Jesus, “that I have written a book as thoroughly well adapted for Germans
as Renan’s is for Frenchmen.” He was mistaken; in spite of its title the
book was not a book for the people. It had nothing new to offer, and what
it did offer was not in a form calculated to become popular. It is true
Strauss, like Renan, was an artist, but he did not write, like an
imaginative novelist, with a constant eye to effect. His art was
unpretentious, even austere, appealing to the few, not to the many. The
people demand a complete and vivid picture. Renan had given them a figure
which was theatrical no doubt, but full of life and movement, and they had
been grateful to him for it. Strauss could not do that.
Even the arrangement of the work is thoroughly unfortunate. In the first
part, which bears the title “The Life of Jesus,” he attempts to combine
into a harmonious portrait such of the historical data as have some claim
to be considered historical; in the second part he traces the “Origin and
Growth of the Mythical History of Jesus.” First, therefore, he tears down
from the tree the ivy and the rich growth of creepers, laying bare the
worn and corroded bark; then he fastens the faded growths to the stem
again, and describes the nature, origin, and characteristics of each
distinct species.
How vastly different, how much more full of life, had been the work of
1835! There Strauss had not divided the creepers from the stem. The
straining strength which upheld this wealth of creepers was but vaguely
suspected. Behind the billowy mists of legend we caught from time to time
a momentary glimpse of the gigantic figure of Jesus, as though lit up by a
lightning‐flash. It was no complete and harmonious picture, but it was
full of suggestions, rich in thoughts thrown out carelessly, rich in
contradictions even, out of which the imagination could create a portrait
of Jesus. It is just this wealth of suggestion that is lacking in the
second picture. Strauss is trying now to give a definite portrait. In the
inevitable process of harmonising and modelling to scale he is obliged to
reject the finest thoughts of the previous work because they will not fit
in exactly; some of them are altered out of recognition, some are filed
away.
There is wanting, too, that perfect freshness as of the spring which is
only found when thoughts have but newly come into flower. The writing is
no longer spontaneous; one feels that Strauss is setting forth thoughts
which have ripened with his mind and grown old with it, and now along with
their definiteness of form have taken on a certain stiffness. There are
now no hinted possibilities, full of promise, to dance gaily through the
movement of his dialectic; all is sober reason—a thought too sober. Renan
had one advantage over Strauss in that he wrote when the material was
fresh to him—one might almost say strange to him—and was capable of
calling up in him the response of vivid feeling.
For a popular book, too, it lacks that living interplay of reflection with
narration without which the ordinary reader fails to get a grip of the
history. The first Life of Jesus had been rich in this respect, since it
had been steeped in the Hegelian theory regarding the realisation of the
Idea. In the meantime Strauss had seen the Hegelian philosophy fall from
its high estate, and himself had found no way of reconciling history and
idea, so that his present Life of Jesus was a mere objective presentment
of the history. It was, therefore, not adapted to make any impression upon
the popular mind.
In reality it is merely an exposition, in more or less popular form, of
the writer’s estimate of what had been done in the study of the subject
during the past thirty years, and shows what he had learnt and what he had
failed to learn.
As regards the Synoptic question he had learnt nothing. In his opinion the
criticism of the Gospels has “run to seed.” He treats with a pitying
contempt both the earlier and the more recent defenders of the Marcan
hypothesis. Weisse is a dilettante; Wilke had failed to make any
impression on him; Holtzmann’s work was as yet unknown to him. But in the
following year he discharged the vials of his wrath upon the man who had
both strengthened the foundations and put on the coping‐stone of the new
hypothesis. “Our lions of St. Mark, older and younger,” he says in the
appendix to his criticism of Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus, “may roar as
loud as they like, so long as there are six solid reasons against the
priority of Mark to set against every one of their flimsy arguments in its
favour—and they themselves supply us with a store of counter‐arguments in
the shape of admissions of later editing and so forth. The whole theory
appears to me a temporary aberration, like the ’music of the future’ or
the anti‐vaccination movement; and I seriously believe that it is the same
order of mind which, in different circumstances, falls a victim to the one
delusion or the other.” But he must not be supposed, he says, to take the
critical mole‐hills thrown up by Holtzmann for veritable mountains.
Against such opponents he does not scruple to seek aid from
Schleiermacher, whose unbiased but decided opinion had ascribed a tertiary
character to Mark. Even Gfrörer’s view that Mark adapted his Gospel to the
needs of the Church by leaving out everything which was open to objection
in Matthew and Luke, is good enough to be brought to bear against the bat‐
eyed partisans of Mark. F. C. Baur is reproached for having given too much
weight to the “tendency” theory in his criticism of the Gospels; and also
for having taken suggestions of Strauss’s and worked them out, supposing
that he was offering something new when he was really only amplifying. In
the end he had only given a criticism of the Gospels, not of the Gospel
history.
But this irritation against his old teacher is immediately allayed when he
comes to speak of the Fourth Gospel. Here the teacher has carried to a
successful issue the campaign which the pupil had begun. Strauss feels
compelled to “express his gratitude for the work done by the Tübingen
school on the Johannine question.” He himself had only been able to deal
with the negative side of the question—to show that the Fourth Gospel was
not an historical source, but a theological invention; they had dealt with
it positively, and had assigned the document to its proper place in the
evolution of Christian thought. There is only one point with which he
quarrels. Baur had made the Fourth Gospel too completely spiritual,
“whereas the fact is,” says Strauss, “that it is the most material of
all.” It is true, Strauss explains, that the Evangelist starts out to
interpret miracle and eschatology symbolically; but he halts half‐way and
falls back upon the miraculous, enhancing the professed fact in proportion
as he makes it spiritually more significant. Beside the spiritual return
of Jesus in the Paraclete he places His return in a material body, bearing
the marks of the wounds; beside the inward present judgment, a future
outward judgment; and the fact that he sees the one in the other, finds
the one present and visible in the other, is just what constitutes the
mystical character of his Gospel. This mysticism attracts the modern
world. “The Johannine Christ, who in His descriptions of Himself seems to
be always out‐doing Himself, is the counterpart of the modern believer,
who in order to remain a believer must continually out‐do himself; the
Johannine miracles which are always being interpreted spiritually, and at
the same time raised to a higher pitch of the miraculous, which are
counted and documented in every possible way, and yet must not be
considered the true ground of faith, are at once miracles and no miracles.
We must believe them, and yet can believe without them; in short they
exactly meet the taste of the present day, which delights to involve
itself in contradictions and is too lethargic and wanting in courage for
any clear insight or decided opinion on religious matters.”
Strictly speaking, however, the Strauss of the second Life of Jesus has no
right to criticise the Fourth Gospel for sublimating the history, for he
himself gives what is nothing else than a spiritualisation of the Jesus of
the Synoptics. And he does it in such an arbitrary fashion that one is
compelled to ask how far he does it with a good conscience. A typical case
is the exposition of Jesus’ answer to the Baptist’s message. “Is it
possible,” Jesus means, “that you fail to find in Me the miracles which
you expect from the Messiah? And yet I daily open the eyes of the
spiritually blind and the ears of the spiritually deaf, make the lame walk
erect and vigorous, and even give new life to those who are morally dead.
Any one who understands how much greater these spiritual miracles are,
will not be offended at the absence of bodily miracles; only such an one
can receive, and is worthy of, the salvation which I am bringing to
mankind.”
Here the fundamental weakness of his method is clearly shown. The vaunted
apparatus for the evaporation of the mythical does not work quite
satisfactorily. The ultimate product of this process was expected to be a
Jesus who should be essential man; the actual product, however, is Jesus
the historical man, a being whose looks and sayings are strange and
unfamiliar. Strauss is too purely a critic, too little of the creative
historian, to recognise this strange being. That Jesus really lived in a
world of Jewish ideas and held Himself to be Messiah in the Jewish sense
is for the writer of the Life of Jesus an impossibility. The deposit which
resists the chemical process for the elimination of myth, he must
therefore break up with the hammer.
How different from the Strauss of 1835! He had then recognised eschatology
as the most important element in Jesus’ world of thought, and in some
incidental remarks had made striking applications of it. He had, for
example, proposed to regard the Last Supper not as the institution of a
feast for coming generations, but as a Paschal meal, at which Jesus
declared that He would next partake of the Paschal bread and Paschal wine
along with His disciples in the heavenly kingdom. In the second Life of
Jesus this view is given up; Jesus did found a feast. “In order to give a
living centre of unity to the society which it was His purpose to found,
Jesus desired to institute this distribution of bread and wine as a feast
to be constantly repeated.” One might be reading Renan. This change of
attitude is typical of much else.
Strauss is not in the least disquieted by finding himself at one with
Schleiermacher in these attempts to spiritualise. On the contrary, he
appeals to him. He shares, he says, Schleiermacher’s conviction “that the
unique self‐consciousness of Jesus did not develop as a consequence of His
conviction that He was the Messiah; on the contrary, it was a consequence
of His self‐consciousness that He arrived at the view that the Messianic
prophecies could point to no one but Himself.” The moment eschatology
entered into the consciousness of Jesus it came in contact with a higher
principle which over‐mastered it and gradually dissolved it. “Had Jesus
applied the Messianic idea to Himself before He had had a profound
religious consciousness to which to relate it, doubtless it would have
taken possession of Him so powerfully that He could never have escaped
from its influence.” We must suppose the ideality, the concentration upon
that which was inward, the determination to separate religion, on the one
hand, from politics, and on the other, from ritual, the serene
consciousness of being able to attain to peace with God and with Himself
by purely spiritual means—all this we must suppose to have reached a
certain ripeness, a certain security, in the mind of Jesus, before He
permitted Himself to entertain the thought of His Messiahship, and this we
may believe is the reason why He grasped it in so independent and
individual a fashion. In this, therefore, Strauss has become the pupil of
Weisse.
Even in the Old Testament prophecies, he explains, we find two
conceptions, a more ideal and a more practical. Jesus holds consistently
to the first, He describes Himself as the Son of Man because this
designation “contains the suggestion of humility and lowliness, of the
human and natural.” At Jerusalem, Jesus, in giving His interpretation of
Psalm cx., “made merry over the Davidic descent of the Messiah.” He
desired “to be Messiah in the sense of a patient teacher exercising a
quiet influence.” As the opposition of the people grew more intense, He
took up some of the features of Isaiah liii. into His conception of the
Messiah.
Of His resurrection, Jesus can only have spoken in a metaphorical sense.
It is hardly credible that one who was pure man could have arrogated to
himself the position of judge of the world. Strauss would like best to
ascribe all the eschatology to the distorting medium of early
Christianity, but he does not venture to carry this through with logical
consistency. He takes it as certain, however, that Jesus, even though it
sometimes seems as if He did not expect the Kingdom to be realised in the
present, but in a future, world‐era, and to be brought about by God in a
supernatural fashion, nevertheless sets about the establishment of the
Kingdom by purely spiritual influence.
With this end in view He leaves Galilee, when He judges the time to be
ripe, in order to work on a larger scale. “In case of an unfavourable
issue, He reckons on the influence which a martyr‐death has never failed
to exercise in giving momentum to a lofty idea.” How far He had advanced,
when He entered on the fateful journey to Jerusalem, in shaping His plan,
and especially in organising the company of adherents who had gathered
about Him, it is impossible to determine with any exactness. He permitted
the triumphal entry because He did not desire to decline the role of the
Messiah in every aspect of it.
Owing to this arbitrary spiritualisation of the Synoptic Jesus, Strauss’s
picture is in essence much more unhistorical than Renan’s. The latter had
not needed to deny that Jesus had done miracles, and he had been able to
suggest an explanation of how Jesus came in the end to fall back upon the
eschatological system of ideas. But at what a price! By portraying Jesus
as at variance with Himself, a hero broken in spirit. This price is too
high for Strauss. Arbitrary as his treatment of history is, he never loses
the intuitive feeling that in Jesus’ self‐consciousness there is a unique
absence of struggle; that He does not bear the scars which are found in
those natures which win their way to freedom and purity through strife and
conflict, that in Him there is no trace of the hardness, harshness, and
gloom which cleave to such natures throughout life, but that He “is
manifestly a beautiful nature from the first.” Thus, for all Strauss’s
awkward, arbitrary handling of the history he is greater than the
rival(124) who could manufacture history with such skill.
Nevertheless, from the point of view of theological science, this work
marks a standstill. That was the net result of the thirty years of
critical study of the life of Jesus for the man who had inaugurated it so
impressively. This was the only fruit which followed those blossoms so
full of promise of the first Life of Jesus.
It is significant that in the same year there appeared Schleiermacher’s
lectures on the Life of Jesus, which had not seen the light for forty
years, because, as Strauss himself remarked in his criticism of the
resurrected work, it had neither anodyne nor dressing for the wounds which
his first Life of Jesus had made.(125) The wounds, however, had cicatrised
in the meantime. It is true Strauss is a just judge, and makes ample
acknowledgment of the greatness of Schleiermacher’s achievement.(126) He
blames Schleiermacher for setting up his “presuppositions in regard to
Christ” as an historical canon, and considering it a proof that a
statement is unhistorical if it does not square with those
presuppositions. But does not the purely human, but to a certain extent
unhistorical, man, who is to be the ultimate product of the process of
eliminating myth, serve Strauss as his “theoretic Christ” who determines
the presentment of his historical Jesus? Does he not share with
Schleiermacher the erroneous, artificial, “double” construction of the
consciousness of Jesus? And what about their views of Mark? What
fundamental difference is there, when all is said, between
Schleiermacher’s de‐rationalised Life of Jesus and Strauss’s? Certainly
this second Life of Jesus would not have frightened Schleiermacher’s away
into hiding for thirty years.
So Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus might now safely venture forth into the
light. There was no reason why it should feel itself a stranger at this
period, and it had no need to be ashamed of itself. Its rationalistic
birth‐marks were concealed by its brilliant dialectic.(127) And the only
real advance in the meantime was the general recognition that the Life of
Jesus was not to be interpreted on rationalistic, but on historical lines.
All other, more definite, historical results had proved more or less
illusory; there is no vitality in them. The works of Renan, Strauss,
Schenkel, Weizsäcker, and Keim are in essence only different ways of
carrying out a single ground‐plan. To read them one after another is to be
simply appalled at the stereotyped uniformity of the world of thought in
which they move. You feel that you have read exactly the same thing in the
others, almost in identical phrases. To obtain the works of Schenkel and
Weizsäcker you only need to weaken down in Strauss the sharp
discrimination between John and the Synoptists so far as to allow of the
Fourth Gospel being used to some extent as an historical source “in the
higher sense,” and to put the hypothesis of the priority of Mark in place
of the Tübingen view adopted by Strauss. The latter is an external
operation and does not essentially modify the view of the Life of Jesus,
since by admitting the Johannine scheme the Marcan plan is again
disturbed, and Strauss’s arbitrary spiritualisation of the Synoptics comes
to something not very different from the acceptance of that “in a higher
sense historical Gospel” alongside of them. The whole discussion regarding
the sources is only loosely connected with the process of arriving at the
portrait of Jesus, since this portrait is fixed from the first, being
determined by the mental atmosphere and religious horizon of the ’sixties.
They all portray the Jesus of liberal theology; the only difference is
that one is a little more conscientious in his colouring than another, and
one perhaps has a little more taste than another, or is less concerned
about the consequences.
The desire to escape in some way from the alternative between the
Synoptists and John was native to the Marcan hypothesis. Weisse had
endeavoured to effect this by distinguishing between the sources in the
Fourth Gospel.(128) Schenkel and Weizsäcker are more modest. They do not
feel the need of any clear literary view of the Fourth Gospel, of any
critical discrimination between original and secondary elements in it;
they are content to use as historical whatever their instinct leads them
to accept. “Apart from the fourth Gospel,” says Schenkel, “we should miss
in the portrait of the Redeemer the unfathomable depths and the
inaccessible heights.” “Jesus,” to quote his aphorism, “was not always
thus in reality, but He was so in truth.” Since when have historians had
the right to distinguish between reality and truth? That was one of the
bad habits which the author of this characterisation of Jesus brought with
him from his earlier dogmatic training.
Weizsäcker(129) expresses himself with more circumspection. “We possess,”
he says, “in the Fourth Gospel genuine apostolic reminiscences as much as
in any part of the first three Gospels; but between the facts on which the
reminiscences are based and their reproduction in literary form there lies
the development of their possessor into a great mystic, and the influence
of a philosophy which here for the first time united itself in this way
with the Gospel; they need, therefore, to be critically examined; and the
historical truth of this gospel, great as it is, must not be measured with
a painful literality.”
One wonders why both these writers appeal to Holtzmann, seeing that they
practically abandon the Marcan plan which he had worked out at the end of
his very thorough examination of this Gospel. They do not accept as
sufficient the controversy regarding the ceremonial regulations in Mark
vii. which, with the rejection at Nazareth, constitute, in Holtzmann’s
view, the turning‐point of the Galilaean ministry, but find the cause of
the change of attitude on the part of the people rather in the Johannine
discourse about eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the Son of Man.
The section Mark x.‐xv., which has a certain unity, they interpret in the
light of the Johannine tradition, finding in it traces of a previous
ministry of Jesus in Jerusalem and interweaving with it the Johannine
story of the Passion. According to Schenkel the last visit to Jerusalem
must have been of considerable duration. When confronted with John, the
admission may be wrung from the Synoptists that Jesus did not travel
straight through Jericho to the capital, but worked first for a
considerable time in Judaea. Strauss tartly observes that he cannot see
what the author of the “characterisation” stood to gain by underwriting
Holtzmann’s Marcan hypothesis.(130)
Weizsäcker is still bolder in making interpolations from the Johannine
tradition. He places the cleansing of the Temple, in contradiction to
Mark, in the early period of Jesus’ ministry, on the ground that “it bears
the character of a first appearance, a bold deed with which to open His
career.” He fails to observe, however, that if this act really took place
at this point of time, the whole development of the life of Jesus which
Holtzmann had so ingeniously traced in Mark, is at once thrown into
confusion. In describing the last visit to Jerusalem, Weizsäcker is not
content to insert the Marcan stones into the Johannine cement; he goes
farther and expressly states that the great farewell discourses of Jesus
to His disciples agree with the Synoptic discourses to the disciples
spoken during the last days, however completely they of all others bear
the peculiar stamp of the Johannine diction.
Thus in the second period of the Marcan hypothesis the same spectacle
meets us as in the earlier. The hypothesis has a literary existence,
indeed it is carried by Holtzmann to such a degree of demonstration that
it can no longer be called a mere hypothesis, but it does not succeed in
winning an assured position in the critical study of the Life of Jesus. It
is common‐land not yet taken into cultivation.
That is due in no small measure to the fact that Holtzmann did not work
out the hypothesis from the historical side, but rather on literary lines,
recalling Wilke—as a kind of problem in Synoptic arithmetic—and in his
preface expresses dissent from the Tübingen school, who desired to leave
no alternative between John on the one side and the Synoptics on the
other, whereas he approves the attempt to evade the dilemma in some way or
other, and thinks he can find in the didactic narrative of the Fourth
Gospel the traces of a development of Jesus similar to that portrayed in
the Synoptics, and has therefore no fundamental objection to the use of
John alongside of the Synoptics. In taking up this position, however, he
does not desire to be understood as meaning that “it would be to the
interests of science to throw Synoptic and Johannine passages together
indiscriminately and thus construct a life of Jesus out of them.” “It
would be much better first to reconstruct separately the Synoptic and
Johannine pictures of Christ, composing each of its own distinctive
material. It is only when this has been done that it is possible to make a
fruitful comparison of the two.” Exactly the same position had been taken
up sixty‐seven years before by Herder. In Holtzmann’s case, however, the
principle was stated with so many qualifications that the adherents of his
view read into it the permission to combine, in a picture treated “in the
grand style,” Synoptic with Johannine passages.