Christian Gottlob Wilke. Tradition und Mythe. Ein Beitrag zur historischen Kritik der kanonischen Evangelien überhaupt, wie insbesondere zur Würdigung des mythischen Idealismus im Leben-Jesu von Strauss. (Tradition and Myth. A Contribution to the General Historical Criticism of the Gospels; with special reference to the mythical idealism of Strauss's “Leben-Jesu.”) Leipzig, 1837.
August Ebrard. Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte. (Scientific Criticism of the Gospel History.) Frankfort, 1842.
Georg Heinr. Aug. Ewald. Geschichte Christus' und seiner Zeit. (History of Christ and His Times.) 1855. Fifth volume of the “Geschichte des Volkes Israel.”
Christoph Friedrich von Ammon. Die Geschichte des Lebens Jesu mit steter Rücksicht auf die vorhandenen Quellen. (History of the Life of Jesus with constant reference to the extant sources.) 3 vols. 1842-1847.
Scarcely ever has a book let loose such a storm of controversy; and scarcely ever has a controversy been so barren of immediate result. The fertilising rain brought up a crop of toad-stools. Of the forty or fifty essays on the subject which appeared in the next [pg 098] five years, there are only four or five which are of any value, and even of these the value is very small.
Strauss's first idea was to deal with each of his opponents separately, and he published in 1837 three successive Streitschriften.[44] In the preface to the first of these he states that he has kept silence for two years from a rooted objection to anything in the nature of reply or counter-criticism, and because he had little expectation of any good results from such controversy. These essays are able, and are often written with biting scorn, especially that directed against his inveterate enemy, Steudel of Tübingen, the representative of intellectual supernaturalism, and that against Eschenmayer, a pastor, also of Tübingen. To a work of the latter, “The Iscariotism of our Days” (1835), he had referred in the preface to the second volume of his Life of Jesus in the following remark: “This offspring of the legitimate marriage between theological ignorance and religious intolerance, blessed by a sleep-walking philosophy, succeeds in making itself so completely ridiculous that it renders any serious reply unnecessary.”
But for all his sarcasm Strauss does not show himself an adroit debater in this controversy, any more than in later times in the Diet.
It is indeed remarkable how unskilled in polemics is this man who had produced a critical work of the first importance with almost playful ease. If his opponents made no effort to understand him rightly—and many of them certainly wrote without having carefully studied the fourteen hundred pages of his two volumes—Strauss on his part seemed to be stricken with a kind of uncertainty, lost himself in a maze of detail, and failed to keep continually re-formulating the main problems which he had set up for discussion, and so compelling his adversaries to face them fairly.
Of these problems there were three. The first was composed of the related questions regarding miracle and myth; the second concerned the connexion of the Christ of faith with the Jesus of [pg 099] history; the third referred to the relation of the Gospel of John to the Synoptists.
It was the first that attracted most attention; more than half the critics devoted themselves to it alone. Even so they failed to get a thorough grasp of it. The only thing that they clearly see is that Strauss altogether denies the miracles; the full scope of the mythological explanation as applied to the traditional records of the life of Jesus, and the extent of the historical material which Strauss is prepared to accept, is still a riddle to them. That is in some measure due, it must in fairness be said, to the arrangement of Strauss's own work, in which the unconnected series of separate investigations makes the subject unnecessarily difficult even for one who wishes to do the author justice.