The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (4th ed.)

BY PROFESSOR OTTO PFLEIDERER, D.D.

The Leben Jesu of David Friedrich Strauss, which was published in the year 1835, marked an epoch in the history of theology. On the one hand, this book represents the crisis in theology at which the doubts and critical objections of centuries as to the credibility of the Bible narratives had accumulated in such overwhelming volume as to break through and sweep away all the defences of orthodox apologetics. On the other hand, in the very completeness of the destructive criticism of past tradition lay the germs of a new science of constructive critical inquiry, the work of which was to bring to light the truth of history. It is quite true that the Life of Jesus of 1835 was far from perfect, as judged by the present standard of scientific criticism, and Biblical science has long since advanced beyond it. Nevertheless, it cannot be disputed that it takes rank amongst the standard works which are secure of a permanent place in literature for all time, for the reason that they give final expression to the spirit of their age, and represent typically one of its characteristic tendencies. The liberating and purifying influence which such works exert on their own time, as well as the service they render in opening out new lines of thought, lends to them, for all coming generations, a peculiar value as admirable weapons in the great fight for truth and freedom. Indeed, if our scientists are to be believed, when they tell us that the development of the individual is only an abbreviated repetition of the similar but much slower phases of the development of the species, it is hardly too much to maintain, that in the present and in the future every individual who determines to make his way from the bondage of a naïve trust in authority and tradition into the freedom and light of mature thought must pass through precisely that stage of thorough-going logical negative criticism which is represented by Strauss’s work in a unique manner. As, according to Christian ethics, the formation of a pure moral character is possible only by the death of the old Adam, the rise of true religious convictions is by a similar Stirb und werde, die and come to life. The imaginary lights of mythological tradition must be put out, that the eye may distinguish the false from the true in the twilight of the Biblical origins of our religion. The ancient structures of belief, which the childish fancy of men had constructed of truth and poetry, Wahrheit und Dichtung, must be taken down and cleared away, in order that a new erection of more durable materials may be raised. To all earnest seekers after truth, the Leben Jesu of Strauss may be helpful, not as supplying the truth ready to hand, but as stripping the bandages of prejudice from the eyes, and so enabling them clearly to see and rightly to seek it.

For these reasons it is obvious that the publication of a new edition of the English translation of this work needs no justification. It is only those who consider the first appearance of the book inexcusable and unfortunate that can call in question the desirability of its republication. But no one can hold such an opinion who is able to follow the course of the history of the religious thought of Protestantism. The critical process which reached its conclusion in Strauss’s book, with its negative or revolutionary results, was latent from the beginning in the life-blood of Protestantism. The theologians of the Reformed Churches of the sixteenth century subjected the traditions of Catholic Church history to keen historical criticism; and if they did not then think of extending its operations to Biblical tradition, we are justified in recognising in the well-known declarations of Luther, as to the inferior value of certain books of the Bible, and as to the unimportance of physical in comparison with spiritual miracles, plain predictions of the line of development which Protestant theology was destined ultimately to take.

It is intelligible enough that the criticism of the Bible could not arise amongst the orthodox theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were restrained by a rigid doctrine of inspiration from an unprejudiced treatment of the Bible, and were moreover too much absorbed in dogmatic controversies and the defence of their confessions of faith, to feel the need of more searching Biblical studies. It was amongst English Free-thinkers and Deists that the credibility of the Biblical narratives was first seriously assailed, and with so much temper as to greatly detract from the scientific value of the result. Thomas Woolston’s Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (six in number, 1727–1729) are specially noteworthy. They attack the literal interpretation of the miracles as ludicrous and offensive, and advocate the allegorical interpretation of them as figures and parables of spiritual truths. It is possible to find in Woolston’s theory an anticipation of the mythical principle of interpretation which Strauss opposes to the rationalistic one. Reimarus, the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, by the publication of which Lessing threw German theology into a ferment, occupies the same position as the English Deists, and indeed owed much to their influence. But at the same time a noteworthy difference is observable from the very first between the way in which Lessing treated these questions and their treatment by the earlier Free-thinkers; and the difference is characteristic of the two schools. German rationalism bears the marks of its origin in the idealistic optimism of the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolff, and remains in sympathy with the ethical spirit of Biblical religion; whilst the but faintly religious naturalism of the English Deists leads them, with their rejection of the Biblical miracles, to attack the religion of the Bible, and drag down into the mire its representatives and heroes. With this the German Rationalists have no sympathy. They were unable to treat the Biblical narratives of miracles as historical occurrences, but they were not prepared on that account to regard them as deceit and delusion on the part of Biblical heroes, or as the invention of Biblical narrators: their reverence for the Bible and its religion kept them from both of these inferences. They tried to get over the difficulty in two ways,—either they looked upon the narratives of miracles, particularly those of the Old Testament, as popular religious legends, traditions, or “myths,” of the same kind as the myths to be met with in all heathen religions; or, on the other hand, regarding them as containing the actual history of perfectly natural events, they ascribed the miraculous appearance and form which they bear simply to the mistaken judgment of the narrators, or, in other cases, to the erroneous view of the interpreters. The latter method was employed especially by Dr. Paulus in his commentary on the Gospels, in which he seeks, with a great display of learning and ingenuity, to explain all the miracles of the New Testament. The theologian Schleiermacher also made frequent use of it in his Lectures on the Life of Jesus; and traces of it are to be met with even in the commentaries of theologians of the supernaturalist school—as, for instance, Olshausen’s. The inexcusable violence which was thereby done to the Biblical narratives, by which they are forced to say something quite different from what the unsophisticated narrators intended them to say, according to the plain sense of their words, was not felt; nor were these interpreters conscious of how much the Gospels are deprived of their choicest treasures of ideal truth and poetic beauty by this method of treatment, and this only for the sake of securing instead miserable common-place stories as the final outcome of critical examination.

The favour with which this radically false rationalistic interpretation of the Gospels was received by very many German theologians at the beginning of this century finds its sole explanation and excuse in the prevailing view of the time—that our Gospels were written very soon after the death of Jesus, during the first generation of Christians, and two of them by eye-witnesses—the apostles Matthew and John. On this supposition, the occurrence in the Gospels of unhistorical elements, of religious legends, such as might be without hesitation allowed in the Old Testament, could not be thought of. Or if the admissibility of this point of view was granted in the case of the birth-stories of the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke (as by De Wette), objection was felt against its application to the miracles of the public life of Jesus. Thus, on the question of the historicity of the gospel narratives, theologians held views which were confused, undecided, contradictory, and lacking thoroughness. This state of things could not last; simple faith had at every point lost its security; doubt attached to the miraculous narratives of the New no less than to those of the Old Testament. But before Strauss no one had had the courage to explain all these narratives of both Testaments alike by the logical application of one and the same principle; and mainly for the reason, that the critics were all under the bondage of the supposition of the apostolic authorship of the Gospels of Matthew and John. Yet even this supposition had received various shocks prior to Strauss. Critics had been unable to close their eyes to the fact that there are differences between these two Gospels particularly, of such a fundamental nature as to preclude the possibility of both being right, and therefore of both having been written by eye-witnesses and apostles. Under the influence of dogmatic and sentimental motives, Schleiermacher and his disciples accepted it as an a priori certainty that John is to be preferred to Matthew; and from this secure position, as was imagined, these theologians assailed the narrative of Matthew at all points, and undermined the tradition of its apostolic authority. But suppose the same arguments with which they assailed Matthew might be used against their favourite evangelist John? What if it could be shown that his narrative is in no respect more probable, but, on the contrary, more improbable, than that of Matthew? In that case, must not the critical verdict which those theologians had given against Matthew so triumphantly and without regard to its consequences, apply equally to John, and thereby overthrow the only remaining pillar of apostolic authority for the gospel tradition?

This logical consequence, which was at the time deemed an unheard-of innovation, notwithstanding the opinions of a few individual critics (Vogel, Bretschneider), Strauss had the courage to draw. By that act he cast off the fetters by which the examination of the Gospels had till then been bound, and secured a free field for a thorough-going criticism of them. Since the external evidence of the authorship of the Gospels is not of a kind or a date such as to compel us to consider the tradition of their apostolic origin established, and as the matter of all the Gospels alike is not free from historical improbability, there is nothing, Strauss argued, to prevent our complete abandonment of the historicity of their miraculous narratives, though the Rationalists continue to maintain it, or our treating them as religious legends or myths, similar to those which, as was admitted, the Old Testament contained. The novelty in the work of Strauss was not the application of the principle of “myth” to Biblical narratives; others had already made use of it in the case of the Old and to some extent in the case of the New Testament; the originality lay in the uncompromising thoroughness with which the principle was applied to every section of the gospel story; the originality lay in the merciless acumen and clearness with which the discrepancies between the Gospels and the difficulties presented to the critical understanding by their narratives were laid bare, and with which all the subterfuges of supernaturalist apologists, as well as all the forced and artificial interpretations of semi-critical Rationalists, were exposed, thereby cutting off all ways of escape from the final consequences of criticism.