No More Learning

The principle enunciated by Semler, Lessing, and Herder,
that the books of the Bible must be read and criticised as
human productions, was systematically applied by Eichhorn. He saw that the New Testament epistles were not all written by the apostles whose names they bear, that 2 Peter and Jude are not genuine, and that the Epistles to Timothy and Titus do not come direct from Paul. Of special importance was his hypothesis as to the synoptic Gospels. The problem as to how their frequent verbal agreement in conjunction with their
discrepancies can be explained, he believed himself able to solve by the hypothesis of a primary Aramaic Gospel, of which various translations and editions were at first current, and from which at a later time sprang our canonical Gospels. Instead of this primitive written Gospel, Gieseler regarded oral tradition as the common source, an hypothesis which explained the differences between the Gospels more easily but
made their agreement in details more difficult. Schleiermacher
combined both hypotheses, by assuming along with the oral
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tradition a number of small written accounts (" Diegeseis"), by the collection and combination of which our synoptic Gospels were formed. The Gospel of Matthew even does not, in his view, come directly from the Apostle Matthew as its author, but is only based upon a collection of speeches made by him (the \6yiu of Papias). The Gospel according to Mark is derived from Matthew's and Luke's Gospels, both of them being used alternately. The Johannine Gospel only is the authentic production of one author, and was composed by
the apostle and eye-witness ; and as the earliest authority for the life of Jesus it is always to be preferred to the synoptists. The authority of the great theologian Schleier macher secured for this theory for a long time wide acceptance.
It must however be remarked, that of all conceivable com binations it is the most erroneous, and is a complete subversion of the real state of the case, since Mark's Gospel is not the latest but the earliest, and John's Gospel not the earliest but the latest, and throughout dependent on Mark and Luke. Historical instinct was not Schleiermacher's strong point, and his preference for the Fourth Gospel did not rest upon historical grounds but upon his theological postulates and his sympathy, as one of the Romanticists, with the Johannine idea of Christ. Schleiermacher ought to have learnt better from Herder, who, though he regarded the Fourth Gospel as apostolic, still possessed enough historical insight to see in it " the echo of the earlier Gospels in a higher key," while he regarded Mark's Gospel and that of the Hebrews as the earliest, from which was derived first Luke's and then Matthew's Gospel (after the destruction of Jerusalem), and finally, a generation later, the Gospel of John. Herder was, in my opinion, perfectly right in this determination of the order (though not of the date) of the Gospels ; that his view was ignored by theo logians was a great hindrance to the clearing up of this im portant problem ; on this, as perhaps on other points, that Herder was eclipsed by the overwhelming authority of Schleiermacher had injurious effects upon the healthy de velopment of German theology. So too Schleiermacher's denial of the genuineness of the first Epistle to Timothy, while he accepted the second and the Epistle to Titus as
genuine, must be considered a very doubtful service to science, when we remember that Eichhorn, and still more De Wette, had a truer perception of the un-Pauline character common
John
? ? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND "EXEGESIS. 211
to the three plainly connected epistles. De Wette was, after Semler and Herder, the most important Protestant Biblical critic before 1835. He was the only critic quite free from dogmatic prejudices, and unequalled for profound learning, keen insight, and fine linguistic perception. Yet neither was he able to arrive at satisfactory and thoroughly consistent results. His critical method was too purely subjective and
formal, founded upon matters of taste and individual con
siderations such as might be met by others of pretty much
the same weight he paid no proper regard to the general character of a book and its place in the history of the early development of Christian doctrines. Hence he generally remained in doubt, unable to arrive at any final result this was the case with the problem of the Gospels. Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles he considered as certainly not genuine, as also the Apocalypse and Peter but what was the advantage of knowing that these works do not come from the authors whose names they traditionally bear, nothing positive was ascertained as to their date, or character, or the ecclesiastical circle to which they belonged, or the purpose they were intended to perform for their time and surroundings? In fact this critical method, which was employed by De Wette in its best form, was purely negative, and was therefore
? only preliminary to the main aim, -- positive insight into the historical origin of the various New Testament writings and their importance in the history of primitive Christianity. This was accomplished by the critical labours of Baur
and the investigators directly or indirectly stimulated by him.
Along with the investigation of the origin of the New Testament writings, a critique of the Gospel narratives was carried on by Rationalistic theologians. But neither was this more satisfactory in its method or its results. Dr. Paulus, the best known representative of the Rationalistic interpretation of the Gospel narratives, started from the principle that in the Gospels we must look for nothing but actual facts, not for poetry or legends, and that these facts were natural and not supernatural events, and that they had acquired the appear ance of supernatural occurrences, or miracles, partly through the errors of commentators, partly through the erroneous apprehension and judgment of the narrators. The task of
scientific commentator to get rid of this false appearance
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and to see in the stories of the evangelists simple events with natural causes. The execution of this task by Dr. Paulus himself was such that we do not know whether to wonder most at his learning and ingenuity or his ineptitude and want of taste. He turns the finest of the Gospel narratives, the blossoms of the noblest religious poetry, by his "natural" interpretation, into the most trivial, commonplace incidents,
Indeed, in not a few places he is even guilty of an absolute meanness
without any deeper meaning or religious significance.
in his interpretations, almost on a par with the notorious
theories of a " priestly fraud. " Thus the narrative of the
supernatural birth of Jesus is reduced to a deception cun
ningly practised upon the Virgin Mary. The occurrence at Christ's baptism was that the clouds just then accidentally
opened and a flying dove appeared in the blue sky. The devil that tempted him in the wilderness was an agent pro vocateur sent out by the Pharisees. The plan of Jesus was essentially the political one of restoring the temporal splendour of the Israelitish theocracy and placing himself as the Messiah- king at its head ; it was not till after the failure of this attempt that he confined himself to an ethical kingdom of God. His miracles of healing were successful cures, the medical means applied being generally ignored by the narrators. The in stances of restoration to life were only from apparent death. The walking of Jesus on the sea was his walking by the sea on the shore. The miraculous draught of fishes was the result of the good advice given by Jesus to the dispirited fishermen. The multiplication of loaves at the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness was the effect of the good example of Jesus in giving away his store of food, which was followed by the rest of those present who had any. The change of the water into wine at Cana was a marriage jest, Jesus giving the present of wine he had brought for the married pair in this humorous way. The resurrection of Jesus himself was an awakening from an apparent death by tetanus ; his ascension, his retirement in his subsequent illness into the summit of the mountains, the mist serving to take him from the sight of those beholding his departure.
That this interpretation of the Gospels, which everywhere
? retains the husk and surrenders the religious countenanced even by orthodox theologians in many instances, and accepted, at any rate partially, by Schleiermacher too in
kernel, was
? ? ? Ch. I. ] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 213
his lectures on the " Life of Jesus," can only be accounted for
by remembering the difficult position of the theologians of that time, whose general culture made a naive belief in the reality of actual miracles impossible, while their historical criticism was still fettered by the supposition that at least one or the other of the Gospels came direct from an eye-witness and had therefore to claim an historical character for all its narratives. The rescue of theology out of this blind alley by
a thorough and consistent, instead of a halting criticism, getting
rid of the fettering suppositions and clearing the way for a scientific study of the origins of Christianity, was the work of Strauss.
In the preface to his Leben Jesu, Strauss places his own position as the "mythical" in contrast with the positions of orthodoxy and Rationalism in the following terms : " Orthodox exegesis started with the twofold assumption that the Gospels contained firstly history, and secondly supernatural history ; then Rationalism rejected the second of these assumptions, only to cling more firmly to the first--that these books had in them pure, though natural, history. Science cannot stop thus half-way, but the first assumption also must be dropped, and the question examined whether and how far we stand in the Gospels upon historical ground. " The mythical theory, he continues, had already been variously applied to the gospel
history, but neither in its pure form nor to its full extent ; too much history was always expected in details, in spite of the
acknowledged mythical character of the Gospels in general. Moreover, the application of this theory had always been too limited ; mythical elements were, indeed, admitted in the narratives of the childhood of Jesus, and again at the close of his life, but not in the intermediate narrative, the history of his public ministry. This limitation is untenable ; it is not permissible to enter the evangelical history by the splendid portal of myth and leave it by a similar one, and for what lies between rest satisfied with the crooked and weary paths of a natural explanation. " The author's method is to apply the principle of myth to the whole extent of the story of the life
of Jesus, to find mythical narratives, or at least embellishments,
scattered throughout all its parts. "
In justification of this method, Strauss appeals to the similar
allegorical interpretation in the ancient Church, e. g. in Origen. While the method of natural explanation of the Rationalists
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and Naturalists sacrificed the divine content of the sacred story and clung to its empty historical form, the mythical, like the allegorical, method prefers, on the contrary, to sacrifice the historical reality of the narrative and keep its absolute (eternal and spiritual) truth. If Supernaturalists cannot make up their minds to this, they only prove that, like children, they much pre fer the painted historical shell, even if emptied of all divine con tents, to the richest content when divested of its coloured cover ing. He then goes on to defend this method against objections which were partly due to misconception of the nature of myth,
as if it were an artificial product of intentional
invention, and partly based on the supposed incredibility of unhistorical legends becoming incorporated in Gospels composed so early
and in part by eye-witnesses. This objection would, Strauss says, be a serious one if the assumption as to the Gospels were correct. But the assumption rests neither on internal nor on external grounds, since neither in the case of the first nor of the fourth Gospel do we possess testimony early enough to assure us of their authorship by the apostles Matthew and
? In the absence of such testimony we are at liberty to assume an interval of at least thirty years between the death of Jesus and the origin of our Gospels ; and that this interval is sufficient to explain the rise of myths is placed beyond all doubt by the actual analogy of profane history (e. g. Herodo
John.
If any one still insists that an historical period like that in which the public life of Jesus was passed renders the forma tion of myths concerning it impossible, the reply that great personality, especially connected with a revolution pro foundly affecting the life of man, soon becomes the centre of an unhistoric halo of mythical glorification, even in the most matter-of-fact period of history. " Conceive recently estab lished community, revering its founder with all the more
tus).
enthusiasm on account of his unexpected and tragic removal from his work a community impregnated with a mass of new ideas which were destined to transform the world com munity of orientals, chiefly unlearned people, who therefore could not appropriate and express those ideas the abstract conceptual forms of the understanding, but only as symbols and stories in the concrete fashion of the imagination. When all this remembered, one can perceive that under these cir cumstances there must necessarily have arisen what actually did arise, viz. a series of sacred narratives fitted to bring vividly
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before the mind the whole mass of new ideas, started by Jesus, and of old ones, applied to him, cast the form of particular incidents in his life. The simple historical structure of the life of Jesus was hung with the most varied and suggestive tapestry of devout reflections and fancies, all the ideas enter tained by primitive Christianity relative to its lost Master being transformed into facts and woven into the course of his life. The most abundant material for this mythical ornamen tation was furnished by the Old Testament, which the first Christian community, composed chiefly of Jewish converts, lived and breathed. Jesus, as the greatest prophet, must have gathered up and surpassed his life and deeds everything that the ancient prophets had done and experienced he, as the restorer of the Hebrew religion, could not be anything inferior to the first law-giver in him, finally, as the Messiah, must have been fulfilled all the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament he had inevitably to meet the ideal of the
Messiah as already conceived by the Jews, so far as the de partures from this ideal which were made in known historical actions and speeches allowed. ought in our time to be unnecessary to remark that this transference of what was ex pected into the history of what actually took place, and in general the mythical embellishment of the life of Jesus, was not the work of premeditated deceit and cunning invention. The legends of a people or of a religious sect are in their genuine elements never the work of a single person, but of the generalised individual of the community, and hence are never consciously or intentionally produced. The imperceptible growth of a joint creative work of this kind made possible by oral tradition being the medium of communication. "
have given Strauss's description and defence of his method
in his own words, in order at the same time to give a speci
men of the lucidity and beauty of his style and exposition. This mastery of form has no doubt contributed much to the profound and far-reaching effect of the book this was, how ever, much more due to the inexorable logic with which the critic worked out his task all parts of the gospel history. " In this book all previous critical researches into the life of Jesus meet but they are at the same time completed, more exact, more pointed, and reduced to one fundamental prin ciple. This iron necessity of the method, carried through like a process of nature, this cold, passionless objectivity, which
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the author is sunk in his work and is only the calculator setting down and summing up the various accounts before him, was what made the book so impressive, or perhaps rather so terrible. It had about it the cold indifference of fate ; in the criticism of the gospel history the balance had been struck, and the verdict was bankruptcy. The gospel history had from all sides already felt the teeth of criticism ; it was here shown that its very heart had been reached. The effect of this work was immense. " 1
Such an effect Strauss himself had not anticipated. The panic of the theological and lay world, which saw in Strauss's criticism nothing less than the destruction of the Christian faith, was all the more surprising to him as he had not in tended anything of the kind. According to his assurance in the preface, which deserves full credit, his conviction had rather been that the inner kernel of the Christian faith was quite independent of his critical investigations. " Christ's supernatural birth, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, however much their reality as historic facts may be called in question. This certainty alone can lend to our criticism calmness and dignity, and distinguish it from the naturalistic criticism of former centuries, which thought to overturn the religious truth with the historic fact, and had therefore inevitably a frivolous character. The dogmatic content of the life of Jesus will be shown to be untouched in an appendix to this work. In the meantime, may the calm ness and coolness with which in the course of it criticism undertakes apparently dangerous operations, be attributed solely to the assured conviction that none of these things harm the Christian faith. "
The appendix to the second volume, thus announced, under took the dogmatic restoration of what criticism had destroyed. Unlike the naturalist and freethinker of earlier times, the critic of the nineteenth century should be filled with reverence for every religion, and should in particular be conscious of the identity of the highest religion, the Christian, with philosophi cal truth. There then follows a critical sketch of the historical development of Christological dogma, the truth contained in which is finally given in the following speculative form :-- "When mankind is once sufficiently developed to have as its
1 Schwarz, Zur Gesch. d. ncucstcn T/icoL, p. 97, sq.
? ? ? ? Ch. I. ] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 1 7
religion the truth that God is man and man of divine race, this truth, since religion is the form assumed by truth for the ordinary mind, must be shown in a manner comprehensible by all as a sensible certainty, i. e. a human individual must arise who is regarded as the present God. Inasmuch as this God- man unites in himself the heavenly divine nature and the earthly human ego, he can be said to have the divine spirit as his father and a human mother ; inasmuch as his ego reflects itself not in itself, but in the absolute substance, seeks to be nothing for itself, but to exist for God alone, he is the sinless and perfect one ; as a man of divine nature he is the power over nature and the performer of miracles ; but as God in human form, he is dependent upon nature, subject to its wants and pains, is in the condition of humiliation. Will he have to pay nature the last tribute also ? Does not the fact that human nature is subject to death falsify the belief that it is one with the divine ? No ; the God-man dies, showing that God has not shrunk from becoming man fully ; that he does not disdain to descend to the lowest depths of the finite, since he can find the way back to himself even thence, and in the most complete self-abnegation can yet remain identical with himself. More precisely, since the God-man as man's spirit reflected in its infinitude, stands in contrast to man as cling ing to his finiteness, this involves an opposition and conflict, and the death of the God-man is necessarily made a violent one at the hands of sinners, physical suffering being thus sup plemented by the moral pain of insult and accusation of guilt. If God thus finds the way from heaven to the tomb, there must also be a way to be found for man from the tomb to heaven ; the death of the Prince of Life is the life of mortal man. By his very appearance in the world as God-man, God showed himself reconciled to the world ; or more exactly, by laying aside in death his subjection to nature, he showed the way by which he eternally accomplishes the reconciliation, viz. by emptying himself and voluntarily assuming subjection to nature, and then annulling it to remain identical with him self. Since the death of the God-man only puts an end to his self-abnegation and humiliation, it is really his elevation and return to God ; thus in the nature of things death is followed by resurrection and ascension. "
We can well understand that Strauss, as the disciple of Hegel, could honestly believe that by this allegorical interpre
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matically what he had destroyed critically," but we can under stand equally well the energetic protest of the Christian world against such a compensation for its loss. Strauss had in fact deluded himself, and his case had in it a tragic element, in that he shared this delusion with the chief philosophy of his time, and cannot therefore be made personally responsible for it, while its disastrous consequences were borne by him person ally more than by any other man. It was the fundamental error of the Hegelian philosophy to suppose that the truth of re ligion consists in the logical consciousness of metaphysical relations, thus totally overlooking its actual nature, consisting, as it does, in emotional and volitional processes ; and this error led Strauss to think he had found the essence of faith in
Christ in metaphysical statements about the human race, which really did not so much as touch the sphere of religious faith, much less exhaust its highest truth. Strauss's mistake did not therefore lie in regarding the gospel stories of miracles as symbols of ideal truths--that they are really this could be easily proved from the New Testament itself ; but his mistake lay in looking for these truths outside religion, instead of within in metaphysical categories of doubtful value for
2l8 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
tation of Christ's appearance as a figure of humanity and its
metaphysical relation to the Absolute, he had restored " dog
? instead of the facts of the devout heart and moral will, which the saving and gladdening effects of our religion are found. If he had " paid more regard to these religious and moral truths, the deliverances of the devout consciousness," as Schleiermacher called them, this would of itself have led him to see further, that the historical Jesus was not merely an accidentally chosen type and example of these truths, but their original creative type and their historic source.
knowledge,
If the historical Jesus had been thus brought into an inner and essential relation to the religious and moral idea of Chris tianity, as its pioneer and prophet, justice would have been
done to his religious importance, which quite lost sight of in Strauss's allegorising, since there no sort of inner connec tion between the philosophical ideas which he looked for the essence of the belief in Christ and the person of Jesus himself. However, Strauss, after the critical disintegration of the legends of miracles, had given us positive picture of the ideal life of Jesus as a religious and ethical character, and had offered this to Christendom as the permanent kernel in place
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of the husks which criticism had destroyed, his scientific work would of course still have been attacked, but not with that passionate bitterness which proved so disastrous not only to Strauss's outward life, but also to his inner development, alienating for ever from Church and theology a man of great talent and a courageous spirit of inquiry. We of to-day, separated by half a century from those years of the Straussian movement, can only look back upon with unfeigned regret at the tragic fate dooming such a powerful and noble mind to failure, partly because the time was not ripe properly to receive
what was true and valid Strauss's critical labours, partly also
because he was himself still fettered by the false, and in this
case fatally mistaken, assumptions of the philosophical intel- lectualism of the time.
Of the mass of polemical literature evoked by Strauss's work, only three books are important for our purpose Xeander's Lcben Jesu (1837), Ullmann's Historisch oder mythisch and Weisse's Die evangelise he Geschichte, kritisch und philosophise bearbeitct (1838). The first two of the writers just mentioned belonged to the mediating school of Schleiermacher, which, with all its supernaturalistic leanings, made too many concessions to criticism to be able to condemn Strauss's line of procedure unconditionally. Strauss offered as a motto, aptly descriptive of Neander's book, the words, " Lord, believe, help thou my unbelief. " Neander, unable wholly to accept or to dispense with miracles, takes refuge in an emasculated conception of miracle a miracle he holds to be not anti-natural but supernatural, as resting on higher laws, at present unknown, the sign of a higher order of creative forces acting in our nature, which the ordinary order of nature has by the divine wisdom been eternally pre destined to receive. We must also assume various
? degrees of the supernatural, a less degree in miracles of healing than in some other kinds. Yet even these latter are a little
softened down. The water at Cana was not changed into actual wine, but properties merely like those of wine were imparted to the same way as mineral waters have them. In the cases of raising the dead there always (even John xi. ) the possibility of only an apparent death. The miraculous star of the Magi explained as a natural conjunction of planets, which only gave occasion for the journey, but did not show the way. The phenomenon at the baptism of Jesus
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220 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
is represented as a vision, the story of the temptation as an allegory. In this way the most striking miracles were either partially or entirely got rid of, though others were still retained, in particular the resurrection of Christ himself. Such an illogical method of procedure was evidently no refutation of Strauss's criticism ; the book was important only as showing how impossible a naive belief in the gospel narratives had become for a theologian affected by the thought of the time, and how important it had therefore become for theological science to take up a fresh position with regard to these
records.
Ullmann penetrated more deeply than Neander into the
heart of the question. He admits that in the Gospels legends
of an essentially symbolic character do occur, but it does not
? follow from this that everything is mythical ; it is precisely the problem to determine exactly the boundaries of the his
holds -- and without doubt rightly -- that Strauss's work failed chiefly in not doing this, but in confining itself to the mere negation of the traditions. Strauss's net result, as Ullmann acutely remarks, amounts to this, that the Church invented Christ ; but this makes the
torical and the mythical. Ullmann
history of Christianity incomprehensible. We ought rather to infer from this actual fact, which has changed the course of the world, that there was a corresponding cause, which can only be found in the personality of Christ, the Founder of the Church. Strauss, Ullmann argues, had underrated or ignored this personality, because his own philosophical assumptions involved the antecedent conviction that the idea does not fully manifest itself in a single individual, but is only un folded in the race as a whole. In reply to this assumption, it must be urged, that as an historical fact geniuses do appear from time to time in all departments of mental life, in whom ideas are embodied typically and perfectly, the idea of art, for example, in some of its forms. In a Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Raphael, Handel, etc. , the idea of their respective arts is fully given in a single example, and a supreme standard is set up for all who come after to aim at. Much more must this be possible in the sphere of religion. Though revelation may be common to all nations and times, it necessarily tends to concentrate itself at one supreme point of the religious development of mankind, and this point is the ideal, sinless Christ.
? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 221
Amongst all the books written against him, Strauss treated that of Ullmann with the most respect, making, in fact, some not inconsiderable concessions to it. To the dilemma pro pounded by Ullmann, whether Christ created the Church or the Church invented Christ, Strauss replied, not without reason, that the alternatives are not mutually exclusive even
the Church had been created by the power of the person ality of Jesus, might still, in return, have transformed and
adorned the idea of Christ by the aid of its mythical
tions and hopes. Nevertheless, in his book, published shortly afterwards, Vergdngliches und Bleibcndes. Zwei friedliche Bldtter (1838-39), Strauss allowed the justice of Ullmann's objection so far as to admit that man's religious life related to the rest of his life as the centre of a circle to its circumference, and that religion Christ was supreme, and was so far above other founders of religions as to be un surpassable for all time. For was in him that the unity of the divine and human first became a matter of conscious
ness, and this with such creative power as to supply the need
of all who came after him. He therefore now, with Ullmann,
recognised Christ as a religious genius historically unique, only he refused to follow Ullmann and Schleiermacher in con
verting this uniqueness of genius into absolute perfection,
thus raising altogether above the plane of history. But assuming that this position of Strauss was in itself a tenable one, its weakness lay his method of proving this grandeur of Christ for clear that the philosophical consciousness 01 the unity of the divine and human can scarcely be ascribed to the Johannine Jesus, and at any rate not to the historical Jesus of the synoptic Gospels. The error, which was bound to prove fatal to this eirenical position, lay in the attempt to find Christ's greatness philosophical idea, instead of in the unique character of his religious and moral consciousness and work. And in order to be able to ascribe that philosophical conscious ness to Christ with an appearance of historical
justification, he was guilty of the blunder of admitting the possible genuine ness of the Johannine Gospel and of treating as an his
torical authority. This produced wavering uncertainty in the third edition of his Leben Jesu, unpleasing contrast to the unflinching logic and clearness of the earlier editions, while the possibility of thus creating favourable impression upon the theological public was lessened by the not unfounded
concep
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suspicion that personal motives of expediency had helped to produce these partial concessions. Strauss himself retraced this false step in the fourth edition, which appeared shortly after, and thus brought the question back to its original posi tion. But this wavering had at any rate shown the totally inadequate treatment by Strauss of the fundamental question for a life of Jesus, as to the historical value of the documentary sources, and their relation to each other. The necessity there fore was shown of a scientific investigation of the question.
This was first supplied, and in a very thorough manner, by Hermann Weisse. He says in the preface to his Evan- gelische Geschichte (1838), that he had from the first welcomed
Strauss's work as not an injurious one but a helpful contri bution to true Christian knowledge and insight, which belongs not to the past but to the future, inasmuch as the book had carried through the unpleasant task of destructive criticism so thoroughly as to give us all the more courage for the attempt to substitute something positive for what criticism had swept away. With this view, Weisse starts with a detailed investigation of the literary relations of the Gospels, and comes, to his own surprise, to the conclusion that Mark's Gospel must be placed before the others in point of origin ality and age ; a conclusion so opposed to the then universal view that it required considerable courage to make it the basis of an account of the gospel history. The same view was simultaneously defended by a compatriot of Weisse, the Saxon clergyman Wilke, in an exhaustive, treatise. Still the view could only slowly and with difficulty make any way at first against the twofold prejudice in favour of John and Matthew, and afterwards against that in favour of Matthew ; it has now been accepted by the majority of theologians ; and the acceptance of the priority of Mark and the late origin of the Gospels of Matthew and of John as among the assured results of Biblical criticism is apparently only a question of time. Notwithstanding Weisse's success in determining the relation of the synoptic Gospels to each other and to that of John, he took up an untenable half-way position with regard to the latter. He considered it to be the work of a disciple of the apostle John, having no claim to direct historical accuracy, but still based, in its speeches at any rate, upon
historical reminiscences of the apostle, which, however, received a strong subjective colouring both in the apostle's
? ? ? ? Ch. NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
223
mind and in the process of literary composition by his disciple. The unity and symmetrical plan of the whole composition of John's Gospel were not recognised by Weisse Baur's indication of them sealed the fate of Weisse's semi-critical hypothesis. But while Weisse was certainly corrected by Baur on the question of the Fourth Gospel, he was as certainly superior to Baur in taking the right view of the synoptists.
In his estimate of the evangelical narratives Weisse fully agrees with Strauss in the negative conclusion, that every thing really miraculous, which the laws of nature, valid for all history, are alleged to have been broken by the absolute spirit, to be regarded as unnatural and on that account as unhistorical. " Before an act of the Deity completely viola ting the laws of nature and history, before a miracle in this properly unhistorical and anti-natural sense, we could only take up an attitude of vacant unreasoning resignation. " Weisse, too, believes that these narratives we must look for religious myths. But he by no means satisfied with Strauss's ex planation of them they are not to be explained, as Strauss thought, by a mechanical transference to the Messiah Jesus of conceptions and legends already given the Old Testa ment, but they are the special product of the religious spirit of Christianity, which expressed in them symbolically its ideal truth, as the fulfilment of all previous Jewish and heathen anticipations. Thus Weisse interprets the stories ot miracles purely as religious allegories, involuntarily invented by the imagination of the primitive community, which did not
distinguish between the poetic form and the ideal content. Weisse rightly urged that this method of exegesis much less offensive than Strauss's to the religious feeling of the present time. " For whatever illustrated legend permeated with the true subject-matter, with the idea of the sacred history, must be itself religious, essentially sacred. The historical revelation of God the Gospels loses not a whit of its sacred content a part of this content ceases to be regarded as an immediate fact of such a kind that the Deity appears as treating his own noblest work rather jest than in earnest. On the contrary, this revelation gains when the Gospels are recognised as the productions of rich spiritual
? which the circle of men, to whom the divine reve lation of Christianity was first addressed, deposited a pro ductive, creative consciousness of the divine spirit, descended
genius,
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? 224 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
into their midst, and of the manner of his working. It was
a consciousness such as this which found its thoroughly
appropriate expression in the sacred legends. " It is certain that this way of looking at the Gospel narratives, in con
junction with a penetrating investigation of the literary rela tions and value of the authorities, first indicated the course by which theology might hope to leave behind it Strauss's purely negative criticism and obtain a positive understanding of the Gospels. The further pursuit of this method by the
Tubingen School led to very important results.
The best, most just and most thorough estimate of Strauss's
book was that given by his Tubingen teacher, the famous critic and ecclesiastical historian, Ferd1nand Chr1st1an Baur, in the introduction to his book, Kritische Untersuchungen iiber die kanonischen Evangelien, ihr Verhdltniss zu einander, ihren Charakter und Ursprung. Baur finds both Strauss's strength and his weakness in his thoroughly logical negative criticism, which revealed the baselessness of our supposed knowledge of the Gospels, and showed us our ignorance of the real historic truth, thus preparing the way for true knowledge. To quote his own words, " Like all works of true originality and genius, Strauss's book has the great merit of being before and yet the child of its time. It gathered up the critical inquiries on the
life of Jesus with their results from every quarter, in order to present their naked ultimate issue and form them into a single whole, by a more vigorous method of proof, by defining what had been left indefinite, and by supplying existing deficiencies. Thus the book became the living centre of the whole critical movement of the time, which alone explains its immense effect. Strauss was hated because the spirit of the time could not endure its own picture, which he held up to it in faithful, clearly drawn outlines. In this reflection of itself the age became conscious of much of which it before had had no distinct idea, coming to perceive its contradictions and incon sistencies and false assumptions ; in a word, its complete want of true knowledge. Let us frankly admit the facts of the case, and rest assured that, instead of going on for ever with vague and empty polemics, it is time to look at Strauss's criticism as a product of its time, and to understand how, in the then existing stage of criticism, it was not only a possible but also a necessary phenomenon. What result could be reached from the investigations then carried on into the origin and
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mutual relation of the Gospels, except a purely negative one One opinion was opposed by another, taken together the opinions were mutually contradictory and destructive, and any certainty was impossible. was, in fact, just as Strauss himself said, in the darkness produced by the extinguishing of all supposed historical lights by criticism, the eye had gradually to learn to distinguish individual objects. Strauss's work was intended to begin this process, by leading men out of the general darkness into the clear day of historical know
But introduced a new era not in virtue of this positive but of its negative side its chief merit lay not in the knowledge which brought to light, but in the want of
of which made men conscious. This the truly historical importance of Strauss's critique. Its greatest merit will always consist having shown the condition of historical knowledge of the gospel history at the time, and in having done this from a pure love of truth, without prejudice or assumption, without mercy or consideration, and must be allowed with cold severity. Every step the work takes beyond this seems to lie outside its true province. But the spirit of an age resists with all its might the proof of its ignorance in a matter of its knowledge of which had long been so certain. Instead of recognising what had to be recognised, any progress was to be made, all possible attempts were made to create fresh illusions as to the true state of the case, by reviving long antiquated hypotheses, by theological charlatanism, by using all the motives of a false party spirit. But higher certainty as to the truth of the gospel history can only be attained by recognising, on the basis of Strauss's criticism, our previous knowledge as no knowledge at all. When all our previous knowledge self- contradictory and self-destructive, certain knowledge can only come from the examination and classification of details. But these details formed the limit of Strauss's criticism. "
In order to get beyond Strauss's negative results, the criticism of the gospel history must become the criticism of the documents which are the sources for this history. And
this not to continue to consist of mutually exclusive hypotheses, but to be placed upon a firm basis, the special characteristics of each Gospel must be exactly ascertained, the literary features and objects of its author must be investigated, and its relation determined to the general circumstances of
ledge.
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the time out of which it arose. This had been attempted, after a fashion, before F. Chr. Baur by Bruno Bauer, Weisse, and Wilke, who put the evangelist Mark in the place of a general indefinite tradition, as the original evangelist, and derived the other Gospels from him. This view was carried to the most extreme lengths by Bruno Bauer, who regarded Mark not only as the first narrator, but even as the creator of the gospel history, thus making the latter a fiction and
Christianity the invention of a single original evangelist. In spite of the evident absurdity of this " phantasmagorical view
of history," we must recognise a grain of truth in Bruno Bauer's opposition to Strauss, when he asked whether the
mysterious myth-creating consciousness of the community could produce its Gospels without having hands wherewith to write, or taste to compose, or judgment to connect related and exclude alien matter ? 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,
? ? ? Ch. MEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
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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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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.