The Quest of the Historical Jesus
A Critical Study of its Progress From Reimarus to Wrede
By
Albert Schweitzer
Privatdocent in New Testament Studies in the University of Strassburg
Translated By
W. Montgomery, B.A., B.D.
With a Preface by
F. C. Burkitt, M.A., D.D.
Norrisian Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge
Second English Edition
London
Adam and Charles Black
1911
CONTENTS
Preface
I. The Problem
II. Hermann Samuel Reimarus
III. The Lives Of Jesus Of The Earlier Rationalism
IV. The Earliest Fictitious Lives Of Jesus
V. Fully Developed Rationalism—Paulus
VI. The Last Phase Of Rationalism—Hase And Schleiermacher
VII. David Friedrich Strauss—The Man And His Fate
VIII. Strauss’s First “Life Of Jesus”
IX. Strauss’s Opponents And Supporters
X. The Marcan Hypothesis
XI. Bruno Bauer. The First Sceptical Life Of Jesus
XII. Further Imaginative Lives Of Jesus
XIII. Renan
XIV. The “Liberal” Lives Of Jesus
XV. The Eschatological Question
XVI. The Struggle Against Eschatology
XVII. Questions Regarding The Aramaic Language, Rabbinic Parallels, And
Buddhistic Influence
XVIII. The Position Of The Subject At The Close Of The Nineteenth Century
XIX. Thoroughgoing Scepticism And Thoroughgoing Eschatology
XX. Results
Index Of Authors And Works
Footnotes
[Cover Art]
_First Edition published March 1910_
PREFACE
_The book here translated is offered to the English‐speaking public in the
belief that it sets before them, as no other book has ever done, the
history of the struggle which the best‐equipped intellects of the modern
world have gone through in endeavouring to realise for themselves the
historical personality of our Lord._
_Every one nowadays is aware that traditional Christian doctrine about
Jesus Christ is encompassed with difficulties, and that many of the
statements in the Gospels appear incredible in the light of modern views
of history and nature. But when the alternative of __“__Jesus or
Christ__”__ is put forward, as it has been in a recent publication, or
when we are bidden to choose between the Jesus of history and the Christ
of dogma, few except professed students know what a protean and
kaleidoscopic figure the __“__Jesus of history__”__ is. Like the Christ in
the Apocryphal Acts of John, He has appeared in different forms to
different minds. __“__We know Him right well,__”__ says Professor
Weinel._(_1_)_ What a claim!_
_Among the many bold paradoxes enunciated in this history of the Quest,
there is one that meets us at the outset, about which a few words may be
said here, if only to encourage those to persevere to the end who might
otherwise be repelled halfway—the paradox that the greatest attempts to
write a Life of Jesus have been written with hate._(_2_)_ It is in full
accordance with this faith that Dr. Schweitzer gives, in paragraph after
paragraph, the undiluted expression of the views of men who agree only in
their unflinching desire to attain historical truth. We are not accustomed
to be so ruthless in England. We sometimes tend to forget that the Gospel
has moved the world, and we think our faith and devotion to it so tender
and delicate a thing that it will break, if it be not handled with the
utmost circumspection. So we become dominated __ by phrases and afraid of
them. Dr. Schweitzer is not afraid of phrases, if only they have been
beaten out by real contact with facts. And those who read to the end will
see that the crude sarcasm of Reimarus and the unflinching scepticism of
Bruno Bauer are not introduced merely to shock and by way of contrast.
Each in his own way made a real contribution to our understanding of the
greatest historical problem in the history of our race. We see now that
the object of attack was not the historical Jesus after all, but a
temporary idea of Him, inadequate because it did not truly represent Him
or the world in which He lived. And by hearing the writers’ characteristic
phrases, uncompromising as they may be, by looking at things for a moment
from their own point of view, different as it may be from ours, we are
able to be more just, not only to these men of a past age, but also to the
great Problem that occupied them, as it also occupies us._
_For, as Father Tyrrell has been pointing out in his last most impressive
message to us all, Christianity is at the Cross Roads. If the Figure of
our Lord is to mean anything for us we must realise it for ourselves. Most
English readers of the New Testament have been too long content with the
rough and ready Harmony of the Four Gospels that they unconsciously
construct. This kind of __“__Harmony__”__ is not a very convincing picture
when looked into, if only because it almost always conflicts with
inconvenient statements of the Gospels themselves, statements that have
been omitted from the __“__Harmony__”__, not on any reasoned theory, but
simply from inadvertence or the difficulty of fitting them in. We treat
the Life of our Lord too much as it is treated in the Liturgical
__“__Gospels__”__, as a simple series of disconnected anecdotes._
_Dr. Schweitzer’s book does not pretend to be an impartial survey. He has
his own solution of the problems, and it is not to be expected that
English students will endorse the whole of his view of the Gospel History,
any more than his German fellow‐workers have done. But valuable and
suggestive as I believe his constructive work to be in its main outlines,
I venture to think his grasp of the nature and complexity of the great
Quest is even more remarkable, and his exposition of it cannot fail to
stimulate us in England. Whatever we may think of Dr. Schweitzer’s
solution or that of his opponents, we too have to reckon with the Son of
Man who was expected to come before the apostles had gone over the cities
of Israel, the Son of Man who would come in His Kingdom before some that
heard our Lord speak should taste death, the Son of Man who came to give
His life a ransom for many, whom __ they would see hereafter coming with
the clouds of heaven. __“__Who is this Son of Man?__”__ Dr. Schweitzer’s
book is an attempt to give the full historical value and the true
historical setting to these fundamental words of the Gospel of Jesus._
_Our first duty, with the Gospel as with every other ancient document, is
to interpret it with reference to its own time. The true view of the
Gospel will be that which explains the course of events in the first
century and the second century, rather than that which seems to have
spiritual and imaginative value for the twentieth century. Yet I cannot
refrain from pointing out here one feature of the theory of thoroughgoing
eschatology, which may appeal to those who are accustomed to the venerable
forms of ancient Christian aspiration and worship. It may well be that
absolute truth cannot be embodied in human thought and that its expression
must always be clothed in symbols. It may be that we have to translate the
hopes and fears of our spiritual ancestors into the language of our new
world. We have to learn, as the Church in the second century had to learn,
that the End is not yet, that New Jerusalem, like all other objects of
sense, is an image of the truth rather than the truth itself. But at least
we are beginning to see that the apocalyptic vision, the New Age which God
is to bring in, is no mere embroidery of Christianity, but the heart of
its enthusiasm. And therefore the expectations of vindication and judgment
to come, the imagery of the Messianic Feast, the __“__other‐
worldliness__”__ against which so many eloquent words were said in the
nineteenth century, are not to be regarded as regrettable accretions
foisted on by superstition to the pure morality of the original Gospel.
These ideas are the Christian Hope, to be allegorised and
__“__spiritualised__”__ by us for our own use whenever necessary, but not
to be given up so long as we remain Christians at all. Books which teach
us boldly to trust the evidence of our documents, and to accept the
eschatology of the Christian Gospel as being historically the eschatology
of Jesus, help us at the same time to retain a real meaning and use for
the ancient phrases of the Te Deum, and for the mediaeval strain of
__“__Jerusalem the Golden.__”_
_F. C. Burkitt._
_Cambridge, 1910._
I. THE PROBLEM
When, at some future day, our period of civilisation shall lie, closed and
completed, before the eyes of later generations, German theology will
stand out as a great, a unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life
of our time. For nowhere save in the German temperament can there be found
in the same perfection the living complex of conditions and factors—of
philosophic thought, critical acumen, historical insight, and religious
feeling—without which no deep theology is possible.
And the greatest achievement of German theology is the critical
investigation of the life of Jesus. What it has accomplished here has laid
down the conditions and determined the course of the religious thinking of
the future.
In the history of doctrine its work has been negative; it has, so to
speak, cleared the site for a new edifice of religious thought. In
describing how the ideas of Jesus were taken possession of by the Greek
spirit, it was tracing the growth of that which must necessarily become
strange to us, and, as a matter of fact, has become strange to us.
Of its efforts to create a new dogmatic we scarcely need to have the
history written; it is alive within us. It is no doubt interesting to
trace how modern thoughts have found their way into the ancient dogmatic
system, there to combine with eternal ideas to form new constructions; it
is interesting to penetrate into the mind of the thinker in which this
process is at work; but the real truth of that which here meets us as
history we experience within ourselves. As in the monad of Leibnitz the
whole universe is reflected, so we intuitively experience within us, even
apart from any clear historical knowledge, the successive stages of the
progress of modern dogma, from rationalism to Ritschl. This experience is
true knowledge, all the truer because we are conscious of the whole as
something indefinite, a slow and difficult movement towards a goal which
is still shrouded in obscurity. We have not yet arrived at any
reconciliation between history and modern thought—only between half‐way
history and half‐way thought. What the ultimate goal towards which we are
moving will be, what this something is which shall bring new life and new
regulative principles to coming centuries, we do not know. We can only
dimly divine that it will be the mighty deed of some mighty original
genius, whose truth and rightness will be proved by the fact that we,
working at our poor half thing, will oppose him might and main—we who
imagine we long for nothing more eagerly than a genius powerful enough to
open up with authority a new path for the world, seeing that we cannot
succeed in moving it forward along the track which we have so laboriously
prepared.
For this reason the history of the critical study of the life of Jesus is
of higher intrinsic value than the history of the study of ancient dogma
or of the attempts to create a new one. It has to describe the most
tremendous thing which the religious consciousness has ever dared and
done. In the study of the history of dogma German theology settled its
account with the past; in its attempt to create a new dogmatic, it was
endeavouring to keep a place for the religious life in the thought of the
present; in the study of the life of Jesus it was working for the
future—in pure faith in the truth, not seeing whereunto it wrought.
Moreover, we are here dealing with the most vital thing in the world’s
history. There came a Man to rule over the world; He ruled it for good and
for ill, as history testifies; He destroyed the world into which He was
born; the spiritual life of our own time seems like to perish at His
hands, for He leads to battle against our thought a host of dead ideas, a
ghostly army upon which death has no power, and Himself destroys again the
truth and goodness which His Spirit creates in us, so that it cannot rule
the world. That He continues, notwithstanding, to reign as the alone Great
and alone True in a world of which He denied the continuance, is the prime
example of that antithesis between spiritual and natural truth which
underlies all life and all events, and in Him emerges into the field of
history.
It is only at first sight that the absolute indifference of early
Christianity towards the life of the historical Jesus is disconcerting.
When Paul, representing those who recognise the signs of the times, did
not desire to know Christ after the flesh, that was the first expression
of the impulse of self‐preservation by which Christianity continued to be
guided for centuries. It felt that with the introduction of the historic
Jesus into its faith, there would arise something new, something which had
not been foreseen in the thoughts of the Master Himself, and that thereby
a contradiction would be brought to light, the solution of which would
constitute one of the great problems of the world.
Primitive Christianity was therefore right to live wholly in the future
with the Christ who was to come, and to preserve of the historic Jesus
only detached sayings, a few miracles, His death and resurrection. By
abolishing both the world and the historical Jesus it escaped the inner
division described above, and remained consistent in its point of view.
We, on our part, have reason to be grateful to the early Christians that,
in consequence of this attitude they have handed down to us, not
biographies of Jesus but only Gospels, and that therefore we possess the
Idea and the Person with the minimum of historical and contemporary
limitations.
But the world continued to exist, and its continuance brought this one‐
sided view to an end. The supra‐mundane Christ and the historical Jesus of
Nazareth had to be brought together into a single personality at once
historical and raised above time. That was accomplished by Gnosticism and
the Logos Christology. Both, from opposite standpoints, because they were
seeking the same goal, agreed in sublimating the historical Jesus into the
supra‐mundane Idea. The result of this development, which followed on the
discrediting of eschatology, was that the historical Jesus was again
introduced into the field of view of Christianity, but in such a way that
all justification for, and interest in, the investigation of His life and
historical personality were done away with.
Greek theology was as indifferent in regard to the historical Jesus who
lives concealed in the Gospels as was the early eschatological theology.
More than that, it was dangerous to Him; for it created a new
supernatural‐historical Gospel, and we may consider it fortunate that the
Synoptics were already so firmly established that the Fourth Gospel could
not oust them; instead, the Church, as though from the inner necessity of
the antitheses which now began to be a constructive element in her
thought, was obliged to set up two antithetic Gospels alongside of one
another.
When at Chalcedon the West overcame the East, its doctrine of the two
natures dissolved the unity of the Person, and thereby cut off the last
possibility of a return to the historical Jesus. The self‐contradiction
was elevated into a law. But the Manhood was so far admitted as to
preserve, in appearance, the rights of history. Thus by a deception the
formula kept the Life prisoner and prevented the leading spirits of the
Reformation from grasping the idea of a return to the historical Jesus.
This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in
quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of
His existence. That the historic Jesus is something different from the
Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self‐
evident. We can, at the present day, scarcely imagine the long agony in
which the historical view of the life of Jesus came to birth. And even
when He was once more recalled to life, He was still, like Lazarus of old,
bound hand and foot with grave‐clothes—the grave‐clothes of the dogma of
the Dual Nature. Hase relates, in the preface to his first Life of Jesus
(1829), that a worthy old gentleman, hearing of his project, advised him
to treat in the first part of the human, in the second of the divine
Nature. There was a fine simplicity about that. But does not the
simplicity cover a presentiment of the revolution of thought for which the
historical method of study was preparing the way—a presentiment which
those who were engaged in the work did not share in the same measure? It
was fortunate that they did not; for otherwise how could they have had the
courage to go on?
The historical investigation of the life of Jesus did not take its rise
from a purely historical interest; it turned to the Jesus of history as an
ally in the struggle against the tyranny of dogma. Afterwards when it was
freed from this πάθος it sought to present the historic Jesus in a form
intelligible to its own time. For Bahrdt and Venturini He was the tool of
a secret order. They wrote under the impression of the immense influence
exercised by the Order of the Illuminati(3) at the end of the eighteenth
century. For Reinhard, Hess, Paulus, and the rest of the rationalistic
writers He is the admirable revealer of true virtue, which is coincident
with right reason. Thus each successive epoch of theology found its own
thoughts in Jesus; that was, indeed, the only way in which it could make
Him live.
But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each
individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no
historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a
Life of Jesus. No vital force comes into the figure unless a man breathes
into it all the hate or all the love of which he is capable. The stronger
the love, or the stronger the hate, the more life‐like is the figure which
is produced. For hate as well as love can write a Life of Jesus, and the
greatest of them are written with hate: that of Reimarus, the Wolfenbüttel
Fragmentist, and that of David Friedrich Strauss. It was not so much hate
of the Person of Jesus as of the supernatural nimbus with which it was so
easy to surround Him, and with which He had in fact been surrounded. They
were eager to picture Him as truly and purely human, to strip from Him the
robes of splendour with which He had been apparelled, and clothe Him once
more with the coarse garments in which He had walked in Galilee.
And their hate sharpened their historical insight. They advanced the study
of the subject more than all the others put together. But for the offence
which they gave, the science of historical theology would not have stood
where it does to‐day. “It must needs be that offences come; but woe to
that man by whom the offence cometh.” Reimarus evaded that woe by keeping
the offence to himself and preserving silence during his lifetime—his
work, “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples,” was only published after his
death, by Lessing. But in the case of Strauss, who, as a young man of
twenty‐seven, cast the offence openly in the face of the world, the woe
fulfilled itself. His “Life of Jesus” was his ruin. But he did not cease
to be proud of it in spite of all the misfortune that it brought him. “I
might well bear a grudge against my book,” he writes twenty‐five years
later in the preface to the “Conversations of Ulrich von Hutten,”(4) “for
it has done me much evil (‘And rightly so!’ the pious will exclaim). It
has excluded me from public teaching in which I took pleasure and for
which I had perhaps some talent; it has torn me from natural relationships
and driven me into unnatural ones; it has made my life a lonely one. And
yet when I consider what it would have meant if I had refused to utter the
word which lay upon my soul, if I had suppressed the doubts which were at
work in my mind—then I bless the book which has doubtless done me grievous
harm outwardly, but which preserved the inward health of my mind and
heart, and, I doubt not, has done the same for many others also.”
Before him, Bahrdt had his career broken in consequence of revealing his
beliefs concerning the Life of Jesus; and after him, Bruno Bauer.
It was easy for them, resolved as they were to open the way even with
seeming blasphemy. But the others, those who tried to bring Jesus to life
at the call of love, found it a cruel task to be honest. The critical
study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The
world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for
truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus
of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record. One must read the
successive Lives of Jesus with which Hase followed the course of the study
from the ’twenties to the ’seventies of the nineteenth century to get an
inkling of what it must have cost the men who lived through that decisive
period really to maintain that “courageous freedom of investigation” which
the great Jena professor, in the preface to his first Life of Jesus,
claims for his researches. One sees in him the marks of the struggle with
which he gives up, bit by bit, things which, when he wrote that preface,
he never dreamed he would have to surrender. It was fortunate for these
men that their sympathies sometimes obscured their critical vision, so
that, without becoming insincere, they were able to take white clouds for
distant mountains. That was the kindly fate of Hase and Beyschlag.
The personal character of the study is not only due, however, to the fact
that a personality can only be awakened to life by the touch of a
personality; it lies in the essential nature of the problem itself. For
the problem of the life of Jesus has no analogue in the field of history.
No historical school has ever laid down canons for the investigation of
this problem, no professional historian has ever lent his aid to theology
in dealing with it. Every ordinary method of historical investigation
proves inadequate to the complexity of the conditions. The standards of
ordinary historical science are here inadequate, its methods not
immediately applicable. The historical study of the life of Jesus has had
to create its own methods for itself. In the constant succession of
unsuccessful attempts, five or six problems have emerged side by side
which together constitute the fundamental problem. There is, however, no
direct method of solving the problem in its complexity; all that can be
done is to experiment continuously, starting from definite assumptions;
and in this experimentation the guiding principle must ultimately rest
upon historical intuition.
The cause of this lies in the nature of the sources of the life of Jesus,
and in the character of our knowledge of the contemporary religious world
of thought. It is not that the sources are in themselves bad. When we have
once made up our minds that we have not the materials for a complete Life
of Jesus, but only for a picture of His public ministry, it must be
admitted that there are few characters of antiquity about whom we possess
so much indubitably historical information, of whom we have so many
authentic discourses. The position is much more favourable, for instance,
than in the case of Socrates; for he is pictured to us by literary men who
exercised their creative ability upon the portrait. Jesus stands much more
immediately before us, because He was depicted by simple Christians
without literary gift.
But at this point there arises a twofold difficulty. There is first the
fact that what has just been said applies only to the first three Gospels,
while the fourth, as regards its character, historical data, and discourse
material, forms a world of its own. It is written from the Greek
standpoint, while the first three are written from the Jewish. And even if
one could get over this, and regard, as has often been done, the Synoptics
and the Fourth Gospel as standing in something of the same relation to one
another as Xenophon does to Plato as sources for the life of Socrates, yet
the complete irreconcilability of the historical data would compel the
critical investigator to decide from the first in favour of one source or
the other. Once more it is found true that “No man can serve two masters.”
This stringent dilemma was not recognised from the beginning; its
emergence is one of the results of the whole course of experiment.
The second difficulty regarding the sources is the want of any thread of
connexion in the material which they offer us. While the Synoptics are
only collections of anecdotes (in the best, historical sense of the word),
the Gospel of John—as stands on record in its closing words—only professes
to give a selection of the events and discourses.
From these materials we can only get a Life of Jesus with yawning gaps.
How are these gaps to be filled? At the worst with phrases, at the best
with historical imagination. There is really no other means of arriving at
the order and inner connexion of the facts of the life of Jesus than the
making and testing of hypotheses. If the tradition preserved by the
Synoptists really includes all that happened during the time that Jesus
was with His disciples, the attempt to discover the connexion must succeed
sooner or later. It becomes more and more clear that this presupposition
is indispensable to the investigation. If it is merely a fortuitous series
of episodes that the Evangelists have handed down to us, we may give up
the attempt to arrive at a critical reconstruction of the life of Jesus as
hopeless.
But it is not only the events which lack historical connexion; we are
without any indication of a thread of connexion in the actions and
discourses of Jesus, because the sources give no hint of the character of
His self‐consciousness. They confine themselves to outward facts. We only
begin to understand these historically when we can mentally place them in
an intelligible connexion and conceive them as the acts of a clearly
defined personality. All that we know of the development of Jesus and of
His Messianic self‐consciousness has been arrived at by a series of
working hypotheses. Our conclusions can only be considered valid so long
as they are not found incompatible with the recorded facts as a whole.
It may be maintained by the aid of arguments drawn from the sources that
the self‐consciousness of Jesus underwent a development during the course
of His public ministry; it may, with equally good grounds, be denied. For
in both cases the arguments are based upon little details in the narrative
in regard to which we do not know whether they are purely accidental, or
whether they belong to the essence of the facts. In each case, moreover,
the experimental working out of the hypothesis leads to a conclusion which
compels the rejection of some of the actual data of the sources. Each view
equally involves a violent treatment of the text.
Furthermore, the sources exhibit, each within itself, a striking
contradiction. They assert that Jesus felt Himself to be the Messiah; and
yet from their presentation of His life it does not appear that He ever
publicly claimed to be so. They attribute to Him, that is, an attitude
which has absolutely no connexion with the consciousness which they assume
that He possessed. But once admit that the outward acts are not the
natural expression of the self‐consciousness and all exact historical
knowledge is at an end; we have to do with an isolated fact which is not
referable to any law.
This being so, the only way of arriving at a conclusion of any value is to
experiment, to test, by working them out, the two hypotheses—that Jesus
felt Himself to be the Messiah, as the sources assert, or that He did not
feel Himself to be so, as His conduct implies; or else to try to
conjecture what kind of Messianic consciousness His must have been, if it
left His conduct and His discourses unaffected. For one thing is certain:
the whole account of the last days at Jerusalem would be unintelligible,
if we had to suppose that the mass of the people had a shadow of a
suspicion that Jesus held Himself to be the Messiah.
Again, whereas in general a personality is to some extent defined by the
world of thought which it shares with its contemporaries, in the case of
Jesus this source of information is as unsatisfactory as the documents.
What was the nature of the contemporary Jewish world of thought? To that
question no clear answer can be given. We do not know whether the
expectation of the Messiah was generally current or whether it was the
faith of a mere sect. With the Mosaic religion as such it had nothing to
do. There was no organic connexion between the religion of legal
observance and the future hope. Further, if the eschatological hope was
generally current, was it the prophetic or the apocalyptic form of that
hope? We know the Messianic expectations of the prophets; we know the
apocalyptic picture as drawn by Daniel, and, following him, by Enoch and
the Psalms of Solomon before the coming of Jesus, and by the Apocalypses
of Ezra and Baruch about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. But we
do not know which was the popular form; nor, supposing that both were
combined into one picture, what this picture really looked like. We know
only the form of eschatology which meets us in the Gospels and in the
Pauline epistles; that is to say, the form which it took in the Christian
community in consequence of the coming of Jesus. And to combine these
three—the prophetic, the Late‐Jewish apocalyptic, and the Christian—has
not proved possible.
Even supposing we could obtain more exact information regarding the
popular Messianic expectations at the time of Jesus, we should still not
know what form they assumed in the self‐consciousness of One who knew
Himself to be the Messiah but held that the time was not yet come for Him
to reveal Himself as such. We only know their aspect from without, as a
waiting for the Messiah and the Messianic Age; we have no clue to their
aspect from within as factors in the Messianic self‐consciousness. We
possess no psychology of the Messiah. The Evangelists have nothing to tell
us about it, because Jesus told them nothing about it; the sources for the
contemporary spiritual life inform us only concerning the eschatological
expectation. For the form of the Messianic self‐consciousness of Jesus we
have to fall back upon conjecture.
Such is the character of the problem, and, as a consequence, historical
experiment must here take the place of historical research. That being so,
it is easy to understand that to take a survey of the study of the life of
Jesus is to be confronted, at first sight, with a scene of the most
boundless confusion. A series of experiments are repeated with constantly
varying modifications suggested by the results furnished by the subsidiary
sciences. Most of the writers, however, have no suspicion that they are
merely repeating an experiment which has often been made before. Some of
them discover this in the course of their work to their own great
astonishment—it is so, for instance, with Wrede, who recognises that he is
working out, though doubtless with a clearer consciousness of his aim, an
idea of Bruno Bauer’s.(5) If old Reimarus were to come back again, he
might confidently give himself out to be the latest of the moderns, for
his work rests upon a recognition of the exclusive importance of
eschatology, such as only recurs again in Johannes Weiss.
Progress, too, is curiously fitful, with long intervals of marking time
between the advances. From Strauss down to the ’nineties there was no real
progress, if one takes into consideration only the complete Lives of Jesus
which appeared. But a number of separate problems took a more clearly
defined form, so that in the end the general problem suddenly moved
forward, as it seemed, with a jerk.
There is really no common standard by which to judge the works with which
we have to do. It is not the most orderly narratives, those which weave in
conscientiously every detail of the text, which have advanced the study of
the subject, but precisely the eccentric ones, those that take the
greatest liberties with the text. It is not by the mass of facts that a
writer sets down alongside of one another as possible—because he writes
easily and there is no one there to contradict him, and because facts on
paper do not come into collision so sharply as they do in reality—it is
not in that way that he shows his power of reconstructing history, but by
that which he recognises as impossible. The constructions of Reimarus and
Bruno Bauer have no solidity; they are mere products of the imagination.
But there is much more historical power in their clear grasp of a single
definite problem, which has blinded them to all else, than there is in the
circumstantial works of Beyschlag and Bernard Weiss.
But once one has accustomed oneself to look for certain definite landmarks
amid this apparent welter of confusion one begins at last to discover in
vague outline the course followed, and the progress made, by the critical
study of the life of Jesus.
It falls, immediately, into two periods, that before Strauss and that
after Strauss. The dominant interest in the first is the question of
miracle. What terms are possible between a historical treatment and the
acceptance of supernatural events? With the advent of Strauss this problem
found a solution, viz., that these events have no rightful place in the
history, but are simply mythical elements in the sources. The way was thus
thrown open. Meanwhile, alongside of the problem of the supernatural,
other problems had been dimly apprehended. Reimarus had drawn attention to
the contemporary eschatological views; Hase, in his first Life of Jesus
(1829), had sought to trace a development in the self‐consciousness of
Jesus.
But on this point a clear view was impossible, because all the students of
the subject were still basing their operations upon the harmony of the
Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel; which means that they had not so far felt
the need of a historically intelligible outline of the life of Jesus.
Here, too, Strauss was the light‐bringer. But the transient illumination
was destined to be obscured by the Marcan hypothesis,(6) which now came to
the front. The necessity of choosing between John and the Synoptists was
first fully established by the Tübingen school; and the right relation of
this question to the Marcan hypothesis was subsequently shown by
Holtzmann.
While these discussions of the preliminary literary questions were in
progress the main historical problem of the life of Jesus was slowly
rising into view. The question began to be mooted: what was the
significance of eschatology for the mind of Jesus? With this problem was
associated, in virtue of an inner connexion which was not at first
suspected, the problem of the self‐consciousness of Jesus. At the
beginning of the ’nineties it was generally felt that, in the solution
given to this dual problem, an in some measure assured knowledge of the
outward and inward course of the life of Jesus had been reached. At this
point Johannes Weiss revived the comprehensive claim of Reimarus on behalf
of eschatology; and scarcely had criticism adjusted its attitude to this
question when Wrede renewed the attempt of Bauer and Volkmar to eliminate
altogether the Messianic element from the life of Jesus.
We are now once more in the midst of a period of great activity in the
study of the subject. On the one side we are offered a historical
solution, on the other a literary. The question at issue is: Is it
possible to explain the contradiction between the Messianic consciousness
of Jesus and His non‐Messianic discourses and actions by means of a
conception of His Messianic consciousness which will make it appear that
He could not have acted otherwise than as the Evangelists describe; or
must we endeavour to explain the contradiction by taking the non‐Messianic
discourses and actions as our fixed point, denying the reality of His
Messianic self‐consciousness and regarding it as a later interpolation of
the beliefs of the Christian community into the life of Jesus? In the
latter case the Evangelists are supposed to have attributed these
Messianic claims to Jesus because the early Church held Him to be the
Messiah, but to have contradicted themselves by describing His life as it
actually was, viz., as the life of a prophet, not of one who held Himself
to be the Messiah. To put it briefly: Does the difficulty of explaining
the historical personality of Jesus lie in the history itself, or only in
the way in which it is represented in the sources?
This alternative will be discussed in all the critical studies of the next
few years. Once clearly posed it compels a decision. But no one can really
understand the problem who has not a clear notion of the way in which it
has shaped itself in the course of the investigation; no one can justly
criticise, or appraise the value of, new contributions to the study of
this subject unless he knows in what forms they have been presented
before.
The history of the study of the life of Jesus has hitherto received
surprisingly little attention. Hase, in his Life of Jesus of 1829, briefly
records the previous attempts to deal with the subject. Friedrich von
Ammon, himself one of the most distinguished students in this department,
in his “Progress of Christianity,”(7) gives some information “regarding
the most notable biographies of Jesus of the last fifty years.” In the
year 1865 Uhlhorn treated together the Lives of Jesus of Renan, Schenkel,
and Strauss; in 1876 Hase, in his “History of Jesus,” gave the only
complete literary history of the subject;(8) in 1892 Uhlhorn extended his
former lecture to include the works of Keim, Delff, Beyschlag, and
Weiss;(9) in 1898 Frantzen described, in a short essay, the progress of
the study since Strauss;(10) in 1899 and 1900 Baldensperger gave, in the
_Theologische Rundschau_, a survey of the most recent publications;(11)
Weinel’s book, “Jesus in the Nineteenth Century,” naturally only gives an
analysis of a few classical works; Otto Schmiedel’s lecture on the “Main
Problems of the Critical Study of the Life of Jesus” (1902) merely
sketches the history of the subject in broad outline.(12)
Apart from scattered notices in histories of theology this is practically
all the literature of the subject. There is room for an attempt to bring
order into the chaos of the Lives of Jesus. Hase made ingenious
comparisons between them, but he was unable to group them according to
inner principles, or to judge them justly. Weisse is for him a feebler
descendant of Strauss, Bruno Bauer is the victim of a fantastic
imagination. It would indeed have been difficult for Hase to discover in
the works of his time any principle of division. But now, when the
literary and eschatological methods of solution have led to complementary
results, when the post‐Straussian period of investigation seems to have
reached a provisional close, and the goal to which it has been tending has
become clear, the time seems ripe for the attempt to trace genetically in
the successive works the shaping of the problem as it now confronts us,
and to give a systematic historical account of the critical study of the
life of Jesus. Our endeavour will be to furnish a graphic description of
all the attempts to deal with the subject; and not to dismiss them with
stock phrases or traditional labels, but to show clearly what they really
did to advance the formulation of the problem, whether their
contemporaries recognised it or not. In accordance with this principle
many famous Lives of Jesus which have prolonged an honoured existence
through many successive editions, will make but a poor figure, while
others, which have received scant notice, will appear great. Behind
Success comes Truth, and her reward is with her.
II. HERMANN SAMUEL REIMARUS
“Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger.” Noch ein Fragment des
Wolfenbüttelschen Ungenannten. Herausgegeben von Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing. Braunschweig, 1778, 276 pp. (The Aims of Jesus and His
Disciples. A further Instalment of the anonymous Wolfenbüttel
Fragments. Published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Brunswick,
1778.)
_Johann Salomo Semler._ Beantwortung der Fragmente eines
Ungenannten insbesondere vom Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger. (Reply
to the anonymous Fragments, especially to that entitled “The Aims
of Jesus and His Disciples.”) Halle, 1779, 432 pp.
Before Reimarus, no one had attempted to form a historical conception of
the life of Jesus. Luther had not so much as felt that he cared to gain a
clear idea of the order of the recorded events. Speaking of the chronology
of the cleansing of the Temple, which in John falls at the beginning, in
the Synoptists near the close, of Jesus’ public life, he remarks: “The
Gospels follow no order in recording the acts and miracles of Jesus, and
the matter is not, after all, of much importance. If a difficulty arises
in regard to the Holy Scripture and we cannot solve it, we must just let
it alone.” When the Lutheran theologians began to consider the question of
harmonising the events, things were still worse. Osiander (1498‐1552), in
his “Harmony of the Gospels,” maintained the principle that if an event is
recorded more than once in the Gospels, in different connexions, it
happened more than once and in different connexions. The daughter of
Jairus was therefore raised from the dead several times; on one occasion
Jesus allowed the devils whom He cast out of a single demoniac to enter
into a herd of swine, on another occasion, those whom He cast out of two
demoniacs; there were two cleansings of the Temple, and so forth.(13) The
correct view of the Synoptic Gospels as being interdependent was first
formulated by Griesbach.
The only Life of Jesus written prior to the time of Reimarus which has any
interest for us, was composed by a Jesuit in the Persian language. The
author was the Indian missionary Hieronymus Xavier, nephew of Francis
Xavier, and it was designed for the use of Akbar, the Moghul Emperor, who,
in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had become the most powerful
potentate in Hindustan. In the seventeenth century the Persian text was
brought to Europe by a merchant, and was translated into Latin by Louis de
Dieu, a theologian of the Reformed Church, whose intention in publishing
it was to discredit Catholicism.(14) It is a skilful falsification of the
life of Jesus in which the omissions, and the additions taken from the
Apocrypha, are inspired by the sole purpose of presenting to the open‐
minded ruler a glorious Jesus, in whom there should be nothing to offend
him.
Thus there had been nothing to prepare the world for a work of such power
as that of Reimarus. It is true, there had appeared earlier, in 1768, a
Life of Jesus by Johann Jakob Hess(15) (1741‐1828), written from the
standpoint of the older rationalism, but it retains so much
supernaturalism and follows so much the lines of a paraphrase of the
Gospels, that there was nothing to indicate to the world what a master‐
stroke the spirit of the time was preparing.
Not much is known about Reimarus. For his contemporaries he had no
existence, and it was Strauss who first made his name known in
literature.(16) He was born in Hamburg on the 22nd of December, 1694, and
spent his life there as a professor of Oriental Languages. He died in
1768. Several of his writings appeared during his lifetime, all of them
asserting the claims of rational religion as against the faith of the
Church; one of them, for example, being an essay on “The Leading Truths of
Natural Religion.” His _magnum opus_, however, which laid the historic
basis of his attacks, was only circulated, during his lifetime, among his
acquaintances, as an anonymous manuscript. In 1774 Lessing began to
publish the most important portions of it, and up to 1778 had published
seven fragments, thereby involving himself in a quarrel with Goetze, the
Chief Pastor of Hamburg. The manuscript of the whole, which runs to 4000
pages, is preserved in the Hamburg municipal library.
The following are the titles of Fragments which he published:
The Toleration of the Deists.
The Decrying of Reason in the Pulpit.
The impossibility of a Revelation which all men should have good grounds
for believing.
The Passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea.
Showing that the books of the Old Testament were not written to reveal a
Religion.
Concerning the story of the Resurrection.
The Aims of Jesus and His disciples.
The monograph on the passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one
of the ablest, wittiest, and most acute which has ever been written. It
exposes all the impossibilities of the narrative in the Priestly Codex,
and all the inconsistencies which arise from the combination of various
sources; although Reimarus has not the slightest inkling that the
separation of these sources would afford the real solution of the problem.
To say that the fragment on “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples” is a
magnificent piece of work is barely to do it justice. This essay is not
only one of the greatest events in the history of criticism, it is also a
masterpiece of general literature. The language is as a rule crisp and
terse, pointed and epigrammatic—the language of a man who is not “engaged
in literary composition” but is wholly concerned with the facts. At times,
however, it rises to heights of passionate feeling, and then it is as
though the fires of a volcano were painting lurid pictures upon dark
clouds. Seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, so lofty a scorn; but
then it is seldom that a work has been written in the just consciousness
of so absolute a superiority to contemporary opinion. And withal, there is
dignity and serious purpose; Reimarus’s work is no pamphlet.
Lessing could not, of course, accept its standpoint. His idea of
revelation, and his conception of the Person of Jesus, were much deeper
than those of the Fragmentist. He was a thinker; Reimarus only a
historian. But this was the first time that a really historical mind,
thoroughly conversant with the sources, had undertaken the criticism of
the tradition. It was Lessing’s greatness that he grasped the significance
of this criticism, and felt that it must lead either to the destruction or
to the re‐casting of the idea of revelation. He recognised that the
introduction of the historical element would transform and deepen
rationalism. Convinced that the fateful moment had arrived, he disregarded
the scruples of Reimarus’s family and the objections of Nicolai and
Mendelssohn, and, though inwardly trembling for that which he himself held
sacred, he flung the torch with his own hand.
Semler, at the close of his refutation of the fragment, ridicules its
editor in the following apologue. “A prisoner was once brought before the
Lord Mayor of London on a charge of arson. He had been seen coming down
from the upper story of the burning house. ‘Yesterday,’ so ran his
defence, ‘about four o’clock I went into my neighbour’s store‐room and saw
there a burning candle which the servants had carelessly forgotten. In the
course of the night it would have burned down, and set fire to the stairs.
To make sure that the fire should break out in the day‐time, I threw some
straw upon it. The flames burst out at the sky‐light, the fire‐engines
came hurrying up, and the fire, which in the night might have been
dangerous, was promptly extinguished.’ ‘Why did you not yourself pick up
the candle and put it out?’ asked the Lord Mayor. ‘If I had put out the
candle the servants would not have learned to be more careful; now that
there has been such a fuss about it, they will not be so careless in
future.’ ‘Odd, very odd,’ said the Lord Mayor, ‘he is not a criminal, only
a little weak in the head.’ So he had him shut up in the mad‐house, and
there he lies to this day.”