vision which He experienced in that moment. The present form of the story
of the transfiguration has a twofold origin. In the first place, it is
partly based on a real experience shared by the three disciples. That
there is an historical fact here is evident from the way in which it is
connected with the context by a definite indication of time. The six days
of Mark ix. 2 cannot really be connected, as Strauss would have us
suppose, with Ex. xxiv. 16;(86) the meaning is simply that between the
previously reported discourse of Jesus and the event described there was
an interval of six days. The three disciples had a waking, spiritual
vision, not a dream‐vision, and what was revealed in this vision was the
Messiahship of Jesus. But at this point comes in the second, the mythico‐
symbolical element. The disciples see Jesus accompanied, according to the
Jewish Messianic expectations, by those whom the people thought of as His
forerunners. He, however, turns away from them, and Moses and Elias, for
whom the disciples were about to build tabernacles, for them to abide in,
disappear. The mythical element is a reflection of the teaching which
Jesus imparted to them on that occasion, in consequence of which there
dawned on them the spiritual “significance of those expectations and
predictions, which they were to recognise as no longer pointing forward to
a future fulfilment, but as already fulfilled.” The high mountain upon
which, according to Mark, the event took place is not to be understood in
a literal sense, but as symbolical of the sublimity of the revelation; it
is to be sought not on the map of Palestine, but in the recesses of the
spirit.
The most striking case of the formation of myth is the story of the
resurrection. Here, too, myth must have attached itself to an historical
fact. The fact in question is not, however, the empty grave. This only
came into the story later, when the Jews, in order to counteract the
Christian belief in the resurrection, had spread abroad the report that
the body had been stolen from the grave. In consequence of this report the
empty grave had necessarily to be taken up into the story, the Christian
account now making use of the fact that the body of Jesus was not found as
a proof of His bodily resurrection. The emphasis laid on the identity of
the body which was buried with that which rose again, of which the Fourth
Evangelist makes so much, belongs to a time when the Church had to oppose
the Gnostic conception of a spiritual, incorporeal immortality. The
reaction against Gnosticism is, as Weisse rightly remarks, one of the most
potent factors in the development of myth in the Gospel history. As an
additional instance of this he might have cited the anti‐gnostic form of
the Johannine account of the baptism of Jesus.
What, then, is the historical fact in the resurrection? “The historical
fact,” replies Weisse, “is only the existence of a belief—not the belief
of the later Christian Church in the myth of the bodily resurrection of
the Lord—but the personal belief of the Apostles and their companions in
the miraculous presence of the risen Christ in the visions and appearances
which they experienced.” “The question whether those extraordinary
phenomena which, soon after the death of the Lord, actually and undeniably
took place within the community of His disciples, rest upon fact or
illusion—that is, whether in them the departed spirit of the Lord, of
whose presence the disciples supposed themselves to be conscious, was
really present, or whether the phenomena were produced by natural causes
of a different kind, spiritual and psychical, is a question which cannot
be answered without going beyond the confines of purely historical
criticism.” The only thing which is certain is “that the resurrection of
Jesus is a fact which belongs to the domain of the spiritual and psychic
life, and which is not related to outward corporeal existence in such a
way that the body which was laid in the grave could have shared therein.”
When the disciples of Jesus had their first vision of the glorified body
of their Lord, they were far from Jerusalem, far from the grave, and had
no thought of bringing that spiritual corporeity into any kind of relation
with the dead body of the Crucified. That the earliest appearances took
place in Galilee is indicated by the genuine conclusion of Mark, according
to which the angel charges the women with the message that the disciples
were to await Jesus in Galilee.
Strauss’s conception of myth, which failed to give it any point of vital
connexion with the history, had not provided any escape from the dilemma
offered by the rationalistic and supernaturalistic views of the
resurrection. Weisse prepared a new historical basis for a solution. He
was the first to handle the problem from a point of view which combined
historical with psychological considerations, and he is fully conscious of
the novelty and the far‐reaching consequences of his attempt. Theological
science did not overtake him for sixty years; and though it did not for
the most part share his one‐sidedness in recognising only the Galilaean
appearances, that does not count for much, since it was unable to solve
the problem of the double tradition regarding the appearances. His
discussion of the question is, both from the religious and from the
historical point of view, the most satisfying treatment of it with which
we are acquainted; the pompous and circumspect utterances of the very
latest theology in regard to the “empty grave” look very poor in
comparison. Weisse’s psychology requires only one correction—the insertion
into it of the eschatological premise.
It is not only the admixture of myth, but the whole character of the
Marcan representation, which forbids us to use it without reserve as a
source for the life of Jesus. The inventor of the Marcan hypothesis never
wearies of repeating that even in the Second Gospel it is only the main
outline of the Life of Jesus, not the way in which the various sections
are joined together, which is historical. He does not, therefore, venture
to write a Life of Jesus, but begins with a “General Sketch of the Gospel
History” in which he gives the main outlines of the Life of Jesus
according to Mark, and then proceeds to explain the incidents and
discourses in each several Gospel in the order in which they occur.(87)
He avoids the professedly historical forced interpretation of detail,
which later representatives of the Marcan hypothesis, Schenkel in
particular, employ in such distressing fashion that Wrede’s book, by
making an end of this inquisitorial method of extracting the Evangelist’s
testimony, may be said to have released the Marcan hypothesis from the
torture‐chamber. Weisse is free from these over‐refinements. He refuses to
divide the Galilaean ministry of Jesus into a period of success and a
period of failure and gradual falling off of adherents, divided by the
controversy about legal purity in Mark vii.; he does not allow this
episode to counterbalance the general evidence that Jesus’ public work was
accompanied by a constantly growing success. Nor does it occur to him to
conceive the sojourn of the Lord in Phoenician territory, and His journey
to the neighbourhood of Caesarea Philippi, as a compulsory withdrawal from
Galilee, an abandonment of His cause in that district, and to head the
chapter, as was usual in the second period of the exegesis of Mark,
“Flights and Retirements.” He is content simply to state that Jesus once
visited those regions, and explicitly remarks that while the Synoptists
speak of the Pharisees and Scribes as working actively against Him, there
is nowhere any hint of a hostile movement on the part of the people, but
that, on the contrary, in spite of the Scribes and Pharisees the people
are always ready to approve Him and take His part; so much so that His
enemies can only hope to get Him into their power by a secret betrayal.
Weisse does not admit any failure in Jesus’ work, nor that death came upon
Him from without as an inevitable necessity. He cannot, therefore, regard
the thought of suffering as forced upon Jesus by outward events. Later
interpreters of Mark have often held that the essential thing in the
Lord’s resolve to die was that by His voluntary acceptance of a fate which
was more and more clearly revealing itself as inevitable, He raised it
into the sphere of ethico‐religious freedom: this was not Weisse’s view.
Jesus, according to him, was not moved by any outward circumstances when
He set out for Jerusalem in order to die there. He did it in obedience to
a supra‐rational higher necessity. We can at most venture to conjecture
that a cessation of His miracle‐working power, of which He had become
aware, revealed to Him that the hour appointed by God had come. He did, in
fact, no further miracle in Jerusalem.
How far Isaiah liii. may have contributed to suggest the conception of
such a death being a necessary part of Messiah’s work, it is impossible to
discover. In the popular expectation there was no thought of the Messiah
as suffering. The thought was conceived by Jesus independently, through
His deep and penetrating spiritual insight. Without any external
suggestion whatever He announces to His disciples that He is to die at
Jerusalem, and that He is going thither with that end in view. He
journeyed, not to the Passover, but to His death. The fact that it took
place at the time of the Feast was, so far as Jesus was concerned,
accidental. The circumstances of His entry were such as to suggest
anything rather than the fulfilment of His predictions; but though the
jubilant multitude surrounded Him day by day, as with a wall of defence,
He did not let that make Him falter in His purpose; rather He forced the
authorities to arrest Him; He preserved silence before Pilate with the
deliberate purpose of rendering His death inevitable. The theory of later
defenders of the Marcan hypothesis that Jesus, giving up His cause in
Galilee for lost, went up to Jerusalem to conquer or die, is foreign to
Weisse’s conception. In his view, Jesus, breaking off His Galilaean work
while the tide of success was still flowing strongly, journeyed to
Jerusalem, in the scorn of consequence, with the sole purpose of dying
there.
It is true there are some premonitions of the later course of Marcan
exegesis. The Second Gospel mentions no Passover journeys as falling in
the course of the public ministry of Jesus; consequently the most natural
conclusion would be that no Passover journeys fall within that period;
that is, that Jesus’ ministry began after one Passover and closed with the
next, thus lasting less than a full year. Weisse thinks, however, that it
is impossible to understand the success of His teaching unless we assume a
ministry of several years, of more than three years, indeed. Mark does not
mention the Feasts simply because Jesus did not go up to Jerusalem.
“Intrinsic probability is, in our opinion, so strongly in favour of a
duration of a considerable number of years, that we are at a loss to
explain how it is that at least a few unprejudiced investigators have not
found in this a sufficient reason for departing from the traditional
opinion.”
The account of the mission of the Twelve is also, on the ground of
“intrinsic probability,” explained in a way which is not in accordance
with the plain sense of the words. “We do not think,” says Weisse, “that
it is necessary to understand this in the sense that He sent all the
twelve out at one time, two and two, remaining alone in the meantime; it
is much more natural to suppose that He only sent them out two at a time,
keeping the others about Him. The object of this mission was less the
immediate spreading abroad of His teaching than the preparation of the
disciples themselves for the independent activity which they would have to
exercise after His death.” These are, however, the only serious liberties
which he takes with the statements of Mark.
When did Jesus begin to think of Himself as the Messiah? The baptism seems
to have marked an epoch in regard to His Messianic consciousness, but that
does not mean that He had not previously begun to have such thoughts about
Himself. In any case He did not on that occasion arrive all at once at
that point of His inward journey which He had reached at the time of His
first public appearance. We must assume a period of some duration between
the baptism and the beginning of His ministry—a longer period than we
should suppose from the Synoptists—during which Jesus cast off the
Messianic ideas of Judaism and attained to a spiritual conception of the
Messiahship. When He began to teach, His “development” was already closed.
Later interpreters of Mark have generally differed from Weisse in assuming
a development in the thought of Jesus during His public ministry.
His conception of the Messiahship was therefore fully formed when He began
to teach in Capernaum; but He did not allow the people to see that He held
Himself to be the Messiah until His triumphal entry. It was in order to
avoid declaring His Messiahship that He kept away from Jerusalem. “It was
only in Galilee and not in the Jewish capital that an extended period of
teaching and work was possible for Him without being obliged to make an
explicit declaration whether He were the Messiah or no. In Jerusalem
itself the High Priests and Scribes would soon have put this question to
Him in such a way that He could not have avoided answering it, whereas in
Galilee He doubtless on more than one occasion cut short such attempts to
question Him too closely by the incisiveness of His replies.” Like
Strauss, Weisse recognises that the key to the explanation of the
Messianic consciousness of Jesus lies in the self‐designation “Son of
Man.” “We are most certainly justified,” he says, with almost prophetic
insight, in his “Problem of the Gospels,” published in 1856, “in regarding
the question, what sense the Divine Saviour desired to attach to this
predicate?—what, in fact, He intended to make known about Himself by using
the title Son of Man—as an essential question for the right understanding
of His teaching, and not of His teaching only, but also of the very heart
and inmost essence of His personality.”
But at this point Weisse lets in the cloven hoof of that fatal method of
interpretation, by the aid of which the defenders of the Marcan hypothesis
who succeeded him were to wage war, with a kind of dull and dogged
determination, against eschatology, in the interests of an original and
“spiritual” conception of the Messiahship supposed to be held by Jesus.
Under the obsession of the fixed idea that it was their mission to defend
the “originality” of Jesus by ascribing to Him a modernising
transformation and spiritualisation of the eschatological system of ideas,
the defenders of the Marcan hypothesis have impeded the historical study
of the Life of Jesus to an almost unbelievable extent.
The explanation of the name Son of Man had, Weisse explains, hitherto
oscillated between two extremes. Some had held the expression to be, even
in the mouth of Jesus, equivalent to “man” in general, an interpretation
which cannot be carried through; others had connected it with the Son of
Man in Daniel, and supposed that in using the term Jesus was employing a
Messianic title understood by and current among the Jews. But how came He
to employ only this unusual periphrastic name for the Messiah? Further, if
this name were really a Messianic title, how could He repeatedly have
refused Messianic salutations, and not until the triumphal entry suffered
the people to hail Him as Messiah?
The questions are rightly asked; it is therefore the more pity that they
are wrongly answered. It follows, Weisse says, from the above
considerations that Jesus did not assume an acquaintance on the part of
His hearers with the Old Testament Messianic significance of the
expression. “It was therefore incontestably the intention of Jesus—and any
one who considers it unworthy betrays thereby his own want of insight—that
the designation should have something mysterious about it, something which
would compel His hearers to reflect upon His meaning.” The expression Son
of Man was calculated to lead them on to higher conceptions of His nature
and origin, and therefore sums up in itself the whole spiritualisation of
the Messiahship.
Weisse, therefore, passionately rejects any suggestion, however modest,
that Jesus’ self‐designation, Son of Man, implies any measure of
acceptance of the Jewish apocalyptic system of ideas. Ewald had furnished
forth his Life of Jesus(88) with a wealth of Old Testament learning, and
had made some half‐hearted attempts to show the connexion of Jesus’ system
of thought with that of post‐canonical Judaism, but without taking the
matter seriously and without having any suspicion of the real character of
the eschatology of Jesus. But even these parade‐ground tactics excite
Weisse’s indignation; in his book, published in 1856, he reproaches Ewald
with failing to understand his task.
The real duty of criticism is, according to Weisse, to show that Jesus had
no part in those fantastic errors which are falsely attributed to Him when
a literal Jewish interpretation is given to His great sayings about the
future of the Son of Man, and to remove all the obstacles which seem to
have prevented hitherto the recognition of the novel character and special
significance of the expression, Son of Man, in the mouth of Him who, of
His own free choice, applied this name to Himself. “How long will it be,”
he cries, “before theology at last becomes aware of the deep importance of
its task? Historical criticism, exercised with all the thoroughness and
impartiality which alone can produce a genuine conviction, must free the
Master’s own teaching from the imputation that lies upon it—the imputation
of sharing the errors and false expectations in which, as we cannot deny,
owing to imperfect or mistaken understanding of the suggestions of the
Master, the Apostles, and with them the whole early Christian Church,
became involved.”
This fundamental position determines the remainder of Weisse’s views.
Jesus cannot have shared the Jewish particularism. He did not hold the Law
to be binding. It was for this reason that He did not go up to the Feasts.
He distinctly and repeatedly expressed the conviction that His doctrine
was destined for the whole world. In speaking of the parousia of the Son
of Man He was using a figure—a figure which includes in a mysterious
fashion all His predictions of the future. He did not speak to His
disciples of His resurrection, His ascension, and His parousia as three
distinct acts, since the event to which He looked forward is not identical
with any of the three, but is composed of them all. The resurrection is,
at the same time, the ascension and parousia, and in the parousia the
resurrection and the ascension are also included. “The one conclusion to
which we believe we can point with certainty is that Jesus spoke of the
future of His work and His teaching in a way that implied the
consciousness of an influence to be continued after His death, whether
unbrokenly or intermittently, and the consciousness that by this influence
His work and teaching would be preserved from destruction and the final
victory assured to it.”
The personal presence of Jesus which the disciples experienced after His
death was in their view only a partial fulfilment of that general promise.
The parousia appeared to them as still awaiting fulfilment. Thought of
thus, as an isolated event, they could only conceive it from the Jewish
apocalyptic standpoint, and they finally came to suppose that they had
derived these fantastic ideas from the Master Himself.
In his determined opposition to the recognition of eschatology in
Strauss’s first Life of Jesus, Weisse here lays down the lines which were
to be followed by the “liberal” Lives of Jesus of the ’sixties and
following years, which only differ from him, not always to their
advantage, in their more elaborate interpretation of the detail of Mark.
The only work, therefore, which was a conscious continuation of Strauss’s,
takes, in spite of its just appreciation of the character of the sources,
a wrong path, led astray by the mistaken idea of the “originality” of
Jesus, which it exalts into a canon of historical criticism. Only after
long and devious wanderings did the study of the subject find the right
road again. The whole struggle over eschatology is nothing else than a
gradual elimination of Weisse’s ideas. It was only with Johannes Weiss
that theology escaped from the influence of Christian Hermann Weisse.
XI. BRUNO BAUER. THE FIRST SCEPTICAL LIFE OF JESUS
Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes. (Criticism of
the Gospel History of John.) Bremen, 1840. 435 pp.
Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. (Criticism of
the Gospel History of the Synoptics.) 3 vols., Leipzig, 1841‐1842;
vol. i. 416 pp.; vol. ii. 392 pp.; vol. iii. 341 pp.
Kritik der Evangelien. (Criticism of the Gospels.) 2 vols.,
1850‐1851, Berlin.
Kritik der Apostelgeschichte. (Criticism of Acts.) 1850.
Kritik der Paulinischen Briefe. Berlin, 1850‐1852. In three parts.
Philo, Strauss, Renan und das Urchristentum. (P., S., R., and
Primitive Christianity.) Berlin, 1874. 155 pp.
Christus und die Cäsaren. Der Ursprung des Christentums aus dem
römischen Griechentum. (The Origin of Christianity from Graeco‐
Roman Civilisation.) Berlin, 1877. 387 pp.
Bruno Bauer was born in 1809 at Eisenberg, in the duchy of Sachsen‐
Altenburg. In philosophy, he was at first associated entirely with the
Hegelian “right.” Like Strauss, he received a strong impulse from Vatke.
At this stage of his development he reviewed, in 1835 and 1836, Strauss’s
Life of Jesus in the _Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik_, and wrote
in 1838 a “Criticism of the History of Revelation.”(89)
In 1834 he had become Privat‐Docent in Berlin, but in 1839 he removed to
Bonn. He was then in the midst of that intellectual crisis of which the
evidence appeared in his critical works on John and the Synoptics. In
August 1841 the Minister, Eichhorn, requested the Faculties of the
Prussian Universities to report on the question whether Bauer should be
allowed to retain the _venia docendi_. Most of them returned an evasive
answer, Königsberg replied in the affirmative, and Bonn in the negative.
In March 1842 Bauer was obliged to cease lecturing, and retired to Rixdorf
near Berlin. In the first heat of his furious indignation over this
treatment he wrote a work with the title “Christianity Exposed,”(90)
which, however, was cancelled before publication at Zurich in 1843.
He then turned his attention to secular history and wrote on the French
Revolution, on Napoleon, on the Illuminism of the Eighteenth Century, and
on the party struggles in Germany during the years 1842‐1846. At the
beginning of the ’fifties he returned to theological subjects, but failed
to exercise any influence. His work was simply ignored.
Radical though he was in spirit, Bauer found himself fighting, at the end
of the ’fifties and beginning of the ’sixties, in the ranks of the
Prussian Conservatives—we are reminded how Strauss in the Würtemberg
Chamber was similarly forced to side with the reactionaries. He died in
1882. His was a pure, modest, and lofty character.
At the time of his removal from Berlin to Bonn he was just at the end of
the twenties, that critical age when pupils often surprise their teachers,
when men begin to find themselves and show what they are, not merely what
they have been taught.