Jakobi writes “for thoughtful and sympathetic readers.” He recognises that much of the miraculous is a later addition to the facts, but he has a rooted distrust of thoroughgoing rationalism, “whose would-be helpful explanations are often stranger than the miracles themselves.” A certain amount of miracle must be maintained, but not for the purpose of founding belief upon it: “the miracles were not intended to authenticate the teaching of Jesus, but to surround His life with a guard of honour.”[20]
Whether Herder, in his two Lives of Jesus, is to be classed with the older rationalists is a question to which the answer must be “Yes, and No,” as in the case of every attempt to classify those men of lonely greatness who stand apart from their contemporaries, but who nevertheless are not in all points in advance of them.
Properly speaking, he has really nothing to do with the rationalists, since he is distinguished from them by the depth of his insight and his power of artistic apprehension, and he is far from sharing their lack of taste. Further, his horizon embraces problems of which rationalism, even in its developed form, never [pg 035] came in sight. He recognises that all attempts to harmonise the Synoptists with John are unavailing; a conclusion which he had avowed earlier in his “Letters referring to the Study of Theology.”[21] He grasps this incompatibility, it is true, rather by the aid of poetic, than of critical insight. “Since they cannot be united,” he writes in his “Life of Jesus according to John,” “they must be left standing independently, each evangelist with his own special merit. Man, Ox, Lion, and Eagle, they advance together, supporting the throne of glory, but they refuse to coalesce into a single form, to unite into a Diatessaron.” But to him belongs the honour of being the first and the only scholar, prior to Strauss, to recognise that the life of Jesus can be construed either according to the Synoptists, or according to John, but that a Life of Jesus based on the four Gospels is a monstrosity. In view of this intuitive historical grasp, it is not surprising that the commentaries of the theologians were an abomination to him.
The fourth Gospel is, in his view, not a primitive historical source, but a protest against the narrowness of the “Palestinian Gospels.” It gives free play, as the circumstances of the time demanded, to Greek ideas. “There was need, in addition to those earlier, purely historical Gospels, of a Gospel at once theological and historical, like that of John,” in which Jesus should be presented, not as the Jewish Messiah, “but as the Saviour of the World.”
The additions and omissions of this Gospel are alike skilfully planned. It retains only those miracles which are symbols of a continuous permanent miracle, through which the Saviour of the World works constantly, unintermittently, among men. The Johannine miracles are not there for their own sakes. The cures of demoniacs are not even represented among them. These had no interest for the Graeco-Roman world, and the Evangelist was unwilling “that this Palestinian superstition should become a permanent feature of Christianity, to be a reproach of scoffers or a belief of the foolish.” His recording of the raising of Lazarus is, in spite of the silence of the Synoptists, easily explicable. The latter could not yet tell the story “without exposing a family which was still living near Jerusalem to the fury of that hatred which had sworn with an oath to put Lazarus to death.” John, however, could recount it without scruple, “for by this time Jerusalem was probably in ruins, and the hospitable family of Bethany were perhaps already with their Friend in the other world.” This most naïve of explanations is reproduced in a whole series of Lives of Jesus.
In dealing with the Synoptists, Herder grasps the problem with [pg 036] the same intuitive insight. Mark is no epitomist, but the creator of the archetype of the Synoptic representation. “The Gospel of Mark is not an epitome; it is an original Gospel. What the others have, and he has not, has been added by them, not omitted by him. Consequently Mark is a witness to an original, shorter Gospel-scheme, to which the additional matter of the others ought properly to be regarded as a supplement.”
Mark is the “unornamented central column, or plain foundation stone, on which the others rest.” The birth-stories of Matthew and Luke are “a new growth to meet new needs.” The different tendencies, also, point to a later period. Mark is still comparatively friendly towards the Jews, because Christianity had not yet separated itself from Judaism. Matthew is more hostile towards them because his Gospel was written at a time when Christians had given up the hope of maintaining amicable relations with the Jews and were groaning under the pressure of persecution. It is for that reason that the Jesus of the Matthaean discourses lays so much stress upon His second coming, and presupposes the rejection of the Jewish nation as something already in being, a sign of the approaching end.
Pure history, however, is as little to be looked for in the first three Gospels as in the fourth. They are the sacred epic of Jesus the Messiah, and model the history of their hero upon the prophetic words of the Old Testament. In this view, also, Herder is a precursor of Strauss.
In essence, however, Herder represents a protest of art against theology. The Gospels, if we are to find the life of Jesus in them, must be read, not with pedantic learning, but with taste. From this point of view, miracles cease to offend. Neither Old Testament prophecies, nor predictions of Jesus, nor miracles, can be adduced as evidence for the Gospel; the Gospel is its own evidence. The miracles stand outside the possibility of proof, and belong to mere “Church belief,” which ought to lose itself more and more in the pure Gospel. Yet miracles, in a limited sense, are to be accepted on the ground of the historic evidence. To refuse to admit this is to be like the Indian king who denied the existence of ice because he had never seen anything like it. Jesus, in order to help His miracle-loving age, reconciled Himself to the necessity of performing miracles. But, in any case, the reality of a miracle is of small moment in comparison with its symbolic value.