leave open a number of possibilities which formerly he had not recognised.
The adhesion of the first disciples may, he now thinks, have happened
essentially in the form in which it is reported in the Fourth Gospel; in
transferring the cleansing of the Temple to the first period of Jesus’
ministry, John may be right as against the Synoptic tradition “which has
no decisive evidence in its favour”; in regard to the question whether
Jesus had been only once, or several times, in Jerusalem, his opinion now
is that “on this point the superior circumstantiality of the Fourth Gospel
cannot be contested.”
As regards the prominence allowed to the eschatology also all is toned
down and softened. Everywhere feeble compromises! But what led Strauss to
place his foot upon this shelving path was the essentially just perception
that the Synoptists gave him no clearly ordered plan to set against that
of the Fourth Gospel; consequently he felt obliged to make some
concessions to its strength in this respect.
Yet he recognised almost immediately that the result was a mere patchwork.
Even in the summer of 1839 he complained to Hase in conversation that he
had been deafened by the clamour of his opponents, and had conceded too
much to them.(79) In the fourth edition he retracted all his concessions.
“The Babel of voices of opponents, critics, and supporters,” he says in
his preface, “to which I had felt it my duty to listen, had confused me in
regard to the idea of my work; in my diligent comparison of various views
I had lost sight of the thing itself. In this way I was led to make
alterations which, when I came to consider the matter calmly, surprised
myself; and in making which it was obvious that I had done myself an
injustice. In all these passages the earlier text has been restored, and
my work has therefore consisted, it might be said, in removing from my
good sword the notches which had not so much been hewn in it by the enemy
as ground into it by myself.”
Strauss’s vacillation had, therefore, not even been of any indirect
advantage to him. Instead of endeavouring to find a purposeful connexion
in the Synoptic Gospels by means of which he might test the plan of the
Fourth Gospel, he simply restores his former view unaltered, thereby
showing that in the decisive point it was incapable of development. In the
very year in which he prepared his improved edition, Weisse, in his
_Evangelische Geschichte_, had set up the hypothesis that Mark is the
ground‐document, and had thus carried criticism past the “dead‐point”
which Strauss had never been able to overcome. Upon Strauss, however, the
new suggestion made no impression. He does, it is true, mention Weisse’s
book in the preface to his third edition, and describes it as “in many
respects a very satisfactory piece of work.” It had appeared too late for
him to make use of it in his first volume; but he did not use it in his
second volume either. He had, indeed, a distinct antipathy to the Marcan
hypothesis.
It was unfortunate that in this controversy the highly important
suggestions in regard to various historical problems which had been made
incidentally in the course of Strauss’s work were never discussed at all.
The impulse in the direction of progress which might have been given by
his treatment of the relation of Jesus to the law, of the question
regarding His particularism, of the eschatological conception, the Son of
Man, and the Messiahship of Jesus, wholly failed to take effect, and it
was only after long and circuitous wanderings that theology again came in
sight of these problems from an equally favourable point of view. In this
respect Strauss shared the fate of Reimarus; the positive solutions of
which the outlines were visible behind their negative criticism escaped
observation in consequence of the offence caused by the negative side of
their work; and even the authors themselves failed to realise their full
significance.
X. THE MARCAN HYPOTHESIS
_Christian Hermann Weisse._ Die evangelische Geschichte kritisch
und philosophisch bearbeitet. (A Critical and Philosophical Study
of the Gospel History.) 2 vols. Leipzig, Breitkopf and Härtel,
1838. Vol. i. 614 pp. Vol. ii. 543 pp.
_Christian Gottlob Wilke._ Der Urevangelist. (The Earliest
Evangelist.) 1838. Dresden and Leipzig. 694 pp.
_Christian Hermann Weisse._ Die Evangelienfrage in ihrem
gegenwärtigen Stadium. (The Present Position of the Problem of the
Gospels.) Leipzig, 1856.
The “Gospel History” of Weisse was written, like Strauss’s Life of Jesus,
by a philosopher who had been driven out of philosophy and forced back
upon theology. Weisse was born in 1801 at Leipzig, and became Professor
Extraordinary of Philosophy in the university there in 1828. In 1837,
finding his advance to the Ordinary Professorship barred by the
Herbartians, he withdrew from academic teaching and gave himself to the
preparation of this work, the plan of which he had had in mind for some
time. Having brought it to a satisfactory completion, he began again in
1841 as a Privat‐Docent in Philosophy, and became Ordinary Professor in
1845. From 1848 onwards he lectured on Theology also. His work on
“Philosophical Dogmatics, or the Philosophy of Christianity,”(80) is well
known. He died in 1866, of cholera. Lotze and Lipsius were both much
influenced by him.
Weisse admired Strauss and hailed his Life of Jesus as a forward step
towards the reconciliation of religion and philosophy. He expresses his
gratitude to him for clearing the ground of the primeval forest of
theology, thus rendering it possible for him (Weisse) to develop his views
without wasting time upon polemics, “since most of the views which have
hitherto prevailed may be regarded as having received the _coup de grâce_
from Strauss.” He is at one with Strauss also in his general view of the
relations of philosophy and religion, holding that it is only if
philosophy, by following its own path, attains independently to the
conviction of the truth of Christianity that its alliance with theology
and religion can be welcomed as advantageous.(81) His work, therefore,
like that of Strauss, leads up finally to a philosophical exposition in
which he shows how for us the Jesus of history becomes the Christ of
faith.(82)
Weisse is the direct continuator of Strauss. Standing outside the
limitations of the Hegelian formulae, he begins at the point where Strauss
leaves off. His aim is to discover, if possible, some thread of general
connexion in the narratives of the Gospel tradition, which, if present,
would represent a historically certain element in the Life of Jesus, and
thus serve as a better standard by which to determine the extent of myth
than can possibly be found in the subjective impression upon which Strauss
relies. Strauss, by way of gratitude, called him a dilettante. This was
most unjust, for if any one deserved to share Strauss’s place of honour,
it was certainly Weisse.
The idea that Mark’s Gospel might be the earliest of the four, first
occurred to Weisse during the progress of his work. In March 1837, when he
reviewed Tholuck’s “Credibility of the Gospel History,” he was as innocent
of this discovery as Wilke was at the same period. But when once he had
observed that the graphic details of Mark, which had hitherto been
regarded as due to an attempt to embellish an epitomising narrative, were
too insignificant to have been inserted with this purpose, it became clear
to him that only one other possibility remained open, viz., that their
absence in Matthew and Luke was due to omission. He illustrates this from
the description of the first day of Jesus’ ministry at Capernaum. “The
relation of the first Evangelist to Mark,” he avers, “in those portions of
the Gospel which are common to both is, with few exceptions, mainly that
of an epitomiser.”
The decisive argument for the priority of Mark is, even more than his
graphic detail, the composition and arrangement of the whole. “It is true,
the Gospel of Mark shows very distinct traces of having arisen out of
spoken discourses, which themselves were by no means ordered and
connected, but disconnected and fragmentary”—being, he means, in its
original form based on notes of the incidents related by Peter. “It is not
the work of an eyewitness, nor even of one who had had an opportunity of
questioning eyewitnesses thoroughly and carefully; nor even of deriving
assistance from inquirers who, on their part, had made a connected study
of the subject, with a view to filling up the gaps and placing each
individual part in its right position, and so articulating the whole into
an organic unity which should be neither merely inward, nor on the other
hand merely external.” Nevertheless the Evangelist was guided in his work
by a just recollection of the general course of the life of Jesus. “It is
precisely in Mark,” Weisse explains, “that a closer study unmistakably
reveals that the incidental remarks (referring for the most part to the
way in which the fame of Jesus gradually extended, the way the people
began to gather round Him and the sick to besiege Him), far from shutting
off and separating the different narratives, tend rather to unite them
with each other, and so give the impression not of a series of anecdotes
fortuitously thrown together, but of a connected history. By means of
these remarks, and by many other connecting links which he works into the
narration of the individual stories, Mark has succeeded in conveying a
vivid impression of the stir which Jesus made in Galilee, and from Galilee
to Jerusalem, of the gradual gathering of the multitudes to Him, of the
growing intensity of loyalty in the inner circle of disciples, and as the
counterpart of all this, of the growing enmity of the Pharisees and
Scribes—an impression which mere isolated narratives, strung together
without any living connexion, would not have sufficed to produce.” A
connexion of this kind is less clearly present in the other Synoptists,
and is wholly lacking in John. The Fourth Gospel, by itself, would give us
a completely false conception of the relation of Jesus to the people. From
the content of its narratives the reader would form the impression that
the attitude of the people towards Jesus was hostile from the very first,
and that it was only in isolated occasions, for a brief moment, that Jesus
by His miraculous acts inspired the people with astonishment rather than
admiration; that, surrounded by a little company of disciples he contrived
for a time to defy the enmity of the multitude, and that, having
repeatedly provoked it by intemperate invective, he finally succumbed to
it.
The simplicity of the plan of Mark is, in Weisse’s opinion, a stronger
argument for his priority than the most elaborate demonstration; one only
needs to compare it with the perverse design of Luke, who makes Jesus
undertake a journey through Samaria. “How,” asks Weisse, “in the case of a
writer who does things of this kind can it be possible at this time of day
to speak seriously of historical exactitude in the use of his sources?”
To come down to detail, Weisse’s argument for the priority of Mark rests
mainly on the following propositions:—
1. In the first and third Gospels, traces of a common plan are found only
in those parts which they have in common with Mark, not in those which are
common to them, but not to Mark also.
2. In those parts which the three Gospels have in common, the “agreement”
of the other two is mediated through Mark.
3. In those sections which the First and Third Gospels have, but Mark has
not, the agreement consists in the language and incidents, not in the
order. Their common source, therefore, the “Logia” of Matthew, did not
contain any type of tradition which gave an order of narration different
from that of Mark.
4. The divergences of wording between the two other Synoptists is in
general greater in the parts where both have drawn on the Logia document
than where Mark is their source.
5. The first Evangelist reproduces this Logia‐document more faithfully
than Luke does; but his Gospel seems to have been of later origin.
This historical argument for the priority of Mark was confirmed in the
year in which it appeared by Wilke’s work, “The Earliest Gospel,”(83)
which treated the problem more from the literary side, and, to take an
illustration from astronomy, supplied the mathematical confirmation of the
hypothesis.
In regard to the Gospel of John, Weisse fully shared the negative views of
Strauss. What is the use, he asks, of keeping on talking about the plan of
this Gospel, seeing that no one has yet succeeded in showing what that
plan is? And for a very good reason: there is none. One would never guess
from the Gospel of John that Jesus, until His departure from Galilee, had
experienced almost unbroken success. It is no good trying to explain the
want of plan by saying that John wrote with the purpose of supplementing
and correcting his predecessors, and that his omissions and additions were
determined by this purpose. Such a purpose is betrayed by no single word
in the whole Gospel.
The want of plan lies in the very plan itself. “It is a fixed idea, one
may say, with the author of this Gospel, who had heard that Jesus had
fallen a victim in Jerusalem to the hatred of the Jewish rulers,
especially the Scribes, that he must represent Jesus as engaged, from His
first appearance onward, in an unceasing struggle with ‘the Jews’—whereas
we know that the mass of the people, even to the last, in Jerusalem
itself, were on the side of Jesus; so much so, indeed, that His enemies
were only able to get Him into their power by means of a secret betrayal.”
In regard to the graphic descriptions in John, of which so much has been
made, the case is no better. It is the graphic detail of a writer who
desires to work up a vivid picture, not the natural touches of an
eyewitness, and there are, moreover, actual inconsistencies, as in the
case of the healing at the pool of Bethesda. The circumstantiality is due
to the care of the author not to assume an acquaintance, on the part of
his readers, with Jewish usages or the topography of Palestine. “A
considerable proportion of the details are of such a character as
inevitably to suggest that the narrator inserts them because of the
trouble which it has cost him to orientate himself in regard to the scene
of the action and the dramatis personae, his object being to spare his
readers a similar difficulty; though he does not always go about it in the
way best calculated to effect his purpose.”
The impossibility also that the historic Jesus can have preached the
doctrine of the Johannine Christ, is as clear to Weisse as to Strauss. “It
is not so much a picture of Christ that John sets forth, as a conception
of Christ; his Christ does not speak _in_ His own Person, but _of_ His own
Person.”
On the other hand, however, “the authority of the whole Christian Church
from the second century to the nineteenth” carries too much weight with
Weisse for him to venture altogether to deny the Johannine origin of the
Gospel; and he seeks a middle path. He assumes that the didactic portions
really, for the most part, go back to John the Apostle. “John,” he
explains, “drawn on by the interest of a system of doctrine which had
formed itself in his mind, not so much as a direct reflex of the teaching
of his Master, as on the basis of suggestions offered by that teaching in
combination with a certain creative activity of his own, endeavoured to
find this system also in the teaching of his Master.”
Accordingly, with this purpose, and originally for himself alone, not with
the object of communicating it to others, he made an effort to exhibit, in
the light of this system of thought, what his memory still retained of the
discourses of the Lord. “The Johannine discourses, therefore, were
recalled by a laborious effort of memory on the part of the disciple. When
he found that his memory‐image of his Master was threatening to dissolve
into a mist‐wraith, he endeavoured to impress the picture more firmly in
his recollection, to connect and define its rapidly disappearing features,
reconstructing it by the aid of a theory evolved by himself or drawn from
elsewhere regarding the Person and work of the Master.” For the portrait
of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels the mind of the disciples who describe
Him is a neutral medium; for the portrait in John it is a factor which
contributes to the production of the picture. The same portrait is
outlined by the apostle in the first epistle which bears his name.
These tentative “essays,” not originally intended for publication, came,
after the death of the apostle, into the hands of his adherents and
disciples, and they chose the form of a complete Life of Jesus as that in
which to give them to the world. They, therefore, added narrative
portions, which they distributed here and there among the speeches, often
doing some violence to the latter in the process. Such was the origin of
the Fourth Gospel.
Weisse is not blind to the fact that this hypothesis of a Johannine basis
in the Gospel is beset with the gravest—one might almost say with
insuperable—difficulties. Here is a man who was an immediate disciple of
the Lord, one who, in the Synoptic Gospels, in Acts, and in the Pauline
letters, appears in a character which gives no hint of a coming spiritual
metamorphosis, one, moreover, who at a relatively late period, when it
might well have been supposed that his development was in all essentials
closed (at the time of Paul’s visit to Jerusalem, which falls at least
fourteen years after Paul’s conversion), was chosen, along with James and
Peter, and in contrast with the apostles of the Gentiles, Paul and
Barnabas, as an apostle of the Jews—“how is it possible,” asks Weisse, “to
explain and make it intelligible, that a man of these antecedents displays
in his thought and speech, in fact in his whole mental attitude, a
thoroughly Hellenistic stamp? How came he, the beloved disciple, who,
according to this very Gospel which bears his name, was admitted more
intimately than any other into the confidence of Jesus, how came he to
clothe his Master in this foreign garb of Hellenistic speculation, and to
attribute to Him this alien manner of speech? But, however difficult the
explanation may be, whatever extreme of improbability may seem to us to be
involved in the assumption of the Johannine authorship of the Epistle and
of these essential elements of the Gospel, it is better to assent to the
improbability, to submit to the burden of being forced to explain the
inexplicable, than to set ourselves obstinately against the weight of
testimony, against the authority of the whole Christian Church from the
second century to the present day.”
There could be no better argument against the genuineness of the Fourth
Gospel than just such a defence of its genuineness as this. In this form
the hypothesis may well be destined to lead a harmless and never‐ending
life. What matters for the historical study of the Life of Jesus is simply
that the Fourth Gospel should be ruled out. And that Weisse does so
thoroughly that it is impossible to imagine its being done more
thoroughly. The speeches, in spite of their apostolic authority, are
unhistorical, and need not be taken into account in describing Jesus’
system of thought. As for the unhappy redactor, who by adding the
narrative pictures created the Gospel, all possibility of his reports
being accurate is roundly denied, and as if that was not enough, he must
put up with being called a bungler into the bargain. “I have, to tell the
truth, no very high opinion of the literary art of the editor of the
Johannine Gospel‐document,” says Weisse in his “Problem of the Gospels” of
1856, which is the best commentary upon his earlier work.
His treatment of the Fourth Gospel reminds us of the story that Frederic
the Great once appointed an importunate office‐seeker to the post of
“Privy Councillor for War,” on condition that he would never presume to
offer a syllable of advice!
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
The hypothesis which was brought forward about the same time by Alexander
Schweizer,(84) with the intention of saving the genuineness of the Gospel
of John, did not make any real contribution to the subject. The reading of
the facts which form his starting‐point is almost the exact converse of
that of Weisse, since he regards, not the speeches, but certain parts of
the narrative as Johannine. That which it is possible, in his opinion, to
refer to the apostle is an account, not involving any miracles, of the
ministry of Jesus at Jerusalem, and the discourses which He delivered
there. The more or less miraculous events which occur in the course of
it—such as, that Jesus had seen Nathanael under the fig‐tree, knew the
past life of the Samaritan woman, and healed the sick man at the Pool of
Bethesda—are of a simple character, and contrast markedly with those which
are represented to have occurred in Galilee, where Jesus turned water into
wine and fed a multitude with a few crusts of bread. We must, therefore,
suppose that this short, authentic, spiritual Jerusalem‐Gospel has had a
Galilaean Life of Jesus worked into it, and this explains the
inconsistencies of the representation and the oscillation between a
sensuous and a spiritual point of view.
This distinction, however, cannot be made good. Schweizer was obliged to
ascribe the reports of a material resurrection to the Galilaean source,
whereas these, since they exclude the Galilaean appearances of Jesus, must
belong to the Jerusalem Gospel; and accordingly, the whole distinction
between a spiritual and material Gospel falls to the ground. Thus this
hypothesis at best preserves the nominal authenticity of the Fourth
Gospel, only to deprive it immediately of all value as a historical
source.
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Had Strauss calmly examined the bearing of Weisse’s hypothesis, he would
have seen that it fully confirmed the line he had taken in leaving the
Fourth Gospel out of account, and he might have been less unjust towards
the hypothesis of the priority of Mark, for which he cherished a blind
hatred, because, in its fully developed form, it first met him in
conjunction with seemingly reactionary tendencies towards the
rehabilitation of John. He never in the whole course of his life got rid
of the prejudice that the recognition of the priority of Mark was
identical with a retrograde movement towards an uncritical orthodoxy.
This is certainly not true as regards Weisse. He is far from having used
Mark unreservedly as a historical source. On the contrary, he says
expressly that the picture which this Gospel gives of Jesus is drawn by an
imaginative disciple of the faith, filled with the glory of his subject,
whose enthusiasm is consequently sometimes stronger than his judgment.
Even in Mark the mythopoeic tendency is already actively at work, so that
often the task of historical criticism is to explain how such myths could
have been accepted by a reporter who stands as near the facts as Mark
does.
Of the _miracula_(85)—so Weisse denominates the “non‐genuine” miracles, in
contradistinction to the “genuine”—the feeding of the multitude is that
which, above all others, cries aloud for an explanation. Its historical
strength lies in its being firmly interwoven with the preceding and
following context; and this applies to both the Marcan narratives. It is
therefore impossible to regard the story, as Strauss proposes to do, as
pure myth; it is necessary to show how, growing out of some incident
belonging to that context, it assumed its present literary form. The
authentic saying about the leaven of the Pharisees, which, in Mark viii.
14 and 15, is connected with the two miracles of feeding the multitude,
gives ground for supposing that they rest upon a parabolic discourse
repeated on two occasions, in which Jesus spoke, perhaps with allusion to
the manna, of a miraculous food given through Him. These discourses were
later transformed by tradition into an actual miraculous giving of food.
Here, therefore, Weisse endeavours to substitute for Strauss’s
“unhistorical” conception of myth a different conception, which in each
case seeks to discover a sufficient historical cause.