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STRAUSS’S NEW WORK ON THE LIFE OF JESUS.
Das Leben Jesu, fur das deutsche Volk bearbeitet. (The
Life of Jesus, adapted to the German People.) von
David Friedrich Strauss. Leipzig : F. A. Brockhaus.
1864.
Nearly thirty years have now elapsed since a “ Life of
Jesus” by David Frederic Strauss made its first appearance.
We were at that time in Germany, and remember well the
startling effect that it produced. There were not indeed
wanting men who at once perceived, that the views which
it set forth with such uncompromising fearlessness, were a
natural consequence of principles of criticism which had
been for a long time partially and perhaps unsuspectingly
applied. But even those who were familiar with such prin
ciples and ’freely recognized them in relation to insulated
points of the gospel history, had never fully realized to
themselves the results with which they were pregnant, and
were filled with a sort of terror when they saw all their
possible applications gathered to a focus and urged home
with remorseless consequentiality to their legitimate issue.
Of replies to this alarming book there was no lack; but
none of them, not even that of Neander, were felt to have
effectually repelled the serious blow which it aimed at the
old traditional trust in the strictly historical character of the
evangelical narratives. Every ensuing contribution to the
. criticism of the New Testament which bore on it the stamp
of solid learning and thorough honesty, though it might
approach the subject from another point of view, moved in
the same direction, and tended rather to confirm than to
weaken the scepticism raised by Strauss. This was espe
cially true of the Tubingen school of theology. The imme
diate effect' was a general unsettling of opinion and a
pervading sense of uneasiness. It was impossible for things
to remain as they were. The old rationalism, which, assu
ming the impossibility of miracle, had attempted to unite
with this negative theory a literal acceptance of the facts
recorded in the Gospels, had exhausted'its resources, and
was shewn by the unanswerable logic of Strauss to be more
untenable and absurd than the simple, childlike faith which
it had undertaken to replace. Only one of two courses now
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remained: either to fall hack into broad, self-consistent
orthodoxy, which took things as they were written with
unquestioning credulity; or else to go boldly forward in the
path opened by Strauss and Baur, and develop the results
which they had established, with courageous honesty into
all their consequences. A perfect trust in truth and fearless
ness of the world, such as few men possess, was indispensable
to the adoption of the latter alternative. It was a trial of
the spirits, and not many were equal to it.
From the storm of reproach and execration which assailed
him on all sides, Strauss took shelter in studious privacy ;
and for many years, finding little encouragement to the
prosecution of theological research, busied himself with pur
suits of another though still kindred character, which bore
valuable fruit in his biographies of Ulrich von Hutten and
Reimarus. Meantime the world moved on, however theolo
gians might wish to be stationary. The events of 1848 and
1849 had powerfully roused the popular mind of Germany;
and the outbreak of the almost contemporary movements
of the German Catholics on one hand, and of the Protestant
Friends of Light on the other, shewed what a craving there
was in all quarters for release from ecclesiastical bondage
and freer religious development. Strauss from his retreat
marked these ominous phenomena with thoughtful and not
irreverent eye. Cautious and temperate in his political
views, he felt with growing conviction, what he has so
strongly expressed in the preface to his present work—that
the country of the Reformation can only become politically
free, to the extent that it has wrought out for itself a
spiritual, religious and moral freedom.
*
He discerned the
risk to which many minds were exposed from their inability
to draw a clear line of separation between the permanent
and the perishable in Christianity—of renouncing the spi
ritual substance with the historical form—or at least of
oscillating continually between a wild unbelief and a spas
modic piety.-f- The result was a firm persuasion that it
was a duty to come to the relief of this morbid condition of
the popular mind. He had convinced himself that, owing
* “Wir Deutsche konnen politisch nur in dem Masse frei werden, als wir
uns geistig, religios und sittlich frei gemacht haben.”—Vorrede, xx.
+ Ibid, xviii.
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to the wide diffusion of education, the people of Germany
were prepared for the profitable entertainment of many
questions, which might have been justly thought to be
prematurely agitated a quarter of a century before. He had
gained the experience, which has been constantly that of
other teachers of religion,—that on spiritual topics where
the premisses lie within every human consciousness, there
is often a readier perception of deep, fundamental truth in
simple and earnest men of the lowest class, than is to be
found among their superiors in social position, whose minds
are clouded by conventional prejudices, and not seldom dark
ened by the interposition of an useless mass of artificial
book-learning between their inner vision and the eternal
realities of the universe. In this purpose of bringing his
views before the general public, he was encouraged by the
warm sympathy of his brother, who, though himself a manu
facturer, took a strong and intelligent interest in the theolo
gical controversies of the time, and was regarded by Strauss
as no unfitting type of the middle-class intellect of Germany,
fully competent to decide on the main points at issue be
tween the conservative and the progressive schools. Before
the publication of the present work, Renan's Vie de Jesus
appeared in France. The reception it met with furnished
additional proof, that the time had come when the ancient
limits of learned insulation might be broken through, and
an appeal be safely made to the popular mind and heart.
Beyond this general appeal from the verdict of a craft to
the judgment of the world, the works of Renan and Strauss
have little in common.
*
Strauss’s first-work was intended immediately for theolo
gians. Some wished at the time that, like Bretschneider’s
Probabilia, it had veiled its heresies in Latin. From the
task that it proposed to itself, it was essentially analytic
and destructive, and it seemed to leave behind it a very
negative result. It took the whole mass of gospel narra
tives as it found them, and subjecting them to the severest
* In one point they touchingly agree—in the dedications prefixed to each ;
one to the memory of a beloved sister, the other to that of a brother. In both
we painfully miss the distinct recognition of a hope, which to us seems the only
availing consolation in such cases. Yet both are affectionate in tone, and, we
do not doubt, are genuine utterances of the heart—each strongly marked by
the idiosyncrasy of character and race—that of Strauss, grave and earnest; that
of Renan, airy and sentimental.
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critical test, it affirmed that it had succeeded in dissolving
much that had been received as history, into legend and
even into myth, of which the source could often be traced,
and of which the aim was obvious. Like the lines of ap
proach drawn round a beleaguered city, the hostile move
ment was from the circumference towards the centre—
constantly advancing further and further, and breaking
down one defence after another, till at last it seemed doubt
ful whether the inmost citadel itself would not be. stormed
and reduced to a ruin. There was something almost ap
palling in the imperturbable coolness and apparent reck
lessness of consequences with which Strauss pursued his
work. But it was a work which had to be done. It was
desirable to test the utmost force of criticism on the histo
rical frame-work of Christianity. Dissent as we may from
the author’s conclusion, and even in cases where he leaves
no way to any definite conclusion at all, it is impossible
not to admire, in many sections of the book, the remarkable
acuteness and skill with which a number of widely dis
persed and scarcely appreciable, indications are combined to
throw light on the possible origin of a particular narrative.
Though the general theory of Strauss, in the unqualified
largeness of its earliest enunciation, must doubtless undergo
important limitations, yet his first work will ever retain a
high value, as opening the source from which many ele
ments have been supplied to the present texture of the
gospel history, and furnishing the student with a model of
thorough critical investigation.
His new work has been written with quite another view. It
is in no sense a revised edition of the first. If the object of
the former was to decompose a multifarious whole into its
constituent parts, the main design of the present volume is to
reconstruct, by gathering up the residuary facts into a solid
nucleus, and then attempting to explain how a mythic atmo
sphere has formed around it. It reverses the order of the
foregoing process. It advances from the centre towards the
circumference, making good its ground as it proceeds—striv
ing to convey as distinct an impression of the origin and
founder of Christianity as facts now ascertainable permit,
and maintaining with calm earnestness throughout, that no
results of historical criticism can affect the certainty of those
eternal truths, or impair the influence of that beautiful life,
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which make the gospel what it is—a possession for ever to
mankind. This is evidently the aim of the hook. No
candid reader can dispute it. There are occasions on which
we think he has overstrained his theory. We cannot accept
all his assumptions without material qualification; and his
own premisses appear to us to yield more positive and con
solatory conclusions than he has himself drawn from them.
But the volume before us, with all its deficiencies, is the
clear expression of an honest, an earnest, and, we will add,
a noble mind—a mind which has sought truth for its own
sake, though on some vital points we feel strongly that it
has missed it, and which has at least proved its own since
rity by cheerfully paying the penalty which truth’s loyal
service too constantly incurs. Strauss, in his preface, does
not conceal his anxiety that his two works, as having dif
ferent objects, should be kept perfectly distinct; and he
has even left directions in his will, that in case a new edi
tion of his former work should be called for, it should be
faithfully reprinted, without any reference to the present
volume, from the first edition, with only a few corrections
from the fourth.
*
The limits to which we are restricted, will prevent us
from giving more than a summary outline of the plan and
contents of this learned and suggestive work. After a rapid
survey of successive attempts to write a “ Life of Jesus”—
beginning with Hess near a century ago, and terminating
with Renan and Keimf—Strauss proceeds to determine the
criteria of authenticity, and to inquire how far they are
satisfied by any extant testimony to the Gospels. He de
cides, that in their present form they furnish no evidence
at first hand. They are the embodiment of a cumulative
tradition, carrying down with it some written memorials of
particular discourses and transactions from a very early
date. He shews how credulous and uncritical were the
earliest witnesses to the books that form our actual canon
* Vorrede, xiii.
+ Die Meftschliche Entwickelung Jesu Christi (The Human Development of
Jesus Christ), a very interesting inaugural address on accepting the chair of
Theology at .Zurich, December 17, 1860 ; much commended by Strauss, and
furnishing, in the warm devotional sentiment with which it envelopes the
person of Christ, a not unwelcome relief from the somewhat chilling influence
of his own more negative views.
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—Irenaeus and Tertullian, and even the more learned and
philosophical Origen and Eusebius. Fidelity to simple fact,
even after the desire to harmonize the four evangelists had
awakened something like a critical spirit, was constantly
overpowered in their minds by dogmatic or practical consi
derations—by the wish to extract a moral or establish a con
clusion. This was the spirit of their age.' They were conscious
of no wrong in yielding to it. The examination of Papias’s
account of the origin of Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels,
proves that the works referred to by him could not have been
identical with those which we now possess under the same
names. Indeed, the preposition rara—according to—hardly
allows direct authorship. In like manner the indication in
Luke’s preface of many contemporary records of Christ’s
ministry, and the evident desire which both the Gospel and
the Acts betray, of reconciling the opposite tendencies of
the Jewish and the Pauline schools, presuppose a later
period for the composition of both those books than is re
concilable with their having proceeded in their present form
from a companion of the apostle Paul. Contrary to the
opinion which he once held, Strauss has yielded to the
arguments of Baur, and is now convinced that the apostle
John cannot have been the author of the fourth GospeL
He ascribes the tenacity with which Schleiermacher and
some other eminent men have clung to the opposite view,
rather to sentiment than to critical proof, and thinks it had
its source in strong reaction against the old rationalism
■which was supposed to find its chief support in the Synop
tical Gospels. Only in the Epistles of Paul, and in the
Apocalypse which he regards as the work of the apostle
John, does Strauss recognize any works of direct apostolic
origin in our present canon. Having upset the earlier dates
which the old apologists had attempted to fix, he does not
pretend to find any more definite lower down. We gather
from the general tenor of his criticism, that he supposes our
four Gospels to have assumed their present form some time
in the earlier part of the second century. With the notions
now prevalent in the Christian world, this may appear dis
tressingly vague. But can those who complain, satisfacto
rily establish anything more certain? We want evidence,
not declamation. When we consider how these narratives
have been composed, of what materials they consist, through
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what changes of form they have passed, how gradually they
have in all probability been accumulated, and how little
anything like formal publication, in our sense of the word,
can be predicated of them, till their authoritative recogni
tion by the Catholic Church towards the close of the second
century—it is obvious that the assignment of a precise date
to the authorship of any one of them, is altogether out of
the question. By taking this broad though vague ground,
from which there is as yet no final verdict of criticism to
warn him off, Strauss gains time and space for that free
development of tradition and its consequences, in which he
finds a natural solution of many perplexing enigmas in the
gospel history. Possibly he may carry his theory too far
in this direction, as he certainly on some points overstrains
its application ; but he is at least more self-consistent than
Ewald, who agreeing to the full with Strauss in an absolute
renunciation of the miraculous, cuts off by his limitation of
the date of the Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, all
possibility of accounting without violence for its introduction
into the narrative of the New Testament
*
Notwithstand
ing this free treatment of the written documents of Chris
tianity, Strauss distinctly admits that a full and living
stream of tradition poured itself into them, which bore along
with it the new spirit of Christ,—vivid impressions of the
most salient features of his personality, and authentic records
of his most remarkable words and acts—and with such a
penetrating and diffusive power, wherever it spread, that it
“ created a soul,” to use a fine expression of Milton’s, “ under
the ribs of death,” and deposited far and wide over the ex
hausted soil of heathenism the elements of a higher faith
and a nobler life. We have often thought we could trace
a wonderful providence in the apparently defective medium
through which Christ has been revealed to us;—not set
* Most unnecessarily, on more occasions than one, Strauss seems to us to
have explained away a very probable fact into the exposition of a mere idea.
Can anything be more fanciful than his interpretation of Luke’s statement, that
Jesus, in consequence of the unbelief of his own kindred, transferred his resi
dence from Nazareth to Capernaum, where he met with a more cordial reception
—as a symbolical announcement of the rejection of Christianity by the Jews,,
and its acceptance by the heathen ? (p. 121). There is to us also something
equally unreal in his comparison of the Sermon on the Mount with the Sinaitic
legislation (p. 124), though this may have been suggested to him by his strong
persuasion that, according to the Messianic conceptions of that age, the Christ
was to be a second Moses.
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forth in clear and definite outline, with every feature exactly
delineated, and every light and shade filled up—a present
ment which would have exhausted by at once satisfying
the imagination,—but disclosed to us in transient glimpses
of ineffable sweetness and surpassing majesty, which require
the co-operation of our own highest thought to interpret
and complete them, and make the Christ in whom is our
deepest trust, the creation in part of God’s own spirit within
us. What Christ planted in the world, was not a dogma
nor a form, but a living word, which had its root in his own
life, and carried with it his own spirit. It propagated itself
under God’s blessing, but through human agencies, over all
the earth, imbibing a flavour from the various soils which
nourished it, and taking a new colour from changing skies.
We mark its earliest growth in the Galilean records of
Matthew. We observe how its vital juices sprout into lux
uriant tendrils and put forth leaves and blossoms in Paul
and Luke.. We see it bending with purple clusters in
John. There is a sense in which the fourth Gospel, while
deeply tinged with the ideas of the time, may still be said
to present us with the most genuine expression of the spirit
of Christ, because it exhibits the highest point of organic
development within the New Testament; though it may
not have been written by the apostle whose name it bears,
and though many of its contents may not correspond to
historical fact.
“The Johannean Gospel,” writes Strauss (p. 143), “with its
image of Christ, attracts more sympathy from the present gene
ration than the Synoptical with theirs. These, written out from
the quiet heart of undoubting faith in the primitive society (for,
in their conception of the person and being of Christ, there is
comparatively little difference between the liberal Judaism of the
first, and the tempered Paulinism of the third Gospel), found a
natural response in the equally sure and quiet trust of the cen
turies of faith. The former, with its restless striving to recon
cile a, new idea with the existing tradition—to represent as an
objective faith, what it grasped subjectively as certain truth—
must be better suited to the temper of a time, whose faith is no
longer a tranquil possession, but an incessant struggle, and that
would fain believe more than it yet properly can. In reference
to the impression which this side of its influence makes on our
present Christianity, we might call the Gospel of John, the
romantic Gospel, though in itself, it is anything but a romantic
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*
production. The unrest, the intense sensitiveness, which in the
believer of to-day result from his effort, amid the new views
which irresistibly force themselves on him, still to keep firm hold
of his ancient faith—proceeded, on the contrary, in the evangel
ist, from his endeavouring to raise the old tradition to the height
of his new ideas, and mould it into accordance with them; but
the restlessness and the effort, the flickering before the eye, the
wavering in the outline of the image so produced, is on both
sides the very same ; and hence it is precisely towards this Gospel
that the modern Christian feels himself especially drawn. The
Johannean Christ, who in his self-delineations continually, as it
were, overdoes himself, is the counterpart of the modern believer,
who to be a believer must be ever in like manner overdoing him
self. The Johannean miracles, which are resolved into spiritual
signs, and yet at the same time exhibit the extreme form of out
ward miracle, which are reported and attested in every way, and
yet are not to be regarded as the true ground of faith—are mira
cles and yet no miracles ; people ought to believe them, and yet
believe without them : just as this half-hearted age seeks to do,
which wears itself out in contradictions, and is too worn and
spiritless to attain to clear insight and decisive speech in reli
gious things.”
There is much truth' in these words, but not the whole
truth. They do not do full justice to the very case which
they so forcibly put. No doubt we have in the fourth Gospel
a vivid expression of the endeavour to reconcile the simple,
popular trusts which are transmitted to us in the three
first, with a philosophic conception of God’s relation to the
universe which at that time pervaded with its subtle influ
ence the whole upper region of thought throughout the
Greco-Roman world. But it was not all unrest; it was not
interminable struggle. In those wonderful chapters, from
the 13th to the 17th, which are the highest utterance of
the Johannean Gospel, the problem has its solution. In
love and trust, in oneness of affection and endeavour with
the omnipresent God, in self-surrender to the Parent Mind
through the heart’s deep sympathy with the holiest human
manifestation of filial obedience—the troubled spirit finds
at last the rest and peace for which it has yearned. And so
it will be in the final issue of this agitated and questioning
* The allusion is to the distinction between the classical and the romantic
schools, familiar to all who are acquainted with the history of German litera
ture in the early part of the present century.
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age of ours. When the battle between science and faith,
between historical traditions and the religion of the in Tier
consciousness, has been fought out, and their mutual rela
tionship has been adjusted ; the spirit of Christ will survive
these controversies of the intellect, and disengaged at length
from artificial obstructions and gratuitous difficulties, will
descend with all its power into the human soul, and fill it
with a profounder faith and a holier love.
*
The somewhat tentative character of Strauss’s first book
and its large application of the mythic principle, that on
the image of Christ, as presented to us in the Gospels, some
of the most striking features had been impressed by the
Messianic assumptions of the primitive Church,—left on the
reader’s mind a painful doubt whether the author recognized
any historical Christ at all, and whether what we had been
accustomed to accept as such, was not to a large extent a
product of the imaginative enthusiasm of the first believers ;
or, to put it in the briefest form, whether, instead of Christ’s
having created the Church, the Church had not rather created
Christ. The supposition, conceived in this broad, unquali
fied way, is so preposterous that it furnished those who
were eager to find in the work not what it might contain
of truth, but where it could be most effectively assailed, a
ready and obvious point of attack. It is only justice to
Strauss to say, that his mature thoughts embodied in the
present volume, afford no ground for imputing to him so
wild an extravagance. He affirms most distinctly not only
the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth, but the won
derful effect of his personality in introducing the greatest
spiritual revolution in the history of the human race. What
he contends for is simply this : that the image of that per
sonality has not been conveyed to us through perfectly
transparent media ; and that though the features are suffi
ciently distinct to enable us to verify the individual, they
have been blended in their transmission with the deep sub
jective influence of the recording mind. Before we condemn
this view, we must first shew that with a thoroughly honest
criticism we are able to escape it. That Jesus was born
* How searching are these words of the great Augustine! “Vae animae
audaci, quae speravit si a te recessisset, se aliquid melius habituram. Versa et
reversa in tergum et in latera et in ventrem, et dura sunt omnia. Tu Solus
requies.”—Confess. Lib. vi. c. 16.
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and bred of humble parentage in Nazareth of Galilee ; that
he was a hearer of John, and received baptism at his hands ;
that he commenced the career of an independent religious
reformer in Galilee, sharing in the general Messianic ex
pectations of his time ; that he penetrated to the spiritual
substance of the law, and believed that in the coming age
its outward form would be abolished for ever; that he
attached followers to himself from his own rank in life,
and preached to multitudes repentance and faith, awaken
ing into consciousness the higher life that was slumbering
in them ; that he waged an unsparing war with the formal
ism and hypocrisy of the professed guides and instructors
of the people, and gave his interest and sympathy in pre
ference to publicans and sinners; that the essence of his
teachings is condensed in the Sermon on the Mount, in
innumerable parables, and in occasional words that escaped
from the fulness of his inmost spiritual being in varied inter
course with the world,—all summed up in the two great com
mandments of love to God and love to man, of which his
whole life was a living impersonation ; that, though he
foresaw the fate which awaited him from direct encounter
with an irritated and malignant priesthood at Jerusalem,
this did not deter him from resolutely pursuing his pro
phetic career till its close ; that, betrayed by one of his own
followers, he fell into the hands of his enemies, and was
executed ignominiously by the Boman authorities on the
cross ; that notwithstanding the dismay and the dispersion
which this event immediately produced among his disciples,
they nevertheless after a season recovered their confidence
and hope, and firmly believed in his resurrection from the
dead and his continued presence and visitation from the
heavenly world;—these are facts which Strauss clearly
recognizes as the historic frame-work of the evangelical
narrative, and as the basis of his further speculations re
specting their accompaniments. He thinks that in conse
quence of being so far above the ideas of his age and coun
try, Jesus has been often misunderstood by those who heard
him ; and that we are therefore justified in interpreting the
general tenor of his instructions by the highest and most
spiritual utterances recorded of him ; that, for instance, we
have probably a truer reflection of his spirit in some of the
parables peculiar to the Pauline Gospel of Luke than in
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others which occur in Matthew’s, and hear evident marks
of the Judaic narrowness of its original materials. He
believes that we can trace a spiritual growth in the mind
of Jesus, and that the consciousness of his Messianic mission did not take possession of him all at once,—that it first
becomes distinctly conspicuous about the time of the trans
figuration. Having once acquired the conviction that he
had been chosen by God to fulfil the Messianic work, it
was only a natural consequence that Jesus should apply to
himself, and expect to find realized in himself as God’s
instrument for a great purpose, the several predicates that
were attached by universal belief to his office. In this part
of his life, however, it is especially difficult to disentangle
what he may actually have said about himself, from the
stronger and ampler language respecting the Messiah then
current among the Jews, which later faith assumed that he
must have used, and therefore unhesitatingly applied to him.
Enough—he was profoundly sincere in his conviction, cou
rageous and ready for self-sacrifice in carrying it out; and
if the admission implies that there was a certain tinge of
enthusiasm in his character, he possessed this quality in
common with some of the purest and noblest spirits that
have adorned the human race; nor is it in any wise incom
patible with a providential vocation and a divine life. Such
we gather to be Strauss’s impression of the historical Jesus.
But in this history there are two elements—one which we
have just described, probable in itself and consistent with
the known laws of matter and mind ; another, intermingled
with it, which transcends those laws and stands out as an
exceptional case in the history of the world. Strauss’s
theory of the universe (of which we shall have to say a
word or two by and by) precludes him from admitting the
possibility under any imaginable circumstances of such
occurrences as would constitute the latter element. The
problem, therefore, which he has to solve, is to account for
the copious infusion of this element into every part of a
history which contains so much of the highest truth and
has left so profound an impression on the subsequent course
of human affairs. His explanation is the following: that
assuming the traditional facts of Christ’s actual life as their
basis, it was the object, first of the preachers of the gospel,
and afterwards of those who reduced our earliest records t(
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writing, to establish on that basis a conclusive argument
that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ or expected Messiah,
the Son of David, the second Moses, the Son of God; and
that the working of this strong purpose, blended with intense
conviction, on the traditional materials subjected to it in a
mental atmosphere already deeply charged with foregone
conclusions, evolved more and more, as the actual facts re
ceded into further distance, the mythical halo which has
invested the whole narrative with a supernatural character.
If Jesus were the Messiah, then all the passages of the Old
Testament which had a Messianic import, and all the ex
pectations to which the current interpretations of them had
given rise, must have had their fulfilment in his person
and his life; and this assumption, ever present to the mind
of the evangelists, moulded unconsciously the loose and
fluctuating mass of oral tradition into the form in which
we now possess it, and mingled with it elements that had
their source in the fervid faith of the believing mind. This
is what has been called the mythic theory of Strauss. The
old rationalistic school, including Eichhorn and Paulus and
not wholly excluding Schleiermacher himself, disbelieved
equally with Strauss the possibility of the strictly miracu
lous ; but they attempted by various expedients to explain
it away from a narrative which they accepted in the main
as historical. Strauss saw the futility of this method, and
the violence which it did to the plainest rules of exegesis;
but he attained the same object of accounting for the intro
duction of the miraculous, by carrying down the Gospels
to a later date, and ascribing it to the imperceptible growth
of tradition.
It becomes necessary here, for the sake of the English
reader, to define a little more exactly the idea conveyed by
the word myth, when used in this sense. Heyne was one
of the first who shewed that the myth was a necessary form
of thought in the earlier stages of human development.
While language is yet imperfectly furnished with abstract
terms, and the imaginative are ascendant over the reasoning
faculties, ideas struggling for utterance clothe themselves
in an objective shape and find expression in narrative and
personification. Heyne made a distinction between conscious
and unconscious fiction; and regarded the latter alone as
properly a myth. In this sense a myth has been called the
�i4
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spontaneous expression in a historical form of the indwelling
idea of a community. Since Heyne’s time the subject has
been more scientifically developed by George in his essay
on “ Myth and Legend.”* In legend, according to him, there
is always at bottom some fact, however much it may have
been subsequently overgrown by the wild offshoots of the
imagination. A myth, on the contrary, fills up with its own
creations from the first—imagining what must have been—
the absolute vacancy of the past. But in the proper myth,
as in the proper legend, according to this interpretation of
them, whatever fiction they may involve is unconscious, is
unintentional. With the progress of the intellect, however,
and a clearer perception of the distinction between a fact
and an idea, this primeval unconsciousness becomes no
longer possible. Fiction is still practised, but it now justi
fies itself by its intention, that of ineulcating a moral or
enforcing a truth. The literary conscience of antiquity was
much laxer in this respect than our own. The line between
fiction and history was far less distinctly recognized. If a
good end could be served, no hesitation was felt in assum
ing a false name to recommend a work, and in arbitrarily
combining and interpolating the actual facts of history to 1
bring out more effectually the impression intended to be
produced. The centuries preceding and following the birth
of Christ, abounded in works of this description. It was
almost a characteristic of the age. The late F. C. Baur was
the first theologian of standing and authority who ventured
boldly to assert the occurrence of this practice within the
limits of the New Testament, as an element towards the
solution of the complicated question of the relative credi
bility of the evangelists. It was with him an unavoidable
consequence of the conclusions at which he had arrived
respecting the origin and composition of the fourth Gospel.
Indeed his clear and forcible reasonings reduce us to this
dilemma ; we must either admit the authenticity and trust
worthiness of John, in which case the Synoptics fall at once
in value, as shewn to be constantly in error; or else, assum
ing the three first Gospels to exhibit the primitive Pales* Mythus und Saga: Ver such einer wissenschaftlichen Entwickelung dieser
Begriffe und ihrer Verhaltnisses zurn christlichen Glauben. Berlin, 1837..
Legend is an inadequate, and in reference to its etymology, an inaccurate ren
dering of Saga, for which there is no exact equivalent in English.
�Strauss's New Work on the Life of Jesus.
15
tinian tradition and John to have used their materials, we
must allow that he has handled them, in many instances
at least, with a freedom that deprives them of all proper
historical character. No third course seems possible. Strauss
has embraced apparently in their whole extent the views of
Baur on this subject. He describes the Johannean Gospel
as another Apocalypse, projecting its images not, like that
of the apostle whose name it has assumed, on the thunder
clouds of the future, but on the quiet wall of the past
(p. 156). He has been compelled, too, under the same in
fluence, to use the word myth in a much wider sense than
that to which it had been restricted by Heyne and George,
including conscious as well as unconscious fiction. In its
application to the evangelical narratives, he considers the
only distinction of importance to lie between the historical
and the ideal, from whatever source the latter may proceed.
“In this new form of the Life of Jesus, I have,” he says,
“ chiefly in pursuance of the indications of Baur, allowed more
scope than formerly to the supposition of conscious and inten
tional fiction; but I have not on that account thought it neces
sary to employ another term. Rather in reply to the question,
whether even the conscious fictions of an individual can properly
be called myths, I must, even after all that has been written on
the subject, still say : by all means, so far as they have found
credence, and passed into the tradition of a people or a religious
party; for this is at the same time a proof that they were fash
ioned by their author not simply at the instance of his particular
fancy, but in harmony with the consciousness of numbers. Every
unhistorical narrative, however it may have arisen, in which a
religious community finds an essential portion of the holy foun
dation on which it rests, inasmuch as it is an absolute expression
of the feelings and conceptions which constitute it what it is, is
a myth ; and if Greek mythology is concerned in separating from
this wider definition of myth, a narrower one which excludes
the idea of conscious fiction, critical, on the other hand, as
contrasted with orthodox theology, has an interest in embracing
under the general conception of myth, all those evangelical nar
ratives to which it assigns a purely ideal significance.”—P. 159.
The mythic principle so understood Strauss applies to
the explanation of the second of the two elements which
we have described as entering into the composition of the
Gospels. The earliest, evangelists preached and wrote to
shew that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ; and the course
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of their argument, with the kind of proofs on which they
chiefly insisted to sustain it, was powerfully influenced by
the conception through which they habitually realized to
themselves the Messianic character and office—whether as
the Son of David, the Son of God or the Incarnate Word.
The devout Jew of that age firmly believed that the Messi
anic era was at hand. His exalted faith threw its own
glowing imagery on the sacred pages of the law and the
prophets; so that wherever he opened them, whether he
lighted on history or poetry or precept, the mystic interpre
tation in which he had been trained, enabled him to discern
some foreshadowing of him that was to come. The Chris
tian had convinced himself that he was already come in
Jesus ; and consequently all those passages of the ancient
Scripture, in which "he had been accustomed to find the
clearest indications of the future deliverer of Israel and
mankind, he assumed without doubting, as God was true,
must have their fulfilment in his person and life. What
men are persuaded they must see, we know as a rule that
they will see, even when present appearances are against
them; but when this enthusiastic conviction operates not
on contemporary facts, but on a continually receding tradi
tion, it inevitably overpowers the objective by the subjec
tive, and envelopes the history of the past in a hazy atmo
sphere of imaginative feeling. Without adopting Strauss’s
theory in all its details, and strongly questioning some of
his assumptions, truth nevertheless compels us to admit,
that of many statements in the Gospels, after thoroughly
analyzing and comparing them, the origin and character are
best explained on the supposition that this mythic principle
was largely concerned in producing them.
This side of the history of Jesus, Strauss has brought out
in a series of mythic groups, in each of which he endeavours
to discover the formative idea which gave birth to it; in
other words, what Messianic assumption has invested the
simple historical nucleus with a character of its own. In
the first of these mythic groups relating to the birth of
Jesus and the communication of his supernatural powers,
three views are clearly traceable which must have origi
nated in different conceptions, and are incapable of perfect
reconcilement with each other, though they are blended to
some extent in our existing Gospels. We have first the
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17
account of the. descent of the Spirit at his baptism, which
is probably the oldest view ; then two narratives, in Mat
thew and in Luke, of his conception by a virgin under
divine influence, which are inconsistent with each other;
and lastly, the doctrine of the word made flesh in John,
who omits the genealogies, and has no allusion to Christ’s
having come into the world in any other than the ordinary
way. His birth at Bethlehem, with the miraculous accom
paniments of the star and the heavenly host, and the adora
tion of the magi and the shepherds,—the murderous jealousy
of Herod, the flight into Egypt, and the presentation in the
Temple,—incidents which it is utterly impossible to weave
together into a self-consistent narrative, and which, strange
and startling as they were, do not appear to have exercised
the slightest effect on thirty ensuing years of tranquil ob
scurity,—we can hardly doubt were assumed to have
occurred, because certain passages referring to the Messi
anic advent in the Old Testament were believed to require
them, and because they were such as antiquity, Jewish and
heathen, constantly associated with the entrance of great
men into the world. Strauss has instituted a parallelism
between the life of Moses and that of Jesus which is to us
novel, and which we think he has somewhat overstrained.
Both, however, were deliverers; both effected the emanci
pation of their people through sore trials and temptations ;
and both, according to the popular belief, ran a risk of
perishing in infancy. This last incident often occurs in
the legendary memorials of the heroes of the world. It is
told of Augustus by his freedman Julius Marathus, in the
broad daylight of Roman civilization, and in an age contem
porary with Christ.
*
The relations of Jesus with the Bap* Suetonius, Octavianus c. 94. It had been announced a few months before
the birth of Augustus, that a citizen of Velitraa (to which his family belonged)
should become the ruler of the world ; whereupon the Senate being alarmed,
issued a decree that no child bom in that year should be reared. We had
marked this passage some time ago as forming a parallel to the story of the
murder of the innocents, and noticed, what Strauss has omitted to mention—
that the language used is identical with that in which Suetonius in another
part of his book, and Tacitus in his History, describe the Messianic expecta
tion of the Jews. The following is the prophecy about Augustus: “ Velitris,
antiquitus tactfl, de coelo parte muri, responsum est, ejus oppidi civern quundoque rerum potiturum.'’ Of the Jewish belief Suetonius thus writes : “Esse
in fatis, ut eo tempore, Judced profecti rerum potirentur” (Vespas. c. 4); and
Tacitus in the very same words: “Profectique Judaa rerum potirentur”
(Hist. v. 13).
B
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tist and with his earliest followers have probably, according
to Strauss, been tinged in the later conceptions of them
with something of a mythic hue. The acknowledgment of
his superiority by the former, could not have been so clear
and decided from the first as is represented ; otherwise the
disciples of the Baptist would not have continued to form
a separate sect, nor would Christ’s own ministry have first
taken independent ground when the Baptist had been
silenced by being cast into prison. With regard to his dis
ciples, Christ is described as summoning them at once, and
the call (to give a greater air of authority to his words) as
having been immediately obeyed. In both cases, probably,
the effect was gradual. The result only is given. What
had preceded it is passed over. The development of these
two relationships—the first with his forerunner, the second
with his followers—forms the subject of two separate mythic
groups in this part of Strauss’s exposition of the life of
Jesus. Less difficulty will generally be felt in accepting
the accounts of the temptation and the transfiguration as
mythical; for few thoughtful theologians of any school can
now for a long time past have seriously treated them as
historical. A conflict with the Evil One is the fundamental
idea pervading the whole ministry of Christ; and a sym
bolical representation of it would form a natural introduc
tion to the history of his public life. So, again, Moses and
Elias had prepared the way for the gospel; and besides the
current belief that the old prophets would reappear in the
days of the Messiah, it was a fitting consecration of the last
and most trying period of his ministry, when death was
awaiting him and all worldly hopes were about to be extin
guished in the blood of the cross, that his great predecessors
should be seen to be associated with him in glory, and that
the voice from heaven should once more be heard pronounc
ing him the Beloved Son. In these transactions we have
two other mythic groups. It is unnecessary to go through
the entire series. We would simply remark, that in those
passages of the life of Jesus which record the exertion of
miraculous power, the theory of the author assumes its
strongest expression and most uncompromising application.
Strauss’s philosophical system precludes his recognizing
the strictly miraculous in any sense. Its utter impossibility
is an assumption which he carries with him ab initio to the
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19
criticism of the evangelical narrative; and it is an assump
tion so deeply rooted in his first principles of belief, that no
accumulation of outward testimony could overcome it, any
more than it could make him accept a logical contradiction.
His theory, therefore, leaves him no alternative but to eli
minate the miraculous from the history as something neces
sarily untrue. He starts from this premiss; and all his
reasonings are in harmony with it. His book is self-con
sistent throughout. With him the phenomenal universe is
an ultimate fact, carrying its cause and principle within
itself. There is nothing, and we can know nothing, beyond
it. He would not, of course, deny that there may hereafter
be an evolution of new and unexpected results from laws
and agencies already in operation; but those laws and
agencies, once clearly ascertained, themselves furnish, in his
view, the limit to any further development of phenomena
that can be conceived. Any power not already contained
in the phenomenal, that could control its course and infuse
a new element of life into the growth of the universe, he
would disown as a gratuitous assumption. His belief, if
we understand him correctly, is limited to the phenomenal
alone, and does not extend to any power extraneous and
antecedent to the phenomenal.
Every theory of the universe must start from some
assumption : the question is, whether the assumption which
admits or that which excludes benevolent intelligence and
righteous will as the root and sustaining principle of the
universe, is most in accordance with the only analogies that
can guide us in a matter so entirely beyond our experience,
and best satisfies the instinctive belief, the spontaneous trust,
the devout yearning which, if the voice of our collective
humanity be not the utterance of a falsehood, must indicate
some corresponding object in reality. It is not our intention
to argue this question with Strauss. It is one too vast and
deep to be discussed within the limits of the present paper,
and belongs in fact rather to philosophy than to theology.
We notice it here only to mark with distinctness the point
where our own views diverge widely from those of the
author, which, though not essential to his historical criticism,
nevertheless underlie it throughout, and give to his conclu
sions the cold and negative character that need not of
necessity belong to them. The religious philosophy implied
B 2
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in this book, which, we again say, should be considered
something apart from its historical criticism, seems to us
essentially pantheistic, and at war with the deepest heart of
the religion of whose history it is the exposition. Take away
the belief in a Living God who can be approached in prayer
and has communion through his omnipresent Spirit with the
human soul; take away the sense of our personal relation to
a Personal God—the child’s sense of kindred with an Ever
lasting Father, which gives the hope of an undying life in
Him ; take away the trust, that the love and the worth and
the beauty which shew themselves in things perishing and
phenomenal, are an influx from an exhaustless Source which
is at once within and beyond them; and what remains that
deserves the name of religion—to carry home the words of
Jesus to the inmost recesses of the heart, or to explain the
power and sanctity of his own life? We feel, therefore, a
much stronger objection to the philosophic theory which pre
vents our author’s admission of the miraculous—that is, of
the intrusion of any power from without into the phenomenal
—than to the historical criticism which shews that in any
particular case the report of the miracle has probably had a
mythic origin. We will even add, that were criticism to suc
ceed in demonstrating that not one miracle recorded in the
New Testament was historically true, with a better religious
philosophy put under that criticism and tempering its re
sults, our faith would receive no shock, and our trust in the
great truths of Christianity would be as strong as ever.
The difficulty that we experience in wholly giving up the
miraculous, is not a religious, but a critical one. Not a few
of the miracles of the New Testament, it is true, may, we
think, not unreasonably be considered as the product of
tradition, interpreting literally the poetic imagery of Isaiah,
*
and assuming that the wonderful works of Elijah and Elisha
must have been repeated by Messiah himself. But allow
ing the utmost for this source of the miraculous, there still
remains so large an amount of extraordinary curative influ
ence, .explicable by no laws at present accessible to us,
interwrought with the inmost substance of the history of
Jesus, that if we attempt to separate it, the very texture of
* “ Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall
be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the
dumb sing.” (Isaiah xxxv. 5, 6.)
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21
the narrative is destroyed; and if we suppose it altogether
the creation of a pious fancy, so sharp a blow would be
inflicted on the credibility of even the great fundamental
outlines of the history, that we could hardly tell whether
we were dealing with any reality at all. Our faith in
Christ’s word and work does not depend, we are free to
confess, on any alleged miraculous attestation in their favour,
but on our inward experience of their truth and power ; we
should believe in them just as firmly, if it could be proved
that not a single miracle had ever been wrought: but we
wish to save the character of the narrative through which
they are conveyed to us ; and taking our stand on the ear
liest and most authentic Palestinian traditions, which have
probably been preserved to us in Matthew, and partly, per
haps, in Mark,—we have never yet met with any critical
process which could entirely extrude what has at least the
semblance of miracle, and leave eveji the ground-work of a
credible history behind. What the consistent anti-supernaturalist has to shew is this—how he can divest the
person of Jesus of all miraculous influence attaching to it,
and yet leave as large a residuum of positive history as
Strauss himself accepts as the basis of his theory. John the
Baptist was in the first instance as much the object of Mes
sianic expectation as Jesus, and for some time their two
ministries appear to have occupied independent spheres;
yet no traditions of supernatural power have gathered round
the person of the former. We find it difficult, therefore, to
believe that gifts of some extraordinary kind, displayed
chiefly in curative effects, and involving al.^o deep spiri
tual insight, were not possessed by Jesus—a result of the
peculiar organization with which he was originally endowed;
and that these formed, as it were, the punctum saliens of
primitive fact out of which the whole mass of mythic and
legendary amplification naturally grew, as they may at first
have been the providential means of exciting and securing
the attention of some whom more spiritual influences would
not so readily have reached. Obscurity is cast over this sub
ject by the vague meaning attached to the word miraculous.
Scarcely two persons use it in the same sense. No one of
any philosophical culture, whatever his religious theory,
ever supposes God to act without law. Law springs out of
the very nature of mind. The more perfect mind is, the more
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surely it is obedient to law, as the condition of harmonious
and self-consistent action,—involving in its effects all the
difference between a kosmos and a chaos. But it does not,
therefore, follow that the deepest laws of the infinite working
can be seized by a finite intelligence, or are even contained
as yet within the limits of the phenomenal. The idea of
progress and development which the past history of our
planet irresistibly forces on us, implies the continual acces
sion of something new, which, as it transcends the actual,
the actual is not of itself competent to originate. Out of
the vast, unexplored possibilities of the spiritual, which
enfold and pervade and underlie the phenomenal, influences
at times may, and (if the world is to advance) must issue,
which contradict the results of experience, and limit the
universality of laws which a premature generalization had
accepted as final. It is this occasional intrusion of the spi
ritual into the phenomenal, which we suppose people mean
in general to express when they speak of the miraculous.
No doubt the disposition to believe in such intrusion (which
is in itself significant, as forming a part of the natural faith
of the human soul) has led constantly to its gratuitous sup
position, and, in ages when there was no science, assumed
its presence in cases which further inquiry shewed were
resolvable into laws uniformly in operation around us. The
number of such cases, it must be confessed, has been regu
larly on the decrease with the progress of science. Never
theless, after every deduction on this account, phenomena
are still on record, supported by unexceptionable testimony
(testimony, the rejection of which would subvert the foun
dations of all history), and inexplicable by any laws which
science can define, for the solution of which we must go to
something beyond the phenomenal as yet known to us.
Every one at all acquainted with the history of religion, or,
if the reader so pleases, of superstition (for the two histories
are closely interwoven with each other), is well aware how
constantly every fresh outbreak of the religious life, espe
cially after a long suppression in formality and indifference,
has been accompanied by some mysterious and unaccount
able phenomena. Our own generation has witnessed them.
The miracles ascribed to St. Bernard are reported on more
direct testimony than can be alleged for those of the Gos
pels. All such cases we would have subjected to the seve-
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23
rest scrutiny, and left to rest each on its appropriate evidence,
apart from any theory. They will probably be found to
contain a large mixture of delusion and self-deception with
some unaccountable reality at bottom—linking our human
nature, here and there, amid the tangled web of the actual,
with dim, mysterious agencies which are slumbering as yet
in the bosom of the Infinite, and of which only at the rarest
intervals we catch a passing glimpse. This is a subject on
which no man will venture to dogmatize. It is the truest
philosophy to hold the mind in candid and reverent sus
pense. The extreme devotion of the present age to the
physical sciences confines its interest and belief to the
ascertainable and phenomenal, and indisposes it to any
recognition of the vaguer realities of the spiritual. We only
desire to enter our protest against the narrow and one-sided
philosophy which would shut up all possibility within the
limits of law reducible to scientific formulas, and exclude
the great Parent Mind from all direct action on the condi
tion of his human family.
*
The logical rigour with which Strauss carries out the
consequences of his system, and his determination to ex
plain every word and every act which appear to him not
to come within the range of the strictly historical, in ac
cordance with its pervading principle, have blinded him
in some cases to the moral beauty and significance of the
narrative, and the deep spiritual intuitions which, amidst
errors of scriptural interpretation, have filled Christ’s words
with enduring light. His theory binds his faculties as with
a spell, and keeps him intent on exploring the dim traces
of rabbinical refinement and mysticism, when with a mind
* There is a superficial philosophy cun-ent in some quarters, that will probably
treat with derision the conceded possibilities of the foregoing paragraph ; that
accepts without difficulty, by the aid of certain traditional formulas, all the
miracles of the Old and New Testament, as exceptional cases (peculiar and
limited to them) in the order of the world, and yet scouts as weak and irrational
credulity every attempt to reduce such cases to deeper but constant laws, and
bring them into harmony with the facts of universal history. To the consider
ation of such persons, who, to be consistent, should believe more or believe less,
we commend the following wise and seasonable words, ascribed (we have reason
to know, on the best authority) to one of the first mathematicians of the age :
“What I reprobate is, not the wariness which widens and lengthens inquiry,
but the assumption which prevents or narrows it; the imposture theory, which
frequently infers imposture from the assumed impossibility of the phenomena
asserted, and then alleges imposture against the examination of the evidence.”
Preface to a book entitled, “ From Matter to Spirit,” p. xxix.
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more open and erect he could not have failed to bring more
prominently into view that remarkable feature of the gos
pel history—the sympathy, if we may so express it, of its
miraculous elements with the moral life of Christ himself,
glowing with the same warm hues of human tenderness
and love, breathing the same deep tone of devout trust and
aspiration, as if the common and the miraculous of the re
cord grew out of the same spiritual root. This may be no
sufficient proof of the strictly historical character of these
narratives, but it attests at least the intensity of the im
pression under which they were conceived, and shews how
the spirit of Christ had entered into and moulded anew
the minds that consorted with him, and handed down the
living tradition of his personal presence which has taken
shape and consistency in our present Gospels. The pre
dominance of this moral and religious element is the great
distinction of the canonical from the apocryphal Gospels,
and a proof of the fine spiritual tact of the primitive Church
which so clearly separated them.
We shall notice only two instances of what appears to
us a certain logical narrowness in Strauss. In commenting
on the beautiful words about the resurrection, Matt. xxii.
51, 52; Mark xii. 26, 27; and Luke xx. 37, 38 (pp. 259, 260),
he sees no force, as De Wette does, and as we do, in the
inference drawn by Christ from the pregnant expression,
“the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob,” clenched by
the sublime universalism peculiar to Luke—iravrse yap avrw
Z&<nv—“ for all live unto him.” We may admit that the exe
gesis adopted by Christ in this passage was a rabbinical one,
and that the words taken by themselves furnish no direct
proof of the doctrine associated with them. But Strauss
himself discerns an evidence of Christ’s greatness in the new
spirit with which he read the old scripture, shewing him
to be a prophet, though no interpreter; and it is surprising
to us that one who can see and acknowledge all this, should
not also feel the depth and force of the spiritual intuition
which perceived at once there could be no death for the
soul in God, and, truer than the ancient words in which it
*
found utterance, was the revelation of an eternal reality to
the world. - The other passage is the story of the raising of
Lazarus. We are constrained by internal and external evi
dence to believe with Strauss that this narrative cannot be
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25
historical We cannot else understand how an event of
such importance, affecting the most intimate friends of
Jesus, could have been so entirely passed over without the
remotest allusion by the Synoptical Gospels. We think
there is great force in Strauss’s reasons for regarding it as
an embodiment in this concrete form of the doctrine, that
the Word is in himself, h avaoraaic, koI f) fah—“the resur
rection and the life.” But in his rigid development of this
idea, and in his anxiety to shew how it has influenced
every part of the narrative, he loses all sense of that ex
quisite tenderness and pathos which would seem to have
so entirely possessed the mind of the evangelist, that in
the glow of composition he forgets the divinity of his sub
ject, and is completely carried away by his human sympa
thies, and in individual expressions falls into dissonance
with his general theme. Strauss, like some other critics,
more logical than his author, is driven to harsh interpre
tations to bring him into harmony with himself. The be
trayal of deep emotion at the grave, conveyed by the words,
ive[ipip.T]ffaTo, trapafcv, f.p.[3pipLpEV0Q (John xi. 34, 38), he un
derstands of the indignation of Jesus at the insensibility of
the bystanders to the greatness and power of the present
Logos. The whole context, however, shews that the writer
meant something very different, and permitting his human
traditions of Christ to overpower for the moment the hypo
thesis of his divinity, has described with uncommon beauty
the struggle in the mind of Jesus with the strength of his na
tural affections. That this is the true rendering of the pas
sage is evident from the subjoined rip Trvsvpan and er lavra,
which qualify the original force of the verb Ipflpipaopat, and
from the single word ISaKpvaEv which furnishes a key to
the whole.
As John has added some things not contained in the
Synoptics, so he has strangely omitted others which are
pre-eminently characteristic of them. There is no curative
effect more constantly recorded in the three first Gospels
than the expulsion of evil spirits, while no instance of it
occurs in the fourth. Strauss’s explanation of this pecu
liarity is at least plausible and entitled to consideration.
Reported cases of this kind were common in that age all
over the world. Josephus and the sophists make frequent
mention of them. And something analogous is said to be
�26
Strauss’s New Work on the Life of Jesus.
met with to this day in the East. Strauss thinks that the
great moral power of Jesus, and the reverence which his
presence inspired, might exercise a healing influence on 1
persons liable to the affections that were popularly ascribed
to demoniacal possession. This was in perfect harmony
with the popular persuasion respecting him. We know
there were then regular exorcists by profession both among
the Jews and the heathens. But this class of persons had
already fallen into disrepute at the commencement of the
second century; and Strauss finds an indication of the later
origin of John’s Gospel in the exclusion from its pages of
all cures of this kind, which it would have been no longer
regarded as consistent with the dignity of the incarnate
Word to ascribe to him.
After the foregoing exposition of his theory, it is hardly
necessary to add that Strauss does not believe in the histo
rical fact of the resurrection of the body on the third day,
nor, we fear we must add, in individual immortality. Indi
viduals, like all other phenomena, according to his view of
things, are transient and perishable. Only the primal idea
which evolves and develops itself in and through them, is
eternal. He exposes with great acuteness the complexities
and inconsistencies of the several evangelical narratives, and
shews that they exhibit traces of two perfectly distinct tra
ditions of the appearances of the risen Jesus—one dreamy
and phantom-like, the other, and probably the later, hard
ened into the distincter outlines of corporeal manifestation.
He thinks that the apostles and their associates fled on the
event of the crucifixion into Galilee ; and that hence arose
the tradition that Christ first manifested himself to them
amid the scenes of his early ministry, in fulfilment of his
promise to meet them there. It took more time, in his
opinion, than is allowed by our present Gospels, for the full
growth of the conviction that he had risen from the dead,
had appeared to his first disciples, and was still spiritually
present with his church. The minuter specifications of time
and place and particular appearance—three, eight and forty
days, the Galilean mountain, the walk to Emmaus, the
closed chamber at Jerusalem, the shore of the Sea of Tibe
rias—he considers to be altogether the product of a later
tradition. All idea of resuscitation after an apparent death,
which was a favourite resource of the old rationalists, and
�Strauss’s New Work on the Life of Jesus.
27
which appears from his posthumous papers to have been
entertained by Schleiermacher himself, is rejected by Strauss
unconditionally, as inconsistent with the best attested facts
of the case. What became of the mortal remains of Jesus
there are no means, he thinks, of our ever knowing. The
belief in the resurrection of Christ he regards with Ewald
as a result of the intense hopes and longings of the disciples,
tradition magnifying dim and uncertain rumours, and the
words of Messianic promise working with a foregone con
clusion on fervid and enthusiastic minds. But this expla
nation does not appear to us, any more than that of Ewald,
sufficient to explain the extraordinary fact in the origin of
the new religion which five words of Tacitus have impressed
in indelible characters on the page of universal history—
repressaque in prcesens—rursus erumpebat. What was the
cause of that wonderful change in the mind of Paul which
made the spiritual world a reality to him ? His own words
imply (1 Cor. xv. 5—8) that the same appearances which
convinced him that Jesus was risen from the dead, had con
vinced others before him. And what was the effect of that
conviction ? It transformed their whole mind and life. The
disciples before and the disciples after the death of Jesus
(an event which might have been expected wholly to crush
the nascent faith, and in the first instance seemed actually
to do so) were completely different men; before, doubting,
timid and carnal; after, bold, confident and spiritual. Nor
was the effect limited to them. Through them, a new light
entered the world, a new hope brightened the horizon of
our planet. Immortality, which had been the floating dream
of a speculative^ few, became the steadfast trust of multi
tudes. The earliest literature and art of the Christians,
their simple hymns and the rude frescoes which adorned
their tombs, touchingly shew how the future beyond the
grave, to which friends and kindred had already passed,
was to them a nearer and more vivid reality than the
troubled and persecuted present in which they lived on
earth. And this has been the animating principle of Chris
tianity throughout its subsequent diffusion over the earth,
marking a new era in the spiritual development of our race,—•
the assurance of a wider and more glorious future for the
immortal soul. The origin of this new conviction we can
trace back to a definite period in past history associated
�28
Strauss’s JVew Work on the Life of Jesus.
with the traditions of Christ. And can we account for it
without the supposition of some fresh infusion from the
spiritual into the phenomenal ? Can that which renovated
the world have grown out of the world? Could death
develop life ? We may never be able to give an objective
precision to our conception of the cause. It is involved in
deepest mystery. But we think Baur was nearer to the
truth than either Ewald or Strauss with all their elaborate
explanations, when of the impression—which transformed
the mind of Paul and of all who with him were engaged in
evangelizing the world,—which linked invisible by a living
bond with visible things, and constituted the firm, immove
able basis of the whole superstructure of the future church
—he declared, as the result of a long life of profound and
fearless inquiry, he did not believe that we should ever by
any psychological analysis be able to give a satisfactory
account. And the deep conviction produced in our mind
by the contemplation of these historical phenomena is this—
that as in relation to the present world the welcome recep
tion of Christ’s spirit and the experience of its happy effects
are an evidence of the eternal truth which flowed in it,—so,
by whatever means it may have been first infused into the
tide of human thought, the firm hold which the doctrine of
immortality has had on the mind of civilized men ever
since the days of the apostles, the response that it has met
with, the uneffaceable mark which it has left on literature,
philosophy and art, and the way in which it has contributed
to harmonize and round, off into a consistent whole, our
conceptions of God and providence and human life,—are
proof conclusive that a doctrine which possesses such en
during vitality and draws its nourishment from the deepest
sources of humanity, can be no other than the voice of God,
and must have its certain counterpart in some invisible
reality.
One satisfaction at least we can derive from this work of
Strauss. It shews us the utmost that we have to fear from
hostile criticism. We now know the worst. Never were the
earliest records of our faith subjected to a more rigorous and
searching scrutiny. Never were the possible elements of
truth and falsehood sifted with a more suspicious and un
sparing hand. The author has done his work with a cold
blooded courage and determination. No lingering affectior
�Strauss's New Work on the Life of Jesus.
29
has blinded the clearness of his intellectual vision. No pre
judice of the heart has hindered him from seeing the bare,
simple fact involved in any dubious narrative. And now—
bating his religious philosophy, which is something quite
extraneous to his historical criticism—what, after all, is the
result ? What great principle of conduct, what consolatory
trust of humanity, is weakened—that would have stood on
a firmer basis and been surrounded with clearer evidence,
had we still continued to take the whole mass of the gospel
history as historical truth, and had no one ever thought of
separating myth and fact? We have still authentic indica
tion of the earliest workings of the greatest moral revolution
that has taken place in the world; and we have glimpses,
so original that they must be true, of the wonderful perso
nality which introduced it, and the more stimulating, the
more spiritually creative, for the very reason that they are
glimpses. We can still trace the first swelling and shooting
forth of the prolific seed which has impregnated the world
with a new life. We feel to this day that we are possessors
of the same deep consciousness and the same aspiring trust
which originated those great changes, and unites us with
them in one unbroken continuity of spiritual life. Now, as
then, it is through the heart and conscience of believing
man that God speaks to our world. As we trace back the
great stream of human thought through the ages to its
source, we observe how it is enriched at a particular point
by a sudden accession of moral and spiritual strength ; and
that alone would prove the intervention of some great in
spiring mind, were the result of modern criticism on ancient
books more destructive than it really is—and would still
have proved it, had those books never existed at all, or been
entirely swept away in the persecution of Diocletian. We
are thankful indeed for their preservation as they are ; but
their chief value to us is the witness which they bear to
the regenerating influence of a spirit which could only
have issued from some great and holy mind, and through
that mind from God himself. Dor the grandest of human
trusts is the presence of a Living God in history, suggesting
the highest thoughts and noblest impulses that animate it,
and guiding them to distant issues, which the very souls
through which they worked, did not anticipate and could
not conceive.
%
�30
Strauss's New Work on the Life of Jesus.
We have remarked in an earlier part of this paper, that
Strauss does not do justice to the resources of his own theory.
It is more conservative than he allows it to be. His philo
sophy has marred the applications of his criticism. He
remarks (p. 624), with a cold desolateness of tone which
sometimes chills the reader in his pages, that the dispersion
of the mythic from a narrative does not restore the historical;
and that we know less of the actual Jesus of Nazareth than
of any great man of antiquity—less, for example, than we
know of Socrates. Even if we confine ourselves to the intel
lectual and objective life, which is all that the criticism of
Strauss here contemplates, this statement is certainly over
done. It is not more difficult to trace the characteristic fea
tures of the man Jesus through the different media by which
it is transmitted to us in the three first Gospels and the
fourth, than it is to form an idea of the peculiar idiosyncrasy
of Socrates from the widely different representations of Xeno
phon and Plato. But if we descend into the deeper life of
the soul, into the region of affection and sympathy, where
the truest evidence of personality is to be found,—then we
say the advantage is altogether on the side of Christ, and
we have proofs of love and reverence and the transforming
influence of a great and genial soul in the diversified con
ceptions of the apostolic tradition, such as the records of
the Socratic school are unable to supply. Even the mythic
may here be said to cumulate the evidence; for it could
only spring from a depth of impression and an intensity of
feeling, going down to the very sources of the moral life,
which the cold admiration of Athenian intellect was impo
tent to produce.
Strauss remarks, that only one side of our humanity is
fully exemplified in the person of Christ—that which con
nects us with God and the religious life; while the indus
trial, the political, the scientific and the artistic elements,
which are so indispensable to the progress of our race, are all
wanting. This is true, no doubt; but he should have added,
that the spiritual element which is so perfectly revealed in
Christ, is essential to the growth of all the rest, and in every
human being of every class and in every age is the source
of inward peace and the principle of a real sanctification of
the life. When, the soul is once placed, as it is by the
spirit of Christ, in a right relation towards God, the great
�Strauss's New Work on the Life of Jesus.
31
conversion of humanity is effected; it is put in the path of
Bhealthful self-development; and the qualities which may
yet be needed to complete the full proportions of our nature,
may be left to arrange themselves organically around this
central germ, through the free working of our collective
faculties guided by the results of experience. In a fine
passage (p. 625), which we have not left ourselves space to
quote, Strauss does ample justice to Christianity, and places
Jesus in the first rank of those who have contributed to
develop the ideal of humanity.
We cannot close this volume, strongly as on some points
we have expressed our dissent, and notwithstanding our pain
ful sense of the serious deficiencies of its religious philosophy,
without a strong feeling of respect for the author, not only
for his learning and ability, which none will dispute, but
also for his courage and truthfulness, his moral earnestness,
and his general candour towards those who are opposed to
him. With all its faults and extravagances, for no theory
finds its true limits all at once, his book will leave its per
manent mark on the theology of the future. It has fixed
one or two points in advance, from which it will henceforth
be impossible to go back. What we have most to complain
of is a certain one-sidedness, which the author no doubt
identifies with completeness and consequentiality. On all
points he makes it too much an absolute question of Yes
or No. He therefore shews on all occasions far more tole
ration for the old thorough-going orthodox than for those
who, cautiously feeling their way towards a wider truth,
stop short of the sweeping results at which he has himself
arrived. Our own modification of his theory would doubt
less bring us under the censure which he pronounces on all
who seek their rest in a juste milieu. We can only say we
have striven to imitate him, where he is most worthy of
imitation—in his love of truth—by giving utterance simply
and without reserve to the conviction that has been produced
in us by the perusal of his book, and by some previous
years of thought and study on the same subject. For the
rest, we regard with no slight suspicion all violent disruption
from the faith and hope which have guided and consoled
the best and wisest of our race through long thousands of
years; and we have yet to learn that truth must always
be sought in one of two contradictory extremes.
��
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Strauss's new work on the life of Jesus
Creator
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Taylor, John James
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 31 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: A review in English by John James Taylor of David Friedrich Strauss's work 'Das Leben Jesu, fur das deutsche Volk bearbeitet; Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1864. Inscription in ink on front page: With the respect of J.J.T. Includes bibliographical references. Reprinted from Theological Review 1:335-365, July 1864. Author not named in the review. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Title of the book translated: 'The Life of Jesus, adapted to the German People'.
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[s.n.]
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[1864?]
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G5252
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Jesus Christ
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Strauss's new work on the life of Jesus), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
German
Conway Tracts
David Friedrich Strauss
Jesus Christ-Historicity