was much too fine‐drawn to bear the weight of the remainder of the
Synoptic material. He distinguishes seven stages in the Galilaean
ministry,(131) of which the really decisive one is the sixth, in which
Jesus leaves Galilee and goes northward, so that Schenkel and Weizsäcker
are justified in distinguishing practically only two great Galilaean
periods, the first of which—down to the controversy about ceremonial
purity—they distinguish as the period of success, the second—down to the
departure from Judaea—as the period of decline. What attracted these
writers to the Marcan hypothesis was not so much the authentification
which it gave to the detail of Mark, though they were willing enough to
accept that, but the way in which this Gospel lent itself to the a priori
view of the course of the life of Jesus which they unconsciously brought
with them. They appealed to Holtzmann because he showed such wonderful
skill in extracting from the Marcan narrative the view which commended
itself to the spirit of the age as manifested in the ’sixties.
Holtzmann read into this Gospel that Jesus had endeavoured in Galilee to
found the Kingdom of God in an ideal sense; that He concealed His
consciousness of being the Messiah, which was constantly growing more
assured, until His followers should have attained by inner enlightenment
to a higher view of the Kingdom of God and of the Messiah; that almost at
the end of His Galilaean ministry He declared Himself to them as the
Messiah at Caesarea Philippi; that on the same occasion He at once began
to picture to them a suffering Messiah, whose lineaments gradually became
more and more distinct in His mind amid the growing opposition which He
encountered, until finally, He communicated to His disciples His decision
to put the Messianic cause to the test in the capital, and that they
followed Him thither and saw how His fate fulfilled itself. It was this
fundamental view which made the success of the hypothesis. Holtzmann, not
less than his followers, believed that he had discovered it in the Gospel
itself, although Strauss, the passionate opponent of the Marcan
hypothesis, took essentially the same view of the development of Jesus’
thought. But the way in which Holtzmann exhibited this characteristic view
of the ’sixties as arising naturally out of the detail of Mark, was so
perfect, so artistically charming, that this view appeared henceforward to
be inseparably bound up with the Marcan tradition. Scarcely ever has a
description of the life of Jesus exercised so irresistible an influence as
that short outline—it embraces scarcely twenty pages—with which Holtzmann
closes his examination of the Synoptic Gospels. This chapter became the
creed and catechism of all who handled the subject during the following
decades. The treatment of the life of Jesus had to follow the lines here
laid down until the Marcan hypothesis was delivered from its bondage to
that a priori view of the development of Jesus. Until then any one might
appeal to the Marcan hypothesis, meaning thereby only that general view of
the inward and outward course of development in the life of Jesus, and
might treat the remainder of the Synoptic material how he chose, combining
with it, at his pleasure, material drawn from John. The victory,
therefore, belonged, not to the Marcan hypothesis pure and simple, but to
the Marcan hypothesis as psychologically interpreted by a liberal
theology.
The points of distinction between the Weissian and the new interpretation
are as follows:—Weisse is sceptical as regards the detail; the new Marcan
hypothesis ventures to base conclusions even upon incidental remarks in
the text. According to Weisse there were not distinct periods of success
and failure in the ministry of Jesus; the new Marcan hypothesis
confidently affirms this distinction, and goes so far as to place the
sojourn of Jesus in the parts beyond Galilee under the heading “Flights
and Retirements.”(132) The earlier Marcan hypothesis expressly denies that
outward circumstances influenced the resolve of Jesus to die; according to
the later, it was the opposition of the people, and the impossibility of
carrying out His mission on other lines which forced Him to enter on the
path of suffering.(133) The Jesus of Weisse’s view has completed His
development at the time of His appearance; the Jesus of the new
interpretation of Mark continues to develop in the course of His public
ministry.
There is complete agreement, however, in the rejection of eschatology. For
Holtzmann, Schenkel, and Weizsäcker, as for Weisse, Jesus desires “to
found an inward kingdom of repentance.”(134) It was Israel’s duty,
according to Schenkel, to believe in the presence of the Kingdom which
Jesus proclaimed. John the Baptist was unable to believe in it, and it was
for this reason that Jesus censured him—for it is in this sense that
Schenkel understands the saying about the greatest among those born of
women who is nevertheless the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. “So near the
light and yet shutting his eyes to its beams—is there not some blame here,
an undeniable lack of spiritual and moral receptivity?”
Jesus makes Messianic claims only in a spiritual sense. He does not grasp
at super‐human glory; it is His purpose to bear the sin of the whole
people, and He undergoes baptism “as a humble member of the national
community.”
His whole teaching consists, when once He Himself has attained to clear
consciousness of His vocation, in a constant struggle to root out from the
hearts of His disciples their theocratic hopes and to effect a
transformation of their traditional Messianic ideas. When, on Simon’s
hailing Him as the Messiah, He declares that flesh and blood has not
revealed it to him, He means, according to Schenkel, “that Simon has at
this moment overcome the false Messianic ideas, and has recognised in Him
the ethical and spiritual deliverer of Israel.”
“That Jesus predicted a personal, bodily, Second Coming, in the brightness
of His heavenly splendour and surrounded by the heavenly hosts, to
establish an earthly kingdom, is not only not proved, it is absolutely
impossible.” His purpose is to establish a community of which His
disciples are to be the foundation, and by means of this community to
bring about the coming of the Kingdom of God. He can, therefore, only have
spoken of His return as an impersonal return in the Spirit. The later
exponents of the Marcan view were no doubt generally inclined to regard
the return as personal and corporeal. For Schenkel, however, it is
historically certain that the real meaning of the eschatological
discourses is more faithfully preserved in the Fourth Gospel than in the
Synoptics.
In his anxiety to eliminate any enthusiastic elements from the
representation of Jesus, he ends by drawing a bourgeois Messiah whom he
might have extracted from the old‐fashioned rationalistic work of the
worthy Reinhard. He feels bound to save the credit of Jesus by showing
that the entry into Jerusalem was not intended as a provocation to the
government. “It is only by making this supposition,” he explains, “that we
avoid casting a slur upon the character of Jesus. It was certainly a
constant trait in His character that He never unnecessarily exposed
Himself to danger, and never, except for the most pressing reasons, did He
give any support to the suspicions which were arising against Him; He
avoided provoking His opponents to drastic measures by any overt act
directed against them.” Even the cleansing of the Temple was not an act of
violence but merely an attempt at reform.
Schenkel is able to give these explanations because he knows the most
secret thoughts of Jesus and is therefore no longer bound to the text. He
knows, for example, that immediately after His baptism He attained to the
knowledge “that the way of the Law was no longer the way of salvation for
His people.” Jesus cannot therefore have uttered the saying about the
permanence of the Law in Mark v. 18. In the controversies about the
Sabbath “He proclaims freedom of worship.”
As time went on, He began to take the heathen world into the scope of His
purpose. “The hard saying addressed to the Canaanite woman represents
rather the proud and exclusive spirit of Pharisaism than the spirit of
Jesus.” It was a test of faith, the success of which had a decisive
influence upon Jesus’ attitude towards the heathen. Henceforth it is
obvious that He is favourably disposed towards them. He travels through
Samaria and establishes a community there. In Jerusalem He openly calls
the heathen to Him. At certain feasts which they had arranged for that
purpose, some of the leaders of the people set a trap for Him, and
betrayed Him into liberal sayings in regard to the Gentiles which sealed
His fate.
This was the course of development of the Master, who, according to
Schenkel, “saw with a clear eye into the future history of the world,” and
knew that the fall of Jerusalem must take place in order to close the
theocratic era and give the Gentiles free access to the universal
community of Christians which He was to found. “This period He described
as the period of His coming, as in a sense His Second Advent upon earth.”
The same general procedure is followed by Weizsäcker in his “Gospel
History,” though his work is of a much higher quality than Schenkel’s. His
account of the sources is one of the clearest that has ever been written.
In the description of the life of Jesus, however, the unhesitating
combination of material from the Fourth Gospel with that of the Synoptics
rather confuses the picture. And whereas Renan only offers the results of
the completed process, Weizsäcker works out his, it might almost be said,
under the eyes of the reader, which makes the arbitrary character of the
proceeding only the more obvious. But in his attitude towards the sources
Weizsäcker is wholly free from the irresponsible caprice in which Schenkel
indulges. From time to time, too, he gives a hint of unsolved problems in
the background. For example, in treating of the declaration of Jesus to
His judges that He would come as the Son of Man upon the clouds of heaven,
he remarks how surprising it is that Jesus could so often have used the
designation Son of Man on earlier occasions without being accused of
claiming the Messiahship. It is true that this is a mere scraping of the
keel upon a sandbank, by which the steersman does not allow himself to be
turned from his course, for Weizsäcker concludes that the name Son of Man,
in spite of its use in Daniel, “had not become a generally current or
really popular designation of the Messiah.” But even this faint suspicion
of the difficulty is a welcome sign. Much emphasis, in fact, in practice
rather too much emphasis, is laid on the principle that in the great
discourses of Jesus the structure is not historical; they are only
collections of sayings formed to meet the needs of the Christian community
in later times. In this Weizsäcker is sometimes not less arbitrary than
Schenkel, who represents the Lord’s Prayer as given by Jesus to the
disciples only in the last days at Jerusalem. It was an axiom of the
school that Jesus could not have delivered discourses such as the
Evangelists record.
If Schenkel’s picture of Jesus’ character attracted much more attention
than Weizsäcker’s work, that is mainly due to the art of lively popular
presentation by which it is distinguished. The writer knows well how to
keep the reader’s interest awake by the use of exciting headlines.
Catchwords abound, and arrest the ear, for they are the catchwords about
which the religious controversies of the time revolved. There is never far
to look for the moral of the history, and the Jesus here portrayed can be
imagined plunging into the midst of the debates in any ministerial
conference. The moralising, it must be admitted, sometimes becomes the
occasion of the feeblest ineptitudes. Jesus sent out His disciples two and
two; this is for Schenkel a marvellous exhibition of wisdom. The Lord
designed, thereby, to show that in His opinion “nothing is more inimical
to the interests of the Kingdom of God than individualism, self‐will,
self‐pleasing.” Schenkel entirely fails to recognise the superb irony of
the saying that in this life all that a man gives up for the sake of the
Kingdom of God is repaid a hundredfold in persecutions, in order that in
the Coming Age he may receive eternal life as his reward. He interpreted
it as meaning that the sufferer shall be compensated by love; his fellow‐
Christians will endeavour to make it up to him, and will offer him their
own possessions so freely that, in consequence of this brotherly love, he
will soon have, for the house which he has lost, a hundred houses, for the
lost sisters, brothers, and so forth, a hundred sisters, a hundred
brothers, a hundred fathers, a hundred mothers, a hundred farms. Schenkel
forgets to add that, if this is to be the interpretation of the saying,
the persecuted man must also receive through this compensating love, a
hundred wives.(135)
This want of insight into the largeness, the startling originality, the
self‐contradictoriness, and the terrible irony in the thought of Jesus, is
not a peculiarity of Schenkel’s; it is characteristic of all the liberal
Lives of Jesus from Strauss’s down to Oskar Holtzmann’s.(136) How could it
be otherwise? They had to transpose a way of envisaging the world which
belonged to a hero and a dreamer to the plane of thought of a rational
bourgeois religion. But in Schenkel’s representation, with its popular
appeal, this banality is particularly obtrusive.
In the end, however, what made the success of the book was not its popular
characteristics, whether good or bad, but the enmity which it drew down
upon the author. The Basle Privat‐Docent who, in his work of 1839, had
congratulated the Zurichers on having rejected Strauss, now, as Professor
and Director of the Seminary at Heidelberg, came very near being adjudged
worthy of the martyr’s crown himself. He had been at Heidelberg since
1851, after holding for a short time De Wette’s chair at Basle. At his
first coming a mildly reactionary theology might have claimed him as its
own. He gave it a right to do so by the way in which he worked against the
philosopher, Kuno Fischer, in the Higher Consistory. But in the struggles
over the constitution of the Church he changed his position. As a defender
of the rights of the laity he ranged himself on the more liberal side.
After his great victory in the General Synod of 1861, in which the new
constitution of the Church was established, he called a German Protestant
assembly at Frankfort, in order to set on foot a general movement for
Church reform. This assembly met in 1863, and led to the formation of the
Protestant Association.
When the _Charakterbild Jesu_ appeared, friend and foe were alike
surprised at the thoroughness with which Schenkel advocated the more
liberal views. “Schenkel’s book,” complained Luthardt, in a lecture at
Leipzig,(137) “has aroused a painful interest. We had learnt to know him
in many aspects; we were not prepared for such an apostasy from his own
past. How long is it since he brought about the dismissal of Kuno Fischer
from Heidelberg because he saw in the pantheism of this philosopher a
danger to Church and State? It is still fresh in our memory that it was he
who in the year 1852 drew up the report of the Theological Faculty of
Heidelberg upon the ecclesiastical controversy raised by Pastor Dülon at
Bremen, in which he denied Dülon’s Christianity on the ground that he had
assailed the doctrines of original sin, of justification by faith, of a
living and personal God, of the eternal Divine Sonship of Christ, of the
Kingdom of God, and of the credibility of the holy Scriptures.” And now
this same Schenkel was misusing the Life of Jesus as a weapon in “party
polemics”!
The agitation against him was engineered from Berlin, where his successful
attack upon the illiberal constitution of the Church had not been
forgiven. One hundred and seventeen Baden clerics signed a protest
declaring the author unfitted to hold office as a theological teacher in
the Baden Church. Throughout the whole of Germany the pastors agitated
against him. It was especially demanded that he should be immediately
removed from his post as Director of the Seminary. A counter‐protest was
issued by the Durlach Conference in the July of 1864, in which Bluntschli
and Holtzmann vigorously defended him. The Ecclesiastical Council
supported him, and the storm gradually died away, especially when Schenkel
in two “Defences” skilfully softened down the impression made by his work,
and endeavoured to quiet the public mind by pointing out that he had only
attempted to set forth one side of the truth.(138)
The position of the prospective martyr was not rendered any more easy by
Strauss. In an appendix to his criticism of Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus
he settled accounts with his old antagonist.(139) He recognises no
scientific value whatever in the work. None of the ideas developed in it
are new. One might fairly say, he thinks, “that the conclusions which have
given offence had been carried down the Neckar from Tübingen to
Heidelberg, and had there been salvaged by Herr Schenkel—in a somewhat
sodden and deteriorated condition, it must be admitted—and incorporated
into the edifice which he was constructing.” Further, Strauss censures the
book for its want of frankness, its half‐and‐half character, which
manifests itself especially in the way in which the author clings to
orthodox phraseology. “Over and over again he gives criticism with one
hand all that it can possibly ask, and then takes back with the other
whatever the interests of faith seem to demand; with the constant result
that what is taken back is far too much for criticism and not nearly
enough for faith.” “In the future,” he concludes, “it will be said of the
seven hundred Durlachers that they fought like paladins to prevent the
enemy from capturing a standard which was really nothing but a patched
dish‐clout.”
Schenkel died in 1885 after severe sufferings. As a critic he lacked
independence, and was, therefore, always inclined to compromises; in
controversy he was vehement. Though he did nothing remarkable in theology,
German Protestantism owes him a vast debt for acting as its tribune in the
’sixties.
That was the last time that any popular excitement was aroused in
connexion with the critical study of the life of Jesus; and it was a mere
storm in a tea‐cup. Moreover, it was the man and not his work that aroused
the excitement. Henceforth public opinion was almost entirely indifferent
to anything which appeared in this department. The great fundamental
question whether historical criticism was to be applied to the life of
Jesus had been decided in connexion with Strauss’s first work on the
subject. If here and there indignation aroused by a Life of Jesus brought
inconveniences to the author and profit to the publisher, that was
connected in every case with purely external and incidental circumstances.
Public opinion was not disquieted for a moment by Volkmar and Wrede,
although they are much more extreme than Schenkel.
Most of the Lives of Jesus which followed had, it is true, nothing very
exciting about them. They were mere variants of the type established
during the ’sixties, variants of which the minute differences were only
discernible by theologians, and which were otherwise exactly alike in
arrangement and result. As a contribution to criticism, Keim’s(140)
“History of Jesus of Nazara” was the most important Life of Jesus which
appeared in a long period.
It is not of much consequence that he believes in the priority of Matthew,
since his presentment of the history follows the general lines of the
Marcan plan, which is preserved also in Matthew. He gives it as his
opinion that the life of Jesus is to be reconstructed from the Synoptics,
whether Matthew has the first place or Mark. He sketches the development
of Jesus in bold lines. As early as his inaugural address at Zurich,
delivered on the 17th of December 1860, which, short as it was, made a
powerful impression upon Holtzmann as well as upon others, he had set up
the thesis that the Synoptics “artlessly, almost against their will, show
us unconsciously in incidental, unobtrusive traits the progressive
development of Jesus as youth and man.”(141) His later works are the
development of this sketch.
His grandiose style gave the keynote for the artistic treatment of the
portrait of Jesus in the ’sixties. His phrases and expressions became
classical. Every one follows him in speaking of the “Galilaean spring‐
tide” in the ministry of Jesus.
On the Johannine question he takes up a clearly defined position, denying
the possibility of using the Fourth Gospel side by side with the Synoptics
as an historical source. He goes very far in finding special significance
in the details of the Synoptists, especially when he is anxious to
discover traces of want of success in the second period of Jesus’
ministry, since the plan of his Life of Jesus depends on the sharp
antithesis between the periods of success and failure. The whole of the
second half of the Galilaean period consists for him in “flights and
retirements.” “Beset by constantly renewed alarms and hindrances, Jesus
left the scene of His earlier work, left His dwelling‐place at Capernaum,
and accompanied only by a few faithful followers, in the end only by the
Twelve, sought in all directions for places of refuge for longer or
shorter periods, in order to avoid and elude His enemies.” Keim frankly
admits, indeed, that there is not a syllable in the Gospels to suggest
that these journeys are the journeys of a fugitive. But instead of
allowing that to shake his conviction, he abuses the narrators and
suggests that they desired to conceal the truth. “These flights,” he says,
“were no doubt inconvenient to the Evangelists. Matthew is here the
frankest, but in order to restore the impression of Jesus’ greatness he
transfers to this period the greatest miracles. The later Evangelists are
almost completely silent about these retirements, and leave us to suppose
that Jesus made His journeys to Caesarea Philippi and the neighbourhood of
Tyre and Sidon in the middle of winter from mere pleasure in travel, or
for the extension of the Gospel, and that He made His last journey to
Jerusalem without any external necessity, entirely in consequence of His
free decision, even though the expectation of death which they ascribe to
Him goes far to counteract the impression of complete freedom.” Why do
they thus correct the history? “The motive was the same difficulty which
draws from us also the question, ‘Is it possible that Jesus should
flee?’ ” Keim answers “Yes.” Here the liberal psychology comes clearly to
light. “Jesus fled,” he explains, “because He desired to preserve Himself
for God and man, to secure the continuance of His ministry to Israel, to
defeat as long as possible the dark designs of His enemies, to carry His
cause to Jerusalem, and there, while acting, as it was His duty to do,
with prudence and foresight in his relations with men, to recognise
clearly, by the Divine silence or the Divine action, what the Divine
purpose really was, which could not be recognised in a moment. He acts
like a man who knows the duty both of examination and action, who knows
His own worth and what is due to Him and His obligations towards God and
man.”(142)