876 under the title “The History of Jesus, on the Basis of Free Historical Inquiry concerning the Gospel and the Gospels,”[103] but with hardly greater success.

And yet the fundamental critical ideas which can be detected beneath this narrative, in spite of its having the form of fiction, give this work a significance such as the contemporary Lives of Jesus which won the applause of theologians did not possess. It is the only Life of Jesus hitherto produced which is written consistently from the Johannine point of view from beginning to end. Strauss had not, after all, in Noack's opinion, conclusively shown the absolute incompatibility of the Synoptics with the Fourth Gospel; neither he nor any other critic had felt the full difficulty of the question why the Fourth Evangelist should be at pains to invent the numerous journeys to the Feasts, seeing that the development of the Logos Christology did not necessarily involve any alteration of the scene of the ministry; on the contrary, it would, one might think, have been the first care of the Evangelist to inweave his novel theory with the familiar tradition in order to avoid discrediting his narrative in advance by his innovations. Noack's conclusion is that the inconsistency is not due to a single author; it is the result of a long process of redaction in which various divergent tendencies have been at work. But as the Fourth Gospel is not the logical terminus of the process of [pg 174] alteration, the only alternative is to place it at the beginning. What we have to seek in it is the original Gospel from which the process of transforming the tradition started.

There is also another line of argument based on the contradictions in the Gospel tradition which leads to the hypothesis that we have to do with redactions of the Gospels. Either Jesus was the Jewish Messiah of the Synoptics, or a Son of God in the Greek, spiritual sense, whose self-consciousness must be interpreted by means of the Logos doctrine: He cannot have been both at the same time. But it is inconceivable that a Jewish claimant of the Messiahship would have been left unmolested up to the last, and have had virtually to force the authorities to put him to death. On the other hand, if He were a simple enthusiast claiming to be a Son of God, a man who lived only for his own “self-consciousness,” He might from the beginning have taken up this attitude without being in any way molested, except by the scorn of men. In this respect also, therefore, the primitive Gospel which we can recover from John has the advantage. It was only later that this “Son of God” became the Jewish Messiah.

We arrive at the primitive Johannine writing when we cancel in the Fourth Gospel all Jewish doctrine and all miracles.[104] Its date is the year 60 and it was composed by—Judas, the beloved disciple. This primitive Gospel received little modification and still shows clearly “the wonderful reality of its history.” It aims only at giving a section of Jesus' history, a representation of His attitude of mind and spirit. With “simple ingenuousness” it gives, “along with the kernel of the historical material of the Gospel, Jesus' thoughts about His own Person in the mysterious oracular sayings and deeply thoughtful and moving discourses by which the Nazarene stirred rather than enlightened the world.” Events of a striking character were, however, absent from it. The feeding of the multitude was represented in it as effected by natural means. It was a philanthropic feeding of a multitude which certainly did not number thousands, the numbers are a later insertion; Jesus fed them with bread and fish which He purchased from a “sutler-lad.” The healing of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda was the unmasking of a malingerer, whom the Lord exposed and ordered to depart. As He had bidden him carry his bed, and it was on the Sabbath, this brought Him into conflict with the authorities. His only “acts” were acts of self-revelation—mystical sayings which He threw out to the people. “The problem which meets us in His history is in truth a psychological problem, how, namely, His exalted view of Himself came to be accepted as the purest and highest truth—in His lifetime, it is true, only by a limited circle of disciples, but after His departure by a constantly growing [pg 175] multitude of believing followers.” The gospel of the beloved disciple Judas made its way quietly into the world, understood by few, even as Jesus Himself had been understood by a few only.

About ten years later, according to Noack, appeared the original form of Luke, which we can reconstruct from what is known of Marcion's Luke.[105] This Evangelist is under Pauline influence, and writes with an apologetic purpose. He desires to refute the calumny that Jesus was “possessed of a devil,” and he does this by making Him cast out devils. It was in this way that miracle forced itself into the Gospel history.

But this primitive Luke, as Noack reconstructs it by combining the statements of the Fathers regarding Marcion's Gospel, knows nothing of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem to die. This circumstance is of capital importance to Noack, because in the course of his attempt to bring the topography of the Fourth Gospel into harmony with that of the Synoptics he had arrived at the remarkable result that the Johannine Christ worked in Galilee, not in Judaea. On the basis of the Onomasticon of Eusebius—which Noack, with the aid of topographical traditions derived from the Crusaders and statements of Mohammedan writers, interprets with a recklessness which is nothing short of criminal—Cana and Bethany (Bethabara) were not in the latitude of Jerusalem, but “near the head-waters of the Jordan in the upper part of the Jordan valley before it flows into the lake of Huleh. There, in Coele-Syria, on the southern slope of Hermon, was the scene of John the Baptist's labours; there Jesus began His ministry; thither He returned to die.” “It is in the Galilaean district which forms the scene of the Song of Solomon that the reader of this book must be prepared to find the Golgotha of the cross.” That is the sentence with which Noack's account of the Life of Jesus opens. This alludes to an idea which had already been worked out in his “Studies on the Song of Solomon,”[106] namely, that the mountain country surrounding the upper Jordan was the pre-exilic Judaea, and that the “city of David” was situated there. The Jews on their return from exile had at first endeavoured to rebuild that Coele-Syrian city of David with the ruins of Solomon's Temple, but had been driven away from it and had then taken the desperate resolution to build the temple of Zerubbabel upon the high plateau lying far to the south of ancient Israel. Ezra the Scribe interpolated the forgery on the ground of which this site began to be accepted as the former city of David. Under the Syrian oppression all remembrance of the ancient city of David entirely disappeared.

This fantastic edifice, in the construction of which the wildest [pg 176] etymologies play a part, is founded on the just recognition that a reconciliation of John with the Synoptists can only be effected by transferring some of the Johannine localities to the North; but this involves not only finding Bethany, Arimathea and the other places, but even the scene of Jesus' death in this district. The brook Kedron conveniently becomes the “brook of Cedars.”

For fifty years the two earliest Evangelists, in spite of their poverty of incident, sufficed for the needs of the Christians. The “fire of Jesus” was fed chiefly by the Pauline Gospel. The original form of the Gospel of Luke accordingly became the starting-point of the next stage of development. Thus arose the Gospel of Mark. Mark was not a native of Palestine, but a man of Roman extraction living in Decapolis, who had not the slightest knowledge of the localities in which the life of Jesus was really passed. He undertook, about the year 130, “in the interest of the new Christian settlement at Jerusalem in Hadrian's time, deliberately and consciously to transform the original plan of the Gospel history and to represent the Lord as crucified at Jerusalem.” The man who from the year 132 onward, as Mark the Bishop, preached the word of the Crucified to a Gentile Christian community amid the ruins of the holy city, had previously, as Mark the Evangelist, taken care that a prophet should not perish out of Jerusalem. In composing his Gospel he made use, in addition to Luke, of a traditional source which he found in Decapolis. He deliberately omitted the frequent journeys to Jerusalem which were still found in the original Luke, and inserted instead Jesus' journey to His death. He it was, also, who made the Nazarite into the Nazarene, laying the scene of Jesus' youth in Nazareth. To the cures of demoniacs he added magical acts such as the feeding of the multitude and the resurrection.

In Matthew, who appeared about 135, legend and fiction riot unchecked. In addition, Jewish parables and sayings are put into the mouth of Jesus, whereas He really had nothing to do with the Jewish world of ideas. For if anything is certain, it is that the moral maxims of the latest Gospel are of a distinctively Jewish origin. About the middle of the second century the originals of John and Luke underwent redaction. The redaction of the Logos Gospel was completed by the addition of the twenty-first chapter; the last redaction of Luke was perhaps carried out by Justin Martyr, fresh from completing his “Dialogue with Trypho”! Thus John and Luke are, in this final form, which is full of contradictions, the latest Gospels, and the saying is fulfilled about the first being last, and the last first.

Arbitrary as these suggestions are, there is nevertheless something impressive in the attempt to explain the remarkable inconsistencies which are found within the Gospel tradition by [pg 177] considerations relating to its origin and development. Despite all his far-fetched ideas, Noack really stands higher than some of his contemporaries who showed more prudence in their theological enterprises, and about that time were earning the applause of the faculty, and quieting the minds of the laity, by performing once more the old conjuring trick—assisted by some new feats of legerdemain—of harmonising John with the Synoptists in such a way as to produce a Life of Jesus which could be turned to the service of ecclesiastical theology.

The outline of the public Life of Jesus, as reconstructed by Noack, is as follows. It lasted from early in the year 35 to the 14th Nisan of the year 37, and began in the moment when Jesus revealed His consciousness of what He was. We do not know how long previously He had cherished it in secret. It is certain that the Baptist helped to bring about this revelation. This is the only part which he plays in the Gospel of John. He was neither a preacher of repentance, nor an Elias, nor the forerunner of Jesus, nor a mere signpost pointing to the Messiah, such as the secondary tradition makes him out to be.

Similarly everything that is Messianic in the consciousness of Jesus is secondary. The lines of His thought were guided by the Greek ideas about sons of God, for the soil of northern Galilee was saturated with these ideas. Other sources which contributed something were the personification of the Divine Wisdom in the “Wisdom Literature” and some of Philo's doctrines. Jesus became the son of God in an ecstatic trance! Had not Philo recognised ecstasy as the last and highest means of rising to union with the Divine?

Jesus' temperament, according to Noack, was pre-disposed to ecstasy, since He was born out of wedlock. One who had this burden upon His spirit may well have early taken refuge in His own thoughts, above the clouds, in the presence of the God of His fathers. Assailed in a thousand ways by the cruelty of the world, it would seem to Him as though His Heavenly Father, though unseen, was stretching out to Him the arms of consolation. Imagination, which ever mercifully lightens for men the yoke of misery, charmed the fatherless child out of His earthly sufferings and put into His hand a coloured glass through which He saw the world and life in a false light. Ecstatic enthusiasm had carried Him up to the dizzy height of spiritual union with the Father in Heaven. A hundred times He was cast down out of His dreams into the hard world of reality, to experience once more His earthly distresses, but ever anew He won His way by fasting, vigil, and prayer to the starry heaven of ecstasy.

“Jesus,” Noack explains, “had in thought projected Himself beyond His earthly nativity and risen to the conception that His [pg 178] ego had been in existence before this earthly body in which He stood visibly upon the stage of the world. He felt that His ego had had being and life before He became incarnate upon earth.... This new conception of Himself, born of His solitary musings, was incorporated into the very substance of His natural personal ego. A new ego had superseded the old natural, corporeally conditioned ego.”

Ambition, too, came into play—the high ambition to do God a service by the offering up of Himself. The passion of self-sacrifice is characteristic of a consciousness such as this. According to the document which underlies the Johannine Gospel it was not in consequence of outward events that Jesus took His resolve to die. “It was the later Gospel tradition which exhibited His fate as an inevitable consequence of His conflict with a world impervious to spiritual impression.” In the original Gospel that fate was freely embraced from the outset as belonging to the vocation of the Son of God. Only by the constant presence of the thought of death could a life which for two years walked the razor edge of such dizzy dreams have been preserved from falling. The conviction, or perhaps rather the instinctive feeling, that the rôle of a Son of God upon earth was not one to be maintained for decades was the necessary counterpoise to the enthusiasm of Jesus' spirit. From the first He was as much at home with the thought of death as with His Heavenly Father.

This Son of Man—according to Noack's interpretation the title is equivalent to Son of Hope—requires of the multitude that they shall take His lofty dream for solid reality. “He revealed His message from heaven to the world at the Paschal Feast of the year 35, by throwing out a challenge to the Sadducaean hierarchy in Jerusalem.” In the time between John's removal from the scene and John's death, there falls the visit of Jesus to Samaria and a sojourn in the neighbourhood of His Galilaean home. At the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem in the autumn of that year, the healing of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda led to a breach with the Sabbatic regulations of the Pharisees. Later on, in consequence of His generous feeding of the multitude in the Gaulonite table-land, there is an attempt to make Him into a Messianic King; which He, however, repudiates. At the time of the Passover in Galilee in the year 36, in the synagogue at Capernaum, He tests the spiritual insight of those who may, He hopes, be ripe for the higher teaching concerning the Son of God made flesh, by the touchstone of His mystical words about the bread of life. At the next Feast of Tabernacles, in the city of Zion, He makes a last desperate attempt to move men's hearts by the parable of the Good Shepherd who is ready to lay down His life for His sheep, the people of Israel.

But His adversaries are remorseless; they wound Him to the very depths of His spirit by bringing to Him the woman taken in adultery, and asking Him what they are to do with her. When this question was sprung upon Him, He saw in a moment the public humiliation designed by His adversaries. All eyes were turned upon Him, and for a few moments the embarrassment of One who was usually so self-possessed was patent to all. He stooped as though He desired to write with His finger upon the ground. Was it shame at His dishonourable birth that compelled Him thus to lower His gaze? But the painful silence of expectation among the spectators did not last long. His adversaries repeated their question, He raised His head and spoke the undying words: “Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone at her.”

Incensed by His constant references to His heavenly Sonship, they endeavour at last to stone Him. He flees from the Temple and takes refuge in the Jordan uplands. His purpose is, at the next Passover, that of the year 37, here in the mountains which were blessed as Joseph's portion, to offer His atoning death as that of the true paschal lamb, and with this act to quit the stage of the world's history. He remained in hiding in order to avoid the risk of assassination by the emissaries of the Pharisees. In Bethany He receives the mysterious visit of the Greeks, who doubtless desired to tempt Him to raise the standard of revolt as a claimant of the Messiahship, but He refuses to be shaken in His determination to die. The washing of the disciples' feet signifies their baptism with water, that they might thereafter receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Judas, the disciple whom Jesus loved, who was a man of much resource, helped Him to avoid being arrested as a disturber of the peace by arranging that the “betrayal” should take place on the evening before the Passover, in order that Jesus might die, as He desired, on the day of the Passover. For this service of love he was, in the secondary tradition, torn from the bosom of the Lord and branded as a traitor.

---