RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Baur
words, expresses fully the guiding principle of the Tubingen School. In the name of fidelity to fact, Baur was conducting a regular siege of the fortifications which had been thrown up by his own predecessors around the Christian doctrines, when Strauss's assault upon the central bastion attracted general attention. It was not without value to him as a diversion, under cover of which he was able to pursue undisturbed for a while longer his critical work. During the next decade the Tubingen School acquired an importance which seemed to threaten the foundations of dogma from a new quarter, relentlessly contrasting the accepted image of Christ, as drawn according to the subjective Christian mind by Schleiermacher, with the results of objective historical criticism. The main part of the task seemed to be left to Baur himself; he was not so fortunate as the leaders of the old Tubingen School, who had their allies in the other theological chairs. On the other hand, he had with him a large number of young and enthusiastic disciples, such as the talented Eduard Zeller, later his son-in-law, the still bolder and braver Schwegler, Kostlin and Planck, Ritschl and Hilgenfeld, the last two the most prominent allies who came from outside of Wiirttemberg. Baur had begun his critical work with Paul, and the same apostle engaged the attention of the school in its later publications. Searching investigations of the Epistle to the Romans appeared in the TZT in 1836, and aroused alarm and opposition. These, together with considerable ma-
2. Applied to terial which he had published in the the Writings Theologische Jahrbucher, begun in 1842
of Paul, by Zeller and edited from 1847 to 1857 by himself and Zeller jointly, which became the organ of the new school, he put together in 1845 (Stuttgart) into a monograph on Paul. The result reached by this part of his work was the denial of the authenticity of all the letters passing under the apostle's name, except Galatians, I and II Corinthians, and Romans, of which last also the two concluding chapters were questioned. Finally, in agreement with Schneckenburger but still more radically, the postapostolic origin of the Acts was asserted. It was not difficult to conjecture what would happen to the Gospels when they were thrown into the same crucible.
The theory of the " objective criticism," as it developed, was that the older apostles, with their original body of disciples, were differentiated from the other Jews only by their belief that the crucified Jesus was the Messiah. All the elements of a new religion contained in his life and teaching were forgotten, or lay undeveloped in the
3. The Fun- apostles' memory, though a Stephen damental attempted to enforce them and sealed
Assumption his testimony by his death. When of the Paul, by a wonderful divination, by School. a train of reasoning from the cross and the resurrection, rediscovered these elements of universality and freedom, the Church stood suspiciously aloof. The older apostles, indeed, with a liberality difficult to understand in the premises, accepted Paul as an equal fellow laborer and admitted his right to the mission to the Gentiles. But a section of the Church re-
mained obstinately hostile. Paul appears, therefore, constantly prepared for combat, and when an epistle presents him in any other mood, it is ipso facto unauthentic. In view of these facts, it became all the more necessary for the next age to emphasize the unity of the Church; when, accordingly, there is perceived a conciliatory tone in an epistle, when it speaks much of the Church and its unity of belief, no further mark of a postapostolic origin is needed. The school believed itself able to prove from the Apocalypse, considered as a product not merely of Judaic narrowness but of positive opposition to Paulinism, and still more from the pseudo-Clementine homilies, that no accommodation took place in the apostles' lifetime.
These views, for all their possible usefulness as against an exaggerated notion in the opposite direction, still left one question unanswered — what really was the Christianity of Christ ? This led inevitably to the question, burning since Strauss, of the status of the Gospels; but it was nearly ten years before Baur brought his disciples to that. In the Jahrbuch for 1844 he attempted to use his critical principles to disprove the authenticity of the Gospel of John. This treatment he supplemented by further investigations on the canonical gospels, and published the whole result in substantive form in 1847 (Tubingen). 4. Applied In a certain sense it was favorable to the to the traditional view. The order
Gospels. of the canon was approximately that of their composition. Matthew, in whom the Judaic tendency is strongest, would then be nearest to the source; Mark would show a tendency to accommodation and minimizing of differences; and this would show all the more clearly the Pauline tendency of Luke. The fourth Gospel, finally, was supposed to display in every feature the tendency to sink these differences in a higher unity, and to take a stand for the conflicts of the second century, Gnosticism, Montanism, and the nascent Trinitarian controversy. This work of Baur's marks the close of the great period of the school. His disciples were now ready to come to his aid. Schwegler's book on Montanism (Tubingen, 1841), Ritschl's on Luke and the Gospel of Marcion (Tubingen, 1846) and on the origin of the primitive catholic Church (Bonn, 1850), Kostlin's on the Johannine system (Berlin, 1843), were all important; but the most significant was Schwegler's on the subapostolic age (Tubingen, 1846), which attempted constructive reasoning, using the writings which had been declared unauthentic as memorials of the development of Judaism and Paulinism into what came later.
According to Schwegler, Judaism had no need of further development; the impulse came from Paulinism, in such a way that the Judaic party
5. Devel- decided, in order to preserve the unity
oped by of the Church (Gk. monorchia), to make Schwegler. some concessions, requiring things of similar import with those demanded by the pseudadelphoi of the New Testament, but more easily fulfilled by the Gentiles. If circumcision had to be abandoned, so much the more weight was laid upon baptism as the Christian
Baur Bauslin