Two things have been gained in this discussion. There is first the recognition that the canon is a growth. The holy book and the conception of its holiness, as well, were evolved. Christianity was not primarily a book-religion save in the sense that almost all Christians revered the Old Testament. Other writings than those which we esteem canonical were long used in churches. Some of those afterward canonical were not used in all the churches. In similar fashion we have learned that identical statements of faith were not current in the earliest churches. Nor was there one uniform system of organisation and government. There was a time concerning which we cannot accurately use the word Church. There were churches, very simple, worshipping communities. But the Church, as outward magnitude, as triumphant organisation, grew. So there were many creeds or, at least, informally accredited and current beginnings of doctrine. By and by there was a formally accepted creed. So there were first dearly loved memorials of Jesus and letters of apostolic men. Only by and by was there a New Testament. The first gain is the recognition of this state of things. The second follows. It is the recognition that, despite a sense in which this literature is unique, there is also a sense in which it is but a part of the whole body of early Christian literature. From the exact and exhaustive study of the early Christian literature as a whole, we are to expect a clearer understanding and a juster estimate of the canonical part of it. It is not easy to say to whom we have to ascribe the discovery and elaboration of these truths. The historians of dogma have done much for this body of opinion. The historians of Christian literature have perhaps done more. Students of institutions and of the canon law have had their share. Baur had more than an inkling of the true state of things. But by far the most conspicuous teacher of our generation, in two at least of these particular fields, has been Harnack. In his lifelong labour upon the sources of Christian history, he had come upon this question of the canon again and again. In his Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 1887-1890, 4te. Aufl., 1910, the view of the canon, which was given above, is absolutely fundamental. In his Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, 1893, and Chronologic der allchristlichen Literatur, 1897-1904, the evidence is offered in rich detail. It was in his tractate, Das Neue Testament um das Jahr 200, 1889, that he contended for the later date against Zahn, who had urged that the outline of the New Testament was established and the conception of it as Scripture present, by the end of the first century. Harnack argues that the decision practically shaped itself between the time of Justin Martyr, c. A.D. 150, and that of Irenæus, c. A.D. 180. The studies of the last twenty years have more and more confirmed this view.
[LIFE OF JESUS]
We said that the work of Strauss revealed nothing so clearly as the ignorance of his time concerning the documents of the early Christian movement. The labours of Baur and of his followers were directed toward overcoming this difficulty. Suddenly the public interest was stirred, and the earlier excitement recalled by the publication of a new life of Jesus. The author was a Frenchman, Ernest Renan, at one time a candidate for the priesthood in the Roman Church. He was a man of learning and literary skill, who made his Vie de Jésus, which appeared in 1863, the starting-point for a series of historical works under the general title, Les Origines de Christianisme. In the next year appeared Strauss' popular work, Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk. In 1864 was published also Weizsäcker's contribution to the life of Christ, his Untersuchungen über die evangelische Geschichte. To the same year belonged Schenkel's Charakterbild Jesu. In the years from 1867-1872 appeared Keim's Geschichte Jesu von Nazara. There is something very striking in this recurrence to the topic. After ail, this was the point for the sake of which those laborious investigations had been undertaken. This was and is the theme of undying religious interest, the character and career of the Nazarene. Renan's philosophical studies had been mainly in English, studies of Locke and Hume. But Herder also had been his beloved guide. For his biblical and oriental studies he had turned almost exclusively to the Germans. There is a deep religious spirit in the work of the period of his conflict with the Church. The enthusiasm for Christ sustained him in his struggle. Of the days before he withdrew from the Church he wrote: 'For two months I was a Protestant like a professor in Halle or Tübingen.' French was at that time a language much better known in the world at large, particularly the English-speaking world, than was German. Renan's book had great art and charm. It took a place almost at once as a bit of world-literature. The number of editions in French and of translations into other languages is amazing. Beyond question, the critical position was made known through Renan to multitudes who would never have been reached by the German works which were really Renan's authorities. It is idle to say with Pfleiderer that it is a pity that, having possessed so much learning, Renan had not possessed more. That is not quite the point. The book has much breadth and solidity of learning. Yet Renan has scarcely the historian's quality. His work is a work of art. It has the halo of romance. Imagination and poetical feeling make it in a measure what it is.
Renan was born in 1823 in Treguier in Brittany. He set out for the priesthood, but turned aside to the study of oriental languages and history. He made long sojourn in the East. He spoke of Palestine as having been to him a fifth Gospel. He became Professor of Hebrew in the College de France. He was suspended from his office in 1863, and permitted to read again only in 1871. He had formally separated himself from the Roman Church in 1845. He was a member of the Academy. His diction is unsurpassed. He died in 1894. In his own phrase, he sought to bring Jesus forth from the darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people. He paints him first as an idyllic national leader, then as a struggling and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but doomed to tragic failure through the resistance offered by reality to his ideal. He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who never was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes. He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some respects an epic or an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet enable us by means of the artist's intuition to realise an event or period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, better than the scant records acknowledged by the strict historian could ever do.
Our materials for a real biography of Jesus are inadequate. This was the fact which, by all these biographies of Jesus, was brought home to men's minds. Keim's book, the most learned of those mentioned, is hardly more than a vast collection of material for the history of Jesus' age, which has now been largely superseded by Schürer's Geschichte des Judischen Volkes im Zeitalier Jesu Christi, 2 Bde., 1886-1890. There have been again, since the decade of the sixties, periods of approach to the great problem. Weiss and Beyschlag published at the end of the eighties lives of Jesus which, especially the former, are noteworthy in their treatment of the critical material. They do not for a moment face the question of the person of Christ. The same remark might be made, almost without exception, as to those lives of Jesus which have appeared in numbers in England and America. The best books of recent years are Albert Reville's Jesus de Nazareth, 1897, and Oscar Holtzmann's Leben Jesu, 1901. So great are the difficulties and in such disheartening fashion are they urged from all sides, that one cannot withhold enthusiastic recognition of the service which Holtzmann particularly has here rendered, in a calm, objective, and withal deeply devout handling of his theme. Meantime new questions have arisen, questions of the relation of Jesus to Messianism, like those touched upon by Wrede in his Das Messias Geheimniss in den Evangelien, 1901, and questions as to the eschatological trait in Jesus' own teaching. Schweitzer's book, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung, 1906, not merely sets forth this deeply interesting chapter in the history of the thought of modern men, but has also serious interpretative value in itself. For English readers Sanday's Life of Christ in Recent Research, 1907, follows the descriptive aspect, at least, of the same purpose with Schweitzer's book, covering, however, only the last twenty years.
It is characteristic that Ritschl, notwithstanding his emphasis upon the historical Jesus, asserted the impossibility of a biography of Jesus. The understanding of Jesus is through faith. For Wrede, on the other hand, such a biography is impossible because of the nature of our sources. Not alone are they scant, but they are not biographical. They are apologetic, propagandist, interested in everything except those problems which a biographer must raise. The last few years have even conjured up the question whether Jesus ever lived. One may say with all simplicity, that the question has, of course, as much rightfulness as has any other question any man could raise. The somewhat extended discussion has, however, done nothing to make evident how it could arise, save in minds unfamiliar with the materials and unskilled in historical research. The conditions which beset us when we ask for a biography of Jesus that shall answer scientific requirement are not essentially different from those which meet us in the case of any other personage equally remote in point of time, and equally woven about—if any such have been—by the love and devotion of men. Bousset's little book, Was Wissen wir von Jesus? 1904, convinces a quiet mind that we know a good deal. Qualities in the personality of Jesus obviously worked in transcendent measure to call out devotion. No understanding of history is adequate which has no place for the unfathomed in personality. Exactly because we ourselves share this devotion, we could earnestly wish that the situation as to the biography of Jesus were other than it is.
[THE OLD TESTAMENT]
We have spoken thus far as if the whole biblical-critical problem had been that of the New Testament. In reality the same impulses which had opened up that question to the minds of men had set them working upon the problem of the Old Testament as well. We have seen how the Christians made for themselves a canon of the New Testament. By the force of that conception of the canon, and through the belief that, almost in a literal sense, God was the author of the whole book, the obvious differences among the writings had been obscured. Men forgot the evolution through which the writings had passed. The same thing had happened for the Old Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the rabbis before the Christian movement. When the Christians took over the Old Testament they took it over in this sense. It was a closed book wherein all appreciation of the long road which the religion of Israel had traversed in its evolution had been lost. The relation of the old covenant to the new was obscured. The Old Testament became a Christian book. Not merely were the Christian facts prophesied in the Old Testament, but its doctrines also were implied. Almost down to modern times texts have been drawn indifferently from either Testament to prove doctrine and sustain theology. Moses and Jesus, prophets and Paul, are cited to support an argument, without any sense of difference. What we have said is hardly more true of Augustine or Anselm than of the classic Puritan divines. This was the state of things which the critics faced.
The Old Testament critical movement is a parallel at all points of the one which we have described in reference to the New. Of course, elder scholars, even Spinoza, had raised the question as to the Mosaic authorship of certain portions of the Pentateuch. Roman Catholic scholars in the seventeenth century, for whom the stringent theory of inspiration had less significance than for Protestants, had set forth views which showed an awakening to the real condition. Yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one would have forecast a revolution in opinion which would recognise the legendary quality of considerable portions of the Pentateuch and historical books, which would leave but little that is of undisputed Mosaic authorship, which would place the prophets before the law, which would concede the growth of the Jewish canon, which would perceive the relation of Judaism to the religions of the other Semite peoples and would seek to establish the true relation of Judaism to Christianity.
In the year 1835, the same year in which Strauss' Leben Jesu saw the light, Wilhelm Vatke published his Religion des Alten Testaments. Vatke was born in 1806, began to teach in Berlin in 1830, was professor extraordinarius there in 1837 and died in 1882, not yet holding a full professorship. His book was obscurely written and scholastic. Public attention was largely occupied by the conflict which Strauss' work had caused. Reuss in Strassburg was working on the same lines, but published the main body of his results much later.