this is not so much the case in Mark as in the others. He has not
forgotten that effective polemic consists of short, pointed, incisive
arguments. The others, as advanced theologians, are of opinion that it is
fitting to indulge in arguments which have nothing to do with the matter
in hand, or only the most distant connexion with it. They form the
transition to the discourses of the Fourth Gospel, which usually
degenerate into an aimless wrangle. In the same connexion it is rightly
observed that the discourses of Jesus do not advance from point to point
by the logical development of an idea, the thoughts are merely strung
together one after another, the only connexion, if connexion there is,
being due to a kind of conventional mould in which the discourse is cast.
The parables, Bauer continues, present difficulties no less great. It is
an ineptitude on the part of the apologists to suggest that the parables
are intended to make things clear. Jesus Himself contradicts this view by
saying bluntly and unambiguously to His disciples that to them it was
given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to the people all
His teaching must be spoken as parables, that “seeing they might see and
not perceive, and hearing they might hear and not understand.” The
parables were therefore intended only to exercise the intelligence of the
disciples; and so far from being understood by the people, mystified and
repelled them; as if it would not have been much better to exercise the
minds of the disciples in this way when He was alone with them. The
disciples, however, do not even understand the simple parable of the
Sower, but need to have it interpreted to them, so that the Evangelist
once more stultifies his own theory.
Bruno Bauer is right in his observation that the parables offer a serious
problem, seeing that they were intended to conceal and not to make plain,
and that Jesus nevertheless taught only in parables. The character of the
difficulty, however, is such that even literary criticism has no
explanation ready. Bruno Bauer admits that he does not know what was in
the mind of the Evangelist when he composed these parables, and thinks
that he had no very definite purpose, or at least that the suggestions
which were floating in his mind were not worked up into a clearly ordered
whole.
Here, therefore, Bauer’s method broke down. He did not, however, allow
this to shake his confidence in his reading of the facts, and he continued
to maintain it in the face of a new difficulty which he himself brought
clearly to light. Mark, according to him, is an artistic unity, the
offspring of a single mind. How then is it to be explained that in
addition to other less important doublets it contains two accounts of the
feeding of the multitude? Here Bauer has recourse to the aid of Wilke, who
distinguishes our Mark from an Ur‐Markus,(93) and ascribes these doublets
to later interpolation. Later on he became more and more doubtful about
the artistic unity of Mark, despite the fact that this was the fundamental
assumption of his theory, and in the second edition of his “Criticism of
the Gospels,” of 1851, he carried through the distinction between the
canonical Mark and the Ur‐Markus.
But even supposing the assumption of a redaction were justified, how could
the redactor have conceived the idea of adding to the first account of the
feeding of the multitude a second which is identical with it almost to the
very wording? In any case, on what principle can Mark be distinguished
from Ur‐Markus? There are no fundamental differences to afford a ready
criterion. The distinction is purely one of subjective feeling, that is to
say, it is arbitrary. As soon as Bauer admits that the artistic unity of
Mark, on which he lays so much stress, has been tampered with, he cannot
maintain his position except by shutting his eyes to the fact that it can
only be a question of the weaving in of fragments of tradition, not of the
inventions of an imitator. But if he once admits the presence of
traditional materials, his whole theory of the earliest Evangelist’s
having created the Gospel falls to the ground.
For the moment he succeeds in laying the spectre again, and continues to
think of Mark as a work of art, in which the interpolation alters nothing.
Bauer discusses with great thoroughness those sayings of Jesus in which He
forbids those whom He had healed to noise abroad their cure. In the form
in which they appear these cannot, he argues, be historical, for Jesus
imposes this prohibition in some cases where it is quite meaningless,
since the healing had taken place in the presence of a multitude. It must
therefore be derived from the Evangelist. Only when it is recognised as a
free creation can its meaning be discerned. It finds its explanation in
the inconsistent views regarding miracle which were held side by side in
the early Church. No doubt was felt that Jesus had performed miracles, and
by these miracles had given evidence of His Divine mission. On the other
hand, by the introduction of the Christian principle, the Jewish demand
for a sign had been so far limited, and the other, the spiritual line of
evidence, had become so important, or at least so indispensable, that it
was no longer possible to build on the miracles only, or to regard Jesus
merely as a wonder‐worker; so in some way or other the importance ascribed
to miracle must be reduced. In the graphic symbolism of the Gospel history
this antithesis takes the form that Jesus did miracles—there was no
getting away from that—but on the other hand Himself declared that He did
not wish to lay any stress upon such acts. As there are times when
miracles must hide their light under a bushel, Jesus, on occasion, forbids
that they should be made known. The other Synoptists no longer understood
this theory of the first Evangelist, and introduced the prohibition in
passages where it was absurd.
The way in which Jesus makes known His Messiahship is based on another
theory of the original Evangelist. The order of Mark can give us no
information regarding the chronology of the life of Jesus, since this
Gospel is anything rather than a chronicle. We cannot even assert that
there is a deliberate logic in the way in which the sections are
connected. But there is one fundamental principle of arrangement which
comes quite clearly to light, viz. that it was only at Caesarea Philippi,
in the closing period of His life, that Jesus made Himself known as the
Messiah, and that, therefore, He was not previously held to be so either
by His disciples or by the people. This is clearly shown in the answers of
the disciples when Jesus asked them whom men took Him to be. The implied
course of events, however, is determined by art, not history—as history it
would be inconceivable.
Could there indeed be a more absurd impossibility? “Jesus,” says Bauer,
“must perform these innumerable, these astounding miracles because,
according to the view which the Gospels represent, He is the Messiah; He
must perform them in order to prove Himself to be the Messiah—and yet no
one recognises Him as the Messiah! That is the greatest miracle of all,
that the people had not long ago recognised the Messiah in this wonder‐
worker. Jesus could only be held to be the Messiah in consequence of doing
miracles; but He only began to do miracles when, in the faith of the early
Church, He rose from the dead as Messiah, and the facts that He rose as
Messiah and that He did miracles, are one and the same fact.”
Mark, however, represents a Jesus who does miracles and who nevertheless
does not thereby reveal Himself to be the Messiah. He was obliged so to
represent Him, because he was conscious that Jesus was not recognised and
acknowledged as Messiah by the people, nor even by His immediate
followers, in the unhesitating fashion in which those of later times
imagined Him to have been recognised. Mark’s conception and representation
of the matter carried back into the past the later developments by which
there finally arose a Christian community for which Jesus had become the
Messiah. “Mark is also influenced by an artistic instinct which leads him
to develop the main interest, the origin of the faith, gradually. It is
only after the ministry of Jesus has extended over a considerable period,
and is, indeed, drawing towards its close, that faith arises in the circle
of the disciples; and it is only later still, when, in the person of the
blind man at Jericho, a prototype of the great company of believers that
was to be has hailed the Lord with a Messianic salutation, that, at the
triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the faith of the people suddenly ripens
and finds expression.”
It is true, this artistic design is completely marred when Jesus does
miracles which must have made Him known to every child as the Messiah. We
cannot, therefore, blame Matthew very much if, while he retains this plan
in its external outlines in a kind of mechanical way, he contradicts it
somewhat awkwardly by making Jesus at an earlier point clearly designate
Himself as Messiah and many recognise Him as such. And the Fourth
Evangelist cannot be said to be destroying any very wonderful work of art
when he gives the impression that from the very first any one who wished
could recognise Jesus as the Messiah.
Mark himself does not keep strictly to his own plan. He makes Jesus forbid
His disciples to make known His Messiahship; how then does the multitude
at Jerusalem recognise it so suddenly, after a single miracle which they
had not even witnessed, and which was in no way different from others
which He had done before? If that “chance multitude” in Jerusalem was
capable of such sudden enlightenment it must have fallen from heaven!
The following remarks of Bauer, too, are nothing less than classical. The
incident at Caesarea Philippi is the central fact of the Gospel history;
it gives us a fixed point from which to group and criticise the other
statements of the Gospel. At the same time it introduces a complication
into the plan of the life of Jesus, because it necessitates the carrying
through of the theory—often in the face of the text—that previously Jesus
had never been regarded as the Messiah; and lays upon us the necessity of
showing not only how Peter had come to recognise His Messiahship, but also
how He subsequently became Messiah for the multitude—if indeed He ever did
become Messiah for them. But the very fact that it does introduce this
complication is in itself a proof that in this scene at Caesarea Philippi
we have the one ray of light which history sheds upon the life of Jesus.
It is impossible to explain how any one could come to reject the simple
and natural idea that Jesus claimed from the first to be the Messiah, if
that had been the fact, and accept this complicated representation in its
place. The latter, therefore, must be the original version. In pointing
this out, Bauer gave for the first time the real proof, from internal
evidence, of the priority of Mark.
The difficulty involved in the conception of miracle as a proof of the
Messiahship of Jesus is another discovery of Bauer’s. Only here, instead
of probing the question to the bottom, he stops half‐way. How do we know,
he should have gone on to ask, that the Messiah was expected to appear as
an earthly wonder‐worker? There is nothing to that effect in Jewish
writings. And do not the Gospels themselves prove that any one might do
miracles without suggesting to a single person the idea that he might be
the Messiah? Accordingly the only inference to be drawn from the Marcan
representation is that miracles were not among the characteristic marks of
the Messiah, and that it was only later, in the Christian community, which
made Jesus the miracle‐worker into Jesus the Messiah, that this connexion
between miracles and Messiahship was established. In dealing with the
question of the triumphal entry, too, Bauer halts half‐way. Where do we
read that Jesus was hailed as Messiah upon that occasion? If He had been
taken by the people to be the Messiah, the controversy in Jerusalem must
have turned on this personal question; but it did not even touch upon it,
and the Sanhedrin never thinks of setting up witnesses to Jesus’ claim to
be the Messiah. When once Bauer had exposed the historical and literary
impossibility of Jesus’ being hailed by the people as Messiah, he ought to
have gone on to draw the conclusion that Jesus did not, according to Mark,
make a Messianic entry into Jerusalem.
It was, however, a remarkable achievement on Bauer’s part to have thus set
forth clearly the historical difficulties of the life of Jesus. One might
suppose that between the work of Strauss and that of Bauer there lay not
five, but fifty years—the critical work of a whole generation.
The stereotyped character of the thrice‐repeated prediction of the
passion, which, according to Bauer, betrays a certain poverty and
feebleness of imagination on the part of the earliest Evangelist, shows
clearly, he thinks, the unhistorical character of the utterance recorded.
The fact that the prediction occurs three times, its definiteness
increasing upon each occasion, proves its literary origin.
It is the same with the transfiguration. The group in which the heroic
representatives of the Law and the Prophets stand as supporters of the
Saviour, was modelled by the earliest Evangelist. In order to place it in
the proper light and to give becoming splendour to its great subject, he
has introduced a number of traits taken from the story of Moses.
Bauer pitilessly exposes the difficulties of the journey of Jesus from
Galilee to Jerusalem, and exults over the perplexities of the
“apologists.” “The theologian,” he says, “must not boggle at this journey,
he must just believe it. He must in faith follow the footsteps of his
Lord! Through the midst of Galilee and Samaria—and at the same time, for
Matthew also claims a hearing, through Judaea on the farther side of
Jordan! I wish him _Bon voyage_!”
The eschatological discourses are not history, but are merely an expansion
of those explanations of the sufferings of the Church of which we have had
a previous example in the charge to the Twelve. An Evangelist who wrote
before the destruction of Jerusalem would have referred to the Temple, to
Jerusalem, and to the Jewish people, in a very different way.
The story of Lazarus deserves special attention. Did not Spinoza say that
he would break his system in pieces if he could be convinced of the
reality of this event? This is the decisive point for the question of the
relation between the Synoptists and John. Vain are all the efforts of the
apologists to explain why the Synoptists do not mention this miracle. The
reason they ignore it is that it originated after their time in the mind
of the Fourth Evangelist, and they were unacquainted with his Gospel. And
yet it is the most valuable of all, because it shows clearly the
concentric circles of progressive intensification by which the development
of the Gospel history proceeds. “The Fourth Gospel,” remarks Bauer,
“represents a dead man as having been restored to life after having been
four days under the power of death, and having consequently become a prey
to corruption; Luke represents the young man at Nain as being restored to
life when his body was being carried to the grave; Mark, the earliest
Evangelist, can only tell us of the restoration of a dead person who had
the moment before succumbed to an illness. The theologians have a great
deal to say about the contrast between the canonical and the apocryphal
writings, but they might have found a similar contrast even within the
four Gospels, if the light had not been so directly in their eyes.”
The treachery of Judas, as described in the Gospels, is inexplicable.
The Lord’s Supper, considered as an historic scene, is revolting and
inconceivable. Jesus can no more have instituted it than He can have
uttered the saying, “Let the dead bury their dead.” In both cases the
objectionableness arises from the fact that a tenet of the early Church
has been cast into the form of an historical saying of Jesus. A man who
was present in person, corporeally present, could not entertain the idea
of offering others his flesh and blood to eat. To demand from others that
they should, while he was actually present, imagine the bread and wine
which they were eating to be his body and blood, would be for an actual
man wholly impossible. It was only when Jesus’ actual bodily presence had
been removed, and only when the Christian community had existed for some
time, that such a conception as is expressed in that formula could have
arisen. A point which clearly betrays the later composition of the
narrative is that the Lord does not turn to the disciples sitting with Him
at table and say, “This is my blood which is shed for you,” but, since the
words were invented by the early Church, speaks of the “many” for whom He
gives Himself. The only historical fact is that the Jewish Passover was
gradually transformed by the Christian community into a feast which had
reference to Jesus.
As regards the scene in Gethsemane, Mark, according to Bauer, held it
necessary that in the moment when the last conflict and final catastrophe
were coming upon Jesus, He should show clearly by His actions that He met
this fate of His own free will. The reality of His choice could only be
made clear by showing Him first engaged in an inner struggle against the
acceptance of His vocation, before showing how He freely submitted to His
fate.
The last words ascribed to Jesus by Mark, “My God, my God, why hast Thou
forsaken me?” were written without thinking of the inferences that might
be drawn from them, merely with the purpose of showing that even to the
last moment of His passion Jesus fulfilled the rôle of the Messiah, the
picture of whose sufferings had been revealed to the Psalmist so long
beforehand by the Holy Spirit.
It is scarcely necessary now, Bauer thinks, to go into the contradictions
in the story of the resurrection, for “the doughty Reimarus, with his
thorough‐going honesty, has already fully exposed them, and no one has
refuted him.”
The results of Bauer’s analysis may be summed up as follows:—
The Fourth Evangelist has betrayed the secret of the original Gospel,
namely, that it too can be explained on purely literary grounds. Mark has
“loosed us from the theological lie.” “Thanks to the kindly fate,” cries
Bauer, “which has preserved to us this writing of Mark by which we have
been delivered from the web of deceit of this hellish pseudo‐science!”
In order to tear this web of falsehood the critic and historian must,
despite his repugnance, once more take up the pretended arguments of the
theologians in favour of the historicity of the Gospel narratives and set
them on their feet, only to knock them down again. In the end Bauer’s only
feeling towards the theologians was one of contempt. “The expression of
his contempt,” he declares, “is the last weapon which the critic, after
refuting the arguments of the theologians, has at his disposal for their
discomfiture; it is his right to use it; that puts the finishing touch
upon his task and points forward to the happy time when the arguments of
the theologians shall no more be heard of.”
These outbreaks of bitterness are to be explained by the feeling of
repulsion which German apologetic theology inspired in every genuinely
honest and thoughtful man by the methods which it adopted in opposing
Strauss. Hence the fiendish joy with which he snatches away the crutches
of this pseudo‐science, hurls them to a distance, and makes merry over its
helplessness. A furious hatred, a fierce desire to strip the theologians
absolutely bare, carried Bauer much farther than his critical acumen would
have led him in cold blood.
Bauer hated the theologians for still holding fast to the barbarous
conception that a great man had forced himself into a stereotyped and
unspiritual system, and in that way had set in motion great ideas, whereas
he held that that would have signified the death of both the personality
and the ideas; but this hatred is only the surface symptom of another
hatred, which goes deeper than theology, going down, indeed, to the very
depths of the Christian conception of the world. Bruno Bauer hates not
only the theologians, but Christianity, and hates it because it expresses
a truth in a wrong way. It is a religion which has become petrified in a
transitional form. A religion which ought to have led on to the true
religion has usurped the place of the true religion, and in this petrified
form it holds prisoner all the real forces of religion.
Religion is the victory over the world of the self‐conscious ego. It is
only when the ego grasps itself in its antithesis to the world as a whole,
and is no longer content to play the part of a mere “walking gentleman” in
the world‐drama, but faces the world with independence and reserve, that
the necessary conditions of universal religion are present. These
conditions came into being with the rise of the Roman Empire, in which the
individual suddenly found himself helpless and unarmed in face of a world
in which he could no longer find free play for his activities, but must
stand prepared at any moment to be ground to powder by it.
The self‐conscious ego, recognising this position, found itself faced by
the necessity of breaking loose from the world and standing alone, in
order in this way to overcome the world. Victory over the world by
alienation from the world—these were the ideas out of which Christianity
was born. But it was not the true victory over the world; Christianity
remained at the stage of violent opposition to the world.
Miracle, to which the Christian religion has always appealed, and to which
it gives a quite fundamental importance, is the appropriate symbol of this
false victory over the world. There are some wonderfully deep thoughts
scattered through Bauer’s critical investigations. “Man’s realisation of
his personality,” he says, “is the death of Nature, but in the sense that
he can only bring about this death by the knowledge of Nature and its
laws, that is to say from within, being himself essentially the
annihilation and negation of Nature.... Spirit honours and recognises the
worth of the very thing which it negates.... Spirit does not fume and
bluster, and rage and rave against Nature, as it is supposed to do in
miracle, for that would be the denial of its inner law, but quietly works
its way through the antithesis. In short the death of Nature implied in
the conscious realisation of personality is the resurrection of Nature in
a nobler form, not the maltreatment, mockery, and insult to which it would
be exposed by miracle.” Not only miracle, however, but the portrait of
Jesus Christ as drawn in the Gospels, is a stereotyping of that false idea
of victory over the world. The Christ of the Gospel history, thought of as
a really historic figure, would be a figure at which humanity would
shudder, a figure which could only inspire dismay and horror. The
historical Jesus, if He really existed, can only have been One who
reconciled in His own consciousness the antithesis which obsessed the
Jewish mind, namely the separation between God and Man; He cannot in the
process of removing this antithesis have called into existence a new
principle of religious division and alienation; nor can He have shown the
way of escape, by the principle of inwardness, from the bondage of the Law
only to impose a new set of legal fetters.