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IN TRODUOTORY REMARKS.

OF the two writers whose works are compared anddiscus sed in the following Essay, those of one, ErnestRenan, are too well known to require much further noticehere. Almost immediately on its fi rst appearance it wastranslated into English, and from particular and especialcauses obtained great popul arity, or at least notoriety, inthis country, a s it had already done in that of the Authorhimself. It was read by, and became known to, many.

persons who were far from being professed theologians,or

indeed theologians at all . Condemned as it had been inFranceby Bishops innumerable and the Romish consistoryitself,

” so also in England it was , if read, condemned, if notoffi cia lly by Bishops who happily have no such poweramong us , at all events unoffi cia lly , and by those

‘

whotake their standard of belief from that which Bishops aresupposed to believe. Ou the other hand, it was read bygreat numbers who coul d not be insensible to its attractions .Those attractions were

,the novel grace with which it in

vested a subject hitherto considered too profound, whencriticall y handl ed, to be fathomed by the unlearned, theunparalleled beauty of its style, the idyllic or pastoralair which it threw around the principal personage, whomit also clothed with a reality unknown before, and whom itplaced in the mids t of scenery

,which the author had

B

2 IN T R OD U CT OR Y R EMA R KS.

seen,and which he now described with a master-hand .

N or was there wanting an appearance of critical investigation

,which, while it flattered the readers of the book

that they,too

,were becoming critical investigators; might

readily be foll owed without any very great stretch ofattention

,and its resul ts accepted without shocking any

tenets but those of the very strictest orthodoxy . N ay, thewriter of these lines once heard it observed by a reader ofRenan’s book

,'

tha t had he not been a Christian already,

that book would have made him one. Such an effect migh t;no doubt

,have been produced , in one sense, by the spirit

of tenderness and love which penetrates the work ; but itmust also have been a different sort of Christianity fromthat of those

,the main - stay of which is an implicit belief in

miracles as recorded in the New Testament,an unhesitating

acceptance of the theory of inspiration,and, above all,

of the doctrine, in its dogmatic form,of the Incarnation .

Such,then

,in its main features thus briefly described ,

was the book of Renan . Very different is the case withthat of Strauss . Of him and of his works but little

,com

para tively speaking, is known in England . It remains tobe seen whether the English translation of his latest work.

will procure for him greater fame or notoriety. Withregard to the writer it is probably known only to a verysmall minority that he publ ished in Germany, in the year

1 831 , a work in two thick volumes (about 600 pages each )on the same subj ect and on the same fundamental principleas his latest one

,which though it occupies in the transla

tion two octavo volumes, is, nevertheless, in the originalcomprised in one

,itself counting onl y 600 pages . The larger

work was also soon after its appearance, translated into,English by a lady who has since taken rank among theforemost writers of fi ction of the time . It is understood

IN T R OD U CT OR Y R EMAR KS . 3

that the whole, or nearly the whole, of the edition has beensold. So that the book

,though little heard of at the time

of publication* or since,mus t have gained a footing some

where, though Without those main supports and grandadvertising powers for so- called heterodox publications

,the

calm and dignifi ed condemnation of Bishops on the onehand, and the noisy and clamorous assaul ts of Convocationon the other . With regard to the general reader, therecan be no doubt that

,as in Renan’s book there was much

to allure and attract,so in this, the fi rs t work of Strauss

,

there was much to repel . The style, no doubt, wassingularly clear and transparent

,the meaning never

obscure, and the matter free from all mysticism, or whatis sometimes designated in England

;transcendentalism.

This, especially in a German work, was certainl y no slightmerit. But

,on the other hand

,the fundamental principle;

that of the myth,

” as applied to the details of the NewTestament

,though adopted by Baur in the beginning of the

nineteenth century as to the miraculous narratives of theOld, was new to the great majority of readers . In Germany,the volumes were welcomed by one party as containingthe great theological dis covery of the age ; by anothen the

work was atta cked as striking at the root of all religionand religious belief. A whole body of theological literaturewas produced

,which might have been placed in a ca tegory

entitled the S traus sian Controversy, carried on as itwas by the a ssailants of Straus s on the one hand, andStrauss himself on the other . Of these, some, as Schleiermacher

,argued in a Spirit which showed that they could

a ppreciate the efforts of a powerful genius even when

Answers , however, were a ttempted by C. J Hare, late A rchdeacon of Lewes , &c.

, and others .

4 INT R OD UCT OR Y R EMAR KS .

exerted on behalf of that which was unacceptable to themselves others as T holuck and Olshausen woul d not havebrought discredit upon an English Convocation . After asuccession

,however, of pamphl ets and brochures, which

were met by Strauss in part by independent pamphl etsand brochures of about equal extent

,in part in the prefaces

to the successive editions of his great work,amounting in

a few years to no less than four, the controversy came to,an end . It left, as is generally the case, both partiesunconvinced. In the meantime

,the assailants had had

the satisfaction of seeing their great opponent degradedby the high band of authority from the appointment whichhe held as Professor of Theology at S tuttg ard—a deg rada q

tion, if so it is to be called, which he accepted in a spirit

of uncomplaining acquiescence, which showed that however he might dis regard or reject the external accessoriesof Christianity, he understood and acted up to the chara cter of its internal essence far more than some of thosewho

,in the interests of what they called Christianity, had

controversially opposed or academically deprived him ofhis offi ce.

*

The general characteristic of this fi rst work ofStrauss was strict and severe logic, combined occasionallyw ith bursts of eloquence, which showed that if the author.wrote in a style which a critic might have cal led dry, hedid so of choice and not of necessity. This characteristic

,

as has been '

before observed, was certainly one to repelrather than attract . It was this, however , which in theeyes of thinking and educated men gaye the book its preeminent value, and placed it high above the theologicaltreatises of the age: N or did it fail to secure for it a

See a smal l pamphlet entitled ‘2T he Opinions of D r. S traus s

(Williams and N orgate,

INT R ODUCT ORY R EMA R KS . 5

hearing in the English translation from fi t audiencethough few.

With regard to the New Life of Jesus,to the discus

sion of which, as compared with that of Renan, the following treatise is more especiall y devoted, it has been supposedand not unnaturally, that it was composed and publishedas a sort of rival to the French work. This, however, wasnot the case . Strauss, in his preface, says that his own

work was close upon completion when that of Renanappeared. The expressions which he uses in speaking ofRenan are rather those of one who welcomes a coadjutorthan opposes a rival. There can

,however

,be little doubt

that the causes which led to the production of both workswere the same . During the last thirty years

,and even

l onger, there can be no question that not only in Germanyand France, but even in England, to which may now,

insome sense, be added Scotland, a great change has takenplace in the minds of men as to the mode in which thesesubjects may be viewed. With the exception , professedl yat least

,of the Bishops, and some of the most bigoted and

intolerant of men, to say nothing of women both youngand old, a feeling has arisen that these subjects may bed iscus sed in the interests of true religion and piety—

'

thatnot all who side against superstition and dogmatic belief,are reprobate and abandoned men, who simply desire toget rid of certain trammels in order that they may givefree indulgence to the impul ses of a vicious nature . Inthis respect even the famous “ Essays and Reviews,

”

to say nothing of various other publications by men ofunimpeachable character

,must have done much towards

enlightening and undeceiving the minds of men , possiblyeven those of women . Many have become aware that itis not an indispensable condition towards becoming in

6 INT R OD UCT OR Y R EMA RKS.

heart and mind a Christian,to believe in proved contradic

tions of the most glaring kind,and have realised the fact

that however “ j eal ous ” the G od of the theocratic andhierarchical system of the Jews may be, j ea lousycannot be an attribute of a Being who

,by his very

nature, must be ful l of gentleness , justice, righteousness,indul gence , and love—that such a Being cannot, as He

is described in the Old Testament to have done,have com

mitted or permitted acts which in capriciousness,cruelty

,

and even lust, exceed what an oriental despot coul d haveconceived. A large number have become aware of thefoll y and contradiction involved in connecting, as with itsbasis and necessa ry support

,by way of forced interpreta

tion of many expressions cal led “ prophecies (nowacknowledged to be nothing of the a world-widereligion with the fragmentary traditions of one of the mostignorant

,exclusive

,narrow-minded and superstitious

nations that the world has ever seen, and have been com

pell ed to admit that every attempt to reconcile the discoveries of progressive science With a cosmogony, evenmore puerile than that of Hindoos or Greeks

,does but add

one more fail ure to the many signal ones that have gonebefore .S o . also with regard to the much-vexed question ofinspiration . Preachers may

,no doubt

,be found at

the present day who maintain what may be called“ thorough even upon this point, and who in the faceof the mental

,if not physical smiles of many, if not the

maj ority among their audiences, will still insist on theplenary inspiration of every chapter

,every verse, every

S ee D ean S tanley’s

“ Three S ermons and Lectures xix .,xx .

Ou the J ewish Church, to the effect that “ Prophecy ” does notmean “ Prediction.

”

INT R OD UCT ORY R EMA RKS. 7

w ord, and every letter of the Bible . But it may-be doubted whether, if challenged, they coul d explainwhat they mean in a manner satisfactorily even to themselves. But whether or not, there can be no doubt thateven on this subject, men

’s minds have undergone,and are

undergoing, a very great change. Those who have takennote of the progress of this controversy can hardly havefailed to observe, that the more the question is discussedthe less intelligible becomes the principal term on whichit turns ; and that any attempt at proof must a ssume, with ;

out proof, the premiss from which the conclusion is to bedrawn.

* For, as we take occasion to observe in the note,

It may, or may not, be worth while to notice thew el l -known

pas s age so often appea led to,and which

,in the English trans lation,

s tands as fol lows “ A l l S cripture is given by inspira tion of G od ,

and is profi table for doctrine,for reproof

,for correction,” etc .

(2 T im. iii , In the origina l it is H&o a “

ypa dn'

y, Heowueuo'r os

’

, Ka i

(bgbe'

hquos r pcs dtda o xaMa v, frpos' ?heyxov, Wpog e

’

7ra v6p0wow , x . r . A.

A nd fi rs t with regard to the translation . It is , we believe, admittedtha t this is doubtful

,and that

,in the absence in the original of

the s ubs tantive verb,Geo

’

mzevcrros is by no means neces sarily thepredicate, but tha t ha s an equa l claim,

xa‘

t being rendereda lso. S o that unders tanding with Geofl uevo ‘

ros not 30 7 2, but what wehave at leas t an equa l right to unders tand

,oven, the meaning would

be,not al l S cripture is

, but A ll S cripture (every writingwould be themore correct trans lation, for, if an a cknowledged anda ccepted body of writing was meant it should be mi c a ‘

H ypa qbr‘

y)being

,if inspired by G od, is a lso us eful

,etc.

,a propos ition '

which no one wou ld dispute. But,independent of this

, whatva lidity of proof is there in a man

’

s own a s sertion that not onlywhat he wa s then writing was “ inspired,” but a floating and thenuns ettled number of otlzer writings

, s ome of which were not evenwritten, e.g .

, the four Gospels and the A cts of the A pos tles,no

unimportant part of “ S cripture,”s urely, a t the time he wrote. If

it is argued, as no doubt it might be, that Paul fores aw by inspiration that thes e wou ld be written, wil l it a lso be maintained thathe foresaw that jus t these and no others rela ting to the Life of

8 INT R OD UCT OR Y R EMA R KS.

even if we allow the common transla tion of the passagethere dis cuss ed, it is impossible to allow a man

’s as ser‘

J esus,of which, as we learn from Luke’

s preface, there were greatnumbers and many apocryphal a ccounts bes ides now extant, wouldbe adopted into our Canonical S criptures ?” But, then it mus t beal so remembered that this adoption does not even pretend to havebeenmade by inspired ”

collectors , but by fallible men—namely:those as s embled a t the Council of Laodicea, about the year 360, at

which,”as G ibbon s ays , theA pocalypsewas tacitly excluded from

the Sacred Canon by the same churches of As ia to which it isaddress ed andwemay learn from the complaint of S ul pitius Severusthat their s entence h ad been ratifi ed by the greater number ofChris tians of his time. Gibbon then gives the reas ons whichinfluenced the Greek, R oman, and Protest ant churches respectivelyto accept this s trange tis sueof wra thful and un-Christian denunciations into their respective Canons . T he Greeks did s o on the

a uthority of an impostor, who in the s ixth century as sumed thecharacter of D ionysius the A reopagite. A s to the R omish Church ,it was not until the year 1 545, that the Council of T rent fi xed the

S eal of it s infal libility on all the books of S cripture contained inthe Latin Vul gate in the number of which the A pocalyps e wasfortunately included. T he advantage,” Gibbon adds , of tum

ing those mys terious prophecies —he might have added, and

ferocious denunciations agains t the S ee of Rome,ins pired the

Protestants with uncommon veneration for so us eful an al ly.

”So

that we s ee tha t this “ inspired ” book, which was thus , accidentallya s it were, admitted into the S acred Canon

,not on Chris tian prin

ciples, but because its thunderous threats could beused agains tadvers aries, and some of the terms of which, e.g . S carlet woman

,

”

even modern Protestant controversal is ts are not ashamed to

employ agains t their fellow Christians - which more than any otherfeeds and fosters thewil d and fanatica l delusions of themos t vainand foolish of our modern divines—very narrowly es caped the pros cription of the Church, and was all but excluded from thatS cripture which Paul is supposed

,and in our version made

, to

a s s ert was given by inspiration of G od .

” Woul d Paul himself, the

Catholic-minded univers alis t A pos t le, have admitted a book, whos eevery sentence glows with a fi ery spirit of J udaistic vengeance intothe s ame category with his own writings , the keynote of which isuniversal charity and world-embracing love

INT R ODUCT OR Y R EMA RKS . 9

tion of his own,or others’ inspiration to carry any

weight. Others have made such assertions, and we onlyrej ect them with ridicule and contempt . Mahomet laidclaim to inspiration ; so did Brigham Young, the founderof the Mormon sect. Plato asserts that all poets areinspired ; and indeed, propounds a theory of plenaryinspiration which would probably satisfy the most extremedemands of our modern believers in the inspiration of theScripture .” He says

,that the Divinity takes their

own mind out of them and us es them as ministersmouth-pieces), that we who hear may know that it is notthey, the poets, who say these precious things , but thatthe Divinity himself is the speaker, and through themspeaks to us .

” He also says that it is through theworthless poet (substitute, in the case under cons ideration

,the untaught fishermen of Galil ee, or publican) that

the god has sung the most sublime hymn, for the expresspurpose of showing us that these fi ne compositions are noth uman performances at all, but Divine ; and that the poetis only an interpreter of the gods

,possessed by one or

o ther of them as the case may be.

”

(Plato, Ion, p . 534,

C . E . , the latter English quotation being taken fromG rote

’

s Paraphrase, vol . i, p. 458 of Comp anions ofS ocra tes .)Here we see that neither the doctrine of inspiration northe term was unknown to those who

, in orthodox language,are called the Heathen

,

” nor are the exclusive propertyof Christians, or of Christian terminology. Not, of course,that this fact is any argument against the possibility of the

"thing itself,any more than the Hindoo belief in the

Incarnations ofVishnu would be an argument against theGospel doctrine of the Incarnation ; or the supposed possibility of eliciting

“ the doctrine of the Trinity from the

1 0 INT R ODUCT ORY R EMA R KS .

T ima us of Plato agains t the truth of that doctrine initself. Ou the contrary it might be urged to show thatthe notion was not naturall y strange or repulsive to theminds of men in what

,as contrasted with a religious state,

might be called a natural one . But it is,oa lea t quantum,

good as against those—of whom,no doubt

,there are

many—who would maintain that t/zez'

r doctrine of Scriptural Inspiration is one of a peculiar kind, unheardbefore, by gods or wondering men . For they woul d atlea st have to show what are the specifi c characteristics ofthat doctrine as contrasted with the theory just describedin Plato’s words . There is no question that they woul dsooner or later fall back upon the argument that theinspiration of the Bible is proved by the superior morality , the refin ed spirituality, the devotional spirit, thesupersensual aspirations and innumerable other qualitieswhich characterise the Bible

,but which no other writings

possess in the same or even in an approximate degree.Now,

not to ins ist upon the fact that the morality, etc . ,of many of the lessons inculcated in the Old Testamenta re more than questionable, and that the contradictions,both in that and in the New more especially, are numerous and palpable to such an extent that no one notwil full y blind can by any possibility shut his eyes to them

,

is it not clear that he who attempts to prove inspirationby such an argument as this

,is

,in fact, appealing in the

last resort to human reas on and human conscience, andmaking them the supreme judges of what is good and whatis bad. Is not the argument as completely circul ar as itcan be? Would he rej ect, in so many words , any rule, ordoctrine, or f a ct recorded in the Bible N0 . Why notbecaus e the Bible is God’s Word—becaus e it is inspired .

Once more - how does he know that it is inspired ? Be

INT R OD UCT OR Y R EMA RKS. 1 1

cause all that is contained in it is moral,good

,and true, and

corresponds with the dictates of the (natural) conscience,reason, and enl ightenment of mankind . If this is not anargument in a circle it would be well to know what is .It is good , because it is inspired it is inspired, because itis good. Not, indeed , that there is not a sense in whichIsaiah and his school of preachers in the Old Testament

,

and Paul and his school of writers in the New,may be

said to be inspired , but it is not the sense in wh ich thedoctrine is maintained by the Pharisaic schools ofChristians . It is that large sense in which all greatteachers, whether in the Heathen or the Christian world,may be said to be

,or to have been

,inspired. Denunciation

of God’s wrath against sin,foresight of the fact that such

sin and wickedness as Isaiah and Ezekiel saw around themmust bring destruction upon the nation that practised it—no inspiration of a non-natural order was requis ite in

tkese matters for men as superior to their generation asSocrates was to his. Neither, surely, was any specialinspiration necessary to enable Paul to denounce the indescribable abominations of the Heathen world, or to seethat acrimonious disputes between rival sects and rivalchurches were then

,as now

,totally at variance with the

spirit of charity and love incul cated by the Christ whomhe bore

,now spiritualised

,in his heart of hearts

,and whom

he believed he had beheld with the eye of flesh . That theMaster’s teaching had in Paul’s time made a deep impression on his mind and the minds of others is unquestionable ; equally so that it had, as might naturally beexpected

,become developed and etherealised to an extent

which even he himself,probably, did not either foresee or

S ee Stanley, as quoted above.

1 2 IN T R OD U CI‘

ORY R EMA R KS .

expect . But that in this there is nothing more wonderful,nothing more requiring special intervention by inspiration

,or otherwis e, than in the case of Plato as compared

with that of Socrates, is , we think, so clear to any one whomeditates on the subj ect with an unprejudiced mind, andwho knows how the torch of science and morality, whenonce lit

, is passed on with ever -increasing brightness fromgeneration to generat ion

,that the point need not be

further arg ued here.It was , then, in view of the discus sion of these questions ,ca rried on with more or less success in his own country,since the publication of his fi rs t great work in the year1 831 , and the interest awakened in the investigation ofthem

,not onl y in the minds of professed theologians, but

als o of educated and enl ightened laymen, that Strausswas induced to write the work of which Zeller’s Essaygives a masterly sketch . The interest of which we speakhas been evidenced not onl y in Catholic France andpriest- ridden Italy, but als o in orthodox England, bythe appearance, in the fi rst, of Renan

’s book ; and inthe last

,of various works of more or less importance in

point of extent, but all by men not onl y of calm judgment and cons iderable powers of thought

,and deeply

impres sed with the importance, nay, the solemnity ofthe subj ects on which they were engaged. Foremostamong them stands Colens o, with his profound andelaborate volumes on the Pentateuch, each succeedingvolume more profound and more elaborate than the last .Many other contributors al so there have been towards theenlightenment of their generation, some of whom haverisked reputation, social position, nay, even main tenanceitself, as , indeed, was Colenso

’

s case, in the cause of truthand the abolition of non- essential superstitious beliefs .

INT R OD UCT ORY R EMARKS . 1 3

U nder this category may be placed the well-known writersof the “ Essays and Reviews R . W. Mackay, author ofthe Progress of the Intellect W. R . Greg, whose workon the Creed of Christendom is hardl y so well knownas, from its clear and powerful writing, it deserves to be ;Miss H. Martineau and others

,some

,

of whom—as Mr ;

Voysey, of Healaugh, have had the courage to utter, evenfrom their pul pits

,truths which it is

,perhaps

,safe to say

,

have never been propounded from pulpits before. Butespeciall y is it worth while to observe that

,on what may

be called the aggressive side,these questions are discussed

in a very different tone from that in Which they were discus sed a century ago. Of the temper in which the actionof this side is met by the defence

,Bishops and Convoca

tion, and so forth, the less for their sakes that is said thebetter ; but no one, even of them, has ever dared to saythat any one of their opponents is a scoffer, or not dul yimpressed with the seriousness of the matter in hand .

Still less,as might perhaps have been said formerly

,can

any one of them be taunted with leading a life other,so

far as appears, than one of the strictest morality, nayeven

,in some cases

,of tru e piety and holiness, or as

showing a temper would that this were true of the champions of orthodoxy) incompatible with the Christian giftsof charity and love. N or are there any

,or but very few

,

who have not made some sa crifi ce, as was said before, onbehalf of the truths which they now maintain . But arethere not

,among their opponents

,some who have sacri

fi ced what they once maintained,for the sake of material

advantages,rank, wealth, and dignity, which they now

enjoy ? Are there none who have tampered with truthsof which they are well convinced, but which they nowpass over with a tender and hesitating step, who write

1 4 IN T R OD UCT OR Y R EMA RKS.

with a reserve more befi tting the otfi ce than the Opinionswhich they hold To mention these by name woul d beungracious

,but thenames will occur to those Who are

acquainted with the his tory of the theological discus sionsof the las t thirty years— nay, perhaps, even of the lastfi ve.

Apart,however, from vapid declamation and thunderous

vituperation , of which there is certainly no lack—apartfrom puerile condemn ation affecting to be offi cia l

,but

fortunately, under the protection of the constitutionalaction of courts of appeal

,as unproductive of effect as it

is charged with malice and an impotent wis h to inflictworldly damage on a peccant brother for a cons cientiousexpres sion of fi rml y

- rooted belief apart,we say

,from

this,there is an argument or an allegation brought forward

by the champion-defenders of the faith,which it may be

well to notice here . They al l ege,then

,that those

,whom

more we suppose for convenience sake than with anypretension to accur acy they class under the comprehen

s ive terms of rationalis ts and neologists, do not deal fairlywith these subjects . Th ey say that these enemies of thefaith apply one rule to sacred and another to profane

history, and to facts as narrated in that Theymaintain, and fairly, if they are speakin g on profane andnot on sacred inspira tion principles, that the truth andsubstance of a history are not impugned by a few dis

crepancies in detail , a few self- contradictions , or theomission in contemporary writers of certain facts recordedin the history under consideration ; They say that the

genera l truth of the his tories of Herodotus , Thucydides

Even the Rev. J W. Burgon s ays , Insp ira tion a nd Intemreta tz’

on,

We des iderate nothing s o much as s earching inquiry .

’

But , if

the result of “s earching inquiry is hostile

,what then ?

https://www.forgottenbooks.com/join

1 6 INT R ODUCT ORY R EMAR KS.

if it were profane, well and good ; we shall not quarrelwith them on this accoun t .But it is, indeed, extraordinary that the champions ofplenary inspiration, of the theory of every chapter,every verse, every word, every letter, cannot see withhow much danger to the edifi ce which they so tenderlysupport this theory is fraught. Especially is this the casein dealing with uneducated thinkers, for such there are,and those who

,in spite of clerical t errors, will draw their

own inferences and conclusions . It appears to have beenby the unanswerable questions of these rough and readybut extremely inconvenient logicians that Bishop

"

Colenso*

was induced to investigate the legends of the Pentateuchwith a view of convincing the sceptical Zul u of thatwhich

,probably

,it will be found far more diffi cul t to

impress upon the orthodox Englis hman, and moreespeciall y Englishwoman, that, in order to be a Christianin the most sublime and exalted sense of the term, it isnot necessary to believe in absurdities and impossibilities.For Colenso saw,

no doubt, that the train of reasoningwhich would pass through the mind of his Zul u woul dbe something like this . “ You, my teacher, tell me thatin order to be religious I must believe the whole of whatis contained in this book which you call the Bible . I haveread it, but I find many things in it, told of God, whomyou preach to me as All -knowing, Al l -merciful, All-good,and A ll -wise, which appear to me to be utterly at variancewith this character . I read of Him as doing many thingswhich, being as they are cruel and outrageous, you, my

While translating the s tory of the Flood, I have had a simpleminded, but intelligent native—one with the docility of a child

, but

the reasoning powers of mature age—look up and ask,

“ Is al l tha ttrue D o you really believe,

”etc. Pref. to Part i., p. 9.

INT R ODUCT OR Y R EMAR KS . 1 7

teacher, would rebuke and punish me for if I were to dothe like. If

, therefore, I cannot be religious withoutbelieving in this book, religious I cannot be, unl ess youcan admit to me that these things which appear to me tobe incredible are so

,or show me that

,in point of fact, I

need not believe them,but that I am still bound to be

religious . And the same may be said of the NewTestament al so .Thus, we see that it was really in the interests of soundand practical morality that Colenso undertook his work.

He wished to show to his Zulus that superstition andreligion are not identical . The lesson which he wishedto teach them, both negative and positive, was to lookfor the sign of God’s spirit speaking to them ,

” not in theinspiration of particul ar narratives in the Bible, but “ ih

that which speaks to the witness of God within them,to

which alone, under God Himself, whose voice it utters inthe secrets of his inner being, each man is ul timatelyresponsible to the Reason and theWe turn now, in conclusion, and more particul arly, tothe work of Strauss itself. And though he himself hasa dmirably explained in his twenty- fi fth section the meaning of the term myth ,

” and the principle involved inthe term

,still , as it is the key-note to the Whole, it may

not be amiss to endeavour to give an explanation of iteven more popular still, and in terms even more familiarthan he does .From some cause or other this word has been of lateyears more frequently heard in ordinary conversation thanwas formerly the case . But, asmight have been expected,its real meaning has been gradually lost sight of, and it isused

,not unfrequently

,as synonymous with cons cious or

Oh the Pentateuch . Part I., p. 1 52.

C

1 8 IN T R OD UCT OR Y R EMAR KS .

wilful fi ction or falsehood conscious ex ercise of theimagination or wil ful assertion of that which is knownnot to be true. Now when Englis h bearers about—I will

not say readers of—S traus s’

s work, for with ordinary attention it woul d be impossible—understand that the myth”

is the fundamental principle of S traus s’

s theory, theyprobably infer, as was well observed by a late reviewer ofthe translation of the work in the R eader,

” that, applying this principle to the principal Personage spoken of inthe Gospels

, S trauss altogether denies His existence, andsupposes even that existence to be a fi ction or inventionon the part of the writers of the Gospels . Nothing canbe further from the truth than this .Wh atever else we may suppose With regard to the condition of the Jews or the state of Palestine at the time ofthe appearance of Jesus

,we know,

at least,thus much from

the description in Tacitus,

* that in point of ignorance,superstition

,and exclusive bigotryfi they had no equals

in the Roman world . As a nation they coul d scarcely besaid to have a common language. By some no doubt, inor in the neighbourhood of the capital, Hebrew wasspoken ; by others farther removed from it , Syriac ; or,towards Tyre and Sidon

,Phoenician ; by the country

people,Aramaic ; and by great numbers not improbably,

a sort of patois made up of a combination of all these languages

,and others with them

,including, of cour se , Greek,

which,as is shown by the Gospels and Epistles

,was pro

bably the language used in writing, perhaps in speakingtoo

,by educated men like Luke

,John, and Paul ); In a

Hist ,B. iv.

,o. 5.

’

r A dversus omnes a lias hostile odium.—l bicl .

IWe omit the names of Matthew and Mark, as suming the ques

tion to be still undecided a s to the authorship of their Gospels . N ot

INT R OD UCT OR Y R EMARKS . 1 9

country circumstanced as this was, the means of communication coul d not be but very diffi cul t and slow. Indeedit appears to have been principally

,if not entirely, on foot .

An d not more than one in a thousand, if so many, coul dbe expected to have the power of recording facts inwriting ; and not a larger number, certainl y, of readingthem when recorded. It would, indeed, be a great chancewhether a verbal narrative of an event that had happenedin one district woul d be understood in another, or even inthe same .Contrast

,now

,in these respects, our own condition in

these modern times . We live in an age of railways, telegraphs

,and newspapers

,instruments of conveyance for

ourselves and for intelligence, the possibility of which ahundr ed years ago no human being could have conceived.

And yet,remember

,even with all this, the extreme diffi

cul ty of obtaining accurate information as to any oneevent

,whether that event has happened miles off,

or within the boundaries of our own county, town, orparish . The event— the nucleus— may have really happened

,or it may not but

,even if it has

,how many

untrue or “ mythical ” accessories have clustered round itbefore it comes to our ears ? How many persons ever forward a piece of news to another exactly in the form inwhich they received it themselves There are, indeed, butfew

,events that happen that do not become, before they

have passed through half- a -dozen mouths, distorted andcoloured by the personal feelings and interests of the narra tors

, though they may be events but little open, it wouldappear

,to such influences . But is it not also within the

experience of every one that events are not only distorted,

that it is s ettled with regard to Luke and J ohn,bu t their names

may be taken as representative of educated men.

0 2

20 INT R OD UCT OR Y R EMA R KS .

exaggerated, and coloured, in every possible way, butthat stories of supposed occurrences arise without thesmallest foundation in fact

,and in manners perfectly

accoun table In this last.

case you have myth pure and'

unmixed ; in the former the growth and development ofit . S o that, in point of fact, we ourselves, living men andliving women, are ever living in the mids t of myths ; ourtelegrams are flashing myths alongtheir wires every day ;and our newspapers are circul ating myths ; and when wesift these myths, examin e their evidence, and strip themof their clus tering parasites til l we arrive , if possible, attheir central stem, als o, perhaps, accounting for theirorigin—we are doing what Straus s has done for the Gospelhistory.

Nor is there about the term myth, when used in thisway

,anything mystical or transcendental . The minds of

some,no doubt, when they hear the term, immediately

turn to the elaborate mythology of the Greeks, Egyptians ,and others, upon which such writers as Grote or Mul lerhave spent so large an amount of elaborate learning anddis quisition . But there is hardly anything in commonbetween the mode in which natural powers become invested

'

with forms and nomenclature, and the myths ofwhich we have just been speaking. Some analogy theremay be between the

'

mode in which great men may,after

death, have been converted into heroes in the technicalsense, demons or demi-gods , as, for ins tance, a Romulusor a Caesar, and others , and the immortalisation of Jesus ;but, otherwise, the explanation of the term myth as usedin Greek or Roman mythology wil l give but little assistance towards the understanding of it , as applied by Straussto the interpretation of the phenomena in the NewTestament.

IN T R OD U C'POR Y R EMA RKS . 21

In addition; however, to embellishment, decoration, andthe successive accrements continually gathering round anarrative when once originated by probably unconsciousfi ction, Strauss discovers a fertil e source of myths in theso- called prophecies of the Old Testament . When oncethe person of Jesus . had been invested by His adherentswith a supernatural character, when once He had come tobe looked upon by His followers and worshippers as theRedeemer

,nothing was more natur al than that those

among them,who were or had been Jews, shoul d search

among their ancient records,the onl y literature of which

they were possessed,for texts applicable to Him, and

which when thus applied were converted into predictions .It is not necessary to enlarge upon this point as it is onethat is continually reappearing in S trauss ’

s work, and thediscussion of it , more especially in the second volume ofthe translation, forms a considerable part of the whole .But t here is one case which it may be well to notice here,as it forms so striking an illustration of the case, andgives

,even to the orthodox reader, alternatives of which,

according to the simplest rule of common sense,he can

choose but one . Which he chooses wil l signify but littleto the critical investigator . We are told in Matthew,ii . 1 3, that in the earliest days of his infancy, Jcsus wascarried by his parents into Egypt in order to avoid thedangers arising from Herod and the catastropheWhichfollowed in the massacre of all the children from twoyears old and under .” Now upon the fact that nothing issaid by Luke of the massacre

, we do not insist, as it is awell known law of evidence that omission is not contradiction . But unless a person can be in two places at thesame time and be the subj ect in each of two separate linesof events, we do insist upon the fact that at the very same

22 IN T ROD U UI‘OR Y R EMA R KS .

time that Jesus is said by Matthew to have been carriedaway into Egypt, he is said by Luke, notwiths tanding theterrors of the tyrant, to have remained and to have beenat Jerus a lem,

and there to have been presented in

the most public manner in the temple . Now at some timeor other

,it is uncertain when, Jesus was investedwith the

title of Son of God . Al so, inthe prophetic books thecollective Israel is cons tantly spoken of by God

,as repre

sented by the Prophet, as His Son . Hence it happenedthat

,not merely in the instance we are speaking of but in

others als o, what was originally said of Israel was takenin a Messianic sens e and applied to Jesus as the Messiah .

S o in the case before us it happens that in Hosea, X i. 1 ,

we fi nd the foll owing words Wh en Israel was a child,then I loved him , and call ed my son out of Egypt ,

”re

ferring,beyond a l l question, to the Exodus . But Matthew

or the compil er of the legends recorded under the name ofMatthew, found in the tradition which he foll owed, aj ourney into Egypt placed in connection with the so

called prophecy, and in the Judaising spirit which characteris es him throughout, adopted it into his narrative.Thus we see the alternatives which are Open to one whopins his faith upon the letter of the ins pired text . Eitherhe mus t admit that the tradition in the First Gospel arosefrom the (erroneous) identifi ca tion of the Son of God "

with Jesu s as the Son of God,

” and consequently thatthe j ourney to Egypt never took place

,being simply a

m h,

” originating in the words understood as a prediction, or if it did take place, then the narrative of Luke ismythical, and the events therein recorded are excludedby the exigences of time and place . That both shoul dhave taken place is simply impossible. There is nothingon which immediately to rest the narrative of Luke con

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24 IN T R OD U CIOR Y R EMARKS .

divines, now a bishop, to the attention and considerationof the advocates of plenary inspiration .

We wil l now conclude these introductory remarkswith one or two additional observations

,and one or two

quotations . We feel sure that the advocates jus t spokenof, the champions of advanced orthodoxy, can have noconception of the damage they are doing to their caus eand to the church which they profess and intend to support . Complaints are now made of the want of candidatesfor ordination

,and more especially of candidates of a

high order of intellectual power . Can any one doubt fora moment what the caus e of this defi ciency is Is it tobe expected that such candidates as those last named canshut their eyes to what is g oing on around them ? Surelywhen they see the sort of theology they are expected topreach or be put under a ban by no inconsiderable numberof their fellow countrymen when they see the forcedattempts at harmonising , the pueril e interpretations , thetrivial explanations of palpable inconsistencies which theyare expected to adopt

,they are more likely to be repelled

from than attracted to the ranks of the Church . Wegive an instance of the second of these, by way of a specimen of that to which an intellect of no mean order ca ncondescend when engaged upon these subj ects . In awork called The New Testament of our Lord andSaviour

,Jesus Christ, in the original Greek : with Intro

ductions and Notes,” by Dr . Wordsworth , Canon of West

minster,the following occurs ; speaking of the wedding

garment,in Matthew xxii . 1 1 , the annotator savs : Par

ticul arly it means baptism as the germ of all the means ofspiritual grace .” The question addressed to the guestwho was without it he considers as specially applied tothose who rej ect the holy sacraments, and for the "uakers

INT R OD UCT OR Y R EMA R KS . 25

in particular ” he says it has a solemn and awful senseFR iE N D (italics in the original) How camest thou inhither not having a wedding garment After this,surely the force of folly could no further goWe close at length with a quotation which all mayapply to themselves who handl e these subjects in a fairand fearless spirit. My (our) great concern has been (is),to show to those who have inherited the cul ture of thisage

,that religion— that the Christian religion—is not re

sponsible for the false interpretations of past (the authormight have said or the present generations—that it ispossible to believe in God and yet hold fast by one’s seientifi c knowledge and convictions . You all know the sortof attacks my (our ) attempt has brought down upon me

(us). For myself (ourselves) I (we) heed them not anymore than I (we) should heed the cobwebs that spreadover the garden path on an autumn morning. Whenpeople use vituperative language, I am we are) sorry fortheir poor morality. When they use il logical argumentsand make irrelative quotations from Scripture

,I am (we

are) sorry their reasoning powers are not better developed.

That is all . Why should I (we) be angry ? If theycoul d help it they woul d do differently. These are nobleand courageous words

,especially when we remember that

they were spoken and are now published* in the metropolis of Puritanism and Sabbatarianism.

D ivine Providence in its relation to Prayer and Plagues . BytheRev. J ames Cranbrook . Edinburgh. S econd Edition.

ST RA U S S A N D R E N AN .

WHE N the solution of the same problem is simul taneouslyundertaken by different individuals

,it may be considered

as a proof that the attempt to solve it is in accordancewith the spirit of the time

, and the more certainl y so inproportion to the importance of the persons

(devotingthemselves to that solution, and the confi dence with whichthey may be credited with a right understanding of whatthe present time requires and is competent to perform.

S o far, the mere fact that two learned men like Straussand Renan , quite independently of one another, consideredthat the time had arrived for undertaking a discussion ofthe life of Jesus , could not have failed to excite our attention in the highest degree . When, four years ago, RenanVisited the Lebanon, and there wrote his fi rst sketch ofthe Life of Jesus ,

” it was impossible that he should knowthat in Germany his celebrated predecessor had some timebefore returned to his New Testament investigations inorder to supplement his earlier work by a fresh discussionof the historical matter of the Gospels . S o, on the otherhand, Strauss had already completed the greater portionof his work when that of the French critic began itsbrill 1 ant career. But it was not merely a Life of Jcsus ingeneral which each undertook to write, but also a P opular

Life of Jesus . And though only the German author added

28 ST R AUSS A N D R E NA N .

to his title-page the dis tinguishing term of popular,

it was in the case of the French self- evident that his workwas intended not merely for the learned but for thegeneral reader . This popul ar destination of the twoworks is very characteristic of the religious conditions aswell as of the education of the time . Our age will nolonger submit to the theory that investigations so closelyconn ected with the highest interests of mankind are to bedealt with as the exclusive property of one particularorder of men . This age demands of theology

,as well as

of natural science and his tory, that its resul ts shall be madepublic property, shall be devoted to the purposes of generalenl ightenment and though in this department

,as well as

in the two others , onl y the expert can be in possession of‘

all the principles, ideas, and methods requisite for thecomplete solution of the problems proposed

,still people

cannot persuade thems elves that theologians are to pursuetheir call ing with closed doors , to communicate to thepublic in general at the most a portion of the results atwhich they arrive, but, as to the course of their investi

g ations and the grounds of their assumptions, onl y to givean account to those who are in a condition to work throughthe whole mass of their learned investigations . On thecontrary

,the more contradictory, in theological matters,

the dicta of the professors are accustomed to be, so muchthe more justifi able appears the desire that these professorsshoul d condescend to permit a wider circle of educatedmen to inspect not merely the results at which theyarrive

,but also the processes and grounds by which and

upon which they arrive at these results that they shoul dwrite not merely for learned men like thems elves , but alsofor the people

,and more especially for the educated portion

of them . And this demand appears all the more fair, as

ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN . 29

among our peop le the numbers are very considerable ofthose who are indeed without special theological knowledge,but who

, in point of general education, of unprejudicedjudgment

,of exercise of extensive thought, are far in

advance of the majority of professed theologians . Thus,Strauss expressly says that he intended his fi rst Life ofJesus” for theologians exclusively

,but that he now writes

for non - theologians,and has taken pains not in any

single proposition to be unintell igible to any educated andthoughtful person among them ; and that it is indifferentto him whether theologians choose to read him or not .As in the Acts of the Apostles Paul declares to his Jewishcountrymen that as they despise him he wil l turn tothe heathens

,so here the critic says to his theological

colleagues, that as they have not chosen to l isten to himhe attaches himself to the laity. Only it would be a greatmistake to suppose that personal considerations aloneinduced him to discuss the lif e of Jesus for the Germanpeople . Ou the contrary, the allegation that he shoul dhave either not written at all

,or exclusively for the learned,

would involve no less an anachronism than that of thosewho, thirty years since, were so simple as to think that ifhe considered it his duty to write so dangerous a book heshould have written it in Latin

,so that

,at all events

,it

might not have been read.

There are,indeed, great differences of degree in what

is meant by the word popular. What appears to oneperson popular, another possibly may fi nd very diffi cul t ;and what is popul ar in one country is not necessarily so inanother . Everything depends upon the degree of generalintelligibil ity to which the author proposes to attain—uponthe class of readers upon which he reckons . How great,in this respect, is the difference between the German and

O ST R AUSS AN D R E NAN .

the French authors of the Lif e of Jcsus” is shown at thevery beginning of the respective works of each by acharacteristic feature . It happens

,by a remarkable coinci

dence, that each dedicates his book to the memory of adeceased relative : Renan, to the pure soul of his sisterHenrietta , who died

'

a t Byblus on 24th September, 1 861Straus s to his onl y brother

,who had been a manufacturer

at Cologne, and died at Darmstadt, 2nd February , 1 863.

The former puts the question to his sister,now sleeping

in the country of Adonis near the sacred Byblus ,” whether

,

in the bosom of God, she still remembers the day whenhis work was begun in her company and with her l ivelysympathy . The latter

,in his dedication,

which he hadwritten as an addr ess to the living and now prints as aninvocation to the dead

,says that he conceives as among

his readers men who,like his brother

,unsatisfi ed with the

gains of industry,hanker after spiritual things who,

after laborious days,fi nd their best recreation in serious

reading who have the rare inclination,unconcerned

about the ban of traditional belief and ecclesiasticalordinances, to think for themselves about questions of theutmost importance to mankind, and the still rarer intelligence to look upon even political progress

,at all events in

Germany,as not suf fi ciently secured until provision has

been made for the deliverance of men’s minds fromreligious delusion, for the purely human cul ture of thepeople.” These two dedications express the whole differencebetween the twowritings in purpose, in tenor, and in tone .It is the object of Renan’s book— and, undoubtedly, not somuch from intention as from agreement with the author’sown peculiar taste— to be as welcome and intelligible to areader of the femal e sex

,and in particul ar of the French

nation as to any reader whomsoever ; and if we imagine

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32 ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN .

criticism, especially, to say nothing of S traus s’

s fi r st Lif eof Jesus ,

” of B'

aur’s profound investigations,are neglected

by him in a manner which, as we shal l fi nd , is, in hiswork

,deeply avenged. If

, moreover, the French critichas an advantage as compared .with the German, in thefact that not onl y did the nature of his occupation placehim in immediate contact with the Eas t, but that he alsohad the opportunity of surveying the theatre of theEvangelical his tory, and if he knew how to appreciatethe latter circums tance at its full value

,especially for the

solution of his problem, we cann ot on the other handoverlook two things, the fi rst that in this behoof Renannot unfrequently makes too much of his advantage

,and

ascribes to the rural charms of Galil ee an influence uponthe spiritual culture of the mind of Jesus which we coul dscarcely admit even if it were not religious but artisticgreatness that was in ques tion ; the next, that there is inStraus s and in an incomparably greater degree, an exi

gency of Evangelical criticism, a phil osophica l insightinto the peculiarity of religious conscious ness, a psychological insight into the motives and development ofreligious conceptions , an unerring judgment as to whatwas possible and what was impossible in the circles fromwhich the Evangelical narratives come down to us

,

a subtlety of scientifi c appreciation saving him frommuch that in the cas e of Renan mus t offend an enl ightened view of history. Lastly, if we enquir e as to themode in which each has dealt with his problem in deta il

,

it cannot be overlooked that Renan'

s book answers farmore fully to the ordinary demand on popularity thanthat of Straus s . Even in point of extent, the latter is,taking into cons ideration its ex tremely close print, threetimes the siz e of the former, and exceeds the other by

ST R AU SS A N D ‘

R ENAN. 83

at least asmuch in'the richness of its contents and the thoroughness with which it deals with its subject . A hundred

questions, only slightly touched by Renan, or which hedecides with a few general assertions

,often very striking

and intelligent, but still too hasty and precipitate, arethoroughly discus sed by Strauss ; of the development andpresent state of Gospel criticism he gives u s a sketchwhich we shall look for in vain in Renan

,as well as for

the investigations instituted by him into the origin andmotive of the Evangelical narratives . Every decision ispreceded by a careful balancing of the grounds on whichit rests ; and if we are not thereby enabled to maintainthe historical nature of a feature, he prefers a non liquetor a hypothesis which openly confesses its own uncer

tainty to narrating a s a fact what cannot be proved tobe such . It is indeed true that by so doing he abandonsan advantage which undoubtedl y contributed no little tothe unheard of success of Renan’s work

,and in which,

in fact,lies its principal charm ; that thorough- going

individualisation , that freshness of representation whichthough leading us in detail upon uncertain ground

,does

still in its general impression, like a successful historicalpainting

,not seldomplace in a striking light the scene

of Evangelical history and the spirit of the acting personages ; he gives up those fi ne pencil- strokes by whichthe French historian understood how to freshen up thefi gure of his hero and to give to the pale forms ofantiquity the appearance of warm reality. But he alsoabandons those random combinations

,those uncertain

,in

place seven perfectly groundl ess, suppositions with whichRenan fi l ls up the gaps in credible tradition ; all thatromantic decoration , that false pathos, that sensibil ity ofthe nineteenth century with which Renan has invested

D

34 ST R AUSS AN D R ENAN.

the founder of Chr istianity and his surroundings ; thoserhetorical exaggerations

,those musical flowers which can

not be trans lated into German and be listened to with thesmallest toleration ; as, for ins tance, when the composer ofthe Book of Daniel is call ed vrai créateur de la philosophie de l ’his toire”

(p . or,when Jesus is represented

to us as foul ant aux pieds tout cc qui est de l’homme,

le sang, l’amour la patrie (p . or when Renan asserts

that the history of the origin of Christianity is a delicieus e pastorale (p. and the like. Strauss’ representa tion may

,in comparis on with Renan

,seem meagre

and colourless ; where the latter describes things to us

a s if he had been present on the spot, the former not uhfrequently fi nds himself compelled to make the unwelcomeadmission that the real course of events is altogetherknown to us : where the one professes to tell us accuratelywhat the persons suffered and did , under what circumstances and impressions they developed themselves, theother is often perfectly s a tisfi ed if he can succeed inexplaining the historical consequences from the generalcircumstances of the period and the country ; in givinga view approximately correct from the main features ofthe course of history. But whoever looks for strict historica l truth will certainly fare better with the historicalsolidity of the German critic than with the genial superfi ciality of the French ; and if to the latter he will not denythe praise of a most attractive and graceful form, of clear,sparkling and flowery language, of artistically fi nished

execution,he wil l not thus allow hims elf to be seduced

into expecting similar ornamentation from a work to theweighty contents of which it would be but little suitable

,

and to bestow less admiration upon the well- tried master

T he references are to the French edition of R enan.

ST R AUS S AN D R ENAN . 35

hand with which Strauss has been able ‘ as an author tocontrol an immense amount of material

,to make the most

complicated analysis transparently clear,to bring innu

merable particulars under the dominant point of view, todistribute light and shade, to say the most importantthings in the most terse and simple language

,to fi nd un

hesitating ly the mest characteristic expression for everythought .

If we woul d examine more accurately the contents ofthese two remarkable works, we cannot of course underf

take to give a detailed accoun t of the plan and results ofwritings which have been long in everybody’s hands

,or to

explain all the individual questions, the discussion of whichwould require a third volume of the size of that of Strauss .We must rather be content to bring out those salientpoints upon which will especially depend the formation ofan opinion upon the character and mutual relation of thetwo works

,and upon the state of historical investigation

into the Gospels as indicated by them .

The fi rst question which here meets u s is that as tothe sources of the Gospel history. It is well known thatBaur characterised it as the main defect of Strauss’ earlierLife of Jesus ,

’ that it gives a criticism of the GospelHistory without a criticism of the Gospels and thisremark has since been not only incessantly repeated

,but

has been not unfrequently, and even in the presence ofStrauss’ last work

,followed up in a spirit so one- sided that

the critic has been absolutely met by the obj ection thathe should have abandoned his whole undertaking untilhe had settled satisfactorily the question as to the originof the Gospels , as to which of the Evangelists wrote fi rs tand which last

,what sources each made use of

,to which

decade each writing belongs, etc . This last poin t is maniD 2

36 srR’

Auss A571) RENAN .

‘

festly an exaggeration, and the questioni

such as eyerysu ccessive discus sion o f the Life of Jesa s would adjournindefi nitely

-j for they a re questions which will never becleared up, and an agreement about them never be rea ched:But even Baur’s own sugges tion, though well grounded initself, may be met by answering that, convers ely

,no cri

ticism of the Gospels is possible without a criticism of theEvangelical history, and that no one, who for the last

'

thirty years has attentively and intelligently followed thecours e of these investigations, will be able to close hiseyes to the fact that t he criticism of the Gospel historywhich Strauss completed in his fi rst Life of Jesus was

the fi r st thing that levell ed the road for more searchinginvestigations a s to the tendency, the plan, and the originof the Gospels . For so long as the extent of the unhistorica l element in these writings was un certain , no certainty

wa s at ta inable as to whether they might come from evewitnesses or not ; whether these authors had, in composmgthem

,historical truth in view

,or further dogmatic pur

poses in what way,‘

and how far they allowed thems elves to be influenced by these purposes ; how free or howdependent was the po sition in which they stood towards

the Evangelical tradition , etc . The obj ection o f Baur is

nevertheles s recognised as just by Strauss himself on thevery quest ion on which he himself lays the greatest weight,th e ques tion , that is , as to the Gospel of John . He says thatno one should interfere with a single word in the discus ?sion of these points until he has come to an understanding

a bout John and his relation to the other Evangelists ; and

that it is Baur who throws the clearest . light upon thisfundamental question , who has taken up the battle against

the Gospel of John,and fought it out in a manner in which

critica l battles are rarely fought out ; and this , he says,

ST R AUSS A N D R E N AN . 37

entitles Baur tomperishable fame (p. In all ess ential points he himself adheres to Baur ’s .Views with regard tothe fourth Gospel . He remarks, indeed, andnot unjustly ,that Baur sometimes identifi es the thoughts of the E van

g elist with the forms of modern specul ations, and therebyidealises them ; but he agrees with him in considering theGospel a s a free-hand religious fi ction, of which the leadingthought is theLogos idea , a fi ction which, having:had its riseat a stirring period of theological and ecclesiastical movements, in the times of Gnosis and Montanism, of disputesabout the Passover

,and of the development of the d octrine

of the Logos,about the middl e of the second century

,ca’r

ries 11 1 itself marks of these various. efforts, but embracesthem under a higher unity he not only agrees, fi na l ly ;

with Baur’s indication of the stand-point from which theEvangelist might consider himself jus tifi ed , not indeed in,

unequivocally characterising himself as the the bosomdisciple of Jesus

,but. in insinuating he was so not only

does he agree with this indication, but he calls it expresslythe crown of Baur ’s treatise, a magnifi cent proof of closeand penetrating criticism which must exercise upon everyone who is competent to follow it a profound and reallypoetical effect.Far less importance is attributed by Strauss to the

investigation into the Synoptics ; nor can I contradict himif he is of Opinion that Gospel criticism has dur ing thelast twenty years somewhat run to seed

,and the whole

investigation become so extensive by the crowd of hypotheses pres sing in, that the main question itself, that of theEvangelical History, will scarcely ever be brought" to adecision if the solution is to be waited for until this battle

is ended ; but that this is not necessary , inasmuch as manyT he references a re to the English trans lation.

38 ST R AUSS AN D R EN AN.

of the essential points in the Gospel History may becleared up without its being by any means settled whetherMatthew wrote in Hebrew or in Greek—a coll ection ofsayings or a Gospel ; whether Luke had before him Mark

and Matthew, or Mark, Matthew and Luke . Thus muchat least may be establis hed without diffi cul ty, and must,indeed

,be established anterior to any further investiga

tion into the Gospel History, that the external evidencesfurnish us with no warrant that any one of the three fi rst

Gospels was composed by an Apostle or a dis ciple ofApostle that, on the contrary, the very evidence ofPapias hims elf (the oldest witness) , about the year 1 20 A .D .

,

to profes sed writings of Matthew and Mark is absolutelyinapplicable to our Gospels of Matthew and Mark.

*

"uite as easily it may be shewn that each of theseGospels contains unhis torical accounts and narratives ingreat number ; that, consequently, none of them is an ori

gina l and thoroughl y reliable source. But their relation,in this respect, to one another—which, comparativelyspeaking, may claim the greatest originality—how far theunhis torical accounts were delivered to them by others

,or

fresh framed by their authors by modifi cation of tradition,

if not by free invention of their own—these are questionswhich can only be decided by criticism of the accounts inquestion following internal traces : but th eir solution is

Even by T ischendort’s pretentious and superfi cial pamphlet,When were the Gospels compos ed ?” Leipsig, 1 865, neither thisresul t nor our view of the external attes tation to theGospel of J ohnis in any way shaken. T he mos t in this pamphlet is nothing more

than a repetition, in a very confi dent tone, of apologetic observations long s ince controverted ; while what the composer has latelyadded is s o untenable, tha t it cannot caus e any s erious diffi cul tieswhatever to any one who has surveyed this department with a

critical eye.

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40 ST R AUSS AN D R E NAN.

of the his tory, as g iven in Matthew, is onl y secondary,and drawn , at a ll events in part, from different and moreancient memoranda, from the continuous us e of whichboth the repetitions and the contradictions which appearin this Gospel are to be explained. That the G ospel didnot receive its fi na l touches until a comparatively lateperiod , Strauss concludes more especially from the baptisma l formula, Matt . xxviii . 1 9

,echoing

,as it does

,the

later ecclesiastical ritual. He agrees with others inassuming that Luke made us e of Matthew, and probablyalso one or other of the original sources which the latterhad before him , and to this he thinks many of the featuresare to be a scribed, in which Luke differs from Matthew,even in the case of those narratives which

,in their main

subj ects,coincide with those of Matthew. A t the same

time he is of opinion that Luke not onl y worked up thetradition which he found ready at hand as an independent author, but also modifi ed it in the sens e of univer

sa listic Paul inism, and supplemented it by narrativeswith this tendency ; but in doing so he did not deal sofreely with it as the four th Evangelis t, to whom,

in otherrespects

,he stands nearer than any of the other synoptics :

the peculiarity of his method consists rather in this (asStrauss

, p . 1 23, convincingly proves) that he gives ahearing to the opposite opinion, he does not feel himselfto be the man to melt up again and remoul d altogetherthe Evangelical tradition, but is content with bringing itinto another shape by analysis , re-modelling and elaboration . That he wrote later than Matthew is proved evenby the turn which he gives to the eschatologic* prophecyin Matthew xxiv. 29 . Mark, as has been a ssumed almostuniversally since the time of Griesbach , and especially by

ale. about the end of the world .

ST R AUSS AN D R ENAN . 41

Baur, is supposed to be so far dependent upon Matthewand Luke, that his work is to be considered as an extractfrom theirs , enriched by onl y a few additions from theman extract, the pecul iarity of which consists mainly in itsdogmatic neutrality, in , the .mode in which the speechelement is subordinated ' to the ; narrative, in the ex ag gerated and wilder conception of the idea of miracle

,in the

more sensuous pa inting and more garish colouring ofmany of the events . This n ew ,

however,has been for

some time opposed by the other,espoused in part by

learned men of note, according to which Mark, on thecontrary, is supposed to have been the common source ofthe two other synoptics

,and the most reliable authority

for the original Evangelical tradition” S o, for the last

few years, Mark has become the fashion, and there isscarcely an historical excellence which might not be discovered in him

,from the exemplary historical arrangement

and purely human image of Christ to the “ brightness ofthe early flower

” which shone upon Ewald so convincinglyin Mark’s Apocryphal accounts of miracles . On this point,however

,many preferred the assumption, not tha t Mark is

himself the originalE vangelist, but only the onewho allowedhimself the fewest variations from the original Evangelist .Strauss is as little able now

,as before, to follow this View .

He continues to look upon the later composition of Mark,and his dependence uponMatthew

,as undeniable : that, with

Matthew, he also used Luke and compounded his Gospelout of the two others appears to him at least very probable and he likewise coincides with Schwegler andBaur

,in the assumption that the leading idea of his work

is the intention of giving not merely a shorter represent a tion of the Evangelical history, but one in which everything that coul d give offence on one side or another, onall points in dispute between the Heathen and J ewish

42 ST R AUS S AN D R ENAN.

Christian party, might, as much a s possible, be passedover in silence ; and he thinks also that with this is connected the fact, which betrays also the tas te of a laterperiod, that Mark lays so much more st ress on thenarratives, and especially on the miracles, than on thespeeches, shortening the latter, lengthening the formerby full description and exaggerating them by peculiarfeatur es of a miraculous character . Finally . Strauss isquite correct in dr awing attention to the points of contact between Mark and John, which prove that one ofthese writers who, in this case, can only have been J ohn,had the other before his eyes.It is , of course, impossible in this place to test theseviews in any degree exhaustively. If

,however

,I am to

express my Opinion in brief, I cannot but declare myselfas in the main , and with a few modifi ca tions in detail ,agreeing with the theory here set forth as to the originand character of our Gospels . In the fi r st plac e it wil lbe, at the present day, almost universall y admitted, andcertainl y by a ll those who are competent to decide

,that

the Evangelical History was propagated, for a considerableperiod

,onl y in the way of oral tradition . Among the

fi r st dis ciples and worshippers of Jesus , there existed nolearned men and no authors : on the contrary, the lea rnedand the literary of his nation h ad turned from him withhatred and contempt . A. society, newly formed, standingin the mids t of the most exciting conflicts and the mostprofound religious excitement, was a soil the leas t favourabl e that can be conceived for the writing of history. A

society,looking every day for the end of the world, feeling

no loftier desir e than that for the coming of the Lord inthe clouds

,could have no motive for representing the

image of its earthly life in written descriptions , for aposterity upon which , considering the near approach of

ST R AUSS AN D R E NAN . 43

the conclusion of the present course of the world, theycould no longer reckon but

,as far as a wish was excited

to learn anything of the speeches,the acts, and the

destinies of that Lord,those who felt that wish adh ered

to the living word, to which, even in the second century, aPapias attributes an incomparably higher value than tothe written tradition, inasmuch as its credibility is guaranteed to him by the personality of those who were questionedby him . It was not until the Apostolica l generation hadgradually died out, not until decades of years had passedsince the departure of Jesu s , that written memorandaabout His life and doctrine were felt to be a desideratum .

But at this period, by reason of the nature of all merelyoral tradition, not merely unhistorical elements in greatnumbers might and mus t have penetrated into the Gospelhistory, many genuine features have been lost or havesl ipped into oblivion, but the whole frame of the historymust have been loosened

,and its natural organism broken

up into a dis arranged mass of separate narratives . Forif,in a general way, it is only the skill of the writer whichcan form a comprehensive biography

,give a conn ected

view of a long historical career,whil e, on the contrary,

on artless remembrance onl y particul ars impress themselves , and in artless tradition onl y these propagate themselves, much more must this be true of religious tradition,far removed as this is , by its very nature, from all historicalpragmatism

,from all explanation of sequence in connec

tion with natural caus es, and for which that alone has anyvalue from which an express reference to religious life canbe gained. What

,therefore

,oral tradition about Jesus pre

sented, cannot have been a connected representation ofHishistory, but only a number of separate stories and speechesAmong the former we must assume to have been placed,

44 ST RAUSS A N D R E NAN .

together with the main facts of the death and theresurrection

,principall y miraculous histories and those

occurrences which were the occasions of an importantsaying ; among the latter, not prolix developments ofdoctrine, but, in part, short and pregnantiexpres sions withan epigrammatic point in part

,those parables of an attrae

tive nature and easy to be_

remembered,which were

besides so agreeable to the Jewish taste , and propagatedthemselves from mouth to mouth . And just for thisreason it was impossible that the oral tradition coul d bethe origin of entire biographies, like our G ospels , or of .

anything more than short and imperfect memoranda,

which even Strauss jus tly considers as the fi rst beginningof Evangelical literature ; combinations of speeches andoccurrences without any claim to biographical completeness and strict chronology, something after the manner,though far from reaching to the extent, of the Memorabilia of X enophon ; and this is expressly confi rmed bythe most ancient testimony about the Evangelical writingswhich we possess, the declaration of Papia s , preserved for usby Eusebius in his Church ‘ History (iii . 39) in Papias

’

own words . For, instead of our four Gospels, this ancientbishop knows only two writings, the fi rs t of which wasattributed to the Apostle Matthew, the other to Mark thecompanion of Peter : a collection, written in Hebrew, of .

U tterances of Christ,” and a Greek account “

of hisspeeches and acts . Now if it is certain, with regard tothe fi rst of these writings, that it can have been neitherthe original work of our Matthew, nor a perfect Gospel atall

,so also with the accounts which we have of the second

,

a most inadmissible freedom must be taken, in order to

fi nd in it our own Mark, or even a ba sis in the maincorresponding to it . For, in the fi rst place , the speeches

S T R AUSS A'

N D R E NAN . 45

in it appear to have been by far the most important pa rtas Papias describes its contents

,at fi rst indeed as consisting

of the speeches and acts of the Lord, but afterwards as ofthe speeches ” only ; and, as it was supposed, to haveborrowed these contents from the lectures of Peter

, who

in his preaching of the Christian doctrine had , at all events,far more occasion to give an account of the doctrinalspeeches and parables of his Master than of those miracleswith Which our Mark is fi ll ed , and which a personal disciple and companion of Jesu s

,however superstitious we may

imagine him to have been,could only have narrated to a

very small extent. In our Mark, on the contrary, theSpeech - element

,as compared with the occurrences

,and

especially with the miracles, is kept so strikingly in theback- ground, that even the most zealous champion of hisoriginality could only explain the phenomenon by thegroundless assumption that he intentionally passed overmost of the speeches

,because, anterior to the time of his

writing,they had been already noted down by Matthew

(but in Aramaic, and consequently not for the Greekreaders of Mark) ; and that, on the other hand, learnedJ ews eagerly Caught up the hypothesis of Mark

,in order

,

by means of it, to support the proposition, does indeed initself contradict all historical possibility

,and destroys all

true relation between cause and effect that Jesus had in hisdoctrine nothing distinctive or peculiar ; was nothing elsebut a J ew of the Pharisaic party ; and did not differ inanything from the heads of it at Jerusalem but in a moredefective cul ture and a greater amount of religious fana ticism . Thus Papias expressly remarks that the sayingsand deeds of Christ were told in the Writing of Mark

,

not in order, but as he had them from occasional mention in the lectures of Peter and whether much or little

46 ST RAUSS AN D R ENAN .

credit is to be given to the statement, it proves at leastthus much

,that the writing of Mark, which Papia s knew,

not only differed from the arrangement of the speeches inthe collection of Matthew (which cannot itself have beena biography in progressive chronological order), but thatit had not

,generally

,the form of a regular narrative

about the life and teaching of Jesus—that the particularsayings. and portions of narrative in it were not strungupon the thread of chronology or any other externalthread

,but onl y quite loosely put together . To our Mark

,

whom his friends praise for the very reason that he, morethan any other Evangelis t, gives us a picture of the regularseries of events, and of the progressive development of anhistorical career

,and who, apart from this exaggeration,

does a t all events unmis takeably exhibit an intention to givea continuous and regular narrative, and varies from thearrangement of Matth ew only in a few and unimportantparticul ars to this Gospel of Mark of ours

,that

mentioned by Papias, as regards its form, must have stoodin much the same relation as Eckermann’s Conversations

with Gothe to the biography of him by Lewis .

Wh o then was the fi r s t to compile a complete repre

s enta tion of the Evangelica l History from thes e and othersimilar memoranda

,and from paral lel oral tradition con

tinua lly developing itself ? This we are unable to say .

But it cannot be assum ed that it wa s one of our fourEvangelists . Not merely becaus e Luke , probably thesecond of them in point of antiquity, expressly makes

mention of many ” Gospels which were in existence in

his time ; because, moreover, it may be proved that Jus tinmade use of at leas t one Gospel-writing bes ides ourMatthew and Luke ; becaus e we also know, from othersources

,of a whole series of Gospels apart from our own ,

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48 s’

ra A'

uss AN D RENAN .

‘

m'

ost faithful ly, which of them on the whole, togetherwith what is legendary and

'

unhistorical,of which there

is plenty in a ll , gives comparatively the most reliableimage of the founder of our religion

,of his doctrine and

his destinies . Now that, in this respect, the Gospel ofJohn does not come under consideration is placed, seientifi ca l ly speaking, beyond all question by all discussionthat has taken place since Baur’s decisive investigationinto the question ; and as to this I can now,

as I didtwenty years ago, only adh ere to a ll the essential results ofthat investigation ; and this acknowledgment is not in thesmallest degree prejudiced by the admis sion that Baurdoes not

,perhaps

,explain in a manner perfectly correct

every single feature of the Johannine representation, thathe has occasionally obliterated the simplicity of the artisticprocess of the Evangelis t by over- complex reflections

brought into too little prominence the importance whichthe external element , of the Evangelical history, in spiteof his idealism,

always had in the eyes of its author ; andthat in a ll these respects the subtle remarks of Straus supon this most sensuous, supersensuous Gospel (e.g . Vol . I. ,

p . 1 87, Vol . II ., pp. 393

,make a Valuable supplement

to those of Baur . Luke is far from dealing with the

traditionary matter as freely as John does ; but still it isunquestionable that even he made very important alterations in it , and in particul ar cases (as especially, chapter x . ,

in the narrative of the seventy disciples) took the olderrepresentation

,traces of which we can follow much more

clearly in Matthew,and not only enriched it by further

traditional elements,but also unhesitatingly modifi ed it in

accordance with practical and dogmatic interests. Withthe remarks which in this respect Strauss makes upon thetendency and procedure of Luke , I can agree the more

ST R AUSS AN D R E NAN . 49

entirely as the substance of them completely coincideswith the view which I have given in my work upon theActs of the Apostles . Modern investigators are, withoutexception

,agreed upon the point that in Luke we are to

look neither for the original Gospel itself nor for afaithful copy of it ; that he is later than Matthew isproved to demonstration

,independent of everything else,

by the passage,chapter xxi . 24, compared with Matthew

xxiv. 29 ; for while Matthew stands sufliciently near tothe destruction of Jerusalem not to hesitate to adopt intohis Gospel the prophecy

,that immediately after it the

Son of Man shall appear in the clouds,Luke interposes

between these two events the time of the heathen ,”

during which Jerusalem is to be in their power, and doesnot expect the second coming of Christ until after theexpiration of this interval . It has, la stly, been of latemaintained

.

on several grounds that Luke did not makeuse of Matthew

,but only Matthew’s predecessor, the

“ original Evangelist . But on an accurate comparisonof the two writings, no doubt upon this point appears tobe possible, as Luke, in so many cases, adheres not only tothe narrative but also to the expressions of Matthew, thatthe latter must have resembled his predecessor almost tothe extent of being indistinguishable from him

,if we are

to attribute all these points of resemblance only to the useof a common original source .Far more doubtful is

,as has been remarked, the ques

tion as to the relation of Mark to the two other synoptics .But however great the zeal and ingenuity that has beencalled forth to prove that not the others have been usedby him, but be by the others ; or, that at least, accordingto another turn— of the three Gospels dependent uponone another, that of Mark is the most ancient, and stands

E

50 ST R AUS S AN D R ENAN .

nearest to the genuine original Gospel of Mark, thedisciple of Peter still I do not think that the suspicionsopposed to this view ever have been

,or ever will be, suc

ces sfully disarmed. Even the external evidence withregard to the existence of our second Gospel

,is decidedly

unfavourable to it . We can point to the fi rst and third,at any rate about the middl e

,or before the middl e of the

second century , in the hands of Justin Martyr , the thirdin those also of the Gnostic Marcion : of Mark no suretrace is found either elsewhere about this time, nor evenin Justin ; for the onl y notice capable of being referred toit, the mention of “ Sons of thunder ” (Mark iii . isquoted by Justin himself, not as from our Gospel of Mark ,but from the memorabil ia of Peter

,

”Le. the memoranda

known to Papias,and professedl y written down by Mark

from the lectu res of Peter . But if Justin,who lived in

Rome , was not acquainted with our Gospel which , according to all appearance

,took its ris e in t his city , or at all

events in Italy,or at least did not use it in the same way

as he us ed the two other synoptics, it cannot in his timehave enjoyed any particular celebrity, and mus t havebeen far removed from being generall y correct . Moreover

,the supposition that we have the most faithful

specimen of the original evangelical history in a writingwhich strikingly neglects precisely the main point, thedoctrine of Jesus and instead of

l

this , coll ects the miracleswith an obvious preference

,and enlarges them with

exaggerated legendary features— this supposition is notonly improbable in itself, but it is also diffi cul t t o reconcil eit with the fact that

,in the most ancient records about

the history of Christ, of which we hear through Papias,it is rather his speeches upon which stress is exclusivelylaid

,and that Justin likewise only seldom mentions the

ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN . 51

miracles, but returns to the saying s of Jesus in every

page of his writings . Moreover,the champions of the

priority of Mark fi nd themselves, in particul ar points,compelled to make the admission that

,in those points

,he

left out or altered component parts of the original Evan

g elica l tradition ; that, e.g .,the Sermon on the Moun t,

which is entirely wanting in him, and with it the narra tive, als o wanting in Mark, about the CapernaumCaptain , cannot have been wanting in the originalwriting ; that the short and colourless mention of thetemptation of Christ supposes a fuller narrative

,such as

we read in Matthew and Luke, that Mark (chapter Vi.was offended on dogmatic grounds with the term “ Sonof Joseph ,

” or Son of the Carpenter ,” as Jesus

,in Luke

and Matthew is called by the Na z arenes,and therefore

changed it into Son of Mary. But how, then, can awriter to whom such radical alterations in the originalrecord are attributed

,unless we have before us con

vincing proofs of the contrary, be at once and on othergrounds preferred to the others and what right havewe to rej ect as inconceivable the notion of a dependenceof him upon them ; while still , in such instances as thosealleged, it must be admitted that he was capable of takinga ccounts such as theirs

,and partly from dogmatic

,partly

from literary motives,working out of them such a repre

s enta tion as he gives ? If, fi na ll y, Mark is to be cons idered as the oldest of our Gospels

,this assumption will

be irreconcilable with the circumstance that (to passover chapter ix . 1

,1 3

, in chapter x iv. 24, he transfers,like Luke, only in more indefi nite expressions , to a laterperiod, the marvellous signs of a second coming of Christ,which Matthew connects immediately with the destructionof Jerusalem. And if it is denied that he used one of

E 2

52 ST R AUSS AN D R E NAN .

the others ; or, conversely, if he is supposed to havebeen used by them

,then the question arises as to how it is

to be explained that Mark gives so remarkably little ofhis own

,that not onl y the almost entire substance of his

accounts, but very frequently their verbal form is foundrepeated , sometimes in Matthew,

sometimes in Luke,often

even in both . Now if it is not to be assumed that Markused them

,then only one of two things remains

either they mus t both have ma de use of Mark, or a ll threemust have used the same fundamental record. But noneof these assumptions s atisfi es the cases in which Marknot merely agrees generally w ith one of the two othersyn optics, or exh ibits a compound from both, but inwhich his text at the same time exh ibits phenomenawhich cann ot be explain ed in a writer working independently, but only in one who had older representationsbefore him

,and neglected to smooth over in an intell igent

manner these roughnesses which so readily result from theappropriation and application of foreign material . When

,

for example,Mark

,oh . i. 2

,attributes to Isaiah a passage

of the prophet Malachi, applied to J ohn the Baptist , thisis most naturally explained by the assumption

,tha t with .

the passage from Isaiah , which Matthew, and Luke alsohere quote , he incautiously connected a second passagefrom a prophet which is quoted by the same writers in adifferent connection (Matthew xi, 1 0, Luke vii. likewis e, with reference to John, but without the name ofthe prophet from whom it is taken . In oh . iii. 1 3

,he

agrees with Luke (ch . vi. in representing the electionof the twelve Apostles as having been made upon themountain, immediately before the sermon (omitted byhim) ; and in the list of them passes most irregularlyfrom one construction to another, followed by Luke, and

ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN. 53

at the same time describes the commissioning of theApostles in words which

,in Matt . x . 1 , and Luke ix . 1

,

stand in a different and far more appropriate connectionthe words themselves exh ibiting a mixture of the text ofboth of them . In this case it is diffi cult to believe thathe fell upon this composition of elements entirely independent of the other

. writers . We fi nd these elementsmanifestly in them in their original places

,and Mark

himself, chap . Vi . 7, plainl y shows to what place theyproperly belong. In chap . iii . 22, he tells u s that whenJcsus, after the election of the disciples, was thronged bythe people in a house

,the Scribes of Jerusalem objected

to him that he cast out devils by the chief of them . Butthis unconnected narrative only becomes intell igible bymeans of Matthew chap . xii. 22, where that reproach isconnected with a casting out of a devil . In chap . xiv. 65,

it is said that the servants of the Sanhedrim put a coveringover the face of Jesus , struck Him,

and cried out to Him,

“ Prophecy.

” It is manifest that we have here abbre

viated , until it is unintelligible, what is found in Luke,chap . xxii . 64 Matt. xxvi . 68 , Prophecy who it is thatstruck thee. Matthew and Luke cannot, therefore, havetheir account from Mark

,and as the latter uses in part

expressions of Matthew,in part those of Luke, he can only

have taken his from them . Mark xv . 37, says that Jcsusdeparted with a loud cry, that the curtain of the templewas rent in twain

,that when the centurion on guard saw

that he departed with such a cry (according to anotherreading shorter but evidently to the same purport, thathe departed s o

,he cried out

,This man was truly the

Son of God. When Mark says this every reader mustindeed ask himself

,how any one, and especially a Roman

centurion,coul d have taken an executed malefactor for

54 ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN .

the Son of God, for the Jewish Messiah, because beforeHis decea se He uttered a loud cry, or how any writercould have attributed such a belief to such a motive .This strange feature is only intelligible to us when weremember that Matthew does indeed also

,chap . xxvii. 50,

speak of the loud cry before the decease,and of the

rending of the curt ain ; but adds, and the earth didquake, and the rocks rent, and the graves were Opened,and many bodies of the saints which slept, arose,

” etc . ;Now , when

"

the centur ion, and they that'

were with him,

watching Jesu s,saw the earthquake

,and those things

that were done, they feared greatly, and said, Truly thiswas the Son of God.

’ Here there is a suffi cient motivefor the expression of the centurion in the precedingmaterial miracles . Mark, as well as Luke, omits thesemiracles (probably on account of the resur rection of thedead, which he did not choose should precede that of the

fi rs t -fruits of them that slept but he does not wishto dispense with the recognition of Christ by the centur ion ; and, consequently, as he coul d not have witnessedthe rending of the cur tain of the Temple

,the onl y re

maining ground for such recognition,the onl y striking

circumstance in the case of the dying person for thecenturion to observe, was the loud cry uttered by theformer .A series of further examples, and in particular of thosein which the text of Mark can he explained only on thesupposition of its being compounded of those of the twoother synoptics, is given by Straus s, p. 1 74, vol . 1 . Butthe explanation that Mark

,in all these cases, h ad before

him not the two other Evangelists, but the fundamentalrecord

,

” common to him and them— this explanation isindeed Opposed by many other considerations

,but is als o

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56 ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN .

Thus it cannot be assumed that the latter borrowed theirnarratives from Mark independent of each other

,or from

Mark’s fundamental record ; for in this case what shouldhave occasioned Matthew onl y to omit those which Lukeadopted, and Luke onl y those which Matthew adopted"uite as little that one of them u sed

,beside Mark

, (gy.

the fundamental Mark the other as well,and then pur

posely repeated those cases of driving out devils , which theother did not give ; for, if he was concerned about com

pletenes s in the case of such mira cles, why shoul d hehave passed over others which both his predecessors gave,and which were

,therefore

,better accredited ; or, if he

was only concerned with supplementing the earlierdescriptions, have repeated those which he found alreadyin both ? Ou the contrary, the fact can only be explainedon the supposition that Mark had Matthew and Lukebefore him, and selected what was agreeable to him . Itis the same also in the other cases . In spite of all theingenuity that has been lately applied to prove the opposite assumption

,the dependence of Mark upon Matthew

and Luke will still always continue to be the last resul tof criticism . But as

,besides them, Mark undoubtedly

made use of other Gospel records also,or at least of one

su ch, and as Luke likewise, as he himself tells us,had

before him not merely one predecessor but several , it isstill possible that

.

each of them, in individual cases, mayhave preserved the original tradition in a purer formthan the others ; but the exact state of the case in thisrespect

, can only be decided by internal evidence, andaccording to the circumstances of each accoun t as it comesunder discussion .

If,now, from this point, we refer to the opinions of

Renan, we shall‘ fi nd that he agrees with the position above

ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN . 57

enunciated, so far as to entertain the conviction that thefundamental source of the Gospel history is to be found inoral tradition

,and that for a long time no such value was

attributed to written memoranda,as that any hesitation

would have been felt to supplement or modify them fromtradition or from one another. Renan, moreover, fi nds

the most ancient traces of Gospel records in the accountswhich Papias gives of the collection of sayings of Matthewand of the memorabilia of Mark. He thinks that it wasfrom these two sources that our two fi rs t Gospels werecompiled

,and that Matthew distinguishes him self by best

preserving the utterances of Jesus in their original form,

and that, on the contrary, Mark (who imposes uponRenan

,just as he does on our German Eul ogists of this

Evangelist,especially by his— in our opinion completely

and entirely a fi’

ected— picturesqueness), adhered mostclosely in the narratives to the most ancient traditionemanating from Peter and other Eyewitnesses . Far lessis the historical credibility of Luke : his Gospel is anexposition given at second

,or more accurately at third

,

hand ; a work of literary art, possessing indeed, comparatively speaking, the greatest charm,

but to be used onl ywith great caution by the critical historian . In Renan’sremarks upon the literary character of this Gospel

,there

is much subtle and pertinent observation ; but when hestates it as his opinion that the author of it is accreditedby the Acts of the Apostles as a companion of Paul

,it

woul d be much nearer the truth to say, that the Acts ofthe Apostles puts it beyond doubt that he wishes to appea ras such, but is not and when he turns the supposed companion of Paul into an exalted Ebionite and Jew,

pious according to the law,we can scarcely believe our

eyes when we see this maintained of the disciple of

58 ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN .

Paul ; but we see also at the same time, that th e authorhas no notion of the peculiar tendency of the third Gospeland of the Acts of the Apostles, and has always been andstill is perfectly unacquainted with the investigationswhich have, in Germany, long since settled these questions

,at least in the main points . But, to a stil l great er

extent,is this the case with his conceptions of the fourth

Gospel . There is no question in Gospel criticism so important for the right apprehension of Gospel History asthis . But, with regard to this fundamental question,Renan’s ideas are so hazy, that his answer to it from thestand- point of modern science

,can only he described as a

remarkablestep in retrogression . Perfectly unacquainted,as it woul d appear, with the German criticism of the lasttwenty years, about John and its results, he grasps at anassumption which, in its self- contradictory lameness, has ,among us , long since outlived itself. On the one hand

,he

cannot conceal from himself that Papias can have knownnothing of a Gospel of John and, as regards the contentsof this Gospel , not only are the abstract metaphysicallectures of the Joh annine Christ an unsurmountableoffence to him,

but he also discovers, that in particularpoints the narrator has, for a particular purpose, know

ingly fa lsifi ed history . Still , on the other hand, he thinksthat not only later writers, like Tatian and Irenaeus, butalso even Justin knew and made use of our fourth Gospel

(the exact opposite to this being the case as regardsJus tin) and while he certainly cannot

“

l ook upon hisspeeches as historical , he is of Opinion with regard to thenarrative portions, that they are for the most part soaccurate that the eyewitness cannot be mistaken, and thatthe course of the lif e of Jesus is, on the whole, more sharplyand satisfactoril y drawn in John than in the synoptics .

ST RA USS AN D R ENAN . 59

Thus he comes, in conclusion, to the resul t that the fourthGospel was probably composed on the basis of the memoranda which John, in his old age, reduced to writing,by one of his disciples

,and by the same hand enriched

with those speech -portions which so little correspondeither to the spirit or the language of the synoptic Christ .Still , he will not, characteristically enough, exclude thepossibility that the Apostle himself

,towards the end of

his life, in his devotion to a theosophical mysticism, a ttri

buted the speeches to his Master. But, be this as it may ;in any case, the Gospel in the majority of its historicalnarratives, is supposed to be as credible as it is in itsaccounts of the speeches of Jesus, unreliable . A similarpartition of the Gospel was formerly attempted in Germany, soon after the fi rst apfiearance of Strauss

’ Life ofJesus but it met with such ill success, that it might havedeterred any one from again taking it up ; and it hasbecome a sheer scientifi c impossibility since Baur trium

phantly shewed that this Gospel, more than any other, isa work out of a single mould

,that one and the same idea

governs every particul ar in it as well as the whole, thatits narratives are noth ing but historical ill ustrations ofits speeches

,and that there is no alternative between

adopting the whole as it stands as Joh annine, and a ttributing that whole to another and far later writer . ButRenan appears not only to know nothing of this fundamental investigation andof all further discussions connectedwith it

,but his position generally towards the Johannine

narratives is so uncritical,that even by all that Strauss

,

in his fi rst Life of Jesu s,has proved to demonstration to

be unhistorical, he will not be disturbed in his faith inhis hypothesis ; and that features in the case of which theliterary invention is so palpable as it is in that of the

60 ST R AUSS AN D R E NAN .

unseamed coat of Christ , are actually forced by him toserve as a proof of the narrator having been an eyewitness .The consequences here resul ting to his representation ofthe history

,will appear when we turn from the sources of

the Evangelical his tory to the history itself.In the discussion of the Evangelical history , either oftwo modes may be adopted. We may start from the individual narratives

,as they lie before us , in order, by criti

cis ing them and by removing their unhistorical elements, toseparate off the historical remainder ; or, conversely wemay begin with the exposition of the supposed historicalcourse of events

,as far as it can stil l be dis covered, and

show from this point how and on what grounds the manifold unhistorical accounts, as time went on

,attached

thems elves to this historical kernel . It was the formerprocess, which we may call an An alytical one, thatStrauss had followed in his fi r st Life of Jesus ; on thepresent occasion he gives the preference to the second

,

the synthetical one . Of the two books into which, afterthe lengthy introduction

,he divides the whole disquisi

tion,—the fi rst treats of the Life of Jesus in its his toricaloutline,—the second of the mythical history of Jesus inits origin and formation .

” He has thus certainly rerenounced the advantage of founding his resul ts upon thatmany-sided criticism of the Evangelical accounts , and

their various explanations,which pursue the subject mat

ter into its fi nest ramifi ca tions , in which the mainstrength of his earlier work consists . But he might feelthe less reluctant to do this

,as in that work he had already

and so brilliantly satisfied this demand ; and as he everywhere introduced into his new work as much of criticaldetail a s was compatible with its more popul ar character.

ST R AUSS AN D R E NAN . 61

And by limiting himself in this direction, he'

g ains inanother the power of doing now what he could not havedone before ; and of, in part, sketching a connected map ofthe real history and historical personality of Jesus , inpart of explaining far more perfectly and accurately thanbefore the origin of the Evangelical history. Here thefi rst of these investigations

,the question as to the history

and the character of Jesus is the main point,and the very

question is brought especially before u s by the parallelbetween Strauss and Renan for the latter has

,on the

whole, done but little for the explanation of what is unhistorica l in the Evangelical narratives . But here also Ishall be obliged to limit myself to the main point .Now, if we enquire, in the fi rst place

,how Jesu s he

came what he was, we shall be compelled to lament, thatin his case as in that of so many of the greatest benefa ctors and heroes of humanity, the entire want of accreditedaccounts of his personal relations and history of his culture . Of the fi rst we know little more than that he wa sborn at Na z areth , that his father was called Joseph ,

hismother, Mary that the fi rst followed the trade of a car

penter, which Jesus also probably learnt Himself and pra ctised of the secondwe do not know even so much asthis and

,until the fi rst appearance of Jesu s in his inter

course With John the Baptist, nothing whatever. In

order,therefore

,to fi l l up this gap we are driven a ltog e

ther to conjectures . Now, if we examine what directionthese conjectures take in the case of each of our two critics

,it is sufi iciently characteristic, that in Renan the

personal , in Strauss the historical relations occupy theforeground . The former does indeed begin with a shortdescription of the state of the Jews in the centuries immedia tely preceding Christ, but attributes much more im

62 ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN .

’

portance to laying before his readers a pictu re of theimm ediate surroundings of Jesus and of the circumstancesunder which he grew up . He speaks of Na z areth and itscharming neighbourhood, of the Jewish mode of instruotion which

,differing far from our s, made, even for the

unl earned individual,a comparatively high mental cul ti

vation possible ; of the influence which the sacred Scriptures of the Jewish nation , especially those of a propheticand poetical character, the proverbial sayings of a Hill eland of other Rabbis, the spirit of a superstitious superna tu

ral is tic view of the world must have exercised upon ayoung man of that nation— a young man entirely unac

qu ainted w ith Greek science, and who had always beenwithout a notion of the politica l condition of the world ;of the development of Messianic idea s and the fermentwhich had been thus produced in the minds of men ; ofthe opposition exis ting between Galilee and Judea, notonl y in the character of the country

,but also in that of

their religious and social life . His disquis itions uponthese points are moreover most attractive and welladapted to give us a more lively view of the circumstances under which Js sus grew up . But on a nearer viewthere is no mis takin g that, even under this head, the ima

gination of the his torian has introduced into his picturemore

'

th an one feature, the his torical character of which it isdiffi cul t to prove that he gives to the enchanting natureof the country of Galil ee, which, moreover, he himselfw a s far from fi nding so rich and so pleasant as it is supposed to have been heretofore

,an importance in the for

mation of the character of Jesus,utterly exaggerated and

incapable of being proved by any defi nite signs that considerabledeductions must bemade from hispanegyric uponthe cheerful innocence

,the idyllic condition of the Gali

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64 ST R AUSS AN D R E NA N .

a learned education , even in the sense of the Judaism ofthat period ; and in support of this assumption he appealsto the freshness and originality of his doctrine and modeof teaching and to the absence of that scholastic spiritwhich is so remarkable even in the case of the highlygifted Apostle of the Gentiles . Moreover

,he remarks

that in Galil ee, the population of which was thickly intermixed with Gentil es and separated by Samaria from theJews

,so proud of their faith , the circums tances were

favourable to a more liberal religious tendency. But hedoes not venture to pus h the assumption further

,sup

ported as it is by no more definite historical traces, andtherefore

,is content to remark that Jcsus (like Socrates

we might add,who was also a mechanic and possessed no

learned know ledge of the philosophy of which he wa s tobe the reformer) found the means which he requir ed forthe development of inward powers with which he wasendowed

,in industrious study of the Old Testament and

al so in free religious intercourse with the learned men ofhis own nation, and in particul ar, with the adherents ofthe three dominant schools . To show this he gives us notonl y a survey far more comprehensive than Renan does ofthe cour se of development of Judaism, and in doing socomprises in his Vi ew in particular the assistance givenin the prophets to a spiritualisation of the religion

,the

formation and modifi ca tion of the Messianic idea,the

Jewish sects of the last century before Christ ; but healso

,following in the steps of Baur , completes this in

vest ig a tion by a description most luminous, and bringingout clearly and strikingly all essential points of the con

tributions made to the preparation for Christianity by theGrecian spirit

,in virtue of its scientifi c and morally reli

gions development,by the Roman empire and the pra cti

ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN . 65

ca l sense of the Roman people. And to this discussionI cannot but attribute the greater value the more decidedly I continue to adhere to the conviction that not onl ythe practical modifi ca tion of the circumstances by theRoman empire, but also the course and spread of the intellectual cul ture of the Greeks

,had a much greater share in

the rise of the Christian religion than is generally assumed . But this is exactly what is most diffi cul t of proofin the case of the founder of Christianity. It is, indeed,perfectly evident that from the time of the appearance ofthe most ancient Al exandrine Christians and Gnosticism

,

Hellenic philosophy and the entire circle of Hellenicthought had an appreciable influence upon the theologicalconceptions and the moral views of the Christians . Inthe case of Paul , also, whose native town of Tarsus was afamous seat of Greek and especially of Stoic philosophy

,

whom his Rabbinical studies might,at all events in the way

of controversy, have brought into contact with foreignelements

,whose teacher, Gamaliel, was reproached with

his knowledge of the Greek language,who

,from the

time of his conversion, lived almost entirely in the Greektown of Antioch

,in Ephesus

,in Corinth

,etc . , - in his ca se

we should be less surprised if it could be shown that manyof his ideas accrued to him

,mediately or immediately

,

from the source upon which a Philo and others at thattime drew so richly . But who will look upon it as aprobable supposition that the same source was open alsoto the self- taught teacher of Na z areth , in whose casethere is not a single reliable token that jus tifi es theassumption that He was a cquainted with the . Greek language

,or was in any way connected with persons of Greek

cultivation But if only the circumstances in questionare clearly considered

,we may be compelled to allow that

F

66 ST R AUSS AN D R E NAN .

the notion is not so inadmis sible as might at fi rst sightappear . The question is, indeed, not whether Jesus himself came into immediate contact with G recianism— thisis extremely improbable—but whether many of thethoughts which Greek philosophy fi rst set in motionmight not have passed over into Palestine, and have

.

become domesticated in the circles which imparted tothe Founder of Christianity the basis of His cul ture

,which

He could not, any more than any other man, dispense withfor the development of His creative idiosyncrasy . Andthis possibil ity cannot be at once negatived when we reflect that these thoughts had been for centuries operatingcontinuously in the Grecian world

,that they were every

where met with disengaged from their scholastic formand their systematic conn ection among the orators andpoets

,as well as among the philosophers, in daily lif e, as

well as in the schools and in l iteratur e ; that, moreover,the Jewish people outside of Palestine, in Syria, in AsiaMinor, and, above all , in Egypt, had likewis e for centuriesbeen in communication, most fruitful in results, with theGreek spirit

,and that it was impossible that those of

Palestine coul d blockad e themselves a gains t the ideaswhich their compatriots abroad had adoPted , under thecircumstances of the lively intercourse which they held

w ith them,an intercourse kept up by commercial connec

tions , and the national religious festivals that the influenceof the Greek character, which, under the Seleucidae, andbefore the violent attempt at Hellenisation on the partof An tiochus E piph anes , appears to have continued for aconsiderable time after a noiseless fa shion, could hardl yhave been entirely set aside by the Maccabaean rea ction

,

and that a speaking monument and most effective agentof this influence reached down for some years into the

ST R A USS A N D R ENAN . 67

Christian period in the sects of the Essenes and Therapeutae.For that the decisive impulse to the rise of Essenism

,

which,according to Josephus, falls precisely into the time

of the Maccabees,proceeded from Hellenism

,and more

particularly from the character of the Orphico -Pytha

gorean religion ; this, notwithstanding a ll modern controversy, may be held to be a perfectly sure resul t, as thethree parties of the Neo-Pythagoreans, the Essenes, and theEbionites

,do in the main , and, on the whole as well as

in the most individual and accidental features, exhibit aconnection which at once jus tifi es u s in characterisingthem as the Jewish and Christian branch of one and thesame stock . Even, therefore, if we knew nothing whatever of the openings by which Greek influences could havehad access to the circle of growing Christianity

,stil l

our ignorance would be far from being any ground fordenying such a connection altogether ; since, on thecontrary

,the general circumstances of that period were

altogether adapted to favour it ; and since, on the otherhand

,we have before us the fact that ideas which were

emphatically enunciated in the ante- Christian period,but

to which self- involved Judaism never attained,found in

Christianity their most fruitful application—all this beingso, we coul d scarcely avoid maintaining such a connection .

But there is even more to be said in favour of it . However little we may know with accuracy of the thenSpiritual condition of Palestine, and in particul ar ofGalilee, still we see that the Galilee of the Gentiles ,with its mixed popul ation, with its half-Grecian towns ofCaesarea and Ptolemais on the neighbouring coasts, withGreeks and inhabitants of Greek education in its principalcity

,was open to foreign influences in a high degree ; and

in the Essenes we recognise a party which,having been

F 2

68 ST R AUSS AN D R ENAN .

from its outset connected with G recianism,was eminently

adapted to obtain a hea ring among its Jewis h countrymenfor ideas which it adopted out of it . It is especially th islast point to which I woul d attribute no smal l importance .Jesus himself, indeed, was cert ainl y not a member of thesociety of the Essenes ; and what the pragmatism of theperiod of enl ightenment pretended to tell of the cc

operation of His brother members towards His beatifi cplan

,has been, and justly, long since forgotten. The

open cheerfulness ofHis character stands in too decidedan opposition to the reclus e reserve, and the asceticseverity of the Essenes—His lofty, spiritual freedom totheir party narrowness and pedantic secrecy ; and, on theother hand

,the Messianic idea , from whichHe starts at the

outset,appears to have had but little importance for them .

But it was quite as l ittle necessary in the four teenth century to be a Begarde

,

* or in the seventeenth a "uaker, inorder to come into contact with these sects

,as it was in

the fi r s t , to be a member of the order of the Essenes, inorder to feel the influence of the leading ideas and religions peculiarity of this order . We may assume withcertainty that the Essenes were a society , the influence ofwhich extended far beyond the narrow circle of its regul armembers

,and could not but reach everyone who in the

Palestine of that time was seriously interested in religiousmatters .Of what extraordinary importance, then , was the onefact that men here saw before them a society eminent forpiety which despised the traditionary sa crifi cia l service ,and

,on its account

,the whole service of the Temple

;

which instead of s a crifi ces required purity of heart, andovercame the national obstin a cy of Judaism by the mostextens ive charity to men " How closely connected this

One of a s ect of Franciscan s .

ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN . 69

moral tendency was with Christianity we see at once bythe extent to which

,and the rapidity with which

,it pene

tra ted into the most ancient Christian commun ity andthat even the founder of Christianity was touched by it ,is shown not only by the whole spirit of his doctrine

,but

especially by what we shall immediately speak of,his

position, that is, towards the Jewish worship, and hissayings about oa th ~taking

~ and marriage,which have an

unmistakeably Essene sound.

Connected with the question just discussed, is the investig a tion into the relation in which Jesus stood to John theBaptist. Now it is unquestionable that the Evangelicalaccounts upon this point are for the most part unhistorical

,

and contain assertions that have arisen merely from dogmatic presumption ; stil l our two critics are right inassuming that these accounts are founded upon so muchof fact as that John was visited by Jesus and imparted toHim his baptism . But Renan adds that this did not takeplace until Jesu s had come forward independently as ateacher

,and had collected a small school around Him. In

saying this he has allowed himself to be misled by someof those unhistorical features, and in particul ar by thefourth Gospel

,whose representation upon this very point

is most unmistakeably shaped by the purpose of elevatingthe higher nature and dignity of Jesus by the surprisingrecognition and voluntary self-subordination of the Baptist, to which appears to be added an incorrect explanation of the words in John iii. 22. But what for u s wouldbe the main point to learn, namely, something about theinfluence which John exercised upon J esu s upon thispoint we have to lament that the Evangelical accounts,which by their View of the whole case are altogether prevented from conceiving the existence of such an influence,

70 ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN .

give us no solution whatever and Strauss, therefore,limits himself

,in reference to it

,to a few general surmis es .

He looks upon it as probable that Jesus not merely madea transitory use of His intercour se with so important apersonage, that together with the move in the direction ofmorals which proceeded from him

,He al so learnt much as

regarded His calling to be a teacher of the people, but thatin doing so He became at the same time continually moreand more conscious of the distinction between His ownmethod and that of the Baptist . For His preaching of thekingdom of God

,ifHe stood in the relation of a disciple to

John, Hemust have received from him a most import ant

impulse ; His connection also with Essenism, which wehave supposed above

,might have been brought about by the

prophet whose baptism bears a strong resemblance to theEssenic lustrations

,and who

,like the Essenes

,subordinated

the privileges of the sons of Abraham to moral performances ; and if , in Matthew, they are Pharisees andSadducees whom the Baptist calls a generation of vipers

,

this appellation of the dominant sects woul d fi t in mostsuitably with the acrimony of the anti-pharisaic speechesof Jesus . The assumption of Renan, on the other hand,that Jesus adopted the rite of baptism from John, canonly adduce in support of itself the questionable testimonyof the fourth Gospel ; unquestionably that of Strauss isthe more correct when he expresses it as his belief

,

founded upon the representation of the synoptics andJohn’

s own half confession,that it was not until after the

death of the founder that the Christian community adoptedthe baptismal usage

,and then referred it

,as they did so

much beside of a later origin,to the ordinance of that

founder,not

,however

,put into His mouth until after His

resurrection . Everything, however, is here so uncertain

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72 ST R A USS A N D R ENAN .

that while we may indeed be doubtful of many individualpoin ts

,we are sure of the collective fi gure resul ting from

a ll these individual features by their unsought- for coincidence in the main .

Now if we attempt to sketch, fi rst of a ll , the outline ofthis fi gure, to get, independent fi rst of a ll of His moreimmediate national and theoretic commis sion, a view ofthe religious cons ciousness of Jesus , we are immediatelystruck by a feature of fundamenta l importance— thatpeculiar inward relation into which Jesus places Him selftowards God

, and which He expresses by the constantdescription of God as His Father . With this, therefore,each of the two writers has started in his discussion ofthe life of Jcsus . The peculiar source of His strength ,says Renan (p

‘

. was an exalted idea of the Divinitywhich He did not owe to Judaism, but which appears tohave been altogether a creation of His own great soul . He

feels God within Himself, He bears Him within HimselfHe preaches

,therefore, not a doctrine, but He preaches

Himself ; and He preaches at the same tim e God as theFather of a l l men, and the kingdom of God, by which,Renan thinks

,He understood originall y not an external

Messianic kingdom,but the reign of true piety ,

and withwhich is connected the morality which is especially proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount. This moral ity didnot indeed

,as Renan says, set up really new principles,

but the purest of these already set up acquired, in vir tueof the person who preached them, by the amiable cha

ra cter of the new Rabbi, His charming appearance, Hisenchanting form

,a “ poesy ” which gave them a pene

tra tive force entirely new . The latter notion is indeedstrange enough ; if Jesu s had really nothing new to sayto his generation , no personal charms w ould have avail edto invest Him with the importance He possessed. To say

ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN .

nothing of the fact that Renan’s conj ectures as to Hisexternal appearance, which remind one more of a hero ofromance, are altogether arbitrary and entirely unneces

sary to explain His subsequent success . Socrates, at least ,Who in his own time exercised a simil ar power of a ttraction over men

,was distinguished among his countrymen

by exactly the Opposite,namely

,his ugliness . But

Renan’s remark as to the fundamental religious view ofJesus , does undoubtedly hit the central point of ourquestion . This has been more accurately investigated byStrauss . Starting from the moral doctrine of the Sermonon the Mount

,he shows how this itself , in its religious

precepts (Matt . v. suffi ces for becoming a Son ofGod, who maketh His sun to rise upon the evil and thegood ; and he at once recognises in this a fundamentalfeature of the piety of Jesu s : “ He felt and conceived ofthe Heavenly Father as the impartial Goodness,

” and onthis very account Jesus preferred

,above all

,to designate

Him by the name of Father .” But when He made thisView

,which the New Testament scarcely touches on in a

single isolated passage,the fundamental View of the rela

tion of God to man this coul d only originate inHimself

,it coul d only be the consequence of that impartial

goodness being the fundamental tendency of His owncharacter

,and ofHis being

,in this, conscious of His agree

ment with God .

” “ He conceived of God, in a moralpoint of view

,as being identical in character with Himself

in the most exalted moments of His religious life,and

strengthened in turn His own religious life by this ideal.But the most exalted religious tendency in His own consciou snes s was exactly that comprehensive love

,over

powering the evil only by the good, and which He

therefore transferred to God as the fundamental tendency

74 ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN.

ofHis natur e . How from this there proceeded , on theone hand, the call to be perfect even as God is perfect,the call to that perfect righteous ness

'

with which Jesusmet the externality of the Mosaic law on the other hand,the principle of the most comprehensive charity towardsa ll men, unlimited and unr eserved, the recognition of theequal ity of all men before God, and of equal duty towardsall men—how

’

for Jesus Hims elf there arose from thisuniversal charity towards man and from the feeling of aunion with the G odhead , an inward cheerful ness exaltingHim above all external deprivations

,anx ieties, and wishes

-all this I wil l onl y briefly point out in this place : theproofs are at hand for every one in sayings , the authen

ticity of which cannot be call ed in question . But if weask how this harmonious d i sposition arose in Him, Strauss

(vol . i. , p . 282) remarks, and most trul y, that it cannot beassumed that it was preceded by severe internal struggles ;for that in all natures which were not enlightened untilthey had gone through violent conflict and rupture

,as

was the ca se with Paul , Augus tin, and Luther, the marksof this continued for ever, and there clung to them for lifesomething harsh, acrid and gloomy, of which not a traceis found in Jesus . He appears from the fi r st a beautifuld graceful natur e

,which had onl y to develop itself out

of its elf, to become continuall y more and more clearlyconscious of itself

,more and more fi rmly established in

itself,but not to turn round and begin a new life. It is

self- evident in His case that,in being whatHe was

,He had

no idea of excluding individual errors and weaknesses,the necessity for cont inuous moral labour , and of accepting the dogma, as such, of the sinl essness of Christ ; andwith reference to this point he says , with good rea son

on the occasion of the baptism by John , that even the

ST R AUSS AN D R ENAN . 75

best and purest of men may ever accuse himself of manyerrors

,of much neglect and much precipitation, and that

it is in exact proportion with the completeness of its perfection that the soul is sensitive of the slightest impurityof the moral impul ses, of the slightest deviation from themoral ideal. And if, besides universal experience andthe conclusion res ting upon the conditions of our ownmoral development

,a special historical proof is required

,

Strauss refers u s in part to the baptism at the Jordan,which was certainly an act of expiation, in part to theexpression of Jesus in which he disclaims the epithet ofgood,

” because it only belongs to God ; and in the samesense he might have reminded us of the prayers Forgiveu s our sins,

” and L ead us not into temptation,” which no

one, it appears to me, who feels himself unconditionall yelevated above human weakness, in a moral point of view,

could either utter in his own name,or even dictate to

others, with that entire personal sympathy which is to besupposed in the case of one who offers a prayer .It is easy to see that the stand-point of the religious life

,

which we are historicall y ju stifi ed in ascribing to Jesus,was in profound and fundamental opposition not only tothe then prevailing Rabbinico-Pharisaic acceptation ofMosaism

,but also to the original tendency of it . It is a

different question how clearly Jesus himself was consciousof this opposition, and how defi nitely He expressesHimself on the subject . As to this point our G ospels,even independent of the fourth

,contain different accounts ,

and these,to a certain extent, irreconcilable . The rela

tion between them and the credibility of each respectivelyis examined by Strauss

,with his accustomed circumspec

tion (vol . i. , p. and the resul t at which he arrives isthat Jesus had a far clearer insight into the novelty ofHis

76 ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN .

principle, and the incompatibility between it and the oldJewish character, than was attained by any one of Hispersonal dis ciples . In proof of this he appeals to therelation in which Jesus stood to the holiday of theSabbath , to fasting, and to the law of divorce ; he appeals tothe expul s ion of dealers out of the temple

,including

,as it

does,an attack upon the whole s acrifi cia l system

,and in

which we may recognise a feeling of displeasur e at theexternality of this mode of worshipping God. He appealsto the saying

“

about the destruction of the Temple,which

he rightly supposes that Jesus really uttered in order topoint to the future abolition of the Temple worship . Butif Matthew v .

,1 8

, 1 9, is brought forward in opposition tothis view, he shows convincingly that these two verses,which absolutely interrupt the connection of the thoughts

,

mus t be a later interpolation either into the text ofMatthew, or at all events into the original tradition ofthe speech of Jesus . But the most decisive proof willalways rest upon the explanations given in the Sermonon the Mount, which, in their magnifi cent boldness andtheir moral ideality, cann ot possibly be looked upon as aproduct of later dogmatism, either that of the JewishChris tian, whose law- service they far outstrip

,or the

Paul ine, whose peculiar thoughts and watch-words do notappear in them, but throughout onl y as the especial creation of Jesus . It was said to them of old, but I say toyou .

” In these words Jcsus appears as a new lawgiver inOpposition to Moses ; and in treating of the Law of Mosesas an imperfect thing, which on account of the stiffneckednes s of the nation , had remained standing on alower ground

,in applying in His new law the outward

command to the inner heart, in requir ing, instead of thelegal act, the innocent disposition, and the corresponding

ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN . 77

conduct—perfect righteousness, He declares the distinctconsciousness of the necessity of an advance from the lawof the Mosaic religion to one more pure and spiritual. Indoing thisHe might still be convinced that Hewas abidingby that law in its true meaning but whenHe placed thatmeaning exclusively in the moral requirement

,in the

command to love God and one’s neighbour, Hedeclared

indirectly that the whole ritual law was a thing of no importance, and established a principle which, in its logicaldevelopment

,must of itself have led to a rupture with

Mosaism, even had Hehimself given no more defi nite indications in this direction . And that this was the case isshown by the further development of Christianity ; for asit cannot be doubted that Paul was the fi r st to declarefaith in Christ and the observance of the Mosaic law tobe incompatible things, preached the abolition of the law,

the foundation of a new religion fundamently opposedboth to Judaism and heathenism,

he must have discoveredin the faith which he found already existing in the Christian community

,something which made it appear to him

irreconcil eable with the continued validity of the law andthus onl y can be explained

,on the one hand his passionate

zeal for the eradication of the new doctrine,and on the

other the antinomis tic form which this doctrine immediately took in his own mind after his conversion . He

held fast by his conviction of the impossibility bf combining the Christian faith with the Jewish , but with aturn that showed the greatest genius and originality . He

now saw in that which had been to him the greatestoffence in Christianity, its most pre- eminent excellence,and the main object of Christ’s appearance to consist inputting an end to the law

,and replacing the Jewish

religion by a new and more perfect one . And we read

78 ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN .

even that Stephen , the persecuted of Paul , declared thatJesus

,at His second coming

,will abrogate the Temple

service,and give a new law in place of the Mosaic ; and

when the Acts of the Apostles represents this statementas false evidence, it immediately after puts into the mouthof Stephen a speech culminating in the proposition thatSolomon, indeed , built a house for God, but that He doesnot dwell in houses built by hands . But if Stephendeclared such views, and Paul found them in existence

,

the most probable conclusion is that the occasion of themwas given in Jcsus’ own declarations , and not merelyindirectly in the spir it of His doctrine.With this relation of freedom towards Mosaism in Jcsusmay have been connected an attempt or an intention togive admission to the kingdom of God ” to nonIsraelites without any preliminary adoption into communion with the Jewish people or religion. To whatextent this was the case is diffi cul t to decide ; for thereason that not merely the different Gospels, but al sodifferent passages of one and the same Gospel, are farfrom agreeing in their statements on this point . Luke (ix .

52, £11 ; X . 30, ft. xvii . 1 1 , ff. ) and John (iv. 4, ft. X . 1 0,

1 6 f .) represent Jesus as not only meeting with afertile fi eld of operations in Samaria, and an aptitudeamong Samaritans which inspires Him with words ofrecognition towards this mixed nat ion so odious to theJews

,but they represent Him also as unequivocally pre

fi g uring the subsequent mission to the heathen, andprophesying the foundation of a Church which shall uniteJews and Gentiles in a spiritual worship of God, disengaged from the Jewish cult . In Matthew, on the otherhand (xix . 1 ; xv. 2 1 , ff. X . 5, f . ; and similarlyin Mark (K . 1 ; v n. in going to Jeru sa lem He avoids

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80 ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN .

we take into consideration the circumstances under whichthe Evangelical tradition was formed

,we may certainl y

assume that, during the conflict between Jewish exclusiveness and Paul ine Catholicity which occupied the generations immediately succeeding Jesus , not merely one side,but the other as well, endeavoured to fortify itself by thewords and the example of Christ

,and dealt with the

Evangelical history in this sense ; and if we call in otheranalogies to our assistance we sha ll l ikewise be compell edto say

,that as Luther was a more liberal spirit than the

Lutheran divines of the succeeding generation, andSocrates a more profound thinker than X enophon orAn tisthenes, so also Jesus must be unconditionally credited with having raised Himself far higher above thenarrow prejudices of His nation than those of His disciples,who coul d scarcely understand the spread of Christianityamong the heathen when it had become an accomplishedfact . If

,therefore, we cann ot doubt that He was far from

educing out of the religious principle which He intro

duced into the world, a Catholic resul t so decidedly andthoroughly as Paul did ; still , on the other hand, He wasnot so far removed from it as that He might not

,under

certain cir cumstances, have considered those who werenot Jews deserving of his intercourse and teaching ; andthus

,in conclus ion, Strauss may be near the truth in con

jecturing that Jesus did , in the fi rst instance, refer Hiscalling onl y to His own people, but that as time went ou ,

and His communication with Samaritans and heathenincreased

,and His experience of aptitude in them, and of

obstinacy in the Jews increased,He included them more

and more in His plan , and raised Himself a t last to theidea that they might afford appreciable support to thesociety founded by Him,

but made no immediate preparation for this

,leaving all beyond to time.

ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN . 81

Still more important than the question just discussed isthat as to the relation in which Jesu s stood to the ideawhich constituted , at that time, the nucleus of the reli

g ious and political hopes of His nation, and which wasdestined through Him to attain to such a world-wideimportance, so profound a modifi ca tion— the idea of theMessiah . The answer

,indeed

,to this question would be,

according to the ordinary conception, extremely simple .A t the beginning of His public appearance He announcedHimself as the Saviour promised by the prophets but He

had, at the same time, removed from the expectation ofthe Messiah cherished by His people all political elements

,

all national limitation,and understood accordingly by the

Messiah the spiritual Saviour of the whole of mankind.

But the historical correctness of this assumption is not sofi rml y establis hed as that a more accur ate investigation,both in respect of the moment at which Jcsus declaredHimself to be the Messiah

,and of the conceptions which

He connected with this title,might not give different

resul ts . As regards,in the fi rst place, the moment of

His appearance as the Messiah, a l l our Evangelis ts doindeed assume it as self- evident that from the fi rs t He

was perfectly conscious of His Messianic dignity. And

this,after all which they tell of His birth, His baptism in

the Jordan,and His temptation

,could not be otherwise.

And they represent Him as announcing this consciousness

,not only practically by His .miraculous operation

,in

which He plenipotentiaril y gives commands to sicknessesand demons

,but on occasion as expressly declaring it in

words (a g . Ma tt . ix. 1 5 ; x . 23 ; X 1 . 2, ff . But,

at the same time, the same informants tell us that at alater period of His public ministryHe recognised a specialrevelation of God

,in the fact that Peter declared Him to

G

82 ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN .

be the Messiah ; they represent Him ,on His fi rst appear

ance,as preaching the nearness of the kingdom of God,

but not as announcing Himself as its founder ; and of theordinary descriptions of the Messiah, Son of David,

” andSon of God

,

” they never represent Him as having us edthe fi rs t, nay, in one place, (Matt . xxii . 41 , if. para ll .)as pretty clearly disavowing it as inapplicable, and asonly accepting the second

,when offered to Him by others ;

while Hehimself chiefly prefers to call Himself the Son ofMan

,which

,according to Matthew

,cannot then have

been a recognised title of the Messiah . Now as it cannotbe assumed that these features were not discovered until alater period

,which

,from its own stand-point had every

motive for the opposite representation, it is concluded,and rightly so, that Jcsus did not, at the beginning of Hiscareer as a tea cher, put forward the pretension that theMessianic expectation was ful fi l led in His own person

,but

onl y subsequently, and after this faith had formed itselfamong His adherents , impart to it His own confi rma tion .

And as,moreover, the notion that He had long had this

conviction in His own mind without declaring it, is irreconcil eable with the ma gnifi cent sincerity and carelessbravery of His character, there follows the further suppositiou that it arose within Him in the course of His publicministry

,and not before ; but that at the fi rst He

,like

the Baptist,onl y proclaimed the nearness of the new

Messianic period, and laboured to produce the inwardcondition of its coming—the conversion

,that is

,of His

nation to true piety . And then the higher on the onehand the opinion and expectation of His adherents roseas to their Master’s calling, and on the other, the morecompletely experience taught Him that that true piety

,of

which the ideal lived within Him,was onl y to be found

ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN . 83

within Himself,and that it was only from Him that it

could spread .to others— that He alone truly knew theFather— the more vivid the consciousness graduallybecame within Him that it was Himself and none otherwhom God had destined to Open the new epoch of theworld to found the kingdom of God . And this consideration is confi rmed by a still further one , broughtforward by Strauss

,and which

,as it appears to me, pene

trates into the inmost core of the whole question . Itcould not havebeen

,he remarks

, (vol . i. p . 268 f . , 31 1

appropriating a striking expression of Schleiermacher’sit coul d not have been from the Messianic prophecies thatthe peculiar self- consciousness of Jesus developed itself,nor generally from the conviction that He was theMessiah

,but conversely, it must have been from His own

self- consciousness that He came to the conclusion that inthe Messianic prophecies no one else could be meant butHimself. For if, at a period antecedent to the completionofHis pecul iar religious consciousness, Hehad hit upon theidea that He was the Messiah, and if that Messianic ideaupon which His religious consciousness developed itselfhad been the national one, it coul d onl y have taken theform which that idea had already taken among His owncontemporaries

,and woul d have obtained such complete

mastery over Him that He could hardly have divestedHimself of it again . If, on the contrary, we fi nd it overmastered in His life and conduct

,it is probable that He

did not meddle with it until, by means of the strengtheningof a pecul iar religious consciousness of His own, He coul dadopt it simultaneously. But if this was so, it is obviousto suppose that not merely passing thoughts about Himselfand His contemporaries, but above all, His experiences ofHis public ministry itself, and the knowledge thereby

G 2

84 ST R AUSS A1\ D R E N A N .

’

gained of'

His spiritual superiority and originality,were

causes which brought to maturity in Him the convictionthat He was the Saviour, long since announced, of Hispeople .

If, then, the Messianic consciousness in Jesu s onl y

g ra dua lly developed itself out ofHis own religious consciousness , and His relation to the surrounding world, thechange which He produced in the prevalent expectationof the Messiah becomes all the more intelligible . Thepolitical elements in the idea of the Messiah, the demandfor a new and powerful Jewish polity , was completely setaside by Him , whether becaus e everything that looked inthe direction of violence, independence, and worldlydominion

,was opposed to the devout, mild, and ideal con

s titution of His mind, or becaus e He had recognised theimpossibil ity of carrying out any political plan of deliverance

,accepted the oppression of foreign spoilers as an

in evitable destiny of Heaven, and expected the introduction of a new state of things solely from Divine omnipotence

,and found the immediate problem that was to be

dealt with,and His own peculiar call ing to consist onl y

in bringing about a second birth of His nation of a morallyreligious character , and thus producing the indispensableinward condition of success . It will not be obj ected thatthe las t assumption attributes to Him too much ca lcu

lation, provided onl y we do not, as Renan does, considerHim a perfect chil d a s regards knowledge and judgmentof the universally known condition of the world, and evenremember the expression, render to Caesar the thingsthat are Caesar ’s ,

” whereby he most clearly refers to theperversity of men’s resisting a power to which they arealready de f a cto subject . But in the same degree inwhich the political side of the Messianic idea disappeared

ST R AUSS A N D R E NA N . 5

as regarded His own conception of His calling, the importance of Hisministry as a teacher must have increasedfrom this, even in His own view,

must His faith in Hishigher destiny have proceeded : He is not the king whoexternally produces a new order of things

,but the prophet

who preaches it , and the teacher who prepares meninwardl y for it . The success of this preparatory ministrymust have been the necessary condition of the realentrance of that order of things

,which entrance, indeed,

coul d scarcely be brought about except by a miraculousinterference of the Godhead. But when, in the course ofHis ministry

,experience impressed upon Him more and

more that it was only among a smal l minority of Hiscountrymen that He could count upon aptitude for thereception of His doctrine

,and among a still smaller upon

a continuous adherence to it ; and on the other hand,among the existing and political powers

,in the school

theology,and the powerful party of the Pharisees

,He could

only look for an obstinate resistance ; then He could notconceal from Himself the possibility that He might fl im

self fall a victim to this opposition ; and this thoughtmust have struck its roots into His '

mind deeper in proportion to the growth of that opposition, and the moredefi nitely when He consul ted the sacred Scriptures of Hisnation as to His destiny and His views

,a number of

passages admitting of a Messianic interpretation, impressed upon Him the conviction that the Divine Messenger was fated to pass along His road through sorrowsand a violent death . When

,therefore, our Evangelists

unanimously assure u s that He prophesied His own tragicdestiny, and when they represent Him as beginning withthese prophecies at the same moment at which He hadgiven corrobora tion to the recognition of His Messianic

86 ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN .

dignity (Matt . xvi. 21 there is in general everyprobability in favour of this . Only these predictionscannot ha ve been so defi nite as we have them in ouraccounts. He cannot have been unequivocally convincedfrom the fi rs t that this was His fi x ed destiny, as, accordingto our Evangelis ts’ own statement, He was not fi rml yso convinced even immediately before Hi s arrest (Matt.xxvi . 39) neither does His whole conduct in Jerus alem,

nor the scene of His entrance, convey the impression ofone who knew that His fate was inevitably sealed, butrather of one who has chall enged the enemy in the centreof His power to a serious , but not hopeless, conflict . HadHe been certainly convinced that the j ourney to Jerusalem could onl y end in His own destruction, then, insteadof the wise man fearlessly and with calm resignation toGod ful fi lling His appointed calling, in which characterHe generally appears to us , He must have been a passiona tely excited enthusiast thus to bring about His owndestruction ; and doubly so if He had done this with thefurther conviction, which humanly He could not have,that Hewould ris e a ga in on the third day after His death .

Ou the contrary,far the most probable supposition is that

He entered upon the j ourney to Jerus alem with seriousforebodings indeed

,and with a mind prepared for the

worst ; but that, even at that t ime, He did not despair ofthe possibility of acting upon His countrymen by a las tdecisive attempt in the capital

,at the feast at which the

whole nation was assembled from far and wide,and even

His own Galil ean adh erents were not absent , and attracting the former to Him in a mass . After His arrival inJerusalem this expectation might have become fainter andfainter, and the conj ecture that He would fall a victim toHis enemies might have become a certainty . He stood

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88 ST R AUSS AN D R E NA N .

for His person, which excluded the assumption of Hisyielding to His enemies

,being given over to the death

thr eatened by them,but

,with this Person

,the entrance of

the “ kingdom of heaven ” was connected . It was impossible that even Jesus

,in spite of the greater purity

of His Messianic idea,could let this demand upon Him

drop ; He might, indeed, so far modify this idea as toabandon the notion of a political domin ion of the Sonof God, and of an application of human force for the foundation of it but

,so long as He did not entirely give it up,

He coul d not abdicate personal participation in the institution of that kingdom : He coul d not, therefore, evenlook upon Him self as the Messiah, without expecting that,in the actual entrance of the new state of things whichHe had at all events prepared

,a prominent share woul d

be destined for Him . But how could this be combin edw ith the probability that He would be the victim of thehatred of His enemies before the actual solution of Hisproblem ? There was but one means for the ful fi lment ofHis purpose : the assumption that He would not, in thiscase

,continue in death Himself, but would, at the latest,

at the time when God shoul d, in a miraculous manner,introduce the new order of things, be again awakened bythe Divine omnipotence for the completion of His work .

This expectation must therefore have been cherished byJesu s , in the later period of His life at least, as the hopeof an immediate victory of His cause declined

,and He

must naturally have announced it in one form or another .It does not indeed by any means foll ow that He reallysaid all that the Evangelical accounts put into His monthabout His coming again in the clouds

,attended by angels ,

about the judgment and all connected with it , about thenearness and the miraculous prognostics of this second

ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN . 89

Advent it is, on the contrary, perfectly clear that far thegreater part of what is found in these speeches is takenpartly out of the history and the expectations of a laterperiod, partly from the escha tology

* then current amongthe Jews and Renan proceeds in anything but a criticalmanner when (p. 270) he attributes to Jesus himself thewhole of the eschatologic speeches in the Gospels

,with

all their materialism and fanta stic imagery,their harsh

nesses, and their contradictions . But the basis of them,

at least the position that in case He should perish beforeaccomplishing His work He would be restored to lifeby God for the completion of it— this position we mustattribute to Himself. But

,as preceding death is a con

dition of coming again, He cannot have predicted the

latter more defi nitely than the former, and if He was not,

until His last days,unconditionally convinced that He

was doomed to die,neither can He have been uncon

ditiona l ly convinced of His coming again, but His fa ithcan only have been that

,even in case of His death being

certain,this would not be the fi na l end either of Him

or His work ; He can only have predicted His returnhypothetically

,and

,therefore

,only in an indefi nite

manner,and without any pretence of fi xing the time

or describing the mode of it in detail .

Even upon this view,however, this expectation may

appear,according to modern ideas

,to be startling enough

to give rise to the question whether we are not attributingto the founder of our religion a fanaticism irreconcilablewith the rest of his character . This demur prevented evenStrauss from expressing himself as decidedl y with regardto the belief of Jesus in His Second Coming as, in my

Theory about the end of a l l things .

90 ST R A USS A N D R E NA N

opinion, he should have done . In the fi rst place thisbelief followed so naturally from the contemplation of thethen situation of affairs, that it was diffi cul t for him toavoid it . Af ter He had once taken into His considerationthe possibility and probability of His violent death , Hehad, upon His own point of View,

no other mode of combining this result with the continued conviction of HisMessianic calling. Then

,for Jesus and His dis ciples,

there lies behind this view,so foreign to our notions, that

world- conquering idealism, that faith, fi rm as a rock,in

the future of His work,without which this work itself

would hardl y have been carried out in the world. It is,

as Renan remarks p . 281,perfectly true that the Apoca .

lyptic expectation alone, without the pure system ofmorality

,the inward apprehension of the religion

,the

spiritual freedom of the new faith , would indeed neverhave led to the world -wide influence of Christianity

,but

that it was exactly this prospect of the future which,taken

in itself,must have crushed a ll its effi ciency for the present

world,that lent to Christianity the elastic power it required

to master the world and then, as regards the founder ofit , we need not be so very much surprised to see Himinvolved in a belief which

,everything considered, was as

natural for Him,as to us

,on our stand-point, it cannot but

be strange . Lastly,we should not forget that much

which appears to us in the highest degree natural mightappear to others as surprising as the expectation of theSecond Coming does to us . That a sane man, with highspiritual gif ts, should have expected to return to earth ina miraculous manner after his death—this we fi nd incredible ; but that each one of u s will continue after death tol ive in another world— this we consider perfectly intelligible . But the one is not further removed from ordinary

ST R AUSS AN D R E NAN . 91

experience than the other ; and the Jews of the time ofJesus, unless they had passed through the schools of Greekphilosophy, were so little capable of reconciling themselvesto the notion of the continuous life of the disembodiedsoul , that for them as well as for Paul (1 Cor . xv.

all the consolation arising from the faith in immortality,was connected with the faith in the resurrection .

If Jesus believed in His own Second Coming, this wasonly a special application

,depending upon His Messianic

consciousness,of a faith which He shared with the whole

of His generation ; it therefore assumes nothing more thanthis, that the resurrection, for which every pious Israelitehoped

,would be accomplished fi rs t in Him,

and in connection with it the accomplishment of His Messianic workcome in.

There might be more doubt about another point, whichin the ordinary conception of Jesus and the accounts aboutHim certainly occupies a considerable space—Hismiracles .Not that the question is whether He performed miracles,for that this is inconceivable is beyond all doubt and therecognition of this impossibility is the fi rst condition forevery historical discussion of the Evangelica l history ; butthe diffi cul ty simply is to determine whether He intendedto perform miracles

,and believed that He performed

miracles. On the one hand there cannot be the slightestdoubt that He shared in the general belief in miracles ofHis contemporaries and countrymen

,t.e.

,that He had

quite as little notion as they of the laws of nature andtheir inviolability

,and

,therefore , neither doubted the

ancient narratives of the miracles of Moses and theprophets, nor considered as impossible a repetition of themin His own time. Ou the other hand, it by no meansfoll ows from such a general belief in the possibility of

92 ST R AUSS A N D R E NA N .

miracles that He must have believed that He performedmiracles Himself, or saw them performed ; nor did evenHis conviction of His Messianic calling necessarily implythis belief. He might live in the hope that God at theproper time woul d found His kingdom after a miraculousmanner, without believing Himself called upon to performmiracles, or capable of doing so . Even Mahomet

,among

a people as superstitious as the Jews,disclaimed in the

most decisive manner,in his own person

,the character of

a performer of miracles . The real state of the case, asregards Jesus in this respect

,can only be gathered from

our Gospels . This only in a general way, still only fromthem . But however decisive the declarations may bewhich they attribute to Him

, l ittle is thus gained for us .

When they represent Him as performing a number ofmiracles which mock at every natural explanation, theymust indeed also represent Him as believing in Hismiracul ous powers and speaking of them. But still ,

'

their

statement taken by itself does not warrant u s in considering those speeches as more historical than the deeds ; butthat they are so must fi rst be proved independently. It isotherwise in the case of those expressions which contradictthe Evangelists’ own superstitious assumptions ; if suchexpressions meet u s from the lips of Jesus it cannot beassumed that they were attributed to Him by the Evan

gelists or by the Christian legend, which was a s eager formiracles as they were ; they have, therefore, a decidedpresumption in favour of their genuineness . Now suchan expression is found in the answer to the demand for asign made by the Pharisees

,when Jesus declares to the

evil and adul terous generation that no sign shal l begiven to them ; and when, according to the credible statement of Matthew and Luke

,he adds, no sign except that

S T R AUSS A N D R ENAN'

. 93

of Jonah, Strauss (vol . 1 . p . 362) is certainly right inmaintaining that these words did not originally refer tothe resurrection as Matthew interprets them

,but that

,on

the contrary, by the sign of Jonah , according to the wholeof the context, only his preaching could he meant, andthat, accordingly, in these words J csus expressly disclaimsany other proof of His exalted mission. This would not

,

certainly, exclude the possibility of a belief of amiraculouspower being granted to Him having forced itself upon Himin the sequel . However Hemight continue to disclaimmaterial performance of miracles

,correctly remarks

Strauss, still in the belief of His countrymen and contemporaries He was bound to performmiracles whether He

woul d or not .” From the time that He was considered aprophet , miraculous powers were attributed to Him, andfrom the time they were attributed they were, as a matterof course

,put into operation . U nder the circumstances

,

and among the men under which and among whom Jesusappeared

,it was impossible that He could be considered a

prophet,nay

,even the greatest of the prophets

,without

being immediately considered a performer of miracles ; andwhen he was once so considered, it is again inconceivablethat reports of the miracles

,which he was supposed to have

performed, shoul d not have been immediately circulated ,and that also individual results should not have reallyoccurred which left the impression of the miracul ous uponHis contemporaries and even upon Himself. But theprovince of these results coul d not extend further than theinfluence extended which the faith , or in other Words, thefeelings and the imagination do

,according to natural -laws

,

exercise upon the bodily life of man .

It may therefore have been the case, a s Strauss alsosupposes, that in many instances those mental disturb

94 ST R AUSS A N 1 ) R ENA N .

anoes which the Judaism of that day looked upon asPossession , in part yielded entirely to the word of theprophet and the fi rm faith of the diseased person

,in part

were at least relieved for some time,and that similar

effects were produced in the case of other complaints aswell, which had their immediate cause in a dis turbance ofthe nervous system it is

,moreover, very possible that even

those in whose state of health no really important amendmen

’ttook place

,felt thems elves momentarily relieved,

considered themselves cured,or were considered by others

to be s o . But the range of these extraordinary materialresults, conn ected with the person and minis tration ofJesus , cannot be extended further, unless we would overstep the limits of what is naturally possible ; and notonl y events so utterly inconceivable as the miracle of theloaves

,the walking on the water

,and the raising of the

dead , but a l sb the majority of the miracul ous cures,in

the form in which they are given,are not to be considered

historical, whether these narratives had, or, as appears tohave been the case with the maj ority of them

,had not

,a

basis of events capable of a natural explanation . For thenatural qua lifi ca tion for producing effects of a peculiarcharacter not only upon the spiritual, but also on thebodily system of men which has . been lately ascribed toJesus—this natural and miracul ous gift

,in the sense in

which it is understood, and in the appl ication made of it ,belongs as much as the supernatural one to the kingdom ofthe imagination

,as it far surpasses all and every analogy

which general experience presents to u s . In themselves,

indeed, even such phenomena as really appeared in connection with the operations of Jcsus as a teacher, mighthave led Him to believe that He was in possession of amiraculous power peculiar to Himself nothing , however,

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96 ST R A USS A N D R E NAN .

attributed to Hims elf an unlimited power over nature,and

the character of the other apologies may readily be inf erredwhen we read

,for example

,that the necessity of getting

credit led Jesus to make contradictory declarations aboutHims elf (p . that He sometimes availed Himself ofan “ innocent a rtifi ce,

”in order to impose upon one whom

He wished to gain over by a show of superior knowledgeJohn i. 42—48 iv. and similar cases ; or when

the raising of Laz arus is supposed to be a drama enactedby the famil y at Bethany, in which it is not quite clearwhether Jesus was onl y deceived by it Himself or subsequently shared in the deceit . The German critic’s owngood tast e would have made it impossible for him to havehit upon so unfortunate an idea ; but he was more fundamentally ensured against it by his insight into thecharacter of our Evangelical accounts

,and into what was

possible,psychologically and morally

,for such a character

as Jesus was . Moreover , he has no need of lamenting withRenan (pp . 92

,31 9

,359

,ft. and elsewhere), that by the

character of Messiah and Thaumatu rge which he assumed,the Galil ean idyll was destroyed, the innocence of hisoriginal religious idealism (which, in Renan, h as moreover an unmis takeable touch of country simplicity) isgiven up that

,in consequence of that character and the

resistance which He met with in it,His disposition became

passionate,imperious

,and ill -humoured ; and that, in the

latter part ofHis lif e, He was no longer Himself. Strauss ,on the contrary

,can recognise in the course of the life of

Jesus the natural development of heroic greatness whichhad grown to maturity in the tranquill ity of His youthfulyears ; in His Messianic appearance the historicallymecessary form of His ministry and even in this

,all that

does not square w ith our preconceived notions he does not

ST R AUSS A N D R E NA N . 97

need, with Renan, to lament as a sort of unavoidable evil,because he does not, like Renan, by a sugary idealisation,deprive himself of the power of comprehending thegreatest fi gure ofh istory in its full historical dependence .Renan judges far more correctly with regard to theoccurrence

,of which the raising of

(

Lazarus is merely asample

,the resurrection of Christ

,and we

l

mu st value hisjudgment a ll the more highly, as this is precisely thepoint at which the roads divide, and not merely is thesuperstitious view of the Evangelical history opposedto the historical ; but also the s o- called natural—inthis case

,indeed

,the most unnatural—explanation is

opposed to the mythical in a manner fundamentallydecisive for the whole . The miraculous revival of theCrucifi ed would be an occurrence in direct contradictionto laws of nature admitting of no exception in theirapplication

,and one which would make every natural

view of Biblical history impossible, every analogy ofexperience inapplicable to it . We could not believe inthe reality of such an occurrence , even if it were accreditedever so strongly. Instead of this, we have in favour of itonly evidence a t second and third hand, which, moreover,in all particulars, stands in contradiction to itself. U ndersuch circums tances , whoever believes in the miracle ofthe resurrection has, in truth , no longer any ground fordoubting any feature whatever in the Evangelical historyon account of its contradiction to the laws of nature andof history. Whoever, on the other hand, does not believein it has but one of two courses left : either to admit thatJesus came out of the grave alive, and then to deny thereality of His death

,and accordingly to consider His

revival as a natural re- awakening from a sham death ; orif he cannot bring himself to do this then to give up

H

98 ST R AUSS A N D R E NA N .

entirely this resurrection and to explain the faith in it onpurely dogmatic grounds ; and thus, at all events in thegeneral principle to adopt the mythical view. Strauss, inhis fi rst Life of Jcsus,

” put this state of things in so cleara light that thenceforth all who attempted to take up thediscussion after him were compell ed, on this main pointat least

,to follow suit ; and, at the same time, he estab

lis hed the grounds of his own view with such surpassingacuteness that even those who

,like Ewald

,were at a loss

to fi nd terms strong enough in which to repudiate andcondemn the destructiveness and unscientifi c nature of hisproceeding

,coul d not avoid siding with the much - despised

critic on the main point, however reluctantly, and Withwhatever amount of circumlocution ; and so abandoning tohim the position from which the whole view of theEvangelical history is governed . That Renan also ad

heres to this view, and entirely resists the temptation to anatural explanation of the miracle

,he tells us (p . 433, f . )

for the rest,he defers the more thorough discussion of the

faith in the Resurrection to the continuation of his work,

which is to treat of the Acts of the Apostles. S o muchthe more carefull y does Strauss deal with this importantquestion in his late work ; and whoever follows his diseussions in a historical spirit will not, it appears to me, beable to escape his conclus ion . For if we have only thechoice between two assumptions , that Jesus in the gravea rose again from a sham death

,or that the faith in His

resur rection was formed without any real reviva l—thesecond of these assumptions rests, independent of all othergrounds, upon, as it appears to me, the following decisiveconsiderationsIn the fi rst place the death of Jesus is better accredited

,

beyond all comparison , than His resurrection . With

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1 00 ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN .

any one,who, after long and exhausting abus e was at last

crucifi ed,left on the cross at least six hours

,and taken

down with all the symptoms of death having occurredthat under such circum stances, after being shut up in asepulchrewithout any care and without food for two daysand a half

,he should have revived in virtue of the

restorative power of nature after about thirty- six hours,

and have been at once in a condition t o undertake apedestrian excursion either to Galil ee or to Emmaus , oneand a half miles distant- this is so exceedingly improbablethat we are compelled to call for the most irrefragableproofs in order to believe it . Instead of this, not onl yare the accounts of the resurrection far removed fromauthenticity in point of origin

,and, as regards their

immediate substance in conflict with ea ch other,but the

general tenor of them is such that a natural continuationof the life of the Crucifi ed is inconceivable . The G ospels

,

thr oughout, describe His appearance with features whichrepresent Him not as a human being re- awakened to hisformer life, but as a supernatural being ; a countenancewhich his nearest friends no longer recognis e ; miracul ousentrance through closed doors sudden coming andsudden vanishing ; ascension into Heaven ; and besidesall this something that cannot be reconciled with it

,

perceptibility by the sense of touch and other proofs ofthe bodil y identity of the Risen One with the Crucifi ed .

Whence these features if, as is assumed, Jesus really aroseafter a natural manner, and then, after his resurrection, aswe are to suppose, associated as before with His dis ciplesand what conception are we to form of His own conditionIf He believed Hims elf, as in this case we shoul d havetosuppose, to have been rescued from death after a mira culous manner

,He must

,after such experience of miracul ous

ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN . 1 0l

assistance from above,have only returned all the more

boldly to His public ministry. If,on the other hand

,He

saw in what had happened to Him a natural occurrence,so

that He considered it necessary to conceal Himself from Hisenemies

,it was His duty, unless He wished to encourage

a deception in the most unjustifi able manner, to informHis disciples of the true state of . the case instead of limiting Himself to encounters with them which could onl yhave the effect of awakening in them the belief that theyhad no longer to deal with a natural human being . Buta natural revival , moreover, could not have produced atall in the disciples the belief which we fi nd them entertaining in the sequel .

A being who had stolen h alf-dead out of the sepulchre,who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treatment,who required bandaging, strengthening and indulgenceand who still at last yielded to His sufferings it is impossible

,

” as Strauss rightly says ; thatHe could have givento His disciples the impression that He was a conquerorover death and the grave, the Prince of Life, an impression which lay at the bottom of their future ministry.

”

Moreover, fi na lly, what conception are we to form of thetermination of a life to which Jesus must be supposed tohave returned by so remarkable an accident

,for it can

scarcely be called otherwise As nothing more is heardof Him after a few transient appearances, He must, inconsequence of the ill - treatment He had received, havevery soon died in obscurity. But how are we to conceiveof this more in detail Are His disciples to be supposedto have known of it

,and notwithstanding, to have preached

of Him as of the Risen Lord,and who had been raised up

to Heaven ? T his is impossible. Or had He concealedHis place of refuge even from them, and those secret

1 02 ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN .

friends whom,in this case

,He must have had ? He would

thus Himself be liable to the suspicion of intentional deceit,and we shoul d be involved in that complication of romanticimprobabilities which have now been justly exploded, andwhich in and for themselves refute an assumption whichcan only be maintained at the price of adopting them .

Now it might indeed appear if we let drop the real ityof the resurrection of Jesus that diiiicul ties of equal magnitude arise . E ven His fi rst adherents were as fi rml y

convinced,as bf their own life

,that the Crucifi ed had, after

a few days returned to life ; this conviction formed theirremovable bas is of their entire subsequent operations ; andmany of them even believed that they had seen the RisenOne . This is fully established not merely by our Gospelsand the Acts of the Apostles but by a witness much earlierstill , and one who stood nearer to the occurrences, theApostle Paul (1 Cor . to whom we may also add theRevelation of John (i., 5— 1 8

,etc .) though it must

certainly be allowed that not only do the Evangelicalaccounts of the appearances of the Risen One g o farbeyond what the persons concerned originally believedthey had observed, but that even Paul does not, throughout,profess to have received his statements from those whohad participated in the sight of those appearances . Howthen is theirrefragable belief of the personal disciples ofJesus and of the whole Christian Church to be explained

,

if the occurrence to which it relates did not,in reality

,

take place at all ?This question might be at once met by the counterquestion which Strauss also puts with his usual acutenessnamely, how we are to explain the faith of Paul in thepersonal appearance of Christ which he saw Paul placesthis appearance on exactly the same footing with those

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1 04 ST R AUSS A N D R ENAN .

magne and the Hohens tauflen Kings,and on the other

hand,from the expectation of Nero’s return , entertained

by Christians and heathen . And yet these are but veryweak analogies to the case which we have now before u s .

With the disciples of J esus the question was not merelywhether their Teacher and Master was alive or dead

,but

the question for them was whether His entire work wasor was not m

'

l, His doctrine and His miracles a fraud,their trust in Him a most miserable delusion

, He Himselfa false prophet, and as such rightly condemned to deathon the accursed tree . They could not believe in Him andHis destiny

,they must give up their whole view of Him

and their love to Him, all their hopes, all the fruits whichtheir intercourse with Him had produ ced

,unless they

could secure the conviction that,notwithstanding His

death He was still alive, and woul d, in time, gloriouslycomplete His work. For us

,from our point of view,

thisconviction would be suffi ciently attained by the thoughtthat He who had died in the body wa s , in the spir it, continuing to live with God . To the native of Palestine

,

who knew nothing of such a spiritual immortality,and

according to whose faith there lay between death andresurrection onl y the gloomy ghost- like l ife in Scheol,this loophole was closed up . For him there was but onemode of rescuing himself and his faith from that shipwreck with which he was threatened by the oppositionbetween actual facts and his dearest convictions ; he wascompelled to assume that, as at some future time God wasto summon forth all the righteous from their graves, so

He had already recalled from death Him whose resurrec

tion must precede that of a ll others, taken Him up intoHis glory and exalted Him to that heaven, from which,moreover

, the Messiah wa s to come . For the disciples of

ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN . 1 05

Jcsus this assumption was all the more obvious, if He hadHimself opened a view of this sort for the emergency ofHis death

,though

,it might be, only in indefi nite allusions

and images . But even without this to fall back upon, itcoul d not have been diffi cul t for them to fi nd what it wa sa necessity for them to believe, foretold in num erouspassages of the Old Testament writings

,in a manner most

luminously evident to them on their own principles ofinterpretation

,as

,indeed, fi nd it they did . Ou the other

hand,it is not necessary, for the explanation of their faith,

to call in the a id of such accidental circumstances as this,that His sepul chre was found empty on the second dayafter His death . Instead of being misled by theseaccounts

,improbable in themselves and only resting on

their connection with the miracle of the resurrection,we

shall do best to hold by the best accredited and thoroughlycredible account (in Matthew and Mark), according towhich the disciples fi rs t saw their risen Lord in Galilee ;and

,consequently, this district was the cradle of the faith

in the resurrection . After the execution of Jcsus,and

perhaps even before it, His disciples fled in terror to theirnative home ; here they fi rst assembled again

,and in the

faith in the resurrection of their Master,found power for

the continuance of His work ; then when, after a considerable time, they returned to the capital, their beliefcould neither be gainsaid by the exhibition of His body

,

nor be strengthened by the sight of His vacant sepulchre.For no one now knew what had become of the body

,

which had probably been buried in the ground on whichthe crucifi xion had taken place . Now the disciples mightcertainly have been convinced that Jesus had re- awakenedfrom death and passed into a new and higher l ife

,without

therefore necessarily believing that they had themselves

1 06 ST R AUSS A N D R E NA N

.

beheld the Risen One and it is possible,indeed , that

their faith in the resurrection took at fi rst a simpler form .

But the whole character and tone of the fi rst Christiancommunity made it almost impossible that that faithshould continue merely as a dogmatic conviction of thischaracter. Al l the conditions wh ich originally producedthat faith must have tended to give it the defi nite characterof actual perception

,the certainty of personal experience.

S o long as this was wanting, so long as the faith in theresurrection was still but an inward conviction, it leftroom for doubt nothing but ocul ar demonstration coul drais e the much desired fact above all question . But howcould this ocul ar demonstration be long wanting in asociety which, by its very nature , was as little qualifi ed ascould be to distinguish accurately betw een the imaginaryand the real , and which, moreover, had been at that timemost profoundly excited in their inmost feelings

,and lived

more in the ideal world of their belief than in the externalworld of reality— a society for which it was a heartfeltnecessity and an article of their faith to be expectingevery moment the miracle of miracles

,the coming of the

Mes siah from Heaven ; in which, by what they sufferedfrom the dis - illus ion they had undergone, by the agonythey underwent from the murder of their beloved Teacher,by pain at the loss of all earthly blessings

,by longing for

salvation and certainty of salvation,by the shocking con

tradiction between reality , on the one part, and a glowingfaith and hope on the other, the tens ion of religious feeling,the power of a pious imagination had been intensifi ed to theutmost ? If ever the internal and external conditions necessary for the production of vis ions were present in abundance

,they were so in the cas e of this earliest society of

the adherents of the Crucifi ed . If we add that individual

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1 08 ST R AUSS AN D R E NA N .

the execution of Jesus, in passages of the Old Testamentwhich adm itted of a Messianic interpretation

,and probably

a lso in individual expressions of Jesus which,in anticipa

tion of His fall,represented the victory of His caus e and

His followers,under the form of a future return .

If, lastly, we must admit that the visionary appearancesof Christ fi rs t gave to the faith in the resurrection itscomplete corroboration

,still

,in the case of the older dis

ciples of Jesu s , as in that of Paul , they are not theground of their faith, but, in any case, only the formunder which it arose in the minds of the faithful . Neithercan it be said that this faith could not possibly have beendeveloped so rapidl y without an external cause . How dowe know how rapidl y it did develop itself ? For thatJesus was seen alive again so early as on the secondmorning after His death is stated only in the comparatively late accounts of our Gospels, and it stands inunmistakeable contradiction with the direction which

, in

Matt. xxviii . 7, and Mark xvi. 7, is given by the angel tothe women to send the Apostles to Galil ee, as they shallthere behold their Risen Lord . This direction , on thecontrary

,supposes that the tradition to which it belonged

knew nothing of appearances on the morning of theresurrection

,nor of any anterior to these later ones in

Galil ee . As regards Paul , he says , indeed, 1 Cor . x v. 4,

that Christ rose ag a in on the third day, but not one wordabout His having been seen on this third da y . And if weask him how he knows anything about the third day, herefers us

,besides tradition , to the Scriptures, t.e. , to

passages of the Old Testament interpreted in a Messianicsense and it is possible that such passages as Hos . Vi. 2,did really originate this limitation of time. Possible al sothat an expression of J esus Him self, in which the three

ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN . 1 09

days (as in Luke xiii . 32) stood symbolically as a roundnumber, gave occasion to it (compare Matt . xxvi . 61 para l l . )But that, at fi rs t , the resurrection was only assumedgenerally to have taken place on the third day

,but the

exact day is not accurately fi xed of this , a tracemight be found in Matt. xii . 40

,as here the Evangelist

,

differing from his own later statement, represents Jesus assaying that He shall be in the grave three days and threenights . This

,indeed

,may there be so expressed onl y on

account of the parallel of Jonas ; but that view of thecase might also have descended from a period in whichthe narratives of the resurrectionwere not

,as yet, referred

to any fi x ed type .With the faith in the resurrection

,only the beginning

was made of representing the fi gure of Jcsus as something supernatural . The mode in which , under theinfluence of this tendency

,the evangelical history was

remodelled,and what different forms the severa l parts of

it passed through in this process of remodelling, is investigated by Strauss (Renan

’s work parts company from us

here) in the second part of his work, and this investigation is the most attractive and instructive part of hiswhole work . Whoever wishes to form a conception of thespirit in which the original Christian legend was formedand the history of Christianity written

,to become

acquainted with the gradual growth of the tradition, withthe ever- strength ening and more and more consciousintrusion of dogmatic interests into the historical narrative— above all , whoever wishes to fol low the road openedby Baur, and so to penetrate deeper into the View andprocess of the fourth Evangelist , will do well to read thissection with profound attention . The present discussion

,

however, in order to keep within its limits , must stop

1 1 0 ST R AUSS A N D R E NAN .

here. If, of the

‘

two works which gave rise to it , theGerman has engaged u s incomparably more than theFrench, this will be found to be the necessary consequenceof the comparative internal value of each . In spite of allthe excellences which we have readily recognised asbelonging to Renan’s work , that of Strauss

’ alone fullycorresponds to the present condition of s cientifi c theological criticism

,and is calcul ated to lead it onwards an

important step . Here, in Germany, we may learn muchfrom Renan in point of form

,not much in point of

substance , and give the preference over him,as regards

the tenability of their scientifi c position to some laterFrench works ; as, for instance, to those of Colani and G .

Von Eichthal . But the success which it has met with,amonghis own countrym en and Romish countries generally,is not undeserved . A great part of this success is certainlydue to the fact that it fell in with that anti-hierarchicalimpul se which is so widely extended at present in France,and still more in Italy another part

,and not a small one,

it owes to the absurd and passionate opposition of theclergy . Moreover

,what contributed not a little to this

success was,most certainly, his graceful , vivid, tasteful

style ; nay, much which we are compelled to consider adefect

,in a s cientifi c point of view, was , undoubtedl y, to

the majority of his readers, a recommendation . But theimportance of his work is not thereby destroyed tohave uttered the right

.word at the right time is to have

done something ; and a book that (as Strauss says) almostbefore it was published was condemned by bishops innumer

able,and the Romish Consistory itself, must necessarily be

a book of merit .”

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