The work of Strauss was continued with modi- fications peculiar to themselves by Bruno Bauer and others, and suggested the more serious labours of the Tiibingen School, headed by F. C. Baur (1792-1860). The all-important problem was now
the historical reality of Jesus. Baur, differing in
this from Strauss, seeks a solution through St. Paul, and a critical investigation of the sources of Christianity. His theory shows the influence of the Hegelian category of thesis and antithesis.
In four Epistles — in Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians — we have, according to Baur, authentic Apostolic documents, genuine Epistles of Paul. They are our best authorities on every question touching the origin, nature, and principles of primitive Christianity. They reveal antitheses of thought, ajPetrine and a Pauline party in the Church. The Petrine was the primitive Christian, made up of men who, while believing in Jesus as the Messiah, did not cease to be Jews. The Pauline was a reformed and Gentile Christianity, which aimed at universalizing the faith in Jesus by freeing it from the Jewish law and traditions. Tlie universalism of Christianit}', and therefore its historical importance and achievements, are thus really the work of the Apostle Paul. His work he accomplished in the face of, and in spite of, the opposition of tlie older Apostles. The men wlio had been with Jesus did not understand Him ; Paul did by natural ability. Not the unity but the differences and antagonisms of the Apostolic Age are the key to all its problems, the point on which the constructive historian must stand if he would do his work. The memorials of the struggle and of the compromises by which it was ended lie in the canonical literature of primitive Christianity. They are best understood as Tendenz-schri/ten.
It is not easy to affirm what position Baur assigns to Christ. He is preoccupied with Paul. In a study on the meaning of the expression ' Son of Man,' he strives to reconstruct, by means of the historical data which the Gospels furnish us, the con- sciousness which Jesus had of Himself and His Messianic character, but the results at which he arrives are vague and contradictory. Sometimes he admits that the historian finds in Jesus certain characteristics which indicate that He possessed qualities unknown to other men ; sometimes he affirms that it is less the original Person of Christ than faith in His Person that has been the basis of the historical development of Christianity.
Baur's picture of the early Church and of Christ is now everywhere recognized as utterly incorrect in its chief and essential features. Why is this ? Simply because he was under the domination of a rigid philosophical system which narrowed his outlook, and prevented him from seeing a multi- tude of historical facts of a different character from those upon which he based his reconstruction. The scholars who have done most to secure recognition for those new facts are Ritschl and Renan. The essence of the advance made by Ritschl lies simply in the denial that the evolution of early Christianity was a purely immanent process, and in the recognition of certain outside forces as determinative factors in the development. The cardinal factor assumed by him was the spirit of the Grseco-Roman world. According to his view, the rise of the Catholic Church, which means the substitution of institutionalism, ecclesiasticism, and sacerdotalism for the spiritual individualism of the earliest period, was due primarily to the influence of the Grseco-Ronian spirit which came into the Church with the conversion of the Gentiles in the 1st cent., and which was thenceforth a controlling influence in its development. Essenti- ally in his spirit a group of younger historians have sought for still other outside factors, and greatly enlarged the historian's outlook.
E. Renan (1823-1892), trained for the Romanist priesthood, which he renounced, and attracted for a time by German Idealism without settling in it, encountered influences which were to enlighten the obscurity that his Catholic education and German initiation had left in his thought. His special work was done in the Semitic domain.
A visit to Palestine in 1860 offered the occasion for a Life of Jesris. In reading the Gospel in Galilee, he tells us, the per- sonality of this great Founder had forcibly appealed to him ; and the first sketch of the book was traced amidst the scenes of the Gospel history. It is no common book, the Vie de Jesus. It sketches a life of Christ which has won wide attention and acceptance. Jesus of Nazareth was a simple, contemplati\e, innocent, rustic saint, with a villager's childlike ideas of the kingdoms of the world and the glories of a court. These ideas He expresses in His parables about kings, says Renan, with the most jdelightf ul naivete and want of connaissance des choses — but with a religious fire of love burning in His heart, a profound apprehension of God as His Father, and that ardour to brin,-
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others to the same love of Him which gives force and breadtli to the least experienced wisdom. His wliole nature revolted against the hard and false sanctimony of the Pharisees. With regard to the Law, He had eagerly accepted the teaching, then widely disseminated among the Jews, of the school of Hillel. But it would not be for even the widest interpreters of the Law, says Renan, that Christ could have felt any great fascination. The Psalms, Isaiah, and more recent Messianic literature had for man}- reasons a greater imaginative charm for His genius. From the Book of Daniel He drew the Messianic title ' Son of Man,' which, with a fine appreciation of His own exquisitely human genius, He reserved specially for Himself. Moreover, the attempt in these books to sketch the future course of history was the origin of Christ's own millennial dreams, and the source of much of His imaginative power over His countrymen. Then there was the freedom of His life in Galilee. ' That mountain summit of Nazareth where no man of modern days can sit without a troubled feeling about his destiny, there Jesus sat twenty years without a doubt. Delivered from self- seeking, the source of our troubles, which makes us seek bitterly for some interest in virtue beyond the tomb. He thought only of His work, of His nation, of the human race. Those mountains, that sea, that azure heaven, those high tablelands on the horizon, were for Him not the melancholy vision of a soul which interrogates nature about its lot, but the certain symbol, the transparent shadow, of an invisible world and a new hea\en.' Thus love of His spiritual Father, Hebrew poetry, the li\ing spirit of the Law, the visions of a Messianic age that should include the whole race of man. His ignorance of science and belief in the plenary force of Divine volition, the political freedom of His time which scarcely interfered with individual action, the beauty of nature about Him, and His wonderful power of inspiring love in the simple men who came to Him — all tended to raise to the highest intensity a character of marvellous breadth and force. Jesus did not come ' stainless out of the struggle of life.' It was the instinct of genius for acting upon the world that led Him into the Messianic groove of thought. It was that that soiled His purity, though without it He never could have founded a lasting Church. If He had any original defect of nature, it was the universal Eastern fault of a want of sincerity with Himself. The growing fascination of His spiritual and Messianic ideas gave Him impatience of the appetite for miracle on the part of the people. The demand for miracle He had to meet, and was not above getting up fictitious miracles as a sort of ' pious fraud,' e.g. the resurrection of Lazarus. The same necessity led Him into fanaticism, which eventually urged Him to death ; ' the tone which He had taken could not be sustained ; it was time for death to come and unloose the knot of a situation of the extremest tension.'