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BY PROFESSOR OTTO PFLEIDERER, D.D.

The Leben Jesu of David Friedrich Strauss, which was published in the year 1835, marked an epoch in the history of theology. On the one hand, this book represents the crisis in theology at which the doubts and critical objections of centuries as to the credibility of the Bible narratives had accumulated in such overwhelming volume as to break through and sweep away all the defences of orthodox apologetics. On the other hand, in the very completeness of the destructive criticism of past tradition lay the germs of a new science of constructive critical inquiry, the work of which was to bring to light the truth of history. It is quite true that the Life of Jesus of 1835 was far from perfect, as judged by the present standard of scientific criticism, and Biblical science has long since advanced beyond it. Nevertheless, it cannot be disputed that it takes rank amongst the standard works which are secure of a permanent place in literature for all time, for the reason that they give final expression to the spirit of their age, and represent typically one of its characteristic tendencies. The liberating and purifying influence which such works exert [6]on their own time, as well as the service they render in opening out new lines of thought, lends to them, for all coming generations, a peculiar value as admirable weapons in the great fight for truth and freedom. Indeed, if our scientists are to be believed, when they tell us that the development of the individual is only an abbreviated repetition of the similar but much slower phases of the development of the species, it is hardly too much to maintain, that in the present and in the future every individual who determines to make his way from the bondage of a naïve trust in authority and tradition into the freedom and light of mature thought must pass through precisely that stage of thorough-going logical negative criticism which is represented by Strauss’s work in a unique manner. As, according to Christian ethics, the formation of a pure moral character is possible only by the death of the old Adam, the rise of true religious convictions is by a similar Stirb und werde, die and come to life. The imaginary lights of mythological tradition must be put out, that the eye may distinguish the false from the true in the twilight of the Biblical origins of our religion. The ancient structures of belief, which the childish fancy of men had constructed of truth and poetry, Wahrheit und Dichtung, must be taken down and cleared away, in order that a new erection of more durable materials may be raised. To all earnest seekers after truth, the Leben Jesu of Strauss may be helpful, not as supplying the truth ready to hand, but as stripping the bandages of prejudice from the eyes, and so enabling them clearly to see and rightly to seek it.

For these reasons it is obvious that the publication of a new edition of the English translation of [7]this work needs no justification. It is only those who consider the first appearance of the book inexcusable and unfortunate that can call in question the desirability of its republication. But no one can hold such an opinion who is able to follow the course of the history of the religious thought of Protestantism. The critical process which reached its conclusion in Strauss’s book, with its negative or revolutionary results, was latent from the beginning in the life-blood of Protestantism. The theologians of the Reformed Churches of the sixteenth century subjected the traditions of Catholic Church history to keen historical criticism; and if they did not then think of extending its operations to Biblical tradition, we are justified in recognising in the well-known declarations of Luther, as to the inferior value of certain books of the Bible, and as to the unimportance of physical in comparison with spiritual miracles, plain predictions of the line of development which Protestant theology was destined ultimately to take.

It is intelligible enough that the criticism of the Bible could not arise amongst the orthodox theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were restrained by a rigid doctrine of inspiration from an unprejudiced treatment of the Bible, and were moreover too much absorbed in dogmatic controversies and the defence of their confessions of faith, to feel the need of more searching Biblical studies. It was amongst English Free-thinkers and Deists that the credibility of the Biblical narratives was first seriously assailed, and with so much temper as to greatly detract from the scientific value of the result. Thomas Woolston’s Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (six in number, 1727–1729) [8]are specially noteworthy. They attack the literal interpretation of the miracles as ludicrous and offensive, and advocate the allegorical interpretation of them as figures and parables of spiritual truths. It is possible to find in Woolston’s theory an anticipation of the mythical principle of interpretation which Strauss opposes to the rationalistic one. Reimarus, the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, by the publication of which Lessing threw German theology into a ferment, occupies the same position as the English Deists, and indeed owed much to their influence. But at the same time a noteworthy difference is observable from the very first between the way in which Lessing treated these questions and their treatment by the earlier Free-thinkers; and the difference is characteristic of the two schools. German rationalism bears the marks of its origin in the idealistic optimism of the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolff, and remains in sympathy with the ethical spirit of Biblical religion; whilst the but faintly religious naturalism of the English Deists leads them, with their rejection of the Biblical miracles, to attack the religion of the Bible, and drag down into the mire its representatives and heroes. With this the German Rationalists have no sympathy. They were unable to treat the Biblical narratives of miracles as historical occurrences, but they were not prepared on that account to regard them as deceit and delusion on the part of Biblical heroes, or as the invention of Biblical narrators: their reverence for the Bible and its religion kept them from both of these inferences. They tried to get over the difficulty in two ways,—either they looked upon the narratives of miracles, particularly those of the Old Testament, as popular religious [9]legends, traditions, or “myths,” of the same kind as the myths to be met with in all heathen religions; or, on the other hand, regarding them as containing the actual history of perfectly natural events, they ascribed the miraculous appearance and form which they bear simply to the mistaken judgment of the narrators, or, in other cases, to the erroneous view of the interpreters. The latter method was employed especially by Dr. Paulus in his commentary on the Gospels, in which he seeks, with a great display of learning and ingenuity, to explain all the miracles of the New Testament. The theologian Schleiermacher also made frequent use of it in his Lectures on the Life of Jesus; and traces of it are to be met with even in the commentaries of theologians of the supernaturalist school—as, for instance, Olshausen’s. The inexcusable violence which was thereby done to the Biblical narratives, by which they are forced to say something quite different from what the unsophisticated narrators intended them to say, according to the plain sense of their words, was not felt; nor were these interpreters conscious of how much the Gospels are deprived of their choicest treasures of ideal truth and poetic beauty by this method of treatment, and this only for the sake of securing instead miserable common-place stories as the final outcome of critical examination.

The favour with which this radically false rationalistic interpretation of the Gospels was received by very many German theologians at the beginning of this century finds its sole explanation and excuse in the prevailing view of the time—that our Gospels were written very soon after the death of Jesus, during the first generation of Christians, and two of [10]them by eye-witnesses—the apostles Matthew and John. On this supposition, the occurrence in the Gospels of unhistorical elements, of religious legends, such as might be without hesitation allowed in the Old Testament, could not be thought of. Or if the admissibility of this point of view was granted in the case of the birth-stories of the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke (as by De Wette), objection was felt against its application to the miracles of the public life of Jesus. Thus, on the question of the historicity of the gospel narratives, theologians held views which were confused, undecided, contradictory, and lacking thoroughness. This state of things could not last; simple faith had at every point lost its security; doubt attached to the miraculous narratives of the New no less than to those of the Old Testament. But before Strauss no one had had the courage to explain all these narratives of both Testaments alike by the logical application of one and the same principle; and mainly for the reason, that the critics were all under the bondage of the supposition of the apostolic authorship of the Gospels of Matthew and John. Yet even this supposition had received various shocks prior to Strauss. Critics had been unable to close their eyes to the fact that there are differences between these two Gospels particularly, of such a fundamental nature as to preclude the possibility of both being right, and therefore of both having been written by eye-witnesses and apostles. Under the influence of dogmatic and sentimental motives, Schleiermacher and his disciples accepted it as an a priori certainty that John is to be preferred to Matthew; and from this secure position, as was imagined, these theologians assailed the narrative of Matthew at all points, and undermined the tradition [11]of its apostolic authority. But suppose the same arguments with which they assailed Matthew might be used against their favourite evangelist John? What if it could be shown that his narrative is in no respect more probable, but, on the contrary, more improbable, than that of Matthew? In that case, must not the critical verdict which those theologians had given against Matthew so triumphantly and without regard to its consequences, apply equally to John, and thereby overthrow the only remaining pillar of apostolic authority for the gospel tradition?

This logical consequence, which was at the time deemed an unheard-of innovation, notwithstanding the opinions of a few individual critics (Vogel, Bretschneider), Strauss had the courage to draw. By that act he cast off the fetters by which the examination of the Gospels had till then been bound, and secured a free field for a thorough-going criticism of them. Since the external evidence of the authorship of the Gospels is not of a kind or a date such as to compel us to consider the tradition of their apostolic origin established, and as the matter of all the Gospels alike is not free from historical improbability, there is nothing, Strauss argued, to prevent our complete abandonment of the historicity of their miraculous narratives, though the Rationalists continue to maintain it, or our treating them as religious legends or myths, similar to those which, as was admitted, the Old Testament contained. The novelty in the work of Strauss was not the application of the principle of “myth” to Biblical narratives; others had already made use of it in the case of the Old and to some extent in the case of the New Testament; the originality lay in the uncompromising [12]thoroughness with which the principle was applied to every section of the gospel story; the originality lay in the merciless acumen and clearness with which the discrepancies between the Gospels and the difficulties presented to the critical understanding by their narratives were laid bare, and with which all the subterfuges of supernaturalist apologists, as well as all the forced and artificial interpretations of semi-critical Rationalists, were exposed, thereby cutting off all ways of escape from the final consequences of criticism.

The merciless thoroughness and unreserved honesty with which criticism did its negative work in this book, by exposing the baselessness of the supposed knowledge of the gospel history, produced a profound shock amongst theologians and laymen. It was not merely the untaught multitude who believed that the foundations of Christianity must perish with the miraculous stories of the Bible; learned theologians were distressed as the daring critic so rudely, and without any regard to consequences, roused them from the illusions of their sentimental or speculative dogmatism and their precipitate treaty of peace between faith and knowledge. “Strauss was hated,” as Baur truly said, “because the spirit of the time was unable to look upon its own portrait, which he held up before it in faithful, clearly drawn lines. The spirit of this age resists with all its power the proof of its ignorance on a matter about which it has long thought itself certain. Instead of acknowledging what had to be acknowledged, if any progress was to be made, all possible attempts were instituted to create fresh illusions as to the true state of the case, by reviving obsolete hypotheses and by theological charlatanism. But a higher certainty as [13]to the truth of the gospel history can be attained in no other way than by acknowledging, on the basis of Strauss’s criticism, that our previous knowledge is no knowledge at all.” But here we come upon the limits of the criticism of Strauss: it brought home to men the fact of their want of knowledge, but it did not conduct to the required new and positive knowledge. This Strauss was unable to do, because he offered a critique of the gospel history only, without a critique of the documents which form the sources of this history.

In these words Baur has accurately described the main defect of Strauss’s book. When Strauss drew from the discrepancies and contradictions of the various narratives of the Gospels the conclusion that they have all alike little credibility, the conclusion was intelligible enough in reply to the ingenious artifices of the traditional harmonists, who maintained that in spite of the contradictions the evangelists were all alike worthy of credit; but really this line of procedure on the part of Strauss conformed as little as that of the harmonists to the principles of strict historical inquiry. These principles require us to examine the relative value of the various sources with reference to their age, to the situation, the character, the interests, and aims of their author; to assign accordingly to one account a higher measure of credibility than to another; and so, by distinguishing between what is better and what is not so well attested, to make out what is probable and reach the original matter of fact. It is true Strauss made some advance towards such a differentiation of the relative value of the gospel narratives; and particularly with reference to the inferior historical value of the Johannine in comparison [14]with the Synoptic narrative, he has made acute observations, the worth of which ought to be estimated the higher as they boldly opposed the then dominant preference for the Gospel of John, and effectively prepared the way for the criticism of Baur. But it was not Strauss’s forte to prepare, as the foundation of the material critique of the gospel history, a thorough critique of the literary sources, nor, in the state of the general science of criticism at the time, could this be very well expected. When all deductions have been made, to Strauss belongs the honour of having given, by his criticism of the gospel narratives, the most effective impulse to a more penetrating examination of the sources of the gospel story, and of having prepared the way for this to no small extent, particularly as regards the Fourth Gospel. Baur’s classical critique of this Gospel completed in this direction the criticism of Strauss, and laid its foundations deeper. As regards the Synoptic Gospels, Weisse and Ewald, Holtzmann and Volkmar, did good work towards clearing up the relations of the Gospels to each other, especially in establishing the priority of Mark, by which a firmer basis was laid for the positive decision of the question as to the historical foundations of the gospel tradition. The fruit of this critique of the sources, carried on from various sides with painstaking industry, was the new literature dealing with the life of Jesus, which, just a generation after the first Leben Jesu of Strauss, took up again the problems it had raised, but in a new fashion, and with improved critical apparatus. We shall have further on to refer to Strauss’s new life of Jesus.

The same scholar, Weisse, who was the first to [15]point out the want in Strauss’s book of a more satisfactory critique of the sources, and who had sought to supply this defect in his Evangelische Geschichte (1838), called attention at the same time to a defect in the mythical theory of Strauss. Weisse was fully agreed with Strauss so far, that we must acknowledge the presence of religious myths in miraculous narratives of the Bible, but he was not satisfied with the way in which Strauss had explained their origin. According to Strauss, the early Christians had simply transferred to Jesus as the actual Messiah the miraculous legends of the Old Testament, out of which the Jews were supposed to have composed the miraculous portrait of their expected Messiah; and he was right in thinking that the miraculous stories of the Old Testament do undoubtedly supply the motives and models of no few narratives in the New Testament, but not, surely, of all. Precisely the chief miracles—the birth of Jesus, his baptism, transfiguration, resurrection, the change of water into wine at Cana, the stilling of the storm, and walking on the sea—violence must be used to explain these miracles by reference to Old Testament types, and the Jewish idea of the Messiah offers no lines corresponding to these. At this point therefore, at all events, we must look about us for another method of explanation. And Weisse was undoubtedly right in pointing to the spontaneous productivity of the Christian spirit in the primitive Church as the source of the miraculous narratives, in which it gave expression in symbolic and allegorical forms to its ideal truth and the new inspired life of which it was conscious. Not that these narratives were intended by the narrators themselves to be merely allegories, or [16]symbolical illustrations of spiritual truths; but the religious imagination gave birth to these illustrations after the manner of unconscious poetry, that is, without distinguishing between the poetic form and the essential truth of the idea; believing, as the religious imagination did, in the ideal content of the narratives, and being at the same time unable to give vivid and sensible expression to it in any other than the material form of outward miracles, it involuntarily came to believe also in the reality of the symbolical form of the narrative to which it had itself given rise; it conceived idea and history both together in such inseparable combination as to confer on each equal truth and certainty.

In the production of such ideal narratives the same process is observable to-day in the experience of simple religious believers: feeling the ideal truth of the content of the stories, they come to believe also in the reality of the outward history in which the idea has for them been incorporated. But the critical understanding of the historical inquirer is permitted, and indeed is bound, to distinguish clearly and definitely, as the simple-minded believer cannot do, between the spiritual idea and the outward form of its representation, and to find in the former both the productive power and the permanent kernel within the outward husk. This explanation of the miraculous legends of the Bible is not only more correct and profound than Strauss’s from the point of view of historical science, but for the religious consciousness it is far less objectionable, as Weisse observes with truth; inasmuch as in this case the legends do not appear as the worthless product of the idle play of the imagination, but as the normal expression, rationally and psychologically intelligible, of a creative [17]religious spirit, which displays its treasures of ideal truth in this legendary and mythical poetry for the benefit of the originators and the wider world. Nor should it be left unnoticed that Strauss himself had already indicated in a few cases this more profound explanation of myths by means of the religious idea. At the close of his interpretation of the story of the Transfiguration (§ 107), for instance, he says, we may see from this example very plainly how the natural system of explanation, by insisting on the historical certainty of the narratives, lets go their ideal truth, sacrificing the content to the form of the story, whereas the mythical interpretation, by resigning the historical material body of such narratives, really rescues and preserves their idea, their soul and spirit. He might, however, have unfolded the idea of the Transfiguration with greater definiteness and fulness if he had not merely alluded to the dogmatic discussion of Paul in 2 Cor. iii. 7 sq., but had recognised it as the real theme of the gospel story, and had interpreted the latter accordingly. In the same way, in the case of the story of the birth of Jesus (Luke i. and ii.), Strauss laid great emphasis on the analogies and figures of the Old Testament, which, after all, could only contribute as secondary motives in the formation of this birth-story, while its real origin is to be sought in the Pauline Messianic idea of “the Son of God, according to the spirit of holiness” (Rom. i. 4; 1 Cor. xv. 45 sq.), a fact Strauss overlooked. This defect takes a really surprising form when he comes to explain the miracles of the Fourth Gospel, which, in complete independence of any suggestion from the Old Testament, are entirely based upon the dogmatic ideas of the Alexandrian theology, and simply supply their [18]transparent symbolic vestment. How much more truthfully and profoundly can the miracle at Cana, or the raising of Lazarus, or the cure of the man born blind, be interpreted from this point of view than from that of Strauss! In this respect Baur’s interpretation of the Fourth Gospel was an immense advance beyond Strauss, as the latter himself acknowledged subsequently.

With the above defects of Strauss’s method of interpretation is connected, in the last place, the fact that the outcome of his book in reference to the decisive question,—What, then, is the historical kernel of the evangelical tradition, what the real character of Jesus and of his work?—is meagre and unsatisfactory. In the closing essay at the end of his work, it is true, he endeavoured to restore dogmatically what he had destroyed critically, but he effected this in a way which amounted to the transformation of religious faith in Christ into a metaphysical allegory. The predications of faith with regard to Christ are to be regarded as containing predications as to the relations of the human race to the Absolute, as to the self-abasement of the Infinite to the Finite, and the return of the Infinite to itself, as to mind and its power over nature, and its dependence on it, and the like. In all this Strauss was led astray by the influence of the Hegelian philosophy, which looked for the truth of religion in logical and metaphysical categories instead of in the facts and experiences of moral feeling and volition. But as there is no essential relation between these metaphysical ideas and the person of Jesus, he is made arbitrarily, as any one else might have been, an illustration and example of absolute ideas to which he stands in no more intimate relation than the rest [19]of the human race; whereby the special historical importance of the originator of the Christian community, and of the first model of its religious and moral life, is not only left without explanation, but is lost altogether, a result which does violence not merely to the religious consciousness, but is unsatisfactory to historical science, which is concerned to understand Jesus as the originating source of Christianity. It is quite true that we can go with Strauss in his answer to the alternative of Ullmann whether the church created the Christ of the Gospels or he the church, by declaring the alternative false, and the two things in so far both tenable as the Christ of the Gospels is a creation of the faith of the church, but this faith an effect of the person of the historical Jesus. We find this answer to Ullmann just, but cannot free Strauss from the charge of having worked out in his book the first only of these two positions, and of having passed over the second. He has shown no more than that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah. But how did the church come by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah? To this question—which is the main question of a Life of Jesus—Strauss gave his readers no answer. Undoubtedly it can be urged in his defence that the criticism of the sources was at that time still in a condition of too great confusion and uncertainty to permit any successful answer to that problem of the historical kernel of the life of Jesus. Nevertheless the difficulty of the matter could not relieve the historian of the duty of at least making an attempt to trace from the materials left to him, as the residue of his critical analysis of the deeds and words of Jesus, the [20]main outlines of his character, to bring out the peculiarity and originality of his religious genius, and in this way to discover in the original personality and reforming activity of Jesus the originating cause of the rise of the community of his disciples and their faith in him as the Messiah and his divine mission. If in his closing essay Strauss had presented a religious and moral description of Jesus of this nature, instead of a metaphysical allegory as a substitute for the shattered mythological conception of tradition, though the objection of the church to his work would not have been wanting, it would then undoubtedly have taken a less passionately denunciatory form than was the case, in consequence of the purely negative character of the result, unrelieved by any modifying conclusion.

In proportion to the strength of the feeling of these defects, shared by readers of all parties, was the urgency of the duty laid upon scientific theologians of preparing, by a renewed and more thorough examination of the Gospels, the stones of a new edifice to be reared upon the site laid bare by Strauss’s critical labours. “In the darkness which criticism produces, by putting out all the lights hitherto thought to be historical, the eye has first to learn by gradual habit to again distinguish a few single objects,” as Strauss himself remarked in his third edition. But this difficult task was not accomplished by those apologists who endeavoured to make good the damage by the antiquated arts of the harmonists, with their petty concessions, mystifications, and evasions, but by those courageous inquirers who, undeterred by dogmatic considerations, sought by a strictly historical method to set in the true light the exact composition and the mutual relations [21]of the evangelical documents. We have already remarked that Baur and his disciples, the so-called Tübingen school, took a leading part in this work, while other independent students co-operated with them, supplementing and correcting their labours. This, however, is not the place to follow these inquiries in detail; but we must glance at their result as regards the historical treatment of the life of Jesus.

For an entire generation the examination of the literary details of the Gospels had occupied theologians so exclusively that the interest in the supreme problems of the evangelical history seemed to have been almost lost sight of. But this interest was newly awakened, and made itself felt far beyond learned theological circles, by the nearly simultaneous publication of Renan’s Vie de Jésus and Strauss’s second Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk (1864). These two works, with all their dissimilarity, resemble each other in this, that they were both written by scholars of the highest eminence, not for the learned world, but for educated people generally, both throwing overboard, therefore, the ballast of learned detailed criticism, and presenting the results of their inquiries in a language intelligible to everybody, and attractive from its literary excellence. They are alike also in this, that both subordinate the criticism of the gospel traditions to a positive description of the personality of Jesus, of his essential religious tendency and genius, of his relation to the Messianic idea of his nation, to the law and the temple, to the hierarchy and religious and political parties of his time, both seeking an explanation of the reformatory success of the commencement, and also of the tragical issue [22]of his labours in these factors. But inasmuch as Strauss confines himself to what he can deem the ascertained or probable facts, after a strict critique of the sources, the portrait delineated by him turns out naturally somewhat indistinct and defective in its outlines; the meagreness of the result answers to the caution of his historical conscience. Renan, on the other hand, feels no such scruples; in his criticism of the sources he goes to work with a much lighter heart, and claims for the biographer the right to help himself over the lacunæ and obscurities or contradictions of his authorities by calling in the aid of the creative imagination, with its powers of combination and inference. By this means he has succeeded in presenting a life of Jesus distinguished for its epic vividness and dramatic development, but its æsthetic charm has been purchased at the price of its historical solidity. This novelistic feature becomes most questionable when it wanders into the vagaries of the naturalistic explanation of the miracles (e.g. the raising of Lazarus), and in such cases casts reflections on the moral character of Jesus. On the other hand, for Renan must be claimed the merit of having emphasised the social aspects of the Messianic mission of Jesus, and of having attempted to sketch the development of his inner life, a change in the phases of his reformatory labours. As to Strauss’s second Life of Jesus, its strength lies, as in the first, not so much in the first part, which deals with the positive side of the history, as in the second part, where it comes to treat of the mythical side of the history. But in the second work, in the place of the analysis of the traditions given in the first, we get a synthetic presentation of the rise and gradual growth and elaboration, in [23]more and more exalted forms, of the idea of the Christ of mythical tradition; the successive stages of the development of the Christian consciousness are set forth by reference to the genesis of the ideas of Christ’s person, power, and supernatural exaltation. Thus this genetic method of treatment, followed in the later work, supplants and confirms the result of the former one; while the latter had shown that the miraculous narratives in the Gospels are myth and not history, the new Life shows how in these myths, after all, history is reflected, namely, the history of the religious consciousness of the Christian community. The great advance of this new treatment upon that of the previous work was the fruit of the intervening studies of Baur and his disciples, to which Renan, to the detriment of the critical and historical value of his work, had not paid sufficient attention.

The two works of Renan and Strauss were followed by a deluge of literature on the life of Jesus, the historical value of which is very various. To give an account of all these books would require more space than is at my disposal. I must confine myself to the work of Theodor Keim, an English translation of which has been published under the “Theological Translation Fund.” The work is so distinguished by the richness of its learned material, and the ability with which it is handled, as to constitute it the best representation of the present condition of our knowledge of the life of Jesus. Keim’s standpoint differs from that of Strauss by the warmth of religious feeling and enthusiasm which pervades his entire work, while at the same time no fetters are laid upon the critical reason; freedom and piety join hands, in order to be just to the [24]double claim which the truth of history on the one hand, and the church on the other, are justified in presenting. The most brilliant part of Keim’s work is his delineation of the religious personality of Jesus,—how in it were combined, in a unique degree, strength and harmony, complete openness towards the world, with perfect inwardness towards God, so as to become the source of a new religion, in which self-surrender and liberty, humility and energy, enthusiasm and lucidity, are blended, and the chasm of previous ages between God and man filled up. His description of the psychological development of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus out of inward experiences and outward impressions and impulses, is also drawn with great delicacy of touch; at all events, it is an able and suggestive effort to penetrate, as far as the state of the sources admits, by means of sympathetic and reproductive divination, to the personal experiences and mental states of the religious genius from whom a new epoch in the world’s religious history proceeded. Still, as in the kindred efforts of Renan, Weizsäcker, Beyschlag and Weiss, we may never forget how much, with the poverty of the ascertained historical materials, is left to the uncontrolled power of combination and divination; in other words, to the imagination, which at best can do no more than roughly and approximately arrive at the truth, while it may no less easily go far astray. It is certainly to be deemed an advance that in the more recent works on the life of Jesus the subject of main interest is not so much the external miracles as the internal, the problems of the peculiar nature and development of his religious consciousness and character, his view of his vocation, his attitude towards [25]the Messianic idea, and the like. Yet this advance is manifestly attended by the temptation to sacrifice the caution of historical criticism to the production of a biography as rich in detail and as dramatic in movement as possible, and to represent things as the ascertained results of critical examination, which are really nothing more than subjective combinations of the writers, to which a certain degree of probability may be attached, though the possibility will always remain, that the actual facts were something quite different. The subtle examination of the question, whether Jesus himself ever declared himself to be the Messiah, or spoke of his return in celestial glory, by Martineau, in his Seat of Authority in Religion, is in this respect deserving of all attention, and is of great value, as at least supplying a needed lesson in caution in view of the excessive confidence with which questions such as these have been treated by Renan, Keim, and later writers. In any case, the reserve and caution of Strauss are quite justified as a corrective and counterpoise to the extravagances committed in the opposite direction.

With regard to the miraculous narratives of the Gospels, the advance of more recent criticism beyond the first book of Strauss has been in two directions. First, these questions no longer constitute the central point of historical interest, but are subordinated in importance to the problems of the religious consciousness of Jesus. Secondly, we do not now seek to interpret these narratives so exclusively and without distinction from the one motive of the transference to Jesus of the types of the Old Testament; but the great difference between the various narratives of miracles is clearly recognised, and various [26]clues are accordingly used in their explanation; whilst in one narrative we observe merely symbols of religious and dogmatic ideas, in others we discover, behind the glorifying tendency to idealism, some background of historical fact, for instance, in the miracles of healing, as is now very generally acknowledged. It cannot be denied, it is true, that with this perfectly legitimate endeavour is connected the peril of falling back into the old abuses of rationalistic artifice. Even Keim has not quite escaped this danger, inasmuch as he abandons the basis of strict history in the case of the story of the resurrection of Jesus, and makes concessions to supernaturalistic dogma; as the sequel of which the old doctrine of miracles may be readmitted into Lives of Jesus, as is really the case in the works of Beyschlag and Weiss.

In this danger appears the necessity for the continued prosecution of the negative work of criticism, a duty as yet by no means supererogatory. The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it. And as this task was performed by Strauss in his first Life of Jesus in a manner that may serve as a model for all time, the book, like every truly classical work, must ever retain its value. Strauss’s criticism broke down the ramparts of dogmatism, new and old, and opened to the inquiring mind the breach through which the conquest of historical truth might be won.

Otto Pfleiderer. [27]

[Contents]

Certior factus ex Britannia, librum meum, quem de vita Jesu XI abhinc annis composui, virorum ejusmodi studiis faventium cura in linguam Britannicam translatum, brevi illic in publicum proditurum esse, lælitia anxietate temperata commoveor.

Nam ut gratulari sibi æquum est auctorem, cujus operi contigit, patriæ terræ ac linguæ fines transgredi, ita sollicitudo eundem subeat necesse est, ne, qui domi placuit liber, foris displiceat, aut cujus inter populares vel adversariorum numero creverat auctoritas, apud exteros neglectus in obscuro maneat. Solum enim cœlumque vix minore libri quam plantæ periculo mutant. Et facilius quidem transtuleris opera in illis rebus versantia, de quibus inter diversas gentes communis quidam aut certe parum discrepans sensus obtinet: ut, quæ poetæ aut disciplinarum quas exactas dicunt periti proferunt, inter politiores hujus seculi nationes fere solent esse communia. Neque tamen vel hoc in librorum genere plane æquum Germano cum Britannis aut Gallis certamen. Peregrina enim cum facilius nostra quam illorum et lingua et indoles recipiat, longe frequentius poetæ quoque illorum in nostram quam nostri in illorum linguas transferuntur. At Germanicum opus in theologiæ et philosophiæ quasi confinio versans, si trajicere in Britanniam parat, ne illa quidem inter utramque gentem sensus et studiorum communione adjuvatur. Tam diversa enim utrimque via istæ disciplinæ processerunt, ut in theologia impii, in philosophia superstitiosi Britannis Germani iidem videamur. Cum iis, qui in Britannia ausi sunt, historias, Judæorum et Christianorum religione sacratas, examini ut ajunt critico subjicere, nihil agendum esset, nisi ut Lockii sui atque Humii principia philosophica, sicut ad reliquas omnes historias, ita ad illas etiam, quas legibus istis hucusque superstitio subtraxerat, adhiberent: in Germania ad hoc monstri res degeneraverat, ut superstitioni a theologorum potissima parte derelictæ philosophia succurreret, critico ergo non simplex sanæ philosophiæ contra theologorum superstitionem, sed duplex et contra philosophorum ex sanioribus principiis deductas ineptas conclusiones, et contra theologorum propter philosophica ista auxilia ornamentaque inflatam atque induratam superstitionem, certamen ineundum esset. Ex hoc rei statu proprie Germanico natum opus meum, nominibus insuper atque opinionibus theologorum ac philosophorum nostratium refertum, nec scholarum etiam vocabula, quibus nostræ tantum aures assuevere, satis evitans, a Britannorum [28]usu ingenioque non posse non abhorrere, tam probe scio, ut de translato in eorum linguam, licet interpretatio, quantum quidem ejus inspicere potuerim, et accurata et perspicua sit et librum, quantum in ipsa est, popularibus commendet, num gaudendum mihi magnopere sit, mehercule nesciam.

Accedit, quod a primo libri mei ortu duo lustra, et a recentissima etiam editione unum jam lustrum intercessit. Ut tum, quum opus inchoabam, via incedebam, quam pauci ingressi, totam emensus nemo erat, ita per primum illud lustrum nullæ fere nisi adversariorum voces audiebantur, principia mea negantium et historiam in Evangeliis vel meram, vel levissima tantum erroris rumorisve adspersione tinctam contineri affirmantium, cum quibus non modo non disputandum, sed a quibus ne discendum quidem quidquam erat, quod ad rem et ad librum vere emendandum pertineret. Proximo demum lustro viri vestigia mea non refugientes neque evitantes, sed persequentes, ubi ego substiteram longius progressi, rem revera juverunt atque promoverunt. Narrationes in Evangeliis traditas, quas rerum vere gestarum esse persuadere mihi non potueram, mythorum in modum, qui inter antiquas gentes inveniuntur, aut in ore populi a minutis initiis coaluisse et eundo crevisse, aut a singulis, sed qui vere ita evenisse superstitiose in animum induxerant, fictas esse existimaveram. Quod ut sufficit explicandis plerisque eorum, quæ dubitationem moventia tribus prioribus Evangeliis continentur: ita quarti Evangelii auctorem ad tuendas et illustrandas sententias suas haud raro meras fabulas scientem confinxisse, a Baurio, theologo Tubingensi doctissimo, nuper ita demonstratum est, ut critici me judicii rigori religiosius quam verius temperasse intelligam. Dumque prima a Christo secula accuratius perscrutantur, partes partiumque certamina, quibus nova ecclesia commovebatur, in apricum proferunt, narrationum haud paucarum, quas fabulas esse ego bene quidem perspexeram, sed unde ortæ essent demonstrare non valueram, veram in illis primæ ecclesiæ motibus originem detegere theologis Tubingensibus contigit.

Imperfectum igitur opus meum, ut solent rerum initia, non ob hoc tamen, quod sententiæ deest, timerem, ne a Britannis sperneretur, nisi formæ etiam illud quod supra dixi peregrinum atque inusitatum accederet. Qui si suum Hennellium non audiverunt, de iisdem rebus cum Britannis Britannice agentem, quomodo audient, si quis Germanus surget, cujus liber cum sua lingua non potuerit cogitandi quoque disputandique morem prorsus Germanicum exuere? Sed absit omen verbis meis, atque ut pridem in Germania, ita mox in Britannia jaceat liber hic εἰς πτῶσιν καὶ ἀνάστασιν πολλῶν καὶ εἰς σημεῖον ἀντιλεγόμενον ὂπως ἂν ἀποκαλυφθῶσιν ἐκ πολλῶν καρδιῶν διαλογισμοί.

STRAUSS.

Scribebam Heilbronnæ.

Med. mens. April a. 1846. [29]