THE HISTORY OF THE DISCUSSION
In all things, finally, one must be prepared for a boundless operation
of the spirit of controversy, which is as it were the atmosphere of
intellectual progress, and, like the physical atmosphere, is traversed
by much dust, many gusts, and many persistent currents. An infinite
quantity of mere insolence and mere personal aspersion arises round
every problem that disturbs widespread prejudice: we have seen some
of it even in a survey which aims solely at bringing out the main
arguments on our issue. And where a body of doctrine is related to
an economic foundation, controversy is sure to be specially protracted.
This has already been abundantly seen in the development of the
"liberal" view of the human Christ, of which M. Loisy may be taken
as an advanced representative; while Professor Schmiedel may rank
as an exponent too advanced to be otherwise than suspect for some
of the school. It is instructive to realize that M. Loisy stands
to-day very much where Strauss did eighty years ago. What was
then revolutionary heresy is now become a very respectable form of
professional theology. Only in his old age did Strauss himself realize
to what philosophical conclusions his critical method led; and on
the historicity question he seems to have made no serious advance at
all. Challenged by Ullmann to say whether, on his theory, the Church
created the Christ of the Gospels or he the Church, Strauss replied
that the alternative was false, and that both things had happened;
the Christ being created by the faith of the Church, which faith in
turn was created by the person of the historical Jesus. From that
gyratory position he never really departed; and that is the position
of M. Loisy to-day.
If it has taken eighty years to yield only that amount of progress,
through a whole library of laborious scholarly literature, there can
be no great weight left in the appeal to scholarly authority. The
authority of to-day is the heretic of our grandfathers' day. It is
for the radical innovator, on the other hand, to learn the lesson
which was not duly learned by his predecessors, unless it be that
in some cases they were merely silenced by orthodox hostility. While
many Freethinkers, probably, had come privately to the view of those
intimates of Bolingbroke who are referred to by Voltaire as denying
the historicity of Jesus, the two writers who first gave European
vogue to the proposition, Dupuis and Volney, staked everything on the
astronomical elements of the cult, and on the chief myth-analogies
with Pagan religions. Their argument was both sound and important,
so far as it went; but for lack of investigation on the Jewish side
of the problem, and of the necessary analysis of the Gospels, they
failed to make any serious impression on the scholars, especially as so
many Freethinking critics, down to Reimarus and Voltaire, treated the
historicity of Jesus as certain. [210] And when an anonymous German
writer in 1799 published a treatise on Revelation and Mythology in
which, according to Strauss, he posited the whole life of Jesus as
pre-conceived in Jewish myth and speculation, he made no impression on
an age busily and vainly occupied with the so-called "rationalizing"
of myths and miracles by reducing them to natural events misunderstood.
Later, another--or the same?--anonymous German, also cited by Strauss,
in a review article condemned every attempt to find a historical basis
for the Gospel myths; but in both cases the anonymity sufficiently
told of the general resentment against any such view. And when
Strauss himself, the first to handle the problem with an approach to
scientific thoroughness, not only adhered to the central assumption
of historicity, but argued confidently that the mythical dissolution
of so many of the details made no difference to faith, it was natural
that interest in his undertaking should slacken. The fact that it
had ruined his career would perhaps count for still more. Freedom
of academic discussion in Germany has never meant any minimizing of
pious malice; and Strauss all his life long had to bear his cross
for the offence of a new advance in historical science.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who for almost the first time, after Schmiedel,
has brought the note of amenity into the argument for historicity as
against the negative, remarks that the greatest Lives of Jesus are
those which have been written with hate--to wit, those by Reimarus
and Strauss. Reimarus, whom Dr. Schweitzer genially overrates,
was indeed given to invective against mythological personages,
from Moses downward; but "hate" is a strange term to apply to the
calm and judicial procedure of Strauss. As well ascribe to hate the
rise of Unitarianism. If hate is to be the term for Strauss's mood,
what epithet is left for that of his opponents, who, as Dr. Schweitzer
relates, circled him with unsleeping malignity to the end, and sought
to ostracize the clerical friend of his youth who delivered an address
over his grave? It is only historic religion that can foster and
sustain such hates as these. It is true that Bruno Bauer, who so
suddenly advanced upon Strauss's position, detecting new elements
of mythic construction in the Gospels, and arriving ten years later
at the definite doctrine of non-historicity, exhibited a play of
storm and stress in the earlier part of his inquiry. He reviled at
that stage, not the Jesus whose "life" he was investigating, but
the theologians who had so confounded confusion. "These outbreaks
of bitterness," Dr. Schweitzer admits, "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." [211] Add that the same methods were
being employed towards Bauer, and the case is perhaps simplified.
With these cases before him, and with the record to write of a hundred
and thirty years of admittedly abortive discussion, Dr. Schweitzer
could not forgo an exordium in praise of the "German temperament" which
had so wonderfully kept the discussion going. Such a record seems a
surprising ground for national pride; but it may be granted him that
the German temperament will never lack material for self-panegyric,
which appears to be the breath of its nostrils. To those, however,
for whom science is independent of nationality, the lesson has
a somewhat different aspect. What has been lacking is scientific
thoroughness. Bruno Bauer's flaws of mood and method were such that
his more radical penetration of the problem at certain points made
no such impression as did the orderly and temperate procedure of
Strauss. "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." [212] "Bauer's 'Criticism of the Gospel History'
is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only
now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most
complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which
is anywhere to be found." [213]
But his mood and his method not only made him fail to establish his
mythical theory; they meant miscarriage in the very conception of
it--a mere substitution of a subjective notion for the method of
inductive science. Bauer's final way of putting the theory merely
discredits it. He decides that the whole myth was the creation of
one evangelist, whereby he shows that he is no mythologist. He never
reached the true myth basis. After all, "the German temperament"
seems to fall short, at some rather essential points, of the faculty
for solving great historical problems; one feels it somewhat acutely
when Dr. Schweitzer comes to the undertaking himself.
The great merit of Schweitzer's book is its manly and genial tone;
though, as this is freely bestowed on the most extreme heretics, he may
make another impression when he speaks of the "inconceivable stupidity"
of the average Life of Jesus in the treatment of the connection of
events. What his book mainly demonstrates is the laborious futility
of the age-long discussion maintained by the professional theologians
of Germany. When he comes to the latest developments, which are but
extensions of the common-sense analyses of Bruno Bauer, he is full
of admiration for criticisms which, I can testify, have occurred
spontaneously to unpretending Freethinkers with no claim to special
training. Some of the most important myth elements in the Gospels--for
instance, the story of Barabbas--he does not even glance at, having
apparently, like the other specialists, never realized that there is
anything there to explain.
By Dr. Schweitzer's account, the great mass of the German specialists
for a century past have been unable to see contradictions and
incompatibilities in the Gospels which leap to the eyes; to himself,
Wrede's statement of some of them appears to be a revelation. It would
seem that the simple old "Secularist" method of exposing these had
covered ground which for the specialists was wholly unexplored. Thus
it comes about that the myth theory, addressed to men who had never
realized the character of their own perpetually conned documents,
fared as it might have done if addressed to the Council of Trent.
Of no myth-theories save those of Bruno Bauer and Pastor Kalthoff,
which alike ignore the clues of mythology and anthropology, does
Dr. Schweitzer seem to have any knowledge. He is capable of giving
a senseless account of a book he has not seen, and, it may be,
of one he has seen. Of Christianity and Mythology he alleges that
"according to that work the Christ-myth is merely a form of the
Krishna-myth"--a proposition which tells only of absolute ignorance
concerning the book. If, as I suspect, he has no better ground for
his account of Hennell's Inquiry as "nothing more than Venturini's
'Non-miraculous History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth' tricked
out with a fantastic paraphernalia of learning," [214] it speaks
ill for the regular functioning of his critical conscience. But
where he has to deal with concrete arguments he is straightforward,
alert, and readily appreciative; and his survey as a whole leads
up to a complete dismissal of the whole work of the liberal school
so-called. In his summing-up, the only critical choice left is between
"complete scepticism" and "complete eschatology"--that is, between
the avowal that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus, and the
conviction that the historical Jesus was purely and simply a Jewish
"hero and dreamer," whose entire doctrine was the advent of the
kingdom of God, the ending of the old order, in which consummation
he secretly believed he was to figure as the Messiah.
The bare statement of the proposition hardly reveals its
significance. Dr. Schweitzer's "dreamer" is not M. Loisy's, who is
conceived as having had something to teach to his disciples, and even
to the multitude. Dr. Schweitzer's Jesus has, indeed, disciples for
no assignable reason, but he is expressly declared to be no Teacher,
even as Wrede's Teacher is expressly declared to be no Messiah. The
joint result is to leave the ground tolerably clear for the scientific
myth theory, of which Dr. Schweitzer has not come within sight,
having omitted to inquire about it. As he sums up:--
Supposing that only a half--nay, only a third--of the critical
arguments which are common to Wrede and the "Sketch of the Life
of Jesus" [by Schweitzer] are sound, then the modern historical
view of the history is wholly ruined. The reader of Wrede's book
cannot help feeling that here no quarter is given; and any one
who goes carefully through the present writer's "Sketch" must come
to see that between the modern historical and the eschatological
life of Jesus no compromise is possible. [215]
Let us see, then, to what the eschatological theory amounts, considered
as a residual historical explanation.