himself tells us, two ways open to him. He might take as his starting‐
point the Jewish Messianic conception, and endeavour to answer the
question how the intuitive prophetic idea of the Messiah became a fixed
reflective conception. That was the historical method; he chose, however,
the other, the literary method. This starts from the opposite side of the
question, from the end instead of the beginning of the Gospel history.
Taking first the Gospel of John, in which it is obvious that reflective
thought has fitted the life of the Jewish Messiah into the frame of the
Logos conception, he then, starting as it were from the embouchure of the
stream, works his way upwards to the high ground in which the Gospel
tradition takes its rise. The decision in favour of the latter view
determined the character of Bauer’s life‐work; it was his task to follow
out, to its ultimate consequences, the literary solution of the problem of
the life of Jesus.
How far this path would lead him he did not at first suspect. But he did
suspect how strong was the influence upon the formation of history of a
dominant idea which moulds and shapes it with a definite artistic purpose.
His interest was especially arrested by Philo, who, without knowing or
intending it, contributed to the fulfilment of a higher task than that
with which he was immediately engaged. Bauer’s view is that a speculative
principle such as Philo’s, when it begins to take possession of men’s
minds, influences them in the first glow of enthusiasm which it evokes
with such overmastering power that the just claims of that which is actual
and historical cannot always secure the attention which is their due. In
Philo’s pupil, John, we must look, not for history, but for art.
The Fourth Gospel is in fact a work of art. This was now for the first
time appreciated by one who was himself an artist. Schleiermacher, indeed,
had at an earlier period taken up the aesthetic standpoint in considering
this Gospel. But he had used it as an apologist, proceeding to exalt the
artistic truth which he rightly recognised into historic reality, and his
critical sense failed him, precisely because he was an aesthete and an
apologist, when he came to deal with the Fourth Gospel. Now, however,
there comes forward a true artist, who shows that the depth of religious
and intellectual insight which Tholuck and Neander, in opposing Strauss,
had urged on behalf of the Fourth Gospel, is—Christian art.
In Bauer, however, the aesthete is at the same time a critic. Although
much in the Fourth Gospel is finely “felt,” like the opening scenes
referring to the Baptist and to Jesus, which Bauer groups together under
the heading “The Circle of the Expectant,” yet his art is by no means
always perfect. The author who conceived those discourses, of which the
movement consists in a kind of tautological return upon itself, and who
makes the parables trail out into dragging allegories, is no perfect
artist. “The parable of the Good Shepherd,” says Bauer, “is neither
simple, nor natural, nor a true parable, but a metaphor, which is,
nevertheless, much too elaborate for a metaphor, is not clearly conceived,
and, finally, in places shows much too clearly the skeleton of reflection
over which it is stretched.”
Bauer treats, in his work of 1840,(91) the Fourth Gospel only. The
Synoptics he deals with only in a quite incidental fashion, “as opposing
armies make demonstrations in order to provoke the enemy to a decisive
conflict.”
He breaks off at the beginning of the story of the passion, because here
it would be necessary to bring in the Synoptic parallels. “From the
distant heights on which the Synoptic forces have taken up a menacing
position, we must now draw them down into the plain; now comes the pitched
battle between them and the Fourth Gospel, and the question regarding the
historical character of that which we have found to be the ultimate basis
of the last Gospel, can now at length be decided.”
If, in the Gospel of John, no smallest particle could be found which was
unaffected by the creative reflection of the author, how will it stand
with the Synoptists?
When Bauer broke off his work upon John in this abrupt way—for he had not
originally intended to conclude it at this point—how far did he still
retain a belief in the historical character of the Synoptics? It looks as
if he had intended to treat then as the solid foundation, in contrast with
the fantastic structure raised upon it by the Fourth Gospel. But when he
began to use his pick upon the rock, it crumbled away. Instead of a
difference of kind he found only a difference of degree. The “Criticism of
the Gospel History of the Synoptists” of 1841 is built on the site which
Strauss had levelled. “The abiding influence of Strauss,” says Bauer,
“consists in the fact that he has removed from the path of subsequent
criticism the danger and trouble of a collision with the earlier orthodox
system.”
Bauer finds his material laid ready to his hand by Weisse and Wilke.
Weisse had divined in Mark the source from which criticism—becoming barren
in the work of Strauss—might draw a new spring of vigorous life; and
Wilke, whom Bauer places above Weisse, had raised this happy conjecture to
the level of a scientifically assured result. The Marcan hypothesis was no
longer on its trial.
But its bearing upon the history of Jesus had still to be determined. What
position do Weisse and Wilke take up towards the hypothesis of a tradition
lying behind the Gospel of Mark? If it be once admitted that the whole
Gospel tradition, so far as concerns its plan, goes back to a single
writer, who has created the connexion between the different events—for
neither Weisse nor Wilke regards the connexion of the sections as
historical—does not the possibility naturally suggest itself that the
narrative of the events themselves, not merely the connexion in which they
appear in Mark, is to be set down to the account of the author of the
Gospel? Weisse and Wilke had not suspected how great a danger arises when,
of the three witnesses who represent the tradition, only one is allowed to
stand, and the tradition is recognised and allowed to exist in this one
written form only. The triple embankment held; will a single one bear the
strain?
The following considerations have to be taken into account. The criticism
of the Fourth Gospel compels us to recognise that a Gospel _may_ have a
purely literary origin. This discovery dawned upon Bauer at a time when he
was still disinclined to accept Wilke’s conclusions regarding Mark. But
when he had recognised the truth of the latter he felt compelled by the
combination of the two to accept the idea that Mark also might be of
purely literary origin. For Weisse and Wilke the Marcan hypothesis had not
implied this result, because they continued to combine with it the wider
hypothesis of a general tradition, holding that Matthew and Luke used the
collection of “Logia,” and also owed part of their supplementary matter to
a free use of floating tradition, so that Mark, it might almost be said,
merely supplied them with the formative principle by means of which they
might order their material.
But what if Papias’s statement about the collection of “Logia” were
worthless, and could be shown to be so by the literary data? In that case
Matthew and Luke would be purely literary expansions of Mark, and like
him, purely literary inventions.
In this connexion Bauer attaches decisive importance to the phenomena of
the birth‐stories. If these had been derived from tradition they could not
differ from each other as they do. If it is suggested that tradition had
produced a large number of independent, though mutually consistent,
stories of the childhood, out of which the Evangelists composed their
opening narratives, this also is found to be untenable, for these
narratives are not composite structures. The separate stories of which
each of these two histories of the childhood consists could not have been
formed independently of one another; none of them existed by itself; each
points to the others and is informed by a view which implies the whole.
The histories of the childhood are therefore not literary versions of a
tradition, but literary inventions.
If we go on to examine the discourse and narrative material, additional to
that of Mark, which is found in Matthew and Luke, a similar result
appears. The same standpoint is regulative throughout, showing that the
additions do not consist of oral or written traditional material which has
been worked into the Marcan plan, but of a literary development of certain
fundamental ideas and suggestions found in the first author. These
developments, as is shown by the accounts of the Sermon on the Mount and
the charge to the Twelve, are not carried as far in Luke as in Matthew.
The additional material in the latter seems indeed to be worked up from
suggestions in the former. Luke thus forms the transition stage between
Mark and Matthew. The Marcan hypothesis, accordingly, now takes on the
following form. Our knowledge of the Gospel history does not rest upon any
basis of tradition, but only upon three literary works. Two of these are
not independent, being merely expansions of the first, and the third,
Matthew, is also dependent upon the second. Consequently there is no
tradition of the Gospel history, but only a single _literary source_.
But, if so, who is to assure us that this Gospel history, with its
assertion of the Messiahship of Jesus, was already a matter of common
knowledge before it was fixed in writing, and did not first become known
in a literary form? In the latter case, one man would have created out of
general ideas the definite historical tradition in which these ideas are
embodied. The only thing that could be set against this literary
possibility, as a historical counter‐possibility, would be a proof that at
the period when the Gospel history is supposed to take place a Messianic
expectation really existed among the Jews, so that a man who claimed to be
the Messiah and was recognised as such, as Mark represents Jesus to have
been, would be historically conceivable. This presupposition had hitherto
been unanimously accepted by all writers, no matter how much opposed in
other respects. They were all satisfied “that before the appearance of
Jesus the expectation of a Messiah prevailed among the Jews”; and were
even able to explain its precise character.
But where—apart from the Gospels—did they get their information from?
Where is the documentary evidence of the Jewish Messianic doctrine on
which that of the Gospels is supposed to be based? Daniel was the last of
the prophets. Everything tends to suggest that the mysterious content of
his work remained without influence in the subsequent period. Jewish
literature ends with the Wisdom writings, in which there is no mention of
a Messiah. In the LXX there is no attempt to translate in accordance with
a preconceived picture of the Messiah. In the Apocalypses, which are of
small importance, there is reference to a Messianic Kingdom; the Messiah
Himself, however, plays a quite subordinate part, and is, indeed, scarcely
mentioned. For Philo He has no existence; the Alexandrian does not dream
of connecting Him with his Logos speculation. There remain, therefore, as
witnesses for the Jewish Messianic expectations in the time of Tiberius,
only Mark and his imitators. This evidence, however, is of such a
character that in certain points it contradicts itself.
In the first place, if at the time when the Christian community was
forming its view of history and the religious ideas which we find in the
Gospels, the Jews had already possessed a doctrine of the Messiah, there
would have been already a fixed type of interpretation of the Messianic
passages in the Old Testament, and it would have been impossible for the
same passages to be interpreted in a totally different way, as referring
to Jesus and His work, as we find them interpreted in the New Testament.
Next, consider the representation of the Baptist’s work. We should have
expected him to connect his baptism with the preaching of “Him who was to
come”—if this were really the Messiah—by baptizing in the name of this
“Coming One.” He, however, keeps them separate, baptizing in preparation
for the Kingdom, though referring in his discourses to “Him who was to
come.”
The earliest Evangelist did not venture openly to carry back into the
history the idea that Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah, because he was
aware that in the time of Jesus no general expectation of the Messiah had
prevailed among the people. When the disciples in Mark viii. 28 report the
opinions of the people concerning Jesus they cannot mention any who hold
Him to be the Messiah. Peter is the first to attain to the recognition of
His Messiahship. But as soon as the confession is made the Evangelist
makes Jesus forbid His disciples to tell the people who He is. Why is the
attribution of the Messiahship to Jesus made in this surreptitious and
inconsistent way? It is because the writer who gave the history its form
well knew that no one had ever come forward publicly on Palestinian soil
to claim the Messiahship, or had been recognised by the people as Messiah.
The “reflective conception of the Messiah” was not, therefore, taken over
ready‐made from Judaism; that dogma first arose along with the Christian
community, or rather the moment in which it arose was the same in which
the Christian community had its birth.
Moreover, how unhistorical, even on a priori grounds, is the mechanical
way in which Jesus at this first appearance at once sets Himself up as the
Messiah and says, “Behold I am He whom ye have expected.” In essence,
Bauer thinks, there is not so much difference between Strauss and
Hengstenberg. For Hengstenberg the whole life of Jesus is the living
embodiment of the Old Testament picture of the Messiah; Strauss, a less
reverent counterpart of Hengstenberg, made the image of the Messiah into a
mask which Jesus Himself was obliged to assume, and which legend
afterwards substituted for His real features.
“We save the honour of Jesus,” says Bauer, “when we restore His Person to
life from the state of inanition to which the apologists have reduced it,
and give it once more a living relation to history, which it certainly
possessed—that can no longer be denied. If a conception was to become
dominant which should unite heaven and earth, God and man, nothing more
and nothing less was necessary as a preliminary condition, than that a Man
should appear, the very essence of whose consciousness should be the
reconciliation of these antitheses, and who should manifest this
consciousness to the world, and lead the religious mind to the sole point
from which its difficulties can be solved. Jesus accomplished this mighty
work, but not by prematurely pointing to His own Person. Instead He
gradually made known to the people the thoughts which filled and entered
into the very essence of His mind. It was only in this indirect way that
His Person—which He freely offered up in the cause of His historical
vocation and of the idea for which He lived—continued to live on in so far
as this idea was accepted. When, in the belief of His followers, He rose
again and lived on in the Christian community, it was as the Son of God
who had overcome and reconciled the great antithesis. He was that in which
alone the religious consciousness found rest and peace, apart from which
there was nothing firm, trustworthy, and enduring.”
“It was only now that the vague, ill‐defined, prophetic representations
were focused into a point; were not only fulfilled, but were also united
together by a common bond which strengthened and gave greater value to
each of them. With His appearance and the rise of belief in Him, a clear
conception, a definite mental picture of the Messiah became possible; and
thus it was that a Christology(92) first arose.”
While, therefore, at the close of Bauer’s first work it might have seemed
that it was only the Gospel of John which he held to be a literary
creation, here the same thing is said of the original Gospel. The only
difference is that we find more primitive reflection in the Synoptics, and
later work in the representation given by the Fourth Evangelist; the
former is of a more practical character, the latter more dogmatic.
Nevertheless it is false to assert that according to Bauer the earliest
Evangelist invented the Gospel history and the personality of Jesus. That
is to carry back the ideas of a later period and a further stage of
development into the original form of his view. At the moment when, having
disposed of preliminaries, he enters on his investigation, he still
assumes that a great, a unique Personality, who so impressed men by His
character that it lived on among them in an ideal form, had awakened into
life the Messianic idea; and that what the original Evangelist really did
was to portray the life of this Jesus—the Christ of the community which He
founded—in accordance with the Messianic view of Him, just as the Fourth
Evangelist portrayed it in accordance with the presupposition that Jesus
was the revealer of the Logos. It was only in the course of his
investigations that Bauer’s opinion became more radical. As he goes on,
his writing becomes ill‐tempered, and takes the form of controversial
dialogues with “the theologians,” whom he apostrophises in a biting and
injurious fashion, and whom he continually reproaches with not daring,
owing to their apologetic prejudices, to see things as they really are,
and with declining to face the ultimate results of criticism from fear
that the tradition might suffer more loss of historic value than religion
could bear. In spite of this hatred of the theologians, which is
pathological in character, like his meaningless punctuation, his critical
analyses are always exceedingly acute. One has the impression of walking
alongside a man who is reasoning quite intelligently, but who talks to
himself as though possessed by a fixed idea. What if the whole thing
should turn out to be nothing but a literary invention—not only the
incidents and discourses, but even the Personality which is assumed as the
starting‐point of the whole movement? What if the Gospel history were only
a late imaginary embodiment of a set of exalted ideas, and these were the
only historical reality from first to last? This is the idea which
obsesses his mind more and more completely, and moves him to contemptuous
laughter. What, he mocks, will these apologists, who are so sure of
everything, do then with the shreds and tatters which will be all that is
left to them?
But at the outset of his investigations Bauer was far from holding such
views. His purpose was really only to continue the work of Strauss. The
conception of myth and legend of which the latter made use is, Bauer
thinks, much too vague to explain this deliberate “transformation” of a
personality. In the place of myth Bauer therefore sets “reflection.” The
life which pulses in the Gospel history is too vigorous to be explained as
created by legend; it is real “experience,” only not the experience of
Jesus, but of the Church. The representation of this experience of the
Church in the Life of a Person is not the work of a number of persons, but
of a single author. It is in this twofold aspect—as the composition of one
man, embodying the experience of many—that the Gospel history is to be
regarded. As religious art it has a profound truth. When it is regarded
from this point of view the difficulties which are encountered in the
endeavour to conceive it as real immediately disappear.
We must take as our point of departure the belief in the sacrificial death
and the resurrection of Jesus. Everything else attaches itself to this as
to its centre. When the need arose to fix definitely the beginning of the
manifestation of Jesus as the Saviour—to determine the point of time at
which the Lord issued forth from obscurity—it was natural to connect this
with the work of the Baptist; and Jesus comes to his baptism. While this
is sufficient for the earliest Evangelist, Matthew and Luke feel it to be
necessary, in view of the important consequences involved in the connexion
of Jesus with the Baptist, to bring them into relation once more by means
of the question addressed by the Baptist to Jesus, although this addition
is quite inconsistent with the assumptions of the earliest Evangelist. If
he had conceived the story of the baptism with the idea of introducing the
Baptist again on a later occasion, and this time, moreover, as a doubter,
he would have given it a different form. This is a just observation of
Bauer’s; the story of the baptism with the miracle which took place at it,
and the Baptist’s question, understood as implying a doubt of the
Messiahship of Jesus, mutually exclude one another.
The story of the temptation embodies an experience of the early Church.
This narrative represents her inner conflicts under the form of a conflict
of the Redeemer. On her march through the wilderness of this world she has
to fight with temptations of the devil, and in the story composed by Mark
and Luke, and artistically finished by Matthew, she records a vow to build
only on the inner strength of her constitutive principle. In the sermon on
the mount also, Matthew has carried out with greater completeness that
which was more vaguely conceived by Luke. It is only when we understand
the words of Jesus as embodying experiences of the early Church that their
deeper sense becomes clear and what would otherwise seem offensive
disappears. The saying, “Let the dead bury their dead,” would not have
been fitting for Jesus to speak, and had He been a real man, it could
never have entered into His mind to create so unreal and cruel a collision
of duties; for no command, Divine or human, could have sufficed to make it
right for a man to contravene the ethical obligations of family life. So
here again, the obvious conclusion is that the saying originated in the
early Church, and was intended to inculcate renunciation of a world which
was felt to belong to the kingdom of the dead, and to illustrate this by
an extreme example.
The mission of the Twelve, too, is, as an historical occurrence, simply
inconceivable. It would have been different if Jesus had given them a
definite teaching, or form of belief, or positive conception of any kind,
to take with them as their message. But how ill the charge to the Twelve
fulfils its purpose as a discourse of instruction! What the disciples
needed to learn, namely, what and how they were to teach, they are not
told; and the discourse which Matthew has composed, working on the basis
of Luke, implies quite a different set of circumstances. It is concerned
with the struggles of the Church with the world and the sufferings which
it must endure. This is the explanation of the references to suffering
which constantly recur in the discourses of Jesus, in spite of the fact
that His disciples were not enduring any sufferings, and that the
Evangelist cannot even make it conceivable as a possibility that those
before whose eyes Jesus holds up the way of the Cross could ever come into
such a position. The Twelve, at any rate, had no sufferings to encounter
during their mission, and if they were merely being sent by Jesus into the
surrounding districts they were not very likely to meet with kings and
rulers there.
That it is a case of invented history is also shown by the fact that
nothing is said about the doings of the disciples, and they seem to come
back again immediately, though the earliest Evangelist, it is true, to
prevent this from being too apparent, inserts at this point the story of
the execution of the Baptist.
All this is just and acute criticism. The charge to the Twelve is not a
discourse of instruction. What Jesus there sets before the disciples they
could not at that time have understood, and the promises which He makes to
them are not appropriate to their circumstances.