Chapter XIX
THE HISTORY OF THE DISCUSSION
In all things, finally, one must be prepared for a boundless operation of the spirit of controversy, which is as it were the atmosphere of intellectual progress, and, like the physical atmosphere, is traversed by much dust, many gusts, and many persistent currents. An infinite quantity of mere insolence and mere personal aspersion arises round every problem that disturbs widespread prejudice: we have seen some of it even in a survey which aims solely at bringing out the main arguments on our issue. And where a body of doctrine is related to an economic foundation, controversy is sure to be specially protracted.
This has already been abundantly seen in the development of the “liberal” view of the human Christ, of which M. Loisy may be taken as an advanced representative; while Professor Schmiedel may rank as an exponent too advanced to be otherwise than suspect for some of the school. It is instructive to realize that M. Loisy stands to-day very much where Strauss did eighty years ago. What was then revolutionary heresy is now become a very respectable form of professional theology. Only in his old age did Strauss himself realize to what philosophical conclusions his critical method led; and on the historicity question he seems to have made no serious advance at all. Challenged by Ullmann to say whether, on his theory, the Church created the Christ of the Gospels or he the Church, Strauss replied that the alternative was false, and that both things had happened; the Christ being created by the faith of the Church, which faith in turn was created by the person of the historical Jesus. From that gyratory position he never really departed; and that is the position of M. Loisy to-day.
If it has taken eighty years to yield only that amount of progress, through a whole library of laborious scholarly literature, there can be no great weight left in the appeal to scholarly authority. The authority of to-day is the heretic of our grandfathers’ day. It is for the radical innovator, on the other hand, to learn the lesson which was not duly learned by his predecessors, unless it be that in some cases they were merely silenced by orthodox hostility. While many Freethinkers, probably, had come privately to the view of those intimates of Bolingbroke who are referred to by Voltaire as denying the historicity of Jesus, the two writers who first gave European vogue to the proposition, Dupuis and Volney, staked everything on the astronomical elements of the cult, and on the chief myth-analogies with Pagan religions. Their argument was both sound and important, so far as it went; but for lack of investigation on the Jewish side of the problem, and of the necessary analysis of the Gospels, they failed to make any serious impression on the scholars, especially as so many Freethinking critics, down to Reimarus and Voltaire, treated the historicity of Jesus as certain.[1] And when an anonymous German writer in 1799 published a treatise on Revelation and Mythology in which, according to Strauss, he posited the whole life of Jesus as pre-conceived in Jewish myth and speculation, he made no impression on an age busily and vainly occupied with the so-called “rationalizing” of myths and miracles by reducing them to natural events misunderstood.
Later, another—or the same?—anonymous German, also cited by Strauss, in a review article condemned every attempt to find a historical basis for the Gospel myths; but in both cases the anonymity sufficiently told of the general resentment against any such view. And when Strauss himself, the first to handle the problem with an approach to scientific thoroughness, not only adhered to the central assumption of historicity, but argued confidently that the mythical dissolution of so many of the details made no difference to faith, it was natural that interest in his undertaking should slacken. The fact that it had ruined his career would perhaps count for still more. Freedom of academic discussion in Germany has never meant any minimizing of pious malice; and Strauss all his life long had to bear his cross for the offence of a new advance in historical science.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who for almost the first time, after Schmiedel, has brought the note of amenity into the argument for historicity as against the negative, remarks that the greatest Lives of Jesus are those which have been written with hate—to wit, those by Reimarus and Strauss. Reimarus, whom Dr. Schweitzer genially overrates, was indeed given to invective against mythological personages, from Moses downward; but “hate” is a strange term to apply to the calm and judicial procedure of Strauss. As well ascribe to hate the rise of Unitarianism. If hate is to be the term for Strauss’s mood, what epithet is left for that of his opponents, who, as Dr. Schweitzer relates, circled him with unsleeping malignity to the end, and sought to ostracize the clerical friend of his youth who delivered an address over his grave? It is only historic religion that can foster and sustain such hates as these. It is true that Bruno Bauer, who so suddenly advanced upon Strauss’s position, detecting new elements of mythic construction in the Gospels, and arriving ten years later at the definite doctrine of non-historicity, exhibited a play of storm and stress in the earlier part of his inquiry. He reviled at that stage, not the Jesus whose “life” he was investigating, but the theologians who had so confounded confusion. “These outbreaks of bitterness,” Dr. Schweitzer admits, “are to be explained by the feeling of repulsion which German apologetic theology inspired in every genuinely honest and thoughtful man by the methods which it adopted in opposing Strauss.”[2] Add that the same methods were being employed towards Bauer, and the case is perhaps simplified.
With these cases before him, and with the record to write of a hundred and thirty years of admittedly abortive discussion, Dr. Schweitzer could not forgo an exordium in praise of the “German temperament” which had so wonderfully kept the discussion going. Such a record seems a surprising ground for national pride; but it may be granted him that the German temperament will never lack material for self-panegyric, which appears to be the breath of its nostrils. To those, however, for whom science is independent of nationality, the lesson has a somewhat different aspect. What has been lacking is scientific thoroughness. Bruno Bauer’s flaws of mood and method were such that his more radical penetration of the problem at certain points made no such impression as did the orderly and temperate procedure of Strauss. “One might suppose that between the work of Strauss and that of Bauer there lay not five but fifty years—the critical work of a whole generation.”[3] “Bauer’s ‘Criticism of the Gospel History’ is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.”[4]
But his mood and his method not only made him fail to establish his mythical theory; they meant miscarriage in the very conception of it—a mere substitution of a subjective notion for the method of inductive science. Bauer’s final way of putting the theory merely discredits it. He decides that the whole myth was the creation of one evangelist, whereby he shows that he is no mythologist. He never reached the true myth basis. After all, “the German temperament” seems to fall short, at some rather essential points, of the faculty for solving great historical problems; one feels it somewhat acutely when Dr. Schweitzer comes to the undertaking himself.
The great merit of Schweitzer’s book is its manly and genial tone; though, as this is freely bestowed on the most extreme heretics, he may make another impression when he speaks of the “inconceivable stupidity” of the average Life of Jesus in the treatment of the connection of events. What his book mainly demonstrates is the laborious futility of the age-long discussion maintained by the professional theologians of Germany. When he comes to the latest developments, which are but extensions of the common-sense analyses of Bruno Bauer, he is full of admiration for criticisms which, I can testify, have occurred spontaneously to unpretending Freethinkers with no claim to special training. Some of the most important myth elements in the Gospels—for instance, the story of Barabbas—he does not even glance at, having apparently, like the other specialists, never realized that there is anything there to explain.