• Matliesoii, Mils M the Study 0/ German Theology, p. 151; ,-f, n'.- I' w.-i.- 1 -h^n Jrm*, i. p. l.W.
I r. - ii'- . tt. a, Weinel, Jemts im neunzehnten Jahr-
knowledged the supremacy of Jesus in the sphere of religion, but he maintained that He possessed such power over the souls of men, to which there may have been conjoined some physical force like magnetism, that He was able to perform cures which were regarded as miraculous. He even went so far as to consider the Fourth Gospel as a possible historical authority.*
In face of all this confusion, and of the number of replies to Strauss and the position which they took up, it is easy to understand that the question of the sources of the Gospel history and a criti- cism of them assumed a glowing importance. This importance Strauss had practically ignored, and new Baur's theory of early Church history and of the origin of early Christian documents was to be worked in to supply the want, and to be adopted by Strauss as a remedy for his own indecision or indill'erence as to the Gospel sources. Strauss felt, it would seem, the justice of Baur's reproof, viz. that he had written a criticism of the Gospel history without a criticism of the Gospels.t
But just as it may be affirmed that Strauss had startetl with dogmatic philosophical assumptions, so the same judgment must be passed upon Baur's starting-point. No one has admitted this more fully than Pfleiderer, so far as the first three Gospels are concerned {op. cit. pp. 231, 232).
Wilke and Weisse had already proved, saya Plieiderer, the priority of Mark (and had thus, with Herder, anticipated much later criticism), and it could only have been the fact that Baur was wedded to his dogmatic method which prompted him to place Mark's Gospel at least as late as A.D. 130, and to see in it a Gospel consisting of ex- tracts from Matthew and Luke.
The impossibility of separating any account of the /ifc of Christ from its sources became more and more evident in the succeeding literature.
2. Closely related in point of time to Strauss' popular book is that of the Frenchman Benan. To attempt any examination of the defects of this famous work would be beyond our jjrovince. But just as Strauss was blamed for his indifi'erence to any treatment of the sources, i.e. the Gospels, so Renan was blamed for his half-and-half treatment of the same Gospels. For this he is severely taken to task by Schwarz.J He blames Renan for pass- ing so lightly over the inquiries of a man like Baur as to the origin of our Gospels ; and he points out that Renan's half-and-half treatment of these same Gospels, especially of the Gospel of John, avenges itself upon him, in that it leads him on from half-rationalistic explanations of the miracles to explanations which are adopted even at the cost of the moral perfection of Jesus. And in this connexion he refers, like other writers, to the ex- planation which Renan gives of the resurrection of Lazarus. Of course the earlier Renan placed the Gospels, the more difficult it was for him to account for the miracles which gathered around Jesus ; and it is not too much to say that the earliest Gospel, St. Mark, the Gospel which Renan himself regarded as the earliest, is bound u]) with the miraculous. Renan's short and easy method was to declare dogmatically that there was no room in liistory for the supernatural. Like Strauss and Baur, Renan too had his assumption as to the historical worth of the Gospels ; he too sets out with a general and comprehensive judgment as to their contents ; for him the Gospels are not biographies, after the manner of those of Suetonius, nor are they legends invented after the manner of Philostratus ; they are legendary biographies.
* liichtenberger, op. cit. p. 328. t See Schwarz, op. eit. p. 545 f.
; Op. cit. pp. 538-640 ; see also B. Weiss, Lye qf Christ, i. pp. ■203, 205, Eng. tr.
CEITICISM
CRITICISM
385
' I would compare them with the Legends of the Saints, the Life of Plotinus, Proclus, Isidorus, and other similar writings, in which historic truth and the purpose of presenting models of virtue are combined in different degrees.' It is not, perhaps, surprising that B. Weiss should speak of Kenan's Vie de Jesiis as not a history but a romance, and should add that, as our sources in their actual form were in many respects out of sympathy with, indeed almost incomprehensible to him, he could not escape the danger of rearranging them accord- ing to his own taste, or in a merely eclectic way. *
3. If we turn to Theodor Keim (1867-1872), to whom has sometimes been attributed the ' Life of Jesus ' from a rationalistic standpoint, we notice that he too is severely taken to task by Pfleiderer for his unsatisfactory and fluctuating criticism of the Gospels as .sources, and for his too close ad- herence to the views of Baur, especially in regard to the relation of the Synoptics to each other. St. Mark, e.g. , is a compilation from St. Matthew and St. Luke, and St. Matthew's is regarded as the earliest Gospel. In comparing Keim's various works relat- ing to the life of Jesus, we certainly find a strange fluctuation with regard to his statements as to the sources and their validity. Thus he actually places St. Matthew in its prinxitive form as early as A.D. 66, and supposes it to have been revised and edited some thirty years later ; St. Mark he places about 100 ; and St. Luke, in which he sees a Gospel written by a companion of St. Paul, about 90.