In regard to the third problem which Strauss had offered for discussion, the relation of the Synoptists to John, there was practically no response. The only one of his critics who understood what was at stake was Hengstenberg. He alone perceived the significance of the fact that critical theology, having admitted mythical elements first in the Old Testament, and then in the beginning and [pg 116] end of the Gospel history, and having, in consequence of the latter admission, felt obliged to give up the first three Gospels, retaining only the fourth, was now being besieged by Strauss in its last stronghold. “They withdrew,” says the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, “into the Gospel of John as into a fortress, and boasted that they were safe there, though they could not suppress a secret consciousness that they only held it at the enemy's pleasure; now the enemy has appeared before it; he is using the same weapons with which he was formerly victorious; the Gospel of John is in as desperate case as formerly the Synoptists. The time has come to make a bold resolve, a decisive choice; either they must give up everything, or else they must successively re-occupy the more advanced positions which at an earlier date they had successively abandoned.” It would be impossible to give a more accurate picture of the desperate position into which Hase and Schleiermacher had brought the mediating theology by their ingenious expedient of giving up the Synoptics in favour of the Gospel of John. Before any danger threatened, they had abandoned the outworks and withdrawn into the citadel, oblivious of the fact that they thereby exposed themselves to the danger of having their own guns turned upon them from the positions they had abandoned, and being obliged to surrender without striking a blow the position of which they had boasted as impregnable. It is impossible to emphasise strongly enough the fact that it was not Strauss, but Hase and Schleiermacher, who had brought the mediating theology into this hopeless position, in which the fall of the Fourth Gospel carried with it the surrender of the historical tradition as a whole.
But there is no position so desperate that theology cannot find a way out of it. The mediating theologians simply ignored the problem which Strauss had raised. As they had been accustomed to do before, so they continued to do after, taking the Gospel of John as the authentic framework, and fitting into it the sections of the Synoptic narrative wherever place could best be found for them. The difference between the Johannine and Synoptic representations of Jesus' method of teaching, says Neander, is only apparently irreconcilable, and he calls out in support of this assertion all the reserves of old worn-out expedients and artifices, among others the argument that the Pauline Christology is only explicable as a combination of the Synoptic and Johannine views. Other writers who belong to the same apologetic school, such as Tholuck, Ebrard,[73] [pg 117] Wieseler,[74] Lange,[75] and Ewald,[76] maintain the same point of view, only that their defence is usually much less skilful.
The only writer who really in some measure enters into the difficulties is Ammon. He, indeed, is fully conscious of the difference, and thinks we cannot rest content with merely recognising it, but must find a solution, even if rather a forced one, “by subordinating the indefinite chronological data of the Synoptists, of whom, after all, only one was, or could have been, an eyewitness, to the ordered narrative of John.” The fourth Evangelist makes so brief a reference to the Galilaean period because it was in accordance with his plan to give more prominence to the discourses of Jesus in the Temple and His dialogues with the Scribes as compared to the parables and teaching given to the people. The cleansing of the Temple falls at the outset of Jesus' ministry; Jesus begins His Messianic work in Jerusalem by this action of making an end of the unseemly chaffering in the court of the Temple. The question regarding the relative authenticity of the reports is decisively settled by a comparison of the two accounts of [pg 118] the triumphal entry, because there it is quite evident that “Matthew, the chief authority among the Synoptists, adapts his narrative to his special Jewish-Messianic standpoint.” According to Ammon's rationalistic view, the work of Jesus consisted precisely in the transformation of this Jewish-Messianic idea into the conception of a “Saviour of the world.” In this lies the explanation of the fate of Jesus: “The mass of the Jewish people were not prepared to receive a Christ so spiritual as Jesus was, since they were not ripe for so lofty a view of religion.”
Ammon here turns his Kantian philosophy to account. It serves especially to explain to him the consciousness of pre-existence avowed by the Jesus of the Johannine narrative as something purely human. We, too, he explains, can “after the spirit” claim an ideal existence prior to the spatial creation without indulging any delusion, and without, on the other hand, thinking of a real existence. In this way Jesus is for Himself a Biblical idea, with which He has become identified. “The purer and deeper a man's self-consciousness is, the keener may his consciousness of God become, until time disappears for him, and his partaking in the Divine nature fills his whole soul.”
But Ammon's support of the authenticity of John's Gospel is, even from a purely literary point of view, not so unreserved as in the case of the other opponents of Strauss. In the background stands the hypothesis that our Gospel is only a working-over of the authentic John, a suggestion in regard to which Ammon can claim priority, since he had made it as early as 1811,[77] nine years before the appearance of Bretschneider's Probabilia. Were it not for the ingenuous fashion in which he works the Synoptic material into the Johannine plan, we might class him with Alexander Schweizer and Weisse, who in a similar way seek to meet the objections of Strauss by an elaborate theory of editing.[78]
The first stage of the discussion regarding the relation of John to the Synoptists passed without result. The mediating theology continued to hold its positions undisturbed—and, strangest of all, Strauss himself was eager for a suspension of hostilities.
It is as though history took the trouble to countersign the [pg 119] genuineness of the great critical discoveries by letting the discoverers themselves attempt to cancel them. As Kant disfigures his critical idealism by making inconsistent additions in order to refute a reviewer who had put him in the same category with Berkeley, so Strauss inserts additions and retractations in the third edition of his Life of Jesus in deference to the uncritical works of Tholuck and Neander! Wilke, the only one of his critics from whom he might have learned something, he ignores. “From the lofty vantage ground of Tholuck's many-sided knowledge I have sometimes, in spite of a slight tendency to vertigo, gained a juster point of view from which to look at one matter or another,” is the avowal which he makes in the preface to this ill-starred edition.
It would, indeed, have done no harm if he had confined himself to stating more exactly here and there the extent of the mythical element, had increased the number of possible cures, had inclined a little less to the negative side in examining the claims of reported facts to rank as historical, and had been a little more circumspect in pointing out the factors which produced the myths; the serious thing was that he now began to hesitate in his denial of the historical character of the Fourth Gospel—the very foundation of his critical view.
A renewed study of it, aided by De Wette's commentary and Neander's Life of Jesus, had made him “doubtful about his doubts regarding the genuineness and credibility of this Gospel.” “Not that I am convinced of its genuineness,” he admits, “but I am no longer convinced that it is not genuine.”
He feels bound, therefore, to state whatever makes in its favour, and to leave open a number of possibilities which formerly he had not recognised. The adhesion of the first disciples may, he now thinks, have happened essentially in the form in which it is reported in the Fourth Gospel; in transferring the cleansing of the Temple to the first period of Jesus' ministry, John may be right as against the Synoptic tradition “which has no decisive evidence in its favour”; in regard to the question whether Jesus had been only once, or several times, in Jerusalem, his opinion now is that “on this point the superior circumstantiality of the Fourth Gospel cannot be contested.”