NEW TESTAMENT
CRITICISM
AND EXEGESIS.
Pleiderer - Development of Theology in Germany since Kant
This touched, in fact, a weak place in Strauss's method, viz.
his ignoring the subjectivity of the authors of the Gospels.
But it was precisely this subjectivity, as F.
Chr.
Baur remarks, which deserved the primary atten tion of historical criticism.
" Since all history, before it reaches us, passes through the medium of a narrator, in our criticism of the gospel history, the first question is not.
What objective reality is possessed by this or that narrative per se ?
but rather, What is the relation of the narrative to the mind of the narrator, through the medium of whom it becomes for us an object of historical knowledge ?
" We must, therefore, in the first place know the aim and purpose of the writer, his motive in writing as he does, and the influence of this motive on his account ; and this question can only be answered by as exact an investigation as possible ot the historical conditions under the influence of which the author wrote.
Every author belongs to the time in which he lives, and the greater the importance of his subject for the
? and interests of the time, the safer the assumption that he must bear the impress of his age, and that the motives determining the form of his narrative must be sought in the circumstances of the time. This holds also of
the Gospels ; hence the first question in the criticism of them will be, What was the aim and purpose of each of their authors ? Thus only can we gain the firm ground of con
struggles, parties,
crete historical truth. Since a special motive [Tendenz]
is most apparent in the fourth Gospel, Baur took this Gospel,
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which had hitherto offered the stoutest resistance to- all the attacks of criticism, as the point of departure for his inquiry.
But before we trace this inquiry further, we must glance at his previous critical works. have begun with the above discussion in the introduction to his book on the canonical Gospels simply in order to make clear his relation to Strauss.
Baur himself, which characteristic of his method, started
not from the Gospels, the most complicated problem of New Testament criticism, but from the Pauline Epistles, where the questions are comparatively simpler. As the fruit of his exegetical lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, he published in 1831 the essay, Die Christuspartei in der korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des paulinischen und petrinischen Christenthums in der altesten Kirche, der Apostel Petrus in Rom. He had here proved that Paul had to con tend in Corinth with a Jewish Christian party, which disputed his apostolical authority and wished to set up a particularistic Jewish Christianity, opposition to his universal Christianity. He had then pursued the traces of the same division of parties in the post-apostolic age, down to the Clementine Homilies,
and attempted to explain by its means the legends of Simon Magus and of the episcopate of Peter Rome. In these in genious, at times rash, theories lay the germs of his later
view of primitive Christianity, but his literary criticism had not yet reached an independent position. The full and unique importance of this was first seen in the work, Uber die
sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, which appeared the same year as Strauss's Leben Jesu (1835). His researches into the Christian Gnosis, published the same year, had led Baur to look for traces of this phenomenon the New Testament also, and he then discerned that the false teachers opposed the Epistles to Timothy and Titus could be no other than the Gnostics of the second century, in particular the Marcionites. This gave a firm footing of objective historical value for the criticism of these epistles place of the previous vague sub
jective hypotheses. Other peculiarities of these epistles, in particular those respecting ecclesiastical offices and arrange
? clearer light by the circumstances of the
ments, were set
second century, and this at the same time served to support the hypothesis based on his characterisation of the false teachers. Individual critics, such as Eichhom and De Wette,
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and also Schleiermacher, had previously doubted the authen ticity, at any rate of I Timothy, and not only were these doubts now fully justified by Baur, but, what was the main thing, the positive result was reached that these Epistles originated in the opposition of the Catholic Church to Gnosticism in the middle of the second century, and were intended to establish the Church's tradition and hierarchy against heretics. The importance of this work of Baur's went far beyond the
question directly treated of, inasmuch as it substituted for
the first time objective eriticism, based on a wide general
conception of the conditions of primitive Christianity, for the subjective criticism hitherto adopted -- a new method, of the great importance of which Baur in his preface shows himself well aware. This critical method he applied during the following years to the Pauline epistles and to the Acts of the Apostles, and collected the results of these researches in the work, Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, sein Leben und
Wirken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre (1st ed. , 1845 ! 2nd ed. , 1866). In the first part of this work, Baur describes the life and work of Paul, as the apostle who first gave Christi anity its universal historical importance, and freed it from Judaism, which was not accomplished -- as was hitherto held in conformity with the Church's tradition --with the concurrence of the elder apostles and the primitive Church, but in op position to and in conflict with them. He here subjects the
account given in the Acts to a thorough critical investigation, which leads to the result that this book differs from the authentic testimony of the Pauline epistles in so many and im portant points that it can be regarded as of only quite second ary historical value"; the author's aim was not to write history, but to give a defence of the Apostle of the Gentiles against the attacks and accusations of the Judaisers. " With
this view he represented Paul as quite a different man from the actual Paul of the genuine Pauline Epistles ; he minimised his divergence from the Jewish Christians in the same way as he made Peter more Pauline than was really the case. The writer's motives for doing this must be looked for in the cir cumstances of the time, in which " Paulinism had been so put in the background by Jewish Christian efforts as only to be able to maintain itself by entering into a compromise with the powerful Jewish Christian party, and by an attitude of conciliation softening down all the harshness and directness
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229
of its opposition to Judaism. "1 The second part of the work gives an analysis and criticism of the Pauline Epistles, of which only those to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, are accepted as genuine. The third part gives an account of the Pauline theology from the point of view that repre sents Christianity as the absolute spiritual religion opposi tion to Heathenism and Judaism. There no doubt much in these two latter parts, as in the former one, capable of being disputed and needing amendment, but the great merit of the book remains, of having clearly set forth with an emphasis, never approached before, the epoch-making im portance of the Apostle Paul in the history of Christianity, the originality of his conception of Christianity, and the magnitude of the struggle by which he carried out his ideas in spite of the Jewish prejudices of the primitive Church.
Equally important, for right understanding of primitive Christianity, with Baur's work on Paul was further his Criticism of John's Gospel, first given as an essay (1844), which he afterwards incorporated in his book on Die kanonischen Evan-
gelien (1847), as its first and most important part. He does not start the customary way with the question as to the author, which only concludes the investigation. The question he starts with on the contrary, that of the idea and purpose guiding the author in his peculiar presentation of the gospel history. Baur finds this in the idea of the Logos presented in the prologue since the Logos, as the divine principle of light and life, appears bodily the phenomenal world in the person of Jesus, and enters into conflict with the darkness of the world, the whole history of Jesus turns on the development and solution of this antithesis of metaphysical and ethical
This view of the Acts of the Apostles was further developed and put into more extreme form by Zeller. It regards the Acts as an "offer of peace " made by Paulinist to the Judaisers with a view to the union of the two
parties: but cannot be maintained: for (1) the supposed extremity of Paulinism presence of an all-powerful Jewish Christianity unhistorical (2) the Acts, on the contrary, exhibits a Gentile Christianity energetically asserting itself against Judaism (3) the inexact account of Paulinism given
in this book cannot be the result of intentional misrepresentation, since was not peculiar to the author but common to Gentile Christians of the second century (4) finally, the theory altogether overlooks the real and undoubted object of the writer, viz. to defend Christianity view of the Roman power as religion not violating the laws of the State, and with claim to the same toleration as Judaism.
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? 23O BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. HI.
principles, light and darkness, truth and falsehood, belief and disbelief, children of God and children of the devil, life and death. Thus John's Gospel contains a Christian gnosis akin to though not identical with the heretical gnosis, clothed in the form of an historical account of the life of
That such an account, completely dominated by ideal motives of a doctrinal nature, does not possess historical truth, and cannot and does not really lay claim to self- evident, and then further proved by Baur by a critical comparison of the Johannine and synoptic Gospels, the
superior historical probability being always found on the side of the latter. In particular shown, opposition to
the attempts to divide the Gospel, that precisely the Johannine speeches serve the dogmatic purpose of the author and stand
the closest connection with the narratives, and
that the whole Gospel shows a systematic unity of composition which excludes all possibility of distinguishing between genuine and not genuine -- or better, between historical and purely ficti tious elements. At last the question as to the author of the Gospel investigated and his identity with the Apostle dis proved, partly by the unhistorical character of so many of the narratives, in which the Gospel inferior even to the writings of Mark and Luke, who were not eye-witnesses, and par ticular by the ignorance shown of places and conditions in
Palestine {e. g. , 28 v. ix. xi. 51 xviii. 13); partly by the attitude of the author to the question of the Passover, which the exact opposite of the view which the Church in Asia Minor claimed to derive from the Apostle John partly also by the contrast between the entire dogmatic character of the Gospel and that of the Apocalypse, which exhibits, accordance with Galatians ii. , the Apostle John as still quite enthralled in Jewish Christian conceptions, which the author of the gospel has left far behind. But be asked how was possible for a non-apostolic gospel to be regarded by the Church as a work of the apostle, Baur finds the explanation in the peculiar spirit and character of the Gospel. By its spiritual nature, that pneumatic character attributed to even by the ancients, exercised peculiar charm on men's minds; and since, in virtue of its later origin, represented a
more developed form of Christian consciousness and life, offered all the more points of contact with the time its
Jesus.
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and diffusion. contains references to all the
general
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? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
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conflicts of the time, and yet nowhere bears the definite mark
of a temporal or local opposition. The most important of these elements of its time are the Gnosis, the doctrine of the Logos, Montanism, and the question of the Passover. To all these movements and questions of the age the Gospel stands in a special relation we cannot say that they presuppose the Gospel, and yet neither conditioned by them comes into contact with them, and yet remains this respect free
and independent. the peculiar characteristic of this Gospel to be connected with all shapes of the consciousness of the age, and yet only in so far as at the same time to main tain an independent attitude towards all, harmonising the antitheses into a higher unity. "
While particular points in Baur's argument may be im pugned, his view of the Fourth Gospel has as a whole not been refuted by later researches, but always confirmed anew. And when we consider how this very Gospel had previously stoutly withstood all criticism, and how difficult this non liquet had made a scientific investigation of the gospels, and so of the origin of Christianity generally, we must admit that Baur's
discovery deserves to be called the beginning of a new era and a fundamental achievement for all future investigation of primitive Christianity. The same cannot be said of his criticism of the three synoptic Gospels. However natural was for him to think that he ought to apply to the other gospels the key which had proved so useful in the case of
? Gospel, viz. the discovery of a dogmatic purpose, was this very fact that prevented him from seeing their literary relation to each other. Only thus can we explain
Baur's resting content with Griesbach's altogether mistaken hypothesis that Mark's Gospel consists of extracts from Matthew and Luke, when Wilke and Weisse had already clearly and irrefragably proved the priority of Mark as the source of both the others. the common fate of scientific discoverers to be led into fresh extremes and errors by the exaggerated application of their newly found principles. Baur did not escape this fatality that his keen critical eye failed him the case of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew and of
the Apocalypse only to be explained by the apparent agree ment in these cases of the traditional view with his theory, derived from Paulus, of the perpetuation of the opposition be tween the Judaic and Pauline parties the post- Pauline age
John's
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? 232 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
A more exact appreciation and a less prejudiced critical analysis of these three books might have led to a limitation of the scope of this theory. Baur's further labours in the history of the Church and of dogma will be described in a later chapter.
Baur was as great a teacher as he was an author. He pro
secuted scientific research as a sacred service in the temple of
truth ; he combined the lofty comprehensive glance of genius with the laborious industry and careful accuracy of the scholar, and imparted the truth he discovered with the straightforward openness of a conscience freed from selfishness and party spirit ; he thus exerted an influence over intelligent and re ceptive young men of the depth and intensity of which the present generation can form no idea. No wonder that Baur from the first decade of his academical activity continued to gather round him a band of disciples who followed intelli gently in the footsteps of their master, and soon became his co-workers by their independent prosecution of his researches.
The first of these was Strauss, who had shot ahead of his teacher by his Leben Jesu, considered above, and who had supplied if not the impulse yet the proximate occasion of the
? epoch-making critical investigation of the Gospels. He was followed by Eduard Zeller, Albert Schwegler, Karl Planck, Karl Kostlin, and" others. The common organ of this
" Tubingen School was the Theologische Jahrbiicher, edited by Zeller, still of special interest as the monument of one of the most active and fruitful periods of modern theology. A glance at the essays and studies therein collected suffices to show how entirely Baur's disciples and friends were free from the slavish dependence, narrow-mindedness, and dull uni formity which are wont to form the unpleasing darker side of "schools. " Essentially agreed in their critical method, Baur's disciples differed from the first not a little in their critical results.
Zeller, in his critical essays on the Acts of the Apostles,
which first appeared in the Theologische Jahrbiicher, and were afterwards collected in a volume, made some valuable con tributions to the exegetical interpretation and historical criticism of the Acts ; even those who, like myself,1 hold that he carried out Baur's theory of an intended reconciliation of Paulinism and Jewish Christianity in a one-sided and much exaggerated
1 Comp. ante, p. 229 note.
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manner, to the neglect of other essential points, will not deny to Zeller's book the merit of having by its incisive criticism
out the problem of early Christian history into the full light of day, and of having thus contributed to its solution, even though this does not accord with his own.
Even more than of Zeller's Apostelgeschichte, we must say of A. Schwegler's book, Das nachapostolische Zeitalter in den Hauptpunkten seiner Entwicke lung vols. , 1846), that, in spite of all the ingenuity often shown the just appreciation of details, must be regarded as on the whole failure.
Baur's view of the original opposition and gradual reconcilia
tion of the primitive Christian parties here exaggerated into a caricature. Christianity before Paul, Schwegler con sidered to have had no lofty ideas at all, but to have been nar row, rigidly ascetic and legal form of Judaism, closely related to Essenism, which, as " Ebionitism," maintained the upper hand even against Paul's universalistic teaching, so that the principles of the latter could scarcely anywhere prevail until the age of Irenaeus ecclesiastical Christianity remained more or less an Ebionitic Jewish Christianity, which by degrees de veloped into Catholicism. This point of view guides Schwegler in his estimate of the whole of early Christian literature everything in really, or presumedly, un-Pauline at once taken as a proof of the Jewish Christian character of the book in question the possibility never considered of the existence of Gentile Christians with un-Pauline and even anti-Pauline views, not from Judaising tendencies, but because they found much Paul's theology which was unsuited to the compre hension and needs of the Gentile Christian Churches. seems as Schwegler, hypnotised as were with the one idea of early Christian " Ebionitism," was completely blind to all the varied thoughts and interests which moved that age and also influenced the life and belief of the Christian Churches.
The dangerous tendency, to be seen, must be confessed, in
Baur, of insisting too exclusively on a new point of view as the only true one, was carried in Schwegler to the most
extreme lengths.
however, of importance to note that a protest was
immediately raised against this one-sidedness from within
the Tubingen School itself. Planck and Kostlin, in several
excellent essays, still worth reading, in the Theologische Jahr- biicher (1847 and 1850) endeavoured to correct Schwegler's
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? 234 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
theory. Its principal error, Planck holds to be, that it made
Paul the real author of the new principle, and therefore the
founder of Christianity, leaving unexplained how he was enabled to arrive at this new knowledge and to connect it with the person of Jesus. We must rather start from the position that the new principle was actually conceived, if not fully developed, by Jesus, being contained in his idea of the true righteousness as perfect self-renunciation and the surrender of the human will to the divine will, thus combining the perfect fulfilment of the law with its translation into the spirit, and the cancelling of its purely external character. Paulinism therefore only developed into full consciousness the principle implicitly contained in primitive Christianity. The true right eousness of self-surrender to God, which Jesus spontaneously exemplified and so experienced as an immediate fact of his own consciousness, became in Paul the quickening " grace," or power of the " Holy Spirit," coming to us from without, from Christ. In this appears the difference between the dependent and the creative mind, between the systematising theologian and the original religious genius. Since the older apostles did not, like Paul, prosecute dogmatic reflections, they failed indeed to see so clearly the difference between the new Christian principle and Judaism, but they still possessed this principle in the form, directly derived from Jesus, of deepened righteousness and practical piety. This Christianity,
? Judaic only in form, was not opposed in principle to Paul's anti-
Judaic Christianity ; and hence a reconciliation of the two was possible, without external concessions, by means of an inward
of each to the other. It should be mentioned that Planck held with Schwegler, that the development was wholly on the Jewish Christian side, while Paulinism stood apart as a stimulating principle but one incapable of growth.
Kostl1n likewise censures Schwegler for not distinguishing between the later extreme Ebionitism and the original apos tolic Jewish Christianity. The latter was from the first, in point of fact, though without being clearly aware of in advance of Judaism, and was then stimulated by Paul to a development two directions on the one hand, advanced to ecclesiastical unity, and, on the other, retrograded to here tical Ebionitism. To Kostlin also belongs in particular the credit of first seeing that Paulinism and Gentile Christianity must not be forthwith identified. The failure of the Pauline
approximation
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doctrines of righteousness by faith and of the annulling of the law to find permanent acceptance, to be explained not, as Schwegler thought, by the preponderance of Jewish Chris tianity, but by the fact that the Gentile Christians themselves were without the speculative conditions and practical needs necessary for the comprehension and adoption of these doc trines. They did not need, like Paul, the disciple of the Pharisees, deliverance from the law, but the discipline of the law the law did not seem to them, as did to Paul, a negative stage of development of transitory validity, but the permanent standard of a pure and thoroughly ethical life for the community. The natural desire to form fixed Christian morals was what made the acceptance of Paul's doctrines of the law and of justification a practical impossibility to the Gentile Christian Churches, even they had been understood. Even Paul had recognised this desire of his Churches so far as to speak of a "law of the Spirit," according to which Christians ought to live. Nevertheless his teaching lacked the legal precision desiderated by the Church was too ideal to be directly made use of by it. The need was felt of
? this ideal Paulinism on the side of the actual morality of works, and this found expression in the combina
tion of Peter with Paul, or the appeal against the one-sided party watchwords of the heretics to the authority of all the apostles--i. e. of Christ himself.
The lines of Planck and Kostlin were further pursued by Albrecht Ritschl, until from being an adherent he became an opponent of the Tubingen school. In the first edition of his book, Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche (1850), his disagreement with the theories of Baur and Schwegler was only partial, but in the second edition (1857) he declared his total antagonism to their fundamental principles. Like Planck and Kostlin, Ritschl holds that the person of Jesus and the belief of the first apostles we have the common neutral start ing-point of the various later parties. The attitude of Jesus towards the law, he maintains, was an essentially independent one -- superiority to the externality of the ceremonial law in the ethical principle of love to God and man, while observing
conservative attitude in outward religious life. Accordingly Ritschl considers that the first apostles no longer regarded
the law as religiously binding, but only continued its ob servance as national custom, view for which he appeals
supplementing
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to the Epistles of Peter and James, the genuineness of which he ventures to maintain against the doubts of criticism. Though we must admit this to be too great a concession to conservative apologetics, we recognise a valuable advance on
the older Tubingen theologians in Ritschl's tracing the de velopment of Catholic Christianity, not like them from Jewish, but from Gentile Christianity, which he distinguishes from
Paulinism. He rightly points out that Paulinism had a neutral basis in common with Jewish Christianity in the doctrines of God, angels and demons, the present and future world, Christ's second coming, the resurrection and judgment ; to which we must add that the specifically Pauline doctrines of reconciliation and justification have their roots in Jewish (Pharisaic) theology. The earlier Tubingen theologians were distinctly in the wrong in almost completely overlooking Paul's Jewish side in exclusive attention to his anti-Jewish tendencies, and thereupon explaining every departure from his teaching by a reference to Judaistic motives, while, reversely, it must be explained for the most part from the anti-Judaistic habit of thought of the Gentile Christians. Ritschl is right in main taining that " Catholic Christianity is a distinct stage of re ligious thought within the sphere of Gentile Christianity ; it is independent of the conditions of Jewish Christian life, and opposed to the fundamental principle of Jewish Christianity ;
it does not, however, depend merely upon the authority of Paul, but rests both upon the Old Testament and the sayings of Christ, and also upon the authority of all the apostles, represented by Peter and Paul. " But when Ritschl goes on to explain the conversion of Paul's teaching into the Catholic Christianity of the early Church by the failure of the latter to
understand the Old Testament, and condemns it as a "de
generation," the objection presents itself that Paul's doctrine of justification is not found in the Old Testament, which, as the Epistle of James shows, offers rather the means of its refutation than of its proof. Ritschl was unacquainted with the sources of the Pauline theology, and hence cannot satis factorily explain its post-apostolic development. A second serious defect is his total neglect of the other chief factor in the evolution of the theology of the Church, and even of that of the New Testament --viz. Hellenism. This explains his strange inability to deal with such an important phenomenon of early Christianity as the Gospel of John, and his omission of all
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reference to in his book, with the exception of a brief and meaningless note. Beyond question this gospel can be explained neither by means of Jewish Christianity nor of Paulinism, least of all by a superficial Gentile "degeneration" of the latter, since purely a product of Christian Hellen ism. The very existence of this single book (irrespective of others, e. g. the Epistle to the Hebrews) a proof that no history of early Christianity can be regarded as complete which does not take account of the important factor of Hellenism, which Ritschl, a much more striking degree even than the other Tubingen critics, has failed to do.
With Ritschl are connected several other opponents of the Tubingen school, of whom we may here mention the more important: Meyer (Commentar zum neuen Testament), Bleek (Einleitung in das N. Test, and Commentar zu den synop-
tischen Evangelien), Lechler (das apostolische und nachaposto- lische Zeitalter mit Riicksicht auf Unterschied und Einheit in Lehre und Leben, 2nd ed. , 1857), Weiss (der petrinische Lehrbegriff der johanneische Lehrbegriff Biblische Theolo-
gie des Neuen Testaments Einleitung in das Neue Testa
ment), Reuss (die Geschichte der heiligen Schriften Neuen Testaments, and Histoire de la The"ologie chretienne au siecle
Ewald (Geschichte Israels, vols. v. and vi. Geschichte Christus, and Gesch. des apostol. Zeitalters), Hase (die Tilbinger Schule. Ein Sendschreiben an Dr. Baur). would lead us far beyond our limits to give the views of all these theologians in detail, and we shall therefore be content to mention summarily their objections to the Tubingen theory. They first dispute the sharp antithesis affirmed by this theory between Paul and the original apostles. A certain difference in tendency indeed admitted but this not such that the two parties were mutually exclusive, but rather such that they supplemented each other. "We find variety coupled with agreement, and unity with difference, between Paul and the earlier apostles we recognise the one spirit in the many gifts" (Lechler). The Judaistic antagonists against whom
Paul had to contend were an extreme party with which the
? apostolique),
themselves must not be identified. Further, the view controverted that the struggle and the attempts at mediation and reconciliation were continued until the middle of the second century on the contrary, contended that the destruction of Jerusalem severed the bond which had
apostles
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hitherto connected the converted Jews with their nation and its worship. With this ceased also the influence of Judaistic agitation upon the Gentile Christian Churches ; and hence forth, in place of the Pauline- Judaistic controversies, we have the new struggle with the heathen political power and heathen heresy (Gnosticism), to which the Johannine Apocalypse already bears witness. Further, an attack is made on Baur's method of tracing in the New Testament writings products of a definite party movement, and of determining their place in the history of primitive Christianity by means of their supposed dogmatic or ecclesiastical " Tendens. " These ob jections are generally urged, moreover (irrespective of just objections to exaggerations on the part of the Tubingen School), from an apologetic desire to save the traditional authorship of the Biblical writings, the most serious critical arguments being too little regarded. The Epistles of James and 1 Peter are asserted to be not only genuine, but pre- Pauline, and (by Ritschl and Weiss) to be nowise connected with Paul. Of the deutero- Pauline Epistles, all--even those to the Ephesians, Timothy, and Titus, regarded as spurious even by Credner and De Wette-- are reclaimed as Pauline. Special ardour is shown in the contention for the genuineness of John's Gospel ; the dilemma, admitted by Lucke, that either the Apocalypse or the Gospel, but not both, is genuine, is given up, and the development of the author of the Apoca lypse into the evangelist is considered probable. But the more hotly the contention raged at first around this question, the greater is the significance of the fact that the former champions of the genuineness of John's Gospel could not altogether resist the adverse arguments, but were compelled to make greater or less concessions to criticism. Hase, Weizsacker, and Reuss have recently attributed the Gospel not to the apostle himself, but to one of his disciples ; and even Weiss limits the historical value of the speeches to a minimum of reminis cences, which have become confused in the mind of the author with his own reflections, and thereby transformed. With re gard to other books also -- e. g. the Pastoral Epistles or the
Acts -- we have to note concessions made by the above-named theologians to Tubingen criticism, so that a gradual agree ment as to the main questions need not be regarded as im possible. It is a specially happy omen that, in the province of exegesis, a uniform method of philological objectivity and
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239
exactness has been more and more developed on all hands ; the services of Meyer and Weiss to exegesis are everywhere acknowledged. A tribute should also be paid to Weiss's Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments, as a work of pre-eminent scientific soundness, containing copious matter arranged with exemplary clearness, and surpassing all others in practical utility as a textbook for students.
The Tubingen school was not behindhand in replying to these numerous and serious attacks. Besides Baur and Zeller, Hilgenfeld, in numerous books and essays (in the Zeitschrift
fiir wissenschaftliche Theologie), distinguished
himself as the ready champion of the right of scientific criticism. Fond of
emphasising his independence of Baur, he still, in all impor tant points, followed in the footsteps of the master ; his method, which he is wont to contrast as Literarkritik with
Baur's Tendenzkritik, is nevertheless essentially the same as
? Baur's. In his view of the fourth
Gospel, Hilgenfeld goes even further than Baur, making it altogether dependent upon Gnosticism. In the Synoptic question he leaves Baur's view
Mark between Matthew and Luke. He modifies somewhat the criticism of Paul's epistles, restoring Philippians and 1 Thessalonians to Paul. Volkmar differs decidedly from the other Tubingen critics
only on the question of the Synoptists ; he follows Wilke and
Weisse in regarding Mark as the earliest Gospel, which was
followed by Luke immediately, and only subsequently by Matthew, the last being dependent upon both the others, and a gospel harmony from the point of view of the Catholic Church, with its reconciliation of differences. This un doubtedly correct view Volkmar has exaggerated, after the fashion of Bruno Bauer, by making Mark the author of a "didactic epic," intended to illustrate the Pauline gospel. Though this seemed to do away with all historical foundations, Volkmar, in his Religion Jesu, and still more in his Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit (1882), tries to separate and establish a kernel of historical facts as the basis of the gospels. In his interpretation of the Apocalypse, he follows Tubingen principles, and refers the Apocalyptic imagery in the boldest manner to the party struggles of
essentially unchanged, only placing
The book is now somewhat out of date, since Volter has shown that the Apocalypse is composed of elements belonging to different authors and times, and
primitive Christianity.
? ? ? 24O BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
Vischer has made a Jewish basis with Christian revisions very probable. With Hilgenfeld and Volkmar, we must mention Holsten as a strict adherent of Baur in his line of criticism. In his commentary on Galatians, and in several works on Paul, he has discussed the Apostle's peculiar teaching with great acumen, though often with too great subtlety and exaggerated
dialectic ; his long-promised review of the entire Pauline theo
logy has not yet appeared. The question of the Synop- tists has also latterly engaged Holsten's attention : he tries very hard, but with doubtful success, to defend Hilgenfeld's view (Matthew-Mark-Luke). On this question, Holtzmann is the exponent of the view now most generally accepted. In his book on die synoptischen Evangelien, he maintains the priority of Mark ; our Matthew he derives from Mark and Matthew's original "collection of sayings" (the \6yia of Papias), and finally Luke from our Matthew and Mark. Besides numerous essays, Holtzmann has furnished valuable contributions to New Testament exegesis and criticism in his works on the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles ; and his Einleitung in das Neue Testa ment gives an excellent summary of the present position of all the questions concerned. Whilst most critics were thus working at questions of detail, Hausrath was led by his natural love of artistic form, and his position as ecclesiastical historian, to combine details into a vivid account of the time as a whole. In particular his neutestamentliche
? Zeitgeschichte has the merit of showing the place of the development of primitive Christianity in the history of the world, and of
describing the connexion, too much neglected, between the evolution of the Christian Church and the condition of the Gra:co- Roman world. As this work is further distinguished by a beauty of style rare in German theolo gians, it has attracted attention even among the laity, and contributed much to the diffusion of the results of modern research.
At the commencement of the sixth decade of the century, after Baur's death, the labours of Bible critics were so much confined to literary questions of detail that these purely learned controversies seemed to have put an end to the interest in the great fundamental questions. This interest was, however, revived in the same field in which a generation before the whole movement had originated. The appearance in quick
? ? ? Ch. I. ] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 24 1
succession of the works of Renan l and Strauss on the life of Jesus, which were followed by several other books on the same subject, brought this question afresh to the front. The difference between Strauss's new book, Leben Jesu fiir das deutsche Volk (1864), and his earlier one, was that he intended
not for theologians only, but for the nation at large, es pecially for the educated men of Germany. Accordingly, thrown into a different form the place of learned
discussions of details we have a summary of the results of
criticism with regard to the gospel history, popular the best sense of the word. In this new work Strauss seeks to obviate the objections often brought against his earlier work, that gave a critique of the gospel history without a critique of the authorities, and led merely to the negative result of the unhistorical character of what was previously regarded as historical, not to the ascertainment of a positive historical kernel. He now prefixes a tolerably thorough criticism of the authorities, though adhering too strictly to Baur's views on all questions, even with regard to Matthew and Mark,
Renan's Vie de Jesus (1863) belongs, neither its origin nor in its effects, to the history of German theology, but its international importance demands the following remarks. It evident that book which in short time attained world-wide celebrity must have had some special excellence. Not to do injustice to we must be careful not to judge by wrong standard. Such would be, in this instance, the standard of strictly scientific historical inquiry. If Renan's object had been to ascertain the actual ultimate founda tion of the gospel narratives, he would, of course, have had to begin with careful investigation of the sources --their composition, date, trustworthiness, and mutual relations, which would doubtless have led him to conclusions in particular with regard to the Fourth Gospel which would have made impos sible for him to make use of the contents of this Gospel unconditionally, and to co-ordinate with the others. doubt not that Renan's subtle historical insight would have enabled him without difficulty to arrive, by means of this criticism of the authorities, calm comparison of the texts, and careful weighing of the various probabilities, at collection of data giving the most probable view we can form on these matters. A book of this kind would have possessed greater value as an historical treatise, but would have lacked all the merits and charm which make Renan's Vie de Jesus so unusually attractive. These merits are, in word, not scientific, but poetical. With faculty of poetical imagination, which paints characters, states of mind and feeling, and scenery with equal vividness, Renan has composed from the gospel stories religious epic, which brings forth the Saviour from the unap proachable darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people, first as the idyllic national leader, then as the contending and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but doomed to tragic failure from the resistance offered by the reality to his ideal. Even those who may disapprove of such
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without doing justice to the grounds of the opposite views. Strauss, as he himself remarks in the preface, is not interested in these questions. "What we really want to know is whether the gospel history is true as a whole and in its details or not, and such preliminary questions can only excite general interest in proportion as they are connected with this fundamental problem. In this respect the criticism of the Gospels has undeniably in the last twenty years somewhat run to seed. New hypotheses, particularly with regard to the first three Gospels, their sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations, crop up in such numbers, and are both maintained and at tacked with as much zeal as if these were the only questions, while the resulting controversy is of such proportions that we have almost to despair of ever settling the principal question, if its solution has to wait for the conclusion of this contro versy. " We must indeed, Strauss says, have made up our minds as to the Fourth Gospel before we can enter into the discussion of these matters ; but the mutual relation of the Synoptic Gospels is not of the same importance. Moreover,
poetical treatment of a subject sacred to Christendom, must admit that it has brought the human figure of Jesus nearer to countless men who had long lost all appreciative feeling and care for the Christ of dogma, and has made him the object of their sympathetic appreciation and reverent admiration. And if offence was given by Renan's bringing out shadows and weaknesses in his picture of Jesus, we might in general, without wishing at all to defend him in detail, reply by way of excuse, that shadows in a bright picture might appear expedient to make the human figure more life-like and his story more dramatic. Finally, it must be said for this religious epic, as for other historical romances, that, without teaching us history in detail, it enables us to realise an historical event or period as a whole by means of the poet's comprehensive and divin ing intuition better than the scanty accounts of the strict historian can ever do. The further volumes of Renan's great work on the genesis of Chris tianity, the scientific value of which cannot be denied, still leave something to be desired as regards critical rigour in the investigation and use of authori ties. But this defect is counterbalanced by the merits of vivid description of the local and social environment of events and fine delineation of character. Renan always places before his readers real human beings of flesh and blood, with noble and base passions and motives, not mere ideal pictures upon a golden background. Of special interest is his description of the Apostle Paul. But he has too little sympathy with this Apostle of faith to be alto gether just to him ; he places him with Luther, as one of the historical men of power, but fails in the case of both men to appreciate the depth of their religious feeling and far-seeing speculation. The theological side of religion is indeed always neglected by Renan, while he has a true eye for its practical social side. He thus serves to supplement the German historians.
? ? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
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without deciding all those endless critical questions, we can
at least arrive at the negative result, that in the person and
work of Jesus there nothing supernatural, nothing that need oppress mankind with the leaden weight of an infallible authority demanding blind belief. " And this negative result
for our purpose, which not solely historical, but looks rather towards the future than the past, an important, not the most important, point. " Of the positive correlative to this negative result we can say nothing for certain but summing up of what in the present position of research must be con sidered probable both permissible and desirable. " All those engaged in these researches are thus reminded of the real point at issue, and such reminding, such recall from the circumference to the centre, has always been profitable to science. " in fact by such a balancing of the accounts that Strauss now, as in his former works, gave useful impulse to the advance of science. The first of the two books into which this Life divided gives the outline of the historical life of
This account has been called dry and meagre, and indeed so in comparison with Renan's richly coloured poetry but who can blame the historian, his authorities are of such a nature that, on critical examination, they fail to furnish him with sufficient material Besides, must be admitted that on the main questions as to the religious and Messianic consciousness of Jesus, and his relation to the Law, Strauss carefully weighs the various indications, and with subtle insight determines the most probable account. Like Schleiermacher and Renan, Strauss assumes that the religious
consciousness of Jesus was the source of his consciousness of himself as the Messiah but he expressly declines to accept the idea (with Renan) that in the latter Jesus made use of
"accommodation" or "played a part"; since the case of a personality of such immeasurable historical influence every inch must have been conviction this conviction was the more natural the case of Jesus, as the Messianic expec tation had a religious and ethical as well as a political side, and the former side would appear to him of prime importance in proportion as the latter had always hitherto proved itself disastrous. The fundamental characteristic of the piety of Jesus, Strauss holds to be his transference of the indiscrimi nate kindness towards good and evil alike, which was the
fundamental principle of his own nature, to God as the deter
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mining principle of his nature also. " By fully developing in himself this glad spirit, which was at one with God and embraced all men as brothers, Jesus had realised the pro phetic ideal of a new covenant, with the law written in the heart; he had, to use Schiller's language, " Die Gottheit in seinen Willen aufgenommen" identified his will with God's, and hence for him God, in Schiller's words, ' had descended from the throne of the universe, the abyss had been filled up, and the terror had fled,' in him man had passed from slavery to freedom. This gladness and integrity ( Ungebrochene), this action from the delight and joy of a beautiful soul, we may call the Hellenic element in Jesus. But the fact that this impulse of his heart, and, in harmony therewith, his conception of God, were purely spiritual and ethical -- this attainment, which the Greek could only attain to by philosophy, was in his case the dowry granted to him by his education according to the Mosaic law, and his instruction in the writings of the
prophets. " Jesus had not, like Paul, to pass through an agitating conflict and conversion, but was from the first a beau tiful nature, his development went on in general uniformly, if not without great effort yet without violent crises ; " this is the only living sense of the dogma of the sinlessness of Jesus, of which, in its rigid ecclesiastical form, as a purely negative idea, we can make absolutely nothing. " After the first book has given a description of the conjectural historical kernel of the history of Jesus, the second book treats of his mythical history, which had formed the sole subject of the earlier work. But while it had there been treated analytically, it is here treated genetically. It is assumed as the result of the former work that the supernatural element in the gospel narratives is mythical ; but the question now arises as to how we are to conceive the origin and development of this mythical history. As the first effect of the life and character of Jesus, we find the belief of his disciples in his resurrection ; and thus we find their ideas of him transplanted into a temperature in which a luxuriant growth of unhistorical seedlings was bound to spring up, each more miraculous than the other. The inspired Son of David comes to be the Son of God without human father ; the Son of God grows into the incarnate creative Word ; the humane, thaumaturgic physician becomes the resuscitator from the dead, the absolute lord of nature and its laws ; the wise popular teacher, the prophet reading the hearts
? ? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
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of men, becomes omniscient, God's alter ego, his life on earth an episode in his eternal existence with God. This process, by which the various strata in the development of the conceptions of Christ were formed one after the other, as the expression of the Christian feeling prevalent in a given circle at a given time, worked out in the second book. thus both supplements and confirms the results of the previous work. For "if any one denies the historical validity of a story universally believed, we have a right to demand from him not only the grounds of his opinion, but also an explanation of the process by which the unhistori- cal narrative has come into existence. " This explanation here given with such thoroughness and perspicuity that the scientific value of the new work, in spite of its popular form,
decidedly superior to that of the earlier one. The fact that nevertheless, did not produce anything like the same sensa
tion only proves that in the intervening generation the world had become accustomed to receive the results of scientific re search even religious matters much more calmly than had previously been the case.
The two works of Renan and Strauss were followed
vast stream of literature on the life of Jesus, which, however, grew shallower as increased in breadth. Most of the works of this class produced in the last twenty years have paid less and less serious attention to both literary and material criti cism, and have almost retrograded to the position of pre-critical apologies and harmonies. Inasmuch as this branch of theology has thus completed its revolution, theologians ought without doubt to deduce the conclusion that a scientifically certain life
of Jesus impossible with the existing authorities. However
painful may be thus to resign ourselves, this might still be
attended by the advantage of leading theology away from devotion to small details and the attempt to trace the steps of Jesus in Galilee and Judea, and to combine the mosaic of evangelical tradition, now in one way, now in another, to the study once more of history on large scale, which would look for the sources of Christianity in the life of expiring antiquity as a whole, and see the triumphant progress of Christ's spirit through the earth the proof of his divine mission, proof drawn from the wide history of the world, and independent of the ever problematical results of the detailed investiga tion of his earthly life. From the mass of this literature
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I will call attention to three works as the most important, Schenkel's Charakterbild Jesu, Keim's Geschichte Jesu von
Nazara, and Weizsacker's Evangelische Untersuchungen. SChenkel's Charakterbild Jesu, which appeared almost
simultaneously with Strauss's " Life of Jesus for the German People," provoked an outburst of opposition among German theologians, the reason of which it is hard to discover in the book assailed. This is so far from having an irreligious tendency, or being a frivolous treatment of sacred history,
that on the contrary it is full of a passionate enthusiasm for the character of Jesus, such as satisfies the demands of the heart much more than those of strict scientific research. In its estimate of the value of the sources, Schenkel's book, it is true, excels all other works here mentioned ; the priority of Mark is maintained with great decision, and all connection of the Fourth Gospel with the Apostle John, who did not live in Ephesus, denied with equal emphasis (so at least in the 4th ed. , 1873). But in his use of the authorities, the author is far from deducing the necessary consequences from this correct conclusion. Instead of attending to the peculiarities of each Gospel, and seeing in them the influence of a later time and
development of doctrine, all the Gospels are really used as if
? of equal value, and from their narratives and speeches
the Johannine), by means of artificial harmonising and arbitrary interpretation, a life of Christ is constructed, which, with all its
ideality, produces rather the impression of a modern reformer and champion of liberty and truth than of the real historical founder of the Church. Even those who are far from over estimating the historical value of Renan' s life of Jesus, can scarcely avoid ranking it higher than Schenkel's representa tion of Jesus. Compare, for instance, Renan's keen insight into the social side of the work of Jesus with Schenkel's
recasting of all the language of the passages of the Gospels in question, to bring them into conformity with modern ethics. Or let us hear Schenkel's description of the significance of the death of Jesus. " In order to kill the bondage to the letter of religion, Jesus, the inspired representative of the spirit of religion, had to die. The sanguinary law condemning free dom of belief was sentenced by his death ; by his sacrificial blood he bought freedom of belief and through it liberation from the bondage of the letter and of sin. Thus his death became a victory of freedom and love, and thereby the source
(even
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of a new religion, which overcame evil the inmost core of personality, a ransom for the captives in Israel and the heathen world. " Schenkel did not consider that "personal freedom of faith and of conscience " are ideals of very recent
which cannot without a serious anachronism be carried back to the rise of Christianity, and actually made the pivot of the whole work of Jesus. Indeed, Schenkel's own character was of such vigorous and yet one-sided subjec tivity that he altogether lacked the impartiality of objective historical insight.
? and interests of the time, the safer the assumption that he must bear the impress of his age, and that the motives determining the form of his narrative must be sought in the circumstances of the time. This holds also of
the Gospels ; hence the first question in the criticism of them will be, What was the aim and purpose of each of their authors ? Thus only can we gain the firm ground of con
struggles, parties,
crete historical truth. Since a special motive [Tendenz]
is most apparent in the fourth Gospel, Baur took this Gospel,
? ? ? Ch. MEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
227'
which had hitherto offered the stoutest resistance to- all the attacks of criticism, as the point of departure for his inquiry.
But before we trace this inquiry further, we must glance at his previous critical works. have begun with the above discussion in the introduction to his book on the canonical Gospels simply in order to make clear his relation to Strauss.
Baur himself, which characteristic of his method, started
not from the Gospels, the most complicated problem of New Testament criticism, but from the Pauline Epistles, where the questions are comparatively simpler. As the fruit of his exegetical lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, he published in 1831 the essay, Die Christuspartei in der korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des paulinischen und petrinischen Christenthums in der altesten Kirche, der Apostel Petrus in Rom. He had here proved that Paul had to con tend in Corinth with a Jewish Christian party, which disputed his apostolical authority and wished to set up a particularistic Jewish Christianity, opposition to his universal Christianity. He had then pursued the traces of the same division of parties in the post-apostolic age, down to the Clementine Homilies,
and attempted to explain by its means the legends of Simon Magus and of the episcopate of Peter Rome. In these in genious, at times rash, theories lay the germs of his later
view of primitive Christianity, but his literary criticism had not yet reached an independent position. The full and unique importance of this was first seen in the work, Uber die
sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, which appeared the same year as Strauss's Leben Jesu (1835). His researches into the Christian Gnosis, published the same year, had led Baur to look for traces of this phenomenon the New Testament also, and he then discerned that the false teachers opposed the Epistles to Timothy and Titus could be no other than the Gnostics of the second century, in particular the Marcionites. This gave a firm footing of objective historical value for the criticism of these epistles place of the previous vague sub
jective hypotheses. Other peculiarities of these epistles, in particular those respecting ecclesiastical offices and arrange
? clearer light by the circumstances of the
ments, were set
second century, and this at the same time served to support the hypothesis based on his characterisation of the false teachers. Individual critics, such as Eichhom and De Wette,
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? 2 28 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
and also Schleiermacher, had previously doubted the authen ticity, at any rate of I Timothy, and not only were these doubts now fully justified by Baur, but, what was the main thing, the positive result was reached that these Epistles originated in the opposition of the Catholic Church to Gnosticism in the middle of the second century, and were intended to establish the Church's tradition and hierarchy against heretics. The importance of this work of Baur's went far beyond the
question directly treated of, inasmuch as it substituted for
the first time objective eriticism, based on a wide general
conception of the conditions of primitive Christianity, for the subjective criticism hitherto adopted -- a new method, of the great importance of which Baur in his preface shows himself well aware. This critical method he applied during the following years to the Pauline epistles and to the Acts of the Apostles, and collected the results of these researches in the work, Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, sein Leben und
Wirken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre (1st ed. , 1845 ! 2nd ed. , 1866). In the first part of this work, Baur describes the life and work of Paul, as the apostle who first gave Christi anity its universal historical importance, and freed it from Judaism, which was not accomplished -- as was hitherto held in conformity with the Church's tradition --with the concurrence of the elder apostles and the primitive Church, but in op position to and in conflict with them. He here subjects the
account given in the Acts to a thorough critical investigation, which leads to the result that this book differs from the authentic testimony of the Pauline epistles in so many and im portant points that it can be regarded as of only quite second ary historical value"; the author's aim was not to write history, but to give a defence of the Apostle of the Gentiles against the attacks and accusations of the Judaisers. " With
this view he represented Paul as quite a different man from the actual Paul of the genuine Pauline Epistles ; he minimised his divergence from the Jewish Christians in the same way as he made Peter more Pauline than was really the case. The writer's motives for doing this must be looked for in the cir cumstances of the time, in which " Paulinism had been so put in the background by Jewish Christian efforts as only to be able to maintain itself by entering into a compromise with the powerful Jewish Christian party, and by an attitude of conciliation softening down all the harshness and directness
? ? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
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of its opposition to Judaism. "1 The second part of the work gives an analysis and criticism of the Pauline Epistles, of which only those to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, are accepted as genuine. The third part gives an account of the Pauline theology from the point of view that repre sents Christianity as the absolute spiritual religion opposi tion to Heathenism and Judaism. There no doubt much in these two latter parts, as in the former one, capable of being disputed and needing amendment, but the great merit of the book remains, of having clearly set forth with an emphasis, never approached before, the epoch-making im portance of the Apostle Paul in the history of Christianity, the originality of his conception of Christianity, and the magnitude of the struggle by which he carried out his ideas in spite of the Jewish prejudices of the primitive Church.
Equally important, for right understanding of primitive Christianity, with Baur's work on Paul was further his Criticism of John's Gospel, first given as an essay (1844), which he afterwards incorporated in his book on Die kanonischen Evan-
gelien (1847), as its first and most important part. He does not start the customary way with the question as to the author, which only concludes the investigation. The question he starts with on the contrary, that of the idea and purpose guiding the author in his peculiar presentation of the gospel history. Baur finds this in the idea of the Logos presented in the prologue since the Logos, as the divine principle of light and life, appears bodily the phenomenal world in the person of Jesus, and enters into conflict with the darkness of the world, the whole history of Jesus turns on the development and solution of this antithesis of metaphysical and ethical
This view of the Acts of the Apostles was further developed and put into more extreme form by Zeller. It regards the Acts as an "offer of peace " made by Paulinist to the Judaisers with a view to the union of the two
parties: but cannot be maintained: for (1) the supposed extremity of Paulinism presence of an all-powerful Jewish Christianity unhistorical (2) the Acts, on the contrary, exhibits a Gentile Christianity energetically asserting itself against Judaism (3) the inexact account of Paulinism given
in this book cannot be the result of intentional misrepresentation, since was not peculiar to the author but common to Gentile Christians of the second century (4) finally, the theory altogether overlooks the real and undoubted object of the writer, viz. to defend Christianity view of the Roman power as religion not violating the laws of the State, and with claim to the same toleration as Judaism.
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principles, light and darkness, truth and falsehood, belief and disbelief, children of God and children of the devil, life and death. Thus John's Gospel contains a Christian gnosis akin to though not identical with the heretical gnosis, clothed in the form of an historical account of the life of
That such an account, completely dominated by ideal motives of a doctrinal nature, does not possess historical truth, and cannot and does not really lay claim to self- evident, and then further proved by Baur by a critical comparison of the Johannine and synoptic Gospels, the
superior historical probability being always found on the side of the latter. In particular shown, opposition to
the attempts to divide the Gospel, that precisely the Johannine speeches serve the dogmatic purpose of the author and stand
the closest connection with the narratives, and
that the whole Gospel shows a systematic unity of composition which excludes all possibility of distinguishing between genuine and not genuine -- or better, between historical and purely ficti tious elements. At last the question as to the author of the Gospel investigated and his identity with the Apostle dis proved, partly by the unhistorical character of so many of the narratives, in which the Gospel inferior even to the writings of Mark and Luke, who were not eye-witnesses, and par ticular by the ignorance shown of places and conditions in
Palestine {e. g. , 28 v. ix. xi. 51 xviii. 13); partly by the attitude of the author to the question of the Passover, which the exact opposite of the view which the Church in Asia Minor claimed to derive from the Apostle John partly also by the contrast between the entire dogmatic character of the Gospel and that of the Apocalypse, which exhibits, accordance with Galatians ii. , the Apostle John as still quite enthralled in Jewish Christian conceptions, which the author of the gospel has left far behind. But be asked how was possible for a non-apostolic gospel to be regarded by the Church as a work of the apostle, Baur finds the explanation in the peculiar spirit and character of the Gospel. By its spiritual nature, that pneumatic character attributed to even by the ancients, exercised peculiar charm on men's minds; and since, in virtue of its later origin, represented a
more developed form of Christian consciousness and life, offered all the more points of contact with the time its
Jesus.
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and diffusion. contains references to all the
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conflicts of the time, and yet nowhere bears the definite mark
of a temporal or local opposition. The most important of these elements of its time are the Gnosis, the doctrine of the Logos, Montanism, and the question of the Passover. To all these movements and questions of the age the Gospel stands in a special relation we cannot say that they presuppose the Gospel, and yet neither conditioned by them comes into contact with them, and yet remains this respect free
and independent. the peculiar characteristic of this Gospel to be connected with all shapes of the consciousness of the age, and yet only in so far as at the same time to main tain an independent attitude towards all, harmonising the antitheses into a higher unity. "
While particular points in Baur's argument may be im pugned, his view of the Fourth Gospel has as a whole not been refuted by later researches, but always confirmed anew. And when we consider how this very Gospel had previously stoutly withstood all criticism, and how difficult this non liquet had made a scientific investigation of the gospels, and so of the origin of Christianity generally, we must admit that Baur's
discovery deserves to be called the beginning of a new era and a fundamental achievement for all future investigation of primitive Christianity. The same cannot be said of his criticism of the three synoptic Gospels. However natural was for him to think that he ought to apply to the other gospels the key which had proved so useful in the case of
? Gospel, viz. the discovery of a dogmatic purpose, was this very fact that prevented him from seeing their literary relation to each other. Only thus can we explain
Baur's resting content with Griesbach's altogether mistaken hypothesis that Mark's Gospel consists of extracts from Matthew and Luke, when Wilke and Weisse had already clearly and irrefragably proved the priority of Mark as the source of both the others. the common fate of scientific discoverers to be led into fresh extremes and errors by the exaggerated application of their newly found principles. Baur did not escape this fatality that his keen critical eye failed him the case of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew and of
the Apocalypse only to be explained by the apparent agree ment in these cases of the traditional view with his theory, derived from Paulus, of the perpetuation of the opposition be tween the Judaic and Pauline parties the post- Pauline age
John's
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? 232 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
A more exact appreciation and a less prejudiced critical analysis of these three books might have led to a limitation of the scope of this theory. Baur's further labours in the history of the Church and of dogma will be described in a later chapter.
Baur was as great a teacher as he was an author. He pro
secuted scientific research as a sacred service in the temple of
truth ; he combined the lofty comprehensive glance of genius with the laborious industry and careful accuracy of the scholar, and imparted the truth he discovered with the straightforward openness of a conscience freed from selfishness and party spirit ; he thus exerted an influence over intelligent and re ceptive young men of the depth and intensity of which the present generation can form no idea. No wonder that Baur from the first decade of his academical activity continued to gather round him a band of disciples who followed intelli gently in the footsteps of their master, and soon became his co-workers by their independent prosecution of his researches.
The first of these was Strauss, who had shot ahead of his teacher by his Leben Jesu, considered above, and who had supplied if not the impulse yet the proximate occasion of the
? epoch-making critical investigation of the Gospels. He was followed by Eduard Zeller, Albert Schwegler, Karl Planck, Karl Kostlin, and" others. The common organ of this
" Tubingen School was the Theologische Jahrbiicher, edited by Zeller, still of special interest as the monument of one of the most active and fruitful periods of modern theology. A glance at the essays and studies therein collected suffices to show how entirely Baur's disciples and friends were free from the slavish dependence, narrow-mindedness, and dull uni formity which are wont to form the unpleasing darker side of "schools. " Essentially agreed in their critical method, Baur's disciples differed from the first not a little in their critical results.
Zeller, in his critical essays on the Acts of the Apostles,
which first appeared in the Theologische Jahrbiicher, and were afterwards collected in a volume, made some valuable con tributions to the exegetical interpretation and historical criticism of the Acts ; even those who, like myself,1 hold that he carried out Baur's theory of an intended reconciliation of Paulinism and Jewish Christianity in a one-sided and much exaggerated
1 Comp. ante, p. 229 note.
? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
233
manner, to the neglect of other essential points, will not deny to Zeller's book the merit of having by its incisive criticism
out the problem of early Christian history into the full light of day, and of having thus contributed to its solution, even though this does not accord with his own.
Even more than of Zeller's Apostelgeschichte, we must say of A. Schwegler's book, Das nachapostolische Zeitalter in den Hauptpunkten seiner Entwicke lung vols. , 1846), that, in spite of all the ingenuity often shown the just appreciation of details, must be regarded as on the whole failure.
Baur's view of the original opposition and gradual reconcilia
tion of the primitive Christian parties here exaggerated into a caricature. Christianity before Paul, Schwegler con sidered to have had no lofty ideas at all, but to have been nar row, rigidly ascetic and legal form of Judaism, closely related to Essenism, which, as " Ebionitism," maintained the upper hand even against Paul's universalistic teaching, so that the principles of the latter could scarcely anywhere prevail until the age of Irenaeus ecclesiastical Christianity remained more or less an Ebionitic Jewish Christianity, which by degrees de veloped into Catholicism. This point of view guides Schwegler in his estimate of the whole of early Christian literature everything in really, or presumedly, un-Pauline at once taken as a proof of the Jewish Christian character of the book in question the possibility never considered of the existence of Gentile Christians with un-Pauline and even anti-Pauline views, not from Judaising tendencies, but because they found much Paul's theology which was unsuited to the compre hension and needs of the Gentile Christian Churches. seems as Schwegler, hypnotised as were with the one idea of early Christian " Ebionitism," was completely blind to all the varied thoughts and interests which moved that age and also influenced the life and belief of the Christian Churches.
The dangerous tendency, to be seen, must be confessed, in
Baur, of insisting too exclusively on a new point of view as the only true one, was carried in Schwegler to the most
extreme lengths.
however, of importance to note that a protest was
immediately raised against this one-sidedness from within
the Tubingen School itself. Planck and Kostlin, in several
excellent essays, still worth reading, in the Theologische Jahr- biicher (1847 and 1850) endeavoured to correct Schwegler's
brought
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? 234 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
theory. Its principal error, Planck holds to be, that it made
Paul the real author of the new principle, and therefore the
founder of Christianity, leaving unexplained how he was enabled to arrive at this new knowledge and to connect it with the person of Jesus. We must rather start from the position that the new principle was actually conceived, if not fully developed, by Jesus, being contained in his idea of the true righteousness as perfect self-renunciation and the surrender of the human will to the divine will, thus combining the perfect fulfilment of the law with its translation into the spirit, and the cancelling of its purely external character. Paulinism therefore only developed into full consciousness the principle implicitly contained in primitive Christianity. The true right eousness of self-surrender to God, which Jesus spontaneously exemplified and so experienced as an immediate fact of his own consciousness, became in Paul the quickening " grace," or power of the " Holy Spirit," coming to us from without, from Christ. In this appears the difference between the dependent and the creative mind, between the systematising theologian and the original religious genius. Since the older apostles did not, like Paul, prosecute dogmatic reflections, they failed indeed to see so clearly the difference between the new Christian principle and Judaism, but they still possessed this principle in the form, directly derived from Jesus, of deepened righteousness and practical piety. This Christianity,
? Judaic only in form, was not opposed in principle to Paul's anti-
Judaic Christianity ; and hence a reconciliation of the two was possible, without external concessions, by means of an inward
of each to the other. It should be mentioned that Planck held with Schwegler, that the development was wholly on the Jewish Christian side, while Paulinism stood apart as a stimulating principle but one incapable of growth.
Kostl1n likewise censures Schwegler for not distinguishing between the later extreme Ebionitism and the original apos tolic Jewish Christianity. The latter was from the first, in point of fact, though without being clearly aware of in advance of Judaism, and was then stimulated by Paul to a development two directions on the one hand, advanced to ecclesiastical unity, and, on the other, retrograded to here tical Ebionitism. To Kostlin also belongs in particular the credit of first seeing that Paulinism and Gentile Christianity must not be forthwith identified. The failure of the Pauline
approximation
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? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
235
doctrines of righteousness by faith and of the annulling of the law to find permanent acceptance, to be explained not, as Schwegler thought, by the preponderance of Jewish Chris tianity, but by the fact that the Gentile Christians themselves were without the speculative conditions and practical needs necessary for the comprehension and adoption of these doc trines. They did not need, like Paul, the disciple of the Pharisees, deliverance from the law, but the discipline of the law the law did not seem to them, as did to Paul, a negative stage of development of transitory validity, but the permanent standard of a pure and thoroughly ethical life for the community. The natural desire to form fixed Christian morals was what made the acceptance of Paul's doctrines of the law and of justification a practical impossibility to the Gentile Christian Churches, even they had been understood. Even Paul had recognised this desire of his Churches so far as to speak of a "law of the Spirit," according to which Christians ought to live. Nevertheless his teaching lacked the legal precision desiderated by the Church was too ideal to be directly made use of by it. The need was felt of
? this ideal Paulinism on the side of the actual morality of works, and this found expression in the combina
tion of Peter with Paul, or the appeal against the one-sided party watchwords of the heretics to the authority of all the apostles--i. e. of Christ himself.
The lines of Planck and Kostlin were further pursued by Albrecht Ritschl, until from being an adherent he became an opponent of the Tubingen school. In the first edition of his book, Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche (1850), his disagreement with the theories of Baur and Schwegler was only partial, but in the second edition (1857) he declared his total antagonism to their fundamental principles. Like Planck and Kostlin, Ritschl holds that the person of Jesus and the belief of the first apostles we have the common neutral start ing-point of the various later parties. The attitude of Jesus towards the law, he maintains, was an essentially independent one -- superiority to the externality of the ceremonial law in the ethical principle of love to God and man, while observing
conservative attitude in outward religious life. Accordingly Ritschl considers that the first apostles no longer regarded
the law as religiously binding, but only continued its ob servance as national custom, view for which he appeals
supplementing
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? 236 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
to the Epistles of Peter and James, the genuineness of which he ventures to maintain against the doubts of criticism. Though we must admit this to be too great a concession to conservative apologetics, we recognise a valuable advance on
the older Tubingen theologians in Ritschl's tracing the de velopment of Catholic Christianity, not like them from Jewish, but from Gentile Christianity, which he distinguishes from
Paulinism. He rightly points out that Paulinism had a neutral basis in common with Jewish Christianity in the doctrines of God, angels and demons, the present and future world, Christ's second coming, the resurrection and judgment ; to which we must add that the specifically Pauline doctrines of reconciliation and justification have their roots in Jewish (Pharisaic) theology. The earlier Tubingen theologians were distinctly in the wrong in almost completely overlooking Paul's Jewish side in exclusive attention to his anti-Jewish tendencies, and thereupon explaining every departure from his teaching by a reference to Judaistic motives, while, reversely, it must be explained for the most part from the anti-Judaistic habit of thought of the Gentile Christians. Ritschl is right in main taining that " Catholic Christianity is a distinct stage of re ligious thought within the sphere of Gentile Christianity ; it is independent of the conditions of Jewish Christian life, and opposed to the fundamental principle of Jewish Christianity ;
it does not, however, depend merely upon the authority of Paul, but rests both upon the Old Testament and the sayings of Christ, and also upon the authority of all the apostles, represented by Peter and Paul. " But when Ritschl goes on to explain the conversion of Paul's teaching into the Catholic Christianity of the early Church by the failure of the latter to
understand the Old Testament, and condemns it as a "de
generation," the objection presents itself that Paul's doctrine of justification is not found in the Old Testament, which, as the Epistle of James shows, offers rather the means of its refutation than of its proof. Ritschl was unacquainted with the sources of the Pauline theology, and hence cannot satis factorily explain its post-apostolic development. A second serious defect is his total neglect of the other chief factor in the evolution of the theology of the Church, and even of that of the New Testament --viz. Hellenism. This explains his strange inability to deal with such an important phenomenon of early Christianity as the Gospel of John, and his omission of all
? ? ? ? Ch.
NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
237
reference to in his book, with the exception of a brief and meaningless note. Beyond question this gospel can be explained neither by means of Jewish Christianity nor of Paulinism, least of all by a superficial Gentile "degeneration" of the latter, since purely a product of Christian Hellen ism. The very existence of this single book (irrespective of others, e. g. the Epistle to the Hebrews) a proof that no history of early Christianity can be regarded as complete which does not take account of the important factor of Hellenism, which Ritschl, a much more striking degree even than the other Tubingen critics, has failed to do.
With Ritschl are connected several other opponents of the Tubingen school, of whom we may here mention the more important: Meyer (Commentar zum neuen Testament), Bleek (Einleitung in das N. Test, and Commentar zu den synop-
tischen Evangelien), Lechler (das apostolische und nachaposto- lische Zeitalter mit Riicksicht auf Unterschied und Einheit in Lehre und Leben, 2nd ed. , 1857), Weiss (der petrinische Lehrbegriff der johanneische Lehrbegriff Biblische Theolo-
gie des Neuen Testaments Einleitung in das Neue Testa
ment), Reuss (die Geschichte der heiligen Schriften Neuen Testaments, and Histoire de la The"ologie chretienne au siecle
Ewald (Geschichte Israels, vols. v. and vi. Geschichte Christus, and Gesch. des apostol. Zeitalters), Hase (die Tilbinger Schule. Ein Sendschreiben an Dr. Baur). would lead us far beyond our limits to give the views of all these theologians in detail, and we shall therefore be content to mention summarily their objections to the Tubingen theory. They first dispute the sharp antithesis affirmed by this theory between Paul and the original apostles. A certain difference in tendency indeed admitted but this not such that the two parties were mutually exclusive, but rather such that they supplemented each other. "We find variety coupled with agreement, and unity with difference, between Paul and the earlier apostles we recognise the one spirit in the many gifts" (Lechler). The Judaistic antagonists against whom
Paul had to contend were an extreme party with which the
? apostolique),
themselves must not be identified. Further, the view controverted that the struggle and the attempts at mediation and reconciliation were continued until the middle of the second century on the contrary, contended that the destruction of Jerusalem severed the bond which had
apostles
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? 238 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
hitherto connected the converted Jews with their nation and its worship. With this ceased also the influence of Judaistic agitation upon the Gentile Christian Churches ; and hence forth, in place of the Pauline- Judaistic controversies, we have the new struggle with the heathen political power and heathen heresy (Gnosticism), to which the Johannine Apocalypse already bears witness. Further, an attack is made on Baur's method of tracing in the New Testament writings products of a definite party movement, and of determining their place in the history of primitive Christianity by means of their supposed dogmatic or ecclesiastical " Tendens. " These ob jections are generally urged, moreover (irrespective of just objections to exaggerations on the part of the Tubingen School), from an apologetic desire to save the traditional authorship of the Biblical writings, the most serious critical arguments being too little regarded. The Epistles of James and 1 Peter are asserted to be not only genuine, but pre- Pauline, and (by Ritschl and Weiss) to be nowise connected with Paul. Of the deutero- Pauline Epistles, all--even those to the Ephesians, Timothy, and Titus, regarded as spurious even by Credner and De Wette-- are reclaimed as Pauline. Special ardour is shown in the contention for the genuineness of John's Gospel ; the dilemma, admitted by Lucke, that either the Apocalypse or the Gospel, but not both, is genuine, is given up, and the development of the author of the Apoca lypse into the evangelist is considered probable. But the more hotly the contention raged at first around this question, the greater is the significance of the fact that the former champions of the genuineness of John's Gospel could not altogether resist the adverse arguments, but were compelled to make greater or less concessions to criticism. Hase, Weizsacker, and Reuss have recently attributed the Gospel not to the apostle himself, but to one of his disciples ; and even Weiss limits the historical value of the speeches to a minimum of reminis cences, which have become confused in the mind of the author with his own reflections, and thereby transformed. With re gard to other books also -- e. g. the Pastoral Epistles or the
Acts -- we have to note concessions made by the above-named theologians to Tubingen criticism, so that a gradual agree ment as to the main questions need not be regarded as im possible. It is a specially happy omen that, in the province of exegesis, a uniform method of philological objectivity and
? ? ? ? Ch. I. ] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
239
exactness has been more and more developed on all hands ; the services of Meyer and Weiss to exegesis are everywhere acknowledged. A tribute should also be paid to Weiss's Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments, as a work of pre-eminent scientific soundness, containing copious matter arranged with exemplary clearness, and surpassing all others in practical utility as a textbook for students.
The Tubingen school was not behindhand in replying to these numerous and serious attacks. Besides Baur and Zeller, Hilgenfeld, in numerous books and essays (in the Zeitschrift
fiir wissenschaftliche Theologie), distinguished
himself as the ready champion of the right of scientific criticism. Fond of
emphasising his independence of Baur, he still, in all impor tant points, followed in the footsteps of the master ; his method, which he is wont to contrast as Literarkritik with
Baur's Tendenzkritik, is nevertheless essentially the same as
? Baur's. In his view of the fourth
Gospel, Hilgenfeld goes even further than Baur, making it altogether dependent upon Gnosticism. In the Synoptic question he leaves Baur's view
Mark between Matthew and Luke. He modifies somewhat the criticism of Paul's epistles, restoring Philippians and 1 Thessalonians to Paul. Volkmar differs decidedly from the other Tubingen critics
only on the question of the Synoptists ; he follows Wilke and
Weisse in regarding Mark as the earliest Gospel, which was
followed by Luke immediately, and only subsequently by Matthew, the last being dependent upon both the others, and a gospel harmony from the point of view of the Catholic Church, with its reconciliation of differences. This un doubtedly correct view Volkmar has exaggerated, after the fashion of Bruno Bauer, by making Mark the author of a "didactic epic," intended to illustrate the Pauline gospel. Though this seemed to do away with all historical foundations, Volkmar, in his Religion Jesu, and still more in his Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit (1882), tries to separate and establish a kernel of historical facts as the basis of the gospels. In his interpretation of the Apocalypse, he follows Tubingen principles, and refers the Apocalyptic imagery in the boldest manner to the party struggles of
essentially unchanged, only placing
The book is now somewhat out of date, since Volter has shown that the Apocalypse is composed of elements belonging to different authors and times, and
primitive Christianity.
? ? ? 24O BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
Vischer has made a Jewish basis with Christian revisions very probable. With Hilgenfeld and Volkmar, we must mention Holsten as a strict adherent of Baur in his line of criticism. In his commentary on Galatians, and in several works on Paul, he has discussed the Apostle's peculiar teaching with great acumen, though often with too great subtlety and exaggerated
dialectic ; his long-promised review of the entire Pauline theo
logy has not yet appeared. The question of the Synop- tists has also latterly engaged Holsten's attention : he tries very hard, but with doubtful success, to defend Hilgenfeld's view (Matthew-Mark-Luke). On this question, Holtzmann is the exponent of the view now most generally accepted. In his book on die synoptischen Evangelien, he maintains the priority of Mark ; our Matthew he derives from Mark and Matthew's original "collection of sayings" (the \6yia of Papias), and finally Luke from our Matthew and Mark. Besides numerous essays, Holtzmann has furnished valuable contributions to New Testament exegesis and criticism in his works on the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles ; and his Einleitung in das Neue Testa ment gives an excellent summary of the present position of all the questions concerned. Whilst most critics were thus working at questions of detail, Hausrath was led by his natural love of artistic form, and his position as ecclesiastical historian, to combine details into a vivid account of the time as a whole. In particular his neutestamentliche
? Zeitgeschichte has the merit of showing the place of the development of primitive Christianity in the history of the world, and of
describing the connexion, too much neglected, between the evolution of the Christian Church and the condition of the Gra:co- Roman world. As this work is further distinguished by a beauty of style rare in German theolo gians, it has attracted attention even among the laity, and contributed much to the diffusion of the results of modern research.
At the commencement of the sixth decade of the century, after Baur's death, the labours of Bible critics were so much confined to literary questions of detail that these purely learned controversies seemed to have put an end to the interest in the great fundamental questions. This interest was, however, revived in the same field in which a generation before the whole movement had originated. The appearance in quick
? ? ? Ch. I. ] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 24 1
succession of the works of Renan l and Strauss on the life of Jesus, which were followed by several other books on the same subject, brought this question afresh to the front. The difference between Strauss's new book, Leben Jesu fiir das deutsche Volk (1864), and his earlier one, was that he intended
not for theologians only, but for the nation at large, es pecially for the educated men of Germany. Accordingly, thrown into a different form the place of learned
discussions of details we have a summary of the results of
criticism with regard to the gospel history, popular the best sense of the word. In this new work Strauss seeks to obviate the objections often brought against his earlier work, that gave a critique of the gospel history without a critique of the authorities, and led merely to the negative result of the unhistorical character of what was previously regarded as historical, not to the ascertainment of a positive historical kernel. He now prefixes a tolerably thorough criticism of the authorities, though adhering too strictly to Baur's views on all questions, even with regard to Matthew and Mark,
Renan's Vie de Jesus (1863) belongs, neither its origin nor in its effects, to the history of German theology, but its international importance demands the following remarks. It evident that book which in short time attained world-wide celebrity must have had some special excellence. Not to do injustice to we must be careful not to judge by wrong standard. Such would be, in this instance, the standard of strictly scientific historical inquiry. If Renan's object had been to ascertain the actual ultimate founda tion of the gospel narratives, he would, of course, have had to begin with careful investigation of the sources --their composition, date, trustworthiness, and mutual relations, which would doubtless have led him to conclusions in particular with regard to the Fourth Gospel which would have made impos sible for him to make use of the contents of this Gospel unconditionally, and to co-ordinate with the others. doubt not that Renan's subtle historical insight would have enabled him without difficulty to arrive, by means of this criticism of the authorities, calm comparison of the texts, and careful weighing of the various probabilities, at collection of data giving the most probable view we can form on these matters. A book of this kind would have possessed greater value as an historical treatise, but would have lacked all the merits and charm which make Renan's Vie de Jesus so unusually attractive. These merits are, in word, not scientific, but poetical. With faculty of poetical imagination, which paints characters, states of mind and feeling, and scenery with equal vividness, Renan has composed from the gospel stories religious epic, which brings forth the Saviour from the unap proachable darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people, first as the idyllic national leader, then as the contending and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but doomed to tragic failure from the resistance offered by the reality to his ideal. Even those who may disapprove of such
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? 242 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Rk. III.
without doing justice to the grounds of the opposite views. Strauss, as he himself remarks in the preface, is not interested in these questions. "What we really want to know is whether the gospel history is true as a whole and in its details or not, and such preliminary questions can only excite general interest in proportion as they are connected with this fundamental problem. In this respect the criticism of the Gospels has undeniably in the last twenty years somewhat run to seed. New hypotheses, particularly with regard to the first three Gospels, their sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations, crop up in such numbers, and are both maintained and at tacked with as much zeal as if these were the only questions, while the resulting controversy is of such proportions that we have almost to despair of ever settling the principal question, if its solution has to wait for the conclusion of this contro versy. " We must indeed, Strauss says, have made up our minds as to the Fourth Gospel before we can enter into the discussion of these matters ; but the mutual relation of the Synoptic Gospels is not of the same importance. Moreover,
poetical treatment of a subject sacred to Christendom, must admit that it has brought the human figure of Jesus nearer to countless men who had long lost all appreciative feeling and care for the Christ of dogma, and has made him the object of their sympathetic appreciation and reverent admiration. And if offence was given by Renan's bringing out shadows and weaknesses in his picture of Jesus, we might in general, without wishing at all to defend him in detail, reply by way of excuse, that shadows in a bright picture might appear expedient to make the human figure more life-like and his story more dramatic. Finally, it must be said for this religious epic, as for other historical romances, that, without teaching us history in detail, it enables us to realise an historical event or period as a whole by means of the poet's comprehensive and divin ing intuition better than the scanty accounts of the strict historian can ever do. The further volumes of Renan's great work on the genesis of Chris tianity, the scientific value of which cannot be denied, still leave something to be desired as regards critical rigour in the investigation and use of authori ties. But this defect is counterbalanced by the merits of vivid description of the local and social environment of events and fine delineation of character. Renan always places before his readers real human beings of flesh and blood, with noble and base passions and motives, not mere ideal pictures upon a golden background. Of special interest is his description of the Apostle Paul. But he has too little sympathy with this Apostle of faith to be alto gether just to him ; he places him with Luther, as one of the historical men of power, but fails in the case of both men to appreciate the depth of their religious feeling and far-seeing speculation. The theological side of religion is indeed always neglected by Renan, while he has a true eye for its practical social side. He thus serves to supplement the German historians.
? ? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
243
without deciding all those endless critical questions, we can
at least arrive at the negative result, that in the person and
work of Jesus there nothing supernatural, nothing that need oppress mankind with the leaden weight of an infallible authority demanding blind belief. " And this negative result
for our purpose, which not solely historical, but looks rather towards the future than the past, an important, not the most important, point. " Of the positive correlative to this negative result we can say nothing for certain but summing up of what in the present position of research must be con sidered probable both permissible and desirable. " All those engaged in these researches are thus reminded of the real point at issue, and such reminding, such recall from the circumference to the centre, has always been profitable to science. " in fact by such a balancing of the accounts that Strauss now, as in his former works, gave useful impulse to the advance of science. The first of the two books into which this Life divided gives the outline of the historical life of
This account has been called dry and meagre, and indeed so in comparison with Renan's richly coloured poetry but who can blame the historian, his authorities are of such a nature that, on critical examination, they fail to furnish him with sufficient material Besides, must be admitted that on the main questions as to the religious and Messianic consciousness of Jesus, and his relation to the Law, Strauss carefully weighs the various indications, and with subtle insight determines the most probable account. Like Schleiermacher and Renan, Strauss assumes that the religious
consciousness of Jesus was the source of his consciousness of himself as the Messiah but he expressly declines to accept the idea (with Renan) that in the latter Jesus made use of
"accommodation" or "played a part"; since the case of a personality of such immeasurable historical influence every inch must have been conviction this conviction was the more natural the case of Jesus, as the Messianic expec tation had a religious and ethical as well as a political side, and the former side would appear to him of prime importance in proportion as the latter had always hitherto proved itself disastrous. The fundamental characteristic of the piety of Jesus, Strauss holds to be his transference of the indiscrimi nate kindness towards good and evil alike, which was the
fundamental principle of his own nature, to God as the deter
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? 244 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
mining principle of his nature also. " By fully developing in himself this glad spirit, which was at one with God and embraced all men as brothers, Jesus had realised the pro phetic ideal of a new covenant, with the law written in the heart; he had, to use Schiller's language, " Die Gottheit in seinen Willen aufgenommen" identified his will with God's, and hence for him God, in Schiller's words, ' had descended from the throne of the universe, the abyss had been filled up, and the terror had fled,' in him man had passed from slavery to freedom. This gladness and integrity ( Ungebrochene), this action from the delight and joy of a beautiful soul, we may call the Hellenic element in Jesus. But the fact that this impulse of his heart, and, in harmony therewith, his conception of God, were purely spiritual and ethical -- this attainment, which the Greek could only attain to by philosophy, was in his case the dowry granted to him by his education according to the Mosaic law, and his instruction in the writings of the
prophets. " Jesus had not, like Paul, to pass through an agitating conflict and conversion, but was from the first a beau tiful nature, his development went on in general uniformly, if not without great effort yet without violent crises ; " this is the only living sense of the dogma of the sinlessness of Jesus, of which, in its rigid ecclesiastical form, as a purely negative idea, we can make absolutely nothing. " After the first book has given a description of the conjectural historical kernel of the history of Jesus, the second book treats of his mythical history, which had formed the sole subject of the earlier work. But while it had there been treated analytically, it is here treated genetically. It is assumed as the result of the former work that the supernatural element in the gospel narratives is mythical ; but the question now arises as to how we are to conceive the origin and development of this mythical history. As the first effect of the life and character of Jesus, we find the belief of his disciples in his resurrection ; and thus we find their ideas of him transplanted into a temperature in which a luxuriant growth of unhistorical seedlings was bound to spring up, each more miraculous than the other. The inspired Son of David comes to be the Son of God without human father ; the Son of God grows into the incarnate creative Word ; the humane, thaumaturgic physician becomes the resuscitator from the dead, the absolute lord of nature and its laws ; the wise popular teacher, the prophet reading the hearts
? ? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
245
of men, becomes omniscient, God's alter ego, his life on earth an episode in his eternal existence with God. This process, by which the various strata in the development of the conceptions of Christ were formed one after the other, as the expression of the Christian feeling prevalent in a given circle at a given time, worked out in the second book. thus both supplements and confirms the results of the previous work. For "if any one denies the historical validity of a story universally believed, we have a right to demand from him not only the grounds of his opinion, but also an explanation of the process by which the unhistori- cal narrative has come into existence. " This explanation here given with such thoroughness and perspicuity that the scientific value of the new work, in spite of its popular form,
decidedly superior to that of the earlier one. The fact that nevertheless, did not produce anything like the same sensa
tion only proves that in the intervening generation the world had become accustomed to receive the results of scientific re search even religious matters much more calmly than had previously been the case.
The two works of Renan and Strauss were followed
vast stream of literature on the life of Jesus, which, however, grew shallower as increased in breadth. Most of the works of this class produced in the last twenty years have paid less and less serious attention to both literary and material criti cism, and have almost retrograded to the position of pre-critical apologies and harmonies. Inasmuch as this branch of theology has thus completed its revolution, theologians ought without doubt to deduce the conclusion that a scientifically certain life
of Jesus impossible with the existing authorities. However
painful may be thus to resign ourselves, this might still be
attended by the advantage of leading theology away from devotion to small details and the attempt to trace the steps of Jesus in Galilee and Judea, and to combine the mosaic of evangelical tradition, now in one way, now in another, to the study once more of history on large scale, which would look for the sources of Christianity in the life of expiring antiquity as a whole, and see the triumphant progress of Christ's spirit through the earth the proof of his divine mission, proof drawn from the wide history of the world, and independent of the ever problematical results of the detailed investiga tion of his earthly life. From the mass of this literature
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? 246
BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
I will call attention to three works as the most important, Schenkel's Charakterbild Jesu, Keim's Geschichte Jesu von
Nazara, and Weizsacker's Evangelische Untersuchungen. SChenkel's Charakterbild Jesu, which appeared almost
simultaneously with Strauss's " Life of Jesus for the German People," provoked an outburst of opposition among German theologians, the reason of which it is hard to discover in the book assailed. This is so far from having an irreligious tendency, or being a frivolous treatment of sacred history,
that on the contrary it is full of a passionate enthusiasm for the character of Jesus, such as satisfies the demands of the heart much more than those of strict scientific research. In its estimate of the value of the sources, Schenkel's book, it is true, excels all other works here mentioned ; the priority of Mark is maintained with great decision, and all connection of the Fourth Gospel with the Apostle John, who did not live in Ephesus, denied with equal emphasis (so at least in the 4th ed. , 1873). But in his use of the authorities, the author is far from deducing the necessary consequences from this correct conclusion. Instead of attending to the peculiarities of each Gospel, and seeing in them the influence of a later time and
development of doctrine, all the Gospels are really used as if
? of equal value, and from their narratives and speeches
the Johannine), by means of artificial harmonising and arbitrary interpretation, a life of Christ is constructed, which, with all its
ideality, produces rather the impression of a modern reformer and champion of liberty and truth than of the real historical founder of the Church. Even those who are far from over estimating the historical value of Renan' s life of Jesus, can scarcely avoid ranking it higher than Schenkel's representa tion of Jesus. Compare, for instance, Renan's keen insight into the social side of the work of Jesus with Schenkel's
recasting of all the language of the passages of the Gospels in question, to bring them into conformity with modern ethics. Or let us hear Schenkel's description of the significance of the death of Jesus. " In order to kill the bondage to the letter of religion, Jesus, the inspired representative of the spirit of religion, had to die. The sanguinary law condemning free dom of belief was sentenced by his death ; by his sacrificial blood he bought freedom of belief and through it liberation from the bondage of the letter and of sin. Thus his death became a victory of freedom and love, and thereby the source
(even
? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
247
of a new religion, which overcame evil the inmost core of personality, a ransom for the captives in Israel and the heathen world. " Schenkel did not consider that "personal freedom of faith and of conscience " are ideals of very recent
which cannot without a serious anachronism be carried back to the rise of Christianity, and actually made the pivot of the whole work of Jesus. Indeed, Schenkel's own character was of such vigorous and yet one-sided subjec tivity that he altogether lacked the impartiality of objective historical insight.
