7. In 1864, after an abstention of twenty years from discussion of the problem, Strauss restated his case in a Life of Jesus, adapted for the German People. Here, accepting the contention of F. C. Baur that the proper line of inquiry was to settle the order of composition of the synoptic gospels, and agreeing in Baur’s view that Matthew came first, he undertook to offer more of positive result than was reached in his earlier research, which simply dealt scientifically with the abundant elements of dubiety in the records. The new procedure was really much less valid than the old. Baur had quite unwarrantably decided that the Sermon on the Mount was one of the most certainly genuine of the discourses ascribed to Jesus;[133] and Strauss, while exhibiting a reserve of doubt[134] as to all “such speeches,” nonetheless committed himself to the “certain” genuineness alike of the Sermon and of the seven parables in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew.[135] Many scholars who continue to hold by the historicity of Jesus have since recognized that the Sermon is no real discourse, but a compilation of gnomic sayings or maxims previously current in Jewish literature.[136] Thus the certainties of Baur and Strauss pass into the category of the cruder certainties which Strauss impugned; and the latter left the life of Jesus an unsolved enigma after all his analysis.
As he himself noted, the German New Testament criticism of the previous twenty years had “run to seed”[137] in a multitude of treatises on the sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations of the Synoptics, as if these were the final issues. They had settled nothing; and after a lapse of fifty years the same problems are being endlessly discussed. The scientific course for Strauss would have been to develop more radically the method of his first Life: failing to do this, he made no new contribution to the problem, though he deftly enough indicated how little difference there was, save in formula, between Baur’s negations and his own.
Something of the explanation is to be detected in the sub-title, “Adapted for the German People.” From his first entrance into the arena he had met with endless odium theologicum; being at once deprived of his post as a philosophical lecturer at Tübingen, and virulently denounced on all hands. His proposed appointment to a chair at Zürich in 1839, as we have seen, led there to something approaching a revolution. Later, he found that acquaintance with him was made a ground of damage to his friends; and though he had actually been elected to the Wirtemberg Diet in 1848 by his fellow citizens of Ludwigsburg town, after being defeated in his candidature for the new parliament at Frankfort through the hostility of the rural voters, he had abundant cause to regard himself as a banned person in Germany. A craving for the goodwill of the people as against the hatred of the priests was thus very naturally and justifiably operative in the conception of his second work; and this none the less because his fundamental political conservatism had soon cut short his representation of radical Ludwigsburg. As he justly said, the question of the true history of Christianity was not one for theologians alone. But the emotional aim affected the intellectual process. As previously in his Life of Ulrich von Hutten, he strove to establish the proposition that the new Reformation he desired was akin to the old; and that the Germans, as the “people of the Reformation,” would show themselves true to their past by casting out the religion of dogma and supernaturalism. Such an attempt to identify the spirit of freethought with the old spirit of Bibliolatry was in itself fantastic, and could not create a genuine movement, though the book had a wide audience. The Glaubenslehre, in which he made good his maxim that “the true criticism of dogma is its history,” is a sounder performance. Strauss’s avowed desire to write a book as suitable to Germans as was Renan’s Vie de Jésus to Frenchmen was something less than scientific. The right book would be written for all nations.
Like most other Germans, Strauss exulted immensely over the war of 1870. In what is now recognized as the national manner, he wrote two boastful open-letters to Renan explaining that whatsoever Germany did was right, and whatsoever France did was wrong, and that the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was altogether just. These letters form an important contribution to the vast cairn of self-praise raised by latter-day German culture. But Strauss’s literary life ended on a nobler note and in a higher warfare. After all his efforts at popularity, and all his fraternization with his people on the ground of racial animosity (not visible in his volume of lectures on Voltaire, written and delivered at the request of the Princess Alice), his fundamental sincerity moved him to produce a final “Confession,” under the title of The Old and the New Faith (1872). It asked the questions: “Are we still Christians?”; “Have we still religion?”; “How do we conceive the world?”; “How do we order our life?”; and it answered them all in a calmly and uncompromisingly naturalistic sense, dismissing all that men commonly call religious belief. The book as a whole is heterogeneous in respect of its two final chapters, “Of our Great Poets” and “Of our Great Musicians,” which seem to have been appended by way of keeping up the attitude of national fraternity evoked by the war. But they could not and did not avail to conciliate the theologians, who opened fire on the book with all their old animosity, and with an unconcealed delight in the definite committal of the great negative critic to an attitude of practical atheism. The book ran through six editions in as many months, and crystallized much of the indefinite freethinking of Germany into something clearer and firmer. All the more was it a new engine of strife and disintegration; and the aging author, shocked but steadied by the unexpected outburst of hostility, penned a quatrain to himself, ending: “In storm hast thou begun; in storm shalt thou end.”
On the last day of the year he wrote an “afterword” summing up his work and his position. He had not written, he declared, by way of contending with opponents; he had sought rather to commune with those of his own way of thinking; and to them, he felt, he had the right to appeal to live up to their convictions, not compromising with other opinions, and not adhering to any Church. For his “Confession” he anticipated the thanks of a more enlightened future generation. “The time of agreement,” he concluded, “will come, as it came for the Leben Jesu; only this time I shall not live to see it.”[138] A little more than a year later (1874) he passed away.
It is noteworthy that he should have held that agreement had come as to the first Leben Jesu. He was in fact convinced that all educated men—at least in Germany—had ceased to believe in miracles and the supernatural, however they might affect to conform to orthodoxy. And, broadly speaking, this was true: all New Testament criticism of any standing had come round to the naturalistic point of view. But, as we have seen, the second Leben Jesu was far enough from reaching a solid historical footing; and the generation which followed made only a piecemeal and unsystematic advance to a scientific solution.
8. And it was long before even Strauss’s early method of scientific criticism was applied to the initial problems of Old Testament history. The investigation lagged strangely. Starting from the clues given by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon, and above all by the suggestion of Astruc (1753) as to the twofold element implied in the God-names Jehovah and Elohim, it had proceeded, for sheer lack of radical skepticism, on the assumption that the Pentateuchal history was true. On this basis, modern Old Testament criticism of a professional kind may be said to have been founded by Eichhorn, who hoped by a quasi-rationalistic method to bring back unbelievers to belief.[139] Of his successors, some, like Ilgen, were ahead of their time; some, like De Wette, failed to make progress in their criticism; some, like Ewald, remained always arbitrary; and some of the ablest and most original, as Vatke, failed to coördinate fully their critical methods and results.[140] Thus, despite all the German activity, little sure progress had been made, apart from discrimination of sources, between the issue of the Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures of the Scotch Catholic priest, Dr. Geddes, in 1800, and the publication of the first part of the work of Bishop Colenso on The Pentateuch (1862). This, by the admission of Kuenen, who had begun as a rather narrow believer,[141] corrected the initial error of the German specialists by applying to the narrative the common-sense tests suggested long before by Voltaire.[142] That academic scholarship thus wasted two generations in its determination to adhere to the “reverent” method, and in its aversion to the “irreverence” which proceeded on the simple power to see facts, is a sufficient comment on the Kantian doctrine that it was the business of scholars to adapt the sacred books to popular needs. Tampering with the judgment of their flocks, the German theologians injured their own.
As of old, part of the explanation lay in the malignant resistance of orthodoxy to every new advance. We have seen how Strauss’s appointment to a chair at Zürich was met by Swiss pietism. The same spirit sought to revert, even in “intellectually free” Germany, to its old methods of repression. The authorities of Berlin discussed with Neander the propriety of suppressing Strauss’s Leben Jesu;[143] and after a time those who shared his views were excluded even from philosophical chairs.[144] Later, the brochure in which Edgar Bauer defended his brother Bruno against his opponents (1842) was seized by the police; and in the following year, for publishing The Strife of Criticism with Church and State, the same writer was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. In private life, persecution was carried on in the usual ways; and the virulence of the theological resistance recalled the palmy days of Lutheran polemics. In the sense that the mass of orthodoxy held its ground for the time being, the attack failed. Naturally the most advanced and uncompromisingly scientific positions were least discussed, the stress of dispute going on around the criticism which modified without annihilating the main elements in the current creed, or that which did the work of annihilation on a popular level of thought. Only in our day is German “expert” criticism beginning openly to reckon with propositions fairly and fully made out by German writers of three or more generations back. Thus in 1781 Corodi in his Geschichte des Chiliasmus dwelt on the pre-Hebraic origins of the belief in angels, in immortality, and heaven and hell, and on the Persian derivation of the Jewish seven archangels; Wegscheider in 1819 in his Institutes of Theology indicated further connections of the same order, and cited pagan parallels to the virgin-birth; J. A. L. Richter in the same year pointed to Indian and Persian precedents for the Logos and many other Christian doctrines; and several other writers, Strauss included, pointed to both Persian and Babylonian influences on Jewish theology and myth.[145] The mythologist and Hebraist F. Korn (who wrote as “F. Nork”), in a series of learned and vigorous but rather loosely speculative works,[146] indicated many of the mythological elements in Christianity, and endorsed many of the astronomical arguments of Dupuis, while holding to the historicity of Jesus.[147]
When even these theses were in the main ignored, more mordant doctrine was necessarily burked. Such subversive criticism of religious history as Ghillany’s Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer (1842), insisting that human sacrifice had been habitual in early Jewry, and that ritual cannibalism underlay the paschal eucharist, found even fewer students prepared to appreciate it than did the searching ethico-philosophical criticism passed on the Christian creed by Feuerbach. F. Daumer,[148] who in 1842 published a treatise on the same lines as Ghillany’s (Der Feuer und Molochdienst), and followed it up in 1847 with another on the Christian mysteries, nearly as drastic, wavered later in his rationalism and avowed his conversion to a species of faith. Hence a certain setback for his school. In France the genial German revolutionist and exile Ewerbeck published, under the titles of Qu’est ce que la Religion? and Qu’est ce que la Bible? (1850), two volumes of very freely edited translations from Feuerbach, Daumer, Ghillany, Lützelberger (on the simple humanity of Jesus), and Bruno Bauer, avowing that after vainly seeking a publisher for years he had produced the books at his own expense. He had, however, so mutilated the originals as to make the work ineffectual for scholars, without making it attractive to the general public; and there is nothing to show that his formidable-looking arsenal of explosives had much effect on contemporary French thought, which developed on other lines.
Old Testament criticism, nevertheless, has in the last generation been much developed, after having long missed some of the first lines of advance. After Colenso’s rectification of the fundamental error as to the historicity of the narrative of the Pentateuch, so long and so obstinately persisted in by the German specialists in contempt of Voltaire, the “higher criticism” proceeded with such substantial certainty on the scientific lines of Kuenen and Wellhausen that, whereas Professor Robertson Smith had to leave the Free Church of Scotland in 1881[149] for propagating Kuenen’s views, before the century was out Canons of the English Church were doing the work with the acquiescence of perhaps six clergymen out of ten; and American preachers were found promoting an edition of the Bible which exhibited some of the critical results to the general reader. Heresy on this score had “become merchandise.” Nevertheless, the professional tendency to compromise (a result of economic and other pressures) keeps most of the ecclesiastical critics far short of the outspoken utterances of M. M. Kalisch, who in his Commentary on Leviticus (1867–72) repudiates every vestige of the doctrine of inspiration.[150] Later clerical critics, notably Canon Driver, use language on that subject which cannot be read with critical respect.[151] But among students at the end of the century the orthodox view was practically extinct. Whereas the defenders of the faith even a generation before habitually stood to the “argument from prophecy,” the conception of prophecy as prediction has now become meaningless as regards the so-called Mosaic books; and the constant disclosure of interpolations and adaptations in the others has discredited it as regards the “prophets” themselves. For the rest, much of the secular history still accepted is tentatively reduced to myth in the Geschichte Israels of Hugo Winckler (1895–1900). The peculiar theory of Dr. Cheyne is no less “destructive.”