Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus. Das Leben Jesu als Grundlage einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums. Heidelberg, C. F. Winter. (The Life of Jesus as the Basis of a purely Historical Account of Early Christianity.) 1828. 2 vols., 1192 pp.
Paulus was not the mere dry-as-dust rationalist that he is usually represented to have been, but a man of very versatile abilities. His limitation was that, like Reinhard, he had an unconquerable distrust of anything that went outside the boundaries of logical thought. That was due in part to the experiences of his youth. His father, a deacon in Leonberg, half-mystic, half-rationalist, had secret difficulties about the doctrine of immortality, and made his wife promise on her death-bed that, if it were possible, she would appear to him after her death in bodily form. After she was dead he thought he saw her raise herself to a sitting posture, and again sink down. From that time onwards he firmly believed himself to be in communication with departed spirits, and he became so dominated by this idea that in 1771 he had to be removed from his office. His children suffered sorely from a régime of compulsory spiritualism, which pressed hardest upon Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, born in 1761, who, for the sake of peace, was obliged to pretend to his father that he was in communication with his mother's spirit.
He himself had inherited only the rationalistic side of his father's temperament. As a student at the Tübingen Stift (theological institute) he formed his views on the writings of [pg 049] Semler and Michaelis. In 1789 he was called to Jena as Professor of Oriental Languages, and succeeded in 1793 to the third ordinary professorship of theology. The naturalistic interpretation of miracles which he upheld in his commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, published in 1800-1802, aroused the indignation of the consistories of Meiningen and Eisenach. But their petition for his removal from the professorship was unsuccessful, since Herder, who was president of the consistorium, used his influence to protect him. In 1799 Paulus, as Pro-rector, used his influence on behalf of his colleague Fichte, who was attacked on the ground of atheism; but in vain, owing to the passionate conduct of the accused.
With Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland, Paulus and his wife, a lively lady of some literary talents, stood in the most friendly relations.
When the Jena circle began to break up, he accepted, in 1803, an invitation from the Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian Joseph II., to go to Würzburg as Konsistorialrat and professor. There the liberal minister, Montgelas, was desirous of establishing a university founded on the principles of illuminism—Schelling, Hufeland, and Schleiermacher were among those whom he contemplated appointing as Docents. Here the Catholic theological students were obliged to attend the lectures of the Protestant professor of theology, as there were no Protestants to form an audience. His first course was on “Encyclopädie” (i.e. introduction to the literature of theology).
The plan failed. Paulus resigned his professorship and became in 1807 a member of the Bavarian educational council (Schulrat). In this capacity he worked at the reorganisation of the Bavarian school system at the time when Hegel was similarly engaged. He gave four years to this task, which he felt to be laid upon him as a duty. Then, in 1811, he went to Heidelberg as professor of theology; and he remained there until his death, in 1851, at the age of ninety. One of his last sayings, a few hours before he died, was, “I am justified before God, through my desire to do right.” His last words were, “There is another world.”
The forty years of his Heidelberg period were remarkably productive; there was no department of knowledge on which he did not write. He expressed his views about homoeopathy, about the freedom of the Press, about academic freedom, and about the duelling nuisance. In 1831, he wrote upon the Jewish Question; and there the veteran rationalist showed himself a bitter anti-Semite, and brought upon himself the scorn of Heine. On politics and constitutional questions he fought for his opinions so openly and manfully that he had to be warned to be more discreet. In philosophy he took an especially keen interest. When in Jena he had, in conjunction with Schiller, busied himself in the study [pg 050] of Kant. He did a particularly meritorious service in preparing an edition of Spinoza's writings, with a biography of that thinker, in 1803, at the time when neo-Spinozism was making its influence felt in German philosophy. He constituted himself the special guardian of philosophy, and the moment he detected the slightest hint of mysticism, he sounded the alarm. His pet aversion was Schelling, who was born fourteen years later than he, in the very same house at Leonberg, and whom he had met as colleague at Jena and at Würzburg. The works, avowed and anonymous, which he directed against this “charlatan, juggler, swindler, and obscurantist,” as he designated him, fill an entire library.
In 1841, Schelling was called to the chair of philosophy in Berlin, and in the winter of 1841-1842 he gave his lectures on “The Philosophy of Revelation” which caused the Berlin reactionaries to hail him as their great ally. The veteran rationalist—he was eighty years old—was transported with rage. He had had the lectures taken down for him, and he published them with critical remarks under the title “The Philosophy of Revelation at length Revealed, and set forth for General Examination, by Dr. H. E. G. Paulus” (Darmstadt, 1842). Schelling was furious, and dragged “the impudent scoundrel” into a court of law on the charge of illicit publication. In Prussia the book was suppressed. But the courts decided in favour of Paulus, who coolly explained that “the philosophy of Schelling appeared to him an insidious attack upon sound reason, the unmasking of which by every possible means was a work of public utility, nay, even a duty.” He also secured the result at which he aimed; Schelling resigned his lectureship.
In his last days the veteran rationalist was an isolated survival from an earlier age into a period which no longer understood him. The new men reproached him for standing in the old ways; he accused them of a want of honesty. It was just in his immobility and his one-sidedness that his significance lay. By his consistent carrying through of the rationalistic explanation he performed a service to theology more valuable than those who think themselves so vastly his superiors are willing to acknowledge.
His Life of Jesus is awkwardly arranged. The first part gives a historical exposition of the Gospels, section by section. The second part is a synopsis interspersed with supplementary matter. There is no attempt to grasp the life of Jesus as a connected whole. In that respect he is far inferior to Venturini. Strictly regarded, his work is only a harmony of the gospels with explanatory comments, the ground plan of which is taken from the Fourth Gospel.22
[pg 051]The main interest centres in the explanations of the miracles, though the author, it must be admitted, endeavoured to guard against this. “It is my chief desire,” he writes in his preface, “that my views regarding the miracle stories should not be taken as by any means the principal thing. How empty would devotion or religion be if one's spiritual well-being depended on whether one believed in miracles or no!” “The truly miraculous thing about Jesus is Himself, the purity and serene holiness of His character, which is, notwithstanding, genuinely human, and adapted to the imitation and emulation of mankind.”
The question of miracle is therefore a subsidiary question. Two points of primary importance are certain from the outset: (1) that unexplained alterations of the course of nature can neither overthrow nor attest a spiritual truth, (2) that everything which happens in nature emanates from the omnipotence of God.
The Evangelists intended to relate miracles; of that there can be no doubt. Nor can any one deny that in their time miracles entered into the plan of God, in the sense that the minds of men were to be astounded and subdued by inexplicable facts. This effect, however, is past. In periods to which the miraculous makes less appeal, in view of the advance in intellectual culture of the nations which have been led to accept Christianity, the understanding must be satisfied if the success of the cause is to be maintained.
Since that which is produced by the laws of nature is really produced by God, the Biblical miracles consist merely in the fact that eyewitnesses report events of which they did not know the secondary causes. Their knowledge of the laws of nature was insufficient to enable them to understand what actually happened. For one who has discovered the secondary causes, the fact remains, as such, but not the miracle.
The question of miracle, therefore, does not really exist, or exists only for those “who are under the influence of the sceptical delusion that it is possible really to think any kind of natural powers as existing apart from God, or to think the Being of God apart from the primal potentialities which unfold themselves in the never-ceasing process of Becoming.” The difficulty arises from the “original sin” of dissolving the inner unity of God and nature, of denying the equivalence implied by Spinoza in his “Deus sive Natura.”
For the normal intelligence the only problem is to discover the secondary causes of the “miracles” of Jesus. It is true there is one miracle which Paulus retains—the miracle of the birth, or at least the possibility of it; in the sense that it is through holy [pg 052] inspiration that Mary receives the hope and the power of conceiving her exalted Son, in whom the spirit of the Messiah takes up its dwelling. Here he indirectly denies the natural generation, and regards the conception as an act of the self-consciousness of the mother.
With the miracles of healing, however, the case is very simple. Sometimes Jesus worked through His spiritual power upon the nervous system of the sufferer; sometimes He used medicines known to Him alone. The latter applies, for instance, to the cures of the blind. The disciples, too, as appears from Mark vi. 7 and 13, were not sent out without medicaments, for the oil with which they were to anoint the sick was, of course, of a medicinal character; and the casting out of evil spirits was effected partly by means of sedatives.
Diet and after-treatment played a great part, though the Evangelists say little about this because directions on these points would not be given publicly. Thus, the saying, “This kind goeth not out save by prayer and fasting,” is interpreted as an instruction to the father as to the way in which he could make the sudden cure of the epileptic into a permanent one, viz. by keeping him to a strict diet and strengthening his character by devotional exercises.
The nature miracles suggest their own explanation. The walking on the water was an illusion of the disciples. Jesus walked along the shore, and in the mist was taken for a ghost by the alarmed and excited occupants of the boat. When Jesus called to them, Peter threw himself into the water, and was drawn to shore by Jesus just as he was sinking. Immediately after taking Jesus into the boat they doubled a headland and drew clear of the storm centre; they therefore supposed that He had calmed the sea by His command. It was the same in the case where He was asleep during the storm. When they waked Him He spoke to them about the wind and the weather. At that moment they gained the shelter of a hill which protected them from the wind that swept down the valley; and they marvelled among themselves that even the winds and the sea obeyed their Messiah.
The feeding of the five thousand is explained in the following way. When Jesus saw the multitude all hungered, He said to His disciples, “We will set the rich people among them a good example, that they may share their supplies with the others,” and he began to distribute His own provisions, and those of the disciples, to the people who were sitting near them. The example had its effect, and soon there was plenty for every one.
The explanation of the transfiguration is somewhat more complicated. While Jesus was lingering with a few followers in this mountainous district He had an interview upon a high mountain at night with two dignified-looking men whom His three companions took for Moses and Elias. These unknown persons, [pg 053] as we learn from Luke ix. 31, informed Him of the fate which awaited Him at Jerusalem. In the early morning, as the sun was rising, the three disciples, only half awake, looked upwards from the hollow in which they had been sleeping and saw Jesus with the two strangers upon the higher part of the mountain, illuminated by the beams of the rising sun, and heard them speak, now of the fate which threatened Him in the capital, now of the duty of steadfastness and the hopes attached thereto, and finally heard an exhortation addressed to themselves, bidding them ever to hold Jesus to be the beloved Son of the Deity, whom they must obey.... Their drowsiness, and the clouds which in an autumnal sunrise float to and fro over those mountains,23 left them no clear recollection of what had happened. This only added to the wonder of the vague undefined impression of having been in contact with apparitions from a higher sphere. The three who had been with Him on the mount never arrived at any more definite knowledge of the facts, because Jesus forbade them to speak of what they had seen until the end should come.
In dealing with the raisings from the dead the author is in his element. Here he is ready with the unfailing explanation taken over from Bahrdt that they were only cases of coma. These narratives should not be headed “raisings from the dead,” but “deliverances from premature burial.” In Judaea, interment took place three hours after death. How many seemingly dead people may have returned to consciousness in their graves, and then have perished miserably! Thus Jesus, owing to a presentiment suggested to Him by the father's story, saves the daughter of Jairus from being buried while in a cataleptic trance. A similar presentiment led Him to remove the covering of the bier which He met at the gate of Nain, and to discover traces of life in the widow's son. A similar instinct moved Him to ask to be taken to the grave of Lazarus. When the stone is rolled away He sees His friend standing upright and calls to him joyfully, “Come forth!”
The Jewish love of miracle “caused everything to be ascribed immediately to the Deity, and secondary causes to be overlooked; consequently no thought was unfortunately given to the question of how to prevent these horrible cases of premature burial from taking place!” But why does it not appear strange to Paulus that Jesus did not enlighten His countrymen as to the criminal character of over-hasty burial, instead of allowing even his closest followers to believe in miracle? Here the hypothesis condemns itself, although it has a foundation of fact, in so far as cases of premature burial are abnormally frequent in the East.
[pg 054]The resurrection of Jesus must be brought under the same category if we are to hold fast to the facts that the disciples saw Him in His natural body with the print of the nails in His hands, and that He took food in their presence. Death from crucifixion was in fact due to a condition of rigor, which extended gradually inwards. It was the slowest of all deaths. Josephus mentions in his Contra Apionem that it was granted to him as a favour by Titus, at Tekoa, that he might have three crucified men whom he knew taken down from the cross. Two of them died, but one recovered. Jesus, however, “died” surprisingly quickly. The loud cry which he uttered immediately before His head sank shows that His strength was far from being exhausted, and that what supervened was only a death-like trance. In such trances the process of dying continues until corruption sets in. “This alone proves that the process is complete and that death has actually taken place.”
In the case of Jesus, as in that of others, the vital spark would have been gradually extinguished, had not Providence mysteriously effected on behalf of its favourite that which in the case of others was sometimes effected in more obvious ways by human skill and care. The lance-thrust, which we are to think of rather as a mere surface wound, served the purpose of a phlebotomy. The cool grave and the aromatic unguents continued the process of resuscitation, until finally the storm and the earthquake aroused Jesus to full consciousness. Fortunately the earthquake also had the effect of rolling away the stone from the mouth of the grave. The Lord stripped off the grave-clothes and put on a gardener's dress which He managed to procure. That was what made Mary, as we are told in John xx. 15, take Him for the gardener. Through the women, He sends a message to His disciples bidding them meet Him in Galilee, and Himself sets out to go thither. At Emmaus, as the dusk was falling, He met two of His followers, who at first failed to recognise Him because His countenance was so disfigured by His sufferings. But His manner of giving thanks at the breaking of bread, and the nail-prints in His uplifted hands, revealed to them who He was. From them He learns where His disciples are, returns to Jerusalem, and appears unexpectedly among them. This is the explanation of the apparent contradiction between the message pointing to Galilee and the appearances in Jerusalem. Thomas was not present at this first appearance, and at a later interview was suffered to put his hand into the marks of the wounds. It is a misunderstanding to see a reproach in the words which Jesus addresses to him. What, then, is the meaning of “Blessed are they that have not seen and have believed”? It is a benediction upon Thomas for what he has done in the interests of later generations. “Now,” Jesus says, “thou, Thomas, art convinced because thou hast so unmistakably seen Me. It is [pg 055] well for those who now or in the future shall not see Me; for after this they can feel a firm conviction, because thou hast convinced thyself so completely that to thee, whose hands have touched Me, no possible doubt can remain of My corporeal reanimation.” Had it not been for Thomas's peculiar mental constitution we should not have known whether what was seen was a phantom or a real appearance of the reanimated Jesus.
In this way Jesus lived with them for forty days, spending part of that time with them in Galilee. In consequence of the ill-treatment which He had undergone, He was not capable of continuous exertion. He lived quietly and gathered strength for the brief moments in which He appeared among His own followers and taught them. When He felt his end drawing near He returned to Jerusalem. On the Mount of Olives, in the early sunlight, He assembled His followers for the last time. He lifted up His hands to bless them, and with hands still raised in benediction He moved away from them. A cloud interposes itself between them and Him, so that their eyes cannot follow Him. As he disappeared there stood before them, clothed in white, the two dignified figures whom the three disciples who were present at the transfiguration had taken for Moses and Elias, but who were really among the secret adherents of Jesus in Jerusalem. These men exhorted them not to stand waiting there but to be up and doing.
Where Jesus really died they never knew, and so they came to describe His departure as an ascension.
This Life of Jesus is not written without feeling. At times, in moments of exaltation, the writer even dashes into verse. If only the lack of all natural aesthetic feeling did not ruin everything! Paulus constantly falls into a style that sets the teeth on edge. The episode of the death of the Baptist is headed “Court-and-Priest intrigues enhance themselves to a judicial murder.” Much is spoiled by a kind of banality. Instead of “disciples,” he always says “pupils,” instead of “faith,” “sincerity of conviction.” The appeal which the father of the lunatic boy addresses to Jesus, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief,” runs “I am sincerely convinced; help me, even if there is anything lacking in the sincerity of my conviction.”
The beautiful saying in the story of Martha and Mary, “One thing is needful,” is interpreted as meaning that a single course will be sufficient for the meal.24 The scene in the home at Bethany rejoices in the heading, “Geniality of Jesus among sympathetic friends in a hospitable family circle at Bethany. A Messiah with no stiff solemnity about Him.” The following is the explanation [pg 056] which Paulus discovers for the saying about the tribute-money: “So long as you need the Romans to maintain some sort of order among you,” says Jesus, “you must provide the means thereto. If you were fit to be independent you would not need to serve any one but God.”
Among the historical problems, Paulus is especially interested in the idea of the Messiahship, and in the motives of the betrayal. His sixty-five pages on the history of the conception of the Messiah are a real contribution to the subject. The Messianic idea, he explains, goes back to the Davidic kingdom; the prophets raised it to a higher religious plane; in the times of the Maccabees the ideal of the kingly Messiah perished and its place was taken by that of the super-earthly deliverer. The only mistake which Paulus makes is in supposing that the post-Maccabean period went back to the political ideal of the Davidic king. On the other hand, he rightly interprets the death of Jesus as the deed by which He thought to win the Messiahship proper to the Son of Man.
With reference to the question of the High Priest at the trial, he remarks that it does not refer to the metaphysical Divine Sonship, but to the Messiahship in the ancient Jewish sense, and accordingly Jesus answers by pointing to the coming of the Son of Man.
The importance of eschatology in the preaching of Jesus is clearly recognised, but Paulus proceeds to nullify this recognition by making the risen Lord cut short all the questions of the disciples in regard to this subject with the admonition “that in whatever way all this should come about, and whether soon or late, their business was to see that they had done their own part.”
How did Judas come to play the traitor? He believed in the Messiahship of Jesus and wanted to force Him to declare Himself. To bring about His arrest seemed to Judas the best means of rousing the people to take His side openly. But the course of events was too rapid for him. Owing to the Feast the news of the arrest spread but slowly. In the night “when people were sleeping off the effects of the Passover supper,” Jesus was condemned; in the morning, before they were well awake, He was hurried away to be crucified. Then Judas was overcome with despair, and went and hanged himself. “Judas stands before us in the history of the Passion as a warning example of those who allow their cleverness to degenerate into cunning, and persuade themselves that it is permissible to do evil that good may come—to seek good objects, which they really value, by intrigue and chicanery. And the underlying cause of their errors is that they have failed to overcome their passionate desire for self-advancement.”
Such was the consistently rationalistic Life of Jesus, which evoked so much opposition at the time of its appearance, and [pg 057] seven years later received its death-blow at the hands of Strauss. The method is doomed to failure because the author only saves his own sincerity at the expense of that of his characters. He makes the disciples of Jesus see miracles where they could not possibly have seen them; and makes Jesus Himself allow miracles to be imagined where He must necessarily have protested against such a delusion. His exegesis, too, is sometimes violent. But in this, who has the right to judge him? If the theologians dragged him before the Lord, He would command, as of old, “Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone at him,” and Paulus would go forth unharmed.
Moreover, a number of his explanations are right in principle. The feeding of the multitudes and the walking on the sea must be explained somehow or other as misunderstandings of something that actually happened. And how many of Paulus' ideas are still going about in all sorts of disguises, and crop up again and again in commentaries and Lives of Jesus, especially in those of the “anti-rationalists”! Nowadays it belongs to the complete duty of the well-trained theologian to renounce the rationalists and all their works; and yet how poor our time is in comparison with theirs—how poor in strong men capable of loyalty to an ideal, how poor, so far as theology is concerned, in simple commonplace sincerity!
Karl August Hase. Das Leben Jesu zunächst für akademische Studien. (The Life of Jesus, primarily for the use of students.) 1829. 205 pp. This work contains a bibliography of the earliest literature of the subject. 5th ed., 1865.
Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher. Das Leben Jesu. 1864. Edited by Rütenik. The edition is based upon a student's note-book of a course of lectures delivered in 1832.
David Friedrich Strauss. Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte. Eine Kritik des Schleiermacher'schen Lebens Jesu. (The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History. A criticism of Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus.) 1865.
In their treatment of the life of Jesus, Hase and Schleiermacher are in one respect still wholly dominated by rationalism. They still cling to the rationalistic explanation of miracle; although they have no longer the same ingenuous confidence in it as their predecessors, and although at the decisive cases they are content to leave a question-mark instead of offering a solution. They might, in fact, be described as the sceptics of rationalism. In another respect, however, they aim at something beyond the range of rationalism, inasmuch as they endeavour to grasp the inner connexion of the events of Jesus' ministry, which in Paulus had entirely fallen out of sight. Their Lives of Jesus are transitional, in the good sense of the word as well as in the bad. In respect of progress, Hase shows himself the greater of the two.
Scarcely thirteen years have elapsed since the death of the great Jena professor, his Excellency von Hase, and already we think of him as a man of the past. Theology has voted to inscribe his name upon its records in letters of gold—and has passed on to the order of the day. He was no pioneer like Baur, and he does not meet the present age on the footing of a contemporary, offering it problems raised by him and still unsolved. Even his “Church History,” with its twelve editions, has already had its day, although it is still the most brilliantly written work in this department, and conceals beneath its elegance of form a massive erudition. He [pg 059] was more than a theologian; he was one of the finest monuments of German culture, the living embodiment of a period which for us lies under the sunset glow of the past, in the land of “once upon a time.”
His path in life was unembarrassed; he knew toil, but not disappointment. Born in 1800, he finished his studies at Tübingen, where he qualified as a Privat-Docent in 1823. In 1824-1825 he spent eleven months in the fortress of Hohenasperg, where he was confined for taking the part of the Burschenschaften,25 and had leisure for meditation and literary plans. In 1830 he went to Jena, where, with a yearly visit to Italy to lay in a store of sunshine and renewed strength, he worked until 1890.
Not without a certain reverence does one take this little text-book of 205 pages into one's hands. This is the first attempt by a fully equipped scholar to reconstruct the life of Jesus on a purely historical basis. There is more creative power in it than in almost any of his later works. It manifests already the brilliant qualities of style for which he was distinguished—clearness, terseness, elegance. What a contrast with that of Bahrdt, Venturini, or Paulus!
And yet the keynote of the work is rationalistic, since Hase has recourse to the rationalistic explanation of miracles wherever that appears possible. He seeks to make the circumstances of the baptism intelligible by supposing the appearance of a meteor. In the story of the transfiguration, the fact which is to be retained is that Jesus, in the company of two unknown persons, appeared to the disciples in unaccustomed splendour. Their identification of His companions as Moses and Elias is a conclusion which is not confirmed by Jesus, and owing to the position of the eyewitnesses, is not sufficiently guaranteed by their testimony. The abrupt breaking off of the interview by the Master, and the injunction of silence, point to some secret circumstance in His history. By this hint Hase seems to leave room for the “secret society” of Bahrdt and Venturini.
He makes no difficulty about the explanation of the story of the stater. It is only intended to show “how the Messiah avoided offence in submitting Himself to the financial burdens of the community.” In regard to the stilling of the storm, it seems uncertain whether Jesus through His knowledge of nature was enabled to predict the end of the storm or whether He brought it about by the possession of power over nature. The “sceptic of rationalism” thus leaves open the possibility of miracle. He proceeds somewhat similarly in explaining the raisings from the dead. They can be made intelligible by supposing that they were cases of coma, but it is also possible to look upon them as [pg 060] supernatural. For the two great Johannine miracles, the change of the water into wine and the increase of the loaves, no naturalistic explanation can be admitted. But how unsuccessful is his attempt to make the increase of the bread intelligible! “Why should not the bread have been increased?” he asks. “If nature every year in the period between seed-time and harvest performs a similar miracle, nature might also, by unknown laws, bring it about in a moment.” Here crops up the dangerous anti-rationalistic intellectual supernaturalism which sometimes brings Hase and Schleiermacher very close to the frontiers of the territory occupied by the disingenuous reactionaries.
The crucial point is the explanation of the resurrection of Jesus. A stringent proof that death had actually taken place cannot, according to Hase, be given, since there is no evidence that corruption had set in, and that is the only infallible sign of death. It is possible, therefore, that the resurrection was only a return to consciousness after a trance. But the direct impression made by the sources points rather to a supernatural event. Either view is compatible with the Christian faith. “Both the historically possible views—either that the Creator gave new life to a body which was really dead, or that the latent life reawakened in a body which was only seemingly dead—recognise in the resurrection a manifest proof of the care of Providence for the cause of Jesus, and are therefore both to be recognised as Christian, whereas a third view—that Jesus gave Himself up to his enemies in order to defeat them by the bold stroke of a seeming death and a skilfully prepared resurrection—is as contrary to historical criticism as to Christian faith.”
Hase, however, quietly lightens the difficulty of the miracle question in a way which must not be overlooked. For the rationalists all miracles stood on the same footing, and all must equally be abolished by a naturalistic explanation. If we study Hase carefully, we find that he accepts only the Johannine miracles as authentic, whereas those of the Synoptists may be regarded as resting upon a misunderstanding on the part of the authors, because they are not reported at first hand, but from tradition. Thus the discrimination of the two lines of Gospel tradition comes to the aid of the anti-rationalists, and enables them to get rid of some of the greatest difficulties. Half playfully, it might almost be said, they sketch out the ideas of Strauss, without ever suspecting what desperate earnest the game will become, if the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel has to be given up.
Hase surrenders the birth-story and the “legends of the Childhood”—the expression is his own—almost without striking a blow. The same fate befalls all the incidents in which angels figure, and the miracles at the time of the death of Jesus. He [pg 061] describes these as “mythical touches.” The ascension is merely “a mythical version of His departure to the Father.”
Hase's conception even of the non-miraculous portion of the history of Jesus is not free from rationalistic traits. He indulges in the following speculations with regard to the celibacy of the Lord. “If the true grounds of the celibacy of Jesus do not lie hidden in the special circumstances of His youth, the conjecture may be permitted that He from whose religion was to go forth the ideal view of marriage, so foreign to the ideas of antiquity, found in His own time no heart worthy to enter into this covenant with Him.” It is on rationalistic lines also that Hase explains the betrayal by Judas. “A purely intellectual, worldly, and unscrupulous character, he desired to compel the hesitating Messiah to found His Kingdom upon popular violence.... It is possible that Judas in his terrible blindness took that last word addressed to him by Jesus, ‘What thou doest, do quickly,’ as giving consent to his plan.”
But Hase again rises superior to this rationalistic conception of the history when he refuses to explain away the Jewish elements in the plan and preaching of Jesus as due to mere accommodation, and maintains the view that the Lord really, to a certain extent, shared this Jewish system of ideas. According to Hase there are two periods in the Messianic activity of Jesus. In the first He accepted almost without reservation the popular ideas regarding the Messianic age. In consequence, however, of His experience of the practical results of these ideas, He was led to abandon this error, and in the second period He developed His own distinctive views. Here we meet for the first time the idea of two different periods in the life of Jesus, which, especially through the influence of Holtzmann and Keim, became the prevailing view, and down to Johannes Weiss, determined the plan of all Lives of Jesus. Hase created the modern historico-psychological picture of Jesus. The introduction of this more penetrating psychology would alone suffice to place him in advance of the rationalists.
Another interesting point is the thorough way in which he traces out the historical and literary consequences of this idea of development. The apostles, he thinks, did not understand this progress of thought on the part of Jesus, and did not distinguish between the sayings of the first and second periods. They remained wedded to the eschatological view. After the death of Jesus this view prevailed so strongly in the primitive community of disciples that they interpolated their expectations into the last discourses of Jesus. According to Hase, the apocalyptic discourse in Matt. xxiv. was originally only a prediction of the judgment upon and destruction of Jerusalem, but this was obscured later by the influx of the eschatological views of the apostolic community. Only John remained free from this error. Therefore the non-eschatological [pg 062] Fourth Gospel preserves in their pure form the ideas of Jesus in His second period.
Hase rightly observes that the Messiahship of Jesus plays next to no part in His preaching, at any rate at first, and that, before the incident at Caesarea Philippi, it was only in moments of enthusiastic admiration, rather than with settled conviction, that even the disciples looked on Him as the Messiah. This indication of the central importance of the declaration of the Messiahship at Caesarea Philippi is another sign-post pointing out the direction which the future study of the life of Jesus was to follow.
Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus introduces us to quite a different order of transitional ideas. Its value lies in the sphere of dogmatics, not of history. Nowhere, indeed, is it so clear that the great dialectician had not really a historical mind than precisely in his treatment of the history of Jesus.
From the first it was no favourable star which presided over this undertaking. It is true that in 1819 Schleiermacher was the first theologian who had ever lectured upon this subject. But his Life of Jesus did not appear until 1864. Its publication had been so long delayed, partly because it had to be reconstructed from students' note-books, partly because immediately after Schleiermacher, in 1832, had delivered the course for the last time, it was rendered obsolete by the work of Strauss. For the questions raised by the latter's Life of Jesus, published in 1835, Schleiermacher had no answer, and for the wounds which it made, no healing. When, in 1864, Schleiermacher's work was brought forth to view like an embalmed corse, Strauss accorded to the dead work of the great theologian a dignified and striking funeral oration.
Schleiermacher is not in search of the historical Jesus, but of the Jesus Christ of his own system of theology; that is to say, of the historic figure which seems to him appropriate to the self-consciousness of the Redeemer as he represents it. For him the empirical has simply no existence. A natural psychology is scarcely attempted. He comes to the facts with a ready-made dialectic apparatus and sets his puppets in lively action. Schleiermacher's dialectic is not a dialectic which generates reality, like that of Hegel, of which Strauss availed himself, but merely a dialectic of exposition. In this literary dialectic he is the greatest master that ever lived.
The limitations of the historical Jesus both in an upward and downward direction are those only which apply equally to the Jesus of dogma. The uniqueness of His Divine self-consciousness is not to be tampered with. It is equally necessary to avoid Ebionism which does away with the Divine in Him, and Docetism [pg 063] which destroys His humanity. Schleiermacher loves to make his hearers shudder by pointing out to them that the least false step entails precipitation into one or other of these abysses; or at least would entail it for any one who was not under the guidance of his infallible dialectic.
In the course of this dialectic treatment, all the historical questions involved in the life of Jesus come into view one after another, but none of them is posed or solved from the point of view of the historian; they are “moments” in his argument.
He is like a spider at work. The spider lets itself down from aloft, and after making fast some supporting threads to points below, it runs back to the centre and there keeps spinning away. You look on fascinated, and before you know it, you are entangled in the web. It is difficult even for a reader who is strong in the consciousness of possessing a sounder grasp of the history than Schleiermacher to avoid being caught in the toils of that magical dialectic.
And how loftily superior the dialectician is! Paulus had shown that, in view of the use of the title Son of Man, the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus must be interpreted in accordance with the passage in Daniel. On this Schleiermacher remarks: “I have already said that it is inherently improbable that such a predilection (sc. for the Book of Daniel) would have been manifested by Christ, because the Book of Daniel does not belong to the prophetic writings properly so-called, but to the third division of the Old Testament literature.”
In his estimate of the importance to be attached to the story of the baptism, too, he falls behind the historical knowledge of his day. “To lay such great stress upon the baptism,” he says, “leads either to the Gnostic view that it was only there that the λόγος united itself with Jesus, or to the rationalistic view that it was only at the baptism that He became conscious of His vocation.” But what does history care whether a view is gnostic or rationalistic if only it is historical!
This dialectic, so fatal often to sound historical views, might have been expressly created to deal with the question of miracle. Compared with Schleiermacher's discussions all that has been written since upon this subject is mere honest—or dishonest—bungling. Nothing new has been added to what he says, and no one else has succeeded in saying it with the same amazing subtlety. It is true, also, that no one else has shown the same skill in concealing how much in the way of miracle he ultimately retains and how much he rejects. His solution of the problem is, in fact, not historical, but dialectical, an attempt to transcend the necessity for a rationalistic explanation of miracle which does not really succeed in getting rid of it.
[pg 064]Schleiermacher arranges the miracles in an ascending scale of probability according to the degree in which they can be seen to depend on the known influence of spirit upon organic matter. The most easily explained are the miracles of healing “because we are not without analogies to show that pathological conditions of a purely functional nature can be removed by mental influence.” But where, on the other hand, the effect produced by Christ lies outside the sphere of human life, the difficulties involved become insoluble. To get rid, in some measure, of these difficulties he makes use of two expedients. In the first place, he admits that in particular cases the rationalistic method may have a certain limited application; in the second place he, like Hase, recognises a difference between the miracle stories themselves, retaining the Johannine miracles, but surrendering, more or less completely, the Synoptic miracles as not resting on evidence of the same certainty and exactness.
That he is still largely under the sway of rationalism can be seen in the fact that he admits on an equal footing, as conceptions of the resurrection of Jesus, a return to consciousness from a trance-state, or a supernatural restoration to life, thought of as a resurrection. He goes so far as to say that the decision of this question has very little interest for him. He fully accepts the principle of Paulus that apart from corruption there is no certain indication of death.
“All that we can say on this point,” he concludes, “is that even to those whose business it was to ensure the immediate death of the crucified, in order that the bodies might at once be taken down, Christ appeared to be really dead, and this, moreover, although it was contrary to their expectations, for it was a subject of astonishment. It is no use going any further into the matter, since nothing can be ascertained in regard to it.”
What is certain is that Jesus in His real body lived on for a time among His followers; that the Fourth Gospel requires us to believe. The reports of the resurrection are not based upon “apparitions.” Schleiermacher's own opinion is what really happened was reanimation after apparent death. “If Christ had only eaten to show that He could eat, while He really had no need of nourishment, it would have been a pretence—something docetic. This gives us a clue to all the rest, teaching us to hold firmly to the way in which Christ intends Himself to be represented, and to put down all that is miraculous in the accounts of the appearances to the prepossessions of the disciples.”
When He revealed himself to Mary Magdalene He had no certainty that He would frequently see her again. “He was conscious that His present condition was that of genuine human life, but He had no confidence in its continuance.” He bade His [pg 065] disciples meet Him in Galilee because He could there enjoy greater privacy and freedom from observation in His intercourse with them. The difference between the present and the past was only that He no longer showed Himself to the world. “It was possible that a movement in favour of an earthly Messianic Kingdom might break out, and we need only take this possibility into account in order to explain completely why Jesus remained in such close retirement.” “It was the premonition of the approaching end of this second life which led Him to return from Galilee to Jerusalem.”
Of the ascension he says: “Here, therefore, something happened, but what was seen was incomplete, and has been conjecturally supplemented.” The underlying rationalistic explanation shows through!
But if the condition in which Jesus lived on after His crucifixion was “a condition of reanimation,” by what right does Schleiermacher constantly speak of it as a “resurrection,” as if resurrection and reanimation were synonymous terms? Further, is it really true that faith has no interest whatever in the question whether it was as risen from the dead, or merely as recovered from a state of suspended animation, that Jesus showed Himself to His disciples? In regard to this, it might seem, the rationalists were more straightforward.
The moment one tries to take hold of this dialectic it breaks in one's fingers. Schleiermacher would not indeed have ventured to play so risky a game if he had not had a second position to retire to, based on the distinction between the Synoptic and the Johannine miracle stories. In this respect he simplified matters for himself, as compared with the rationalists, even more than Hase. The miracle at the baptism is only intelligible in the narrative of the Fourth Gospel, where it is not a question of an external occurrence, but of a purely subjective experience of John, with which we have nothing to do. The Synoptic story of the temptation has no intelligible meaning. “To change stones into bread, if there were need for it, would not have been a sin.” “A leap from the Temple could have had no attraction for any one.”
The miracles of the birth and childhood are given up without hesitation; they do not belong to the story of the life of Jesus; and it is the same with the miracles at His death. One might fancy it was Strauss speaking when Schleiermacher says: “If we give due consideration to the fact that we have certainly found in these for the most part simple narratives of the last moments of Christ two incidents, such as the rending of the veil of the Temple and the opening of the graves, in reference to which we cannot possibly suppose that they are literal descriptions of actual facts, then we are bound to ask the question whether the same does not apply to many other points. Certainly the mention of [pg 066] the sun's light failing and the consequent great darkness looks very much as if it had been imported by poetic imagination into the simple narrative.”
A rebuke could have no possible effect upon the wind and sea. Here we must suppose either an alteration of the facts or a different causal connexion.
In this way Schleiermacher—and it was for this reason that these lectures on the life of Jesus became so celebrated—enabled dogmatics, though not indeed history, to take a flying leap over the miracle question.
What is chiefly fatal to a sound historical view is his one-sided preference for the Fourth Gospel. It is, according to him, only in this Gospel that the consciousness of Jesus is truly reflected. In this connexion he expressly remarks that of a progress in the teaching of Jesus, and of any “development” in Him, there can be no question. His development is the unimpeded organic unfolding of the idea of the Divine Sonship.
For the outline of the life of Jesus, also, the Fourth Gospel is alone authoritative. “The Johannine representation of the way in which the crisis of His fate was brought about is the only clear one.” The same applies to the narrative of the resurrection in this Gospel. “Accordingly, on this point also,” so he concludes his discussion, “I take it as established that the Gospel of John is the narrative of an eyewitness and forms an organic whole. The first three Gospels are compilations formed out of various narratives which had arisen independently; their discourses are composite structures, and their presentation of the history is such that one can form no idea of the grouping of events.” The “crowded days,” such as that of the sermon on the mount and the day of the parables, exist only in the imagination of the Evangelists. In reality there were no such days. Luke is the only one of them who has some semblance of historical order. His Gospel is compiled with much insight and critical tact out of a number of independent documents, as Schleiermacher believed himself to have shown convincingly in his critical study of Luke's Gospel, published in 1817.
It is only on the ground of such a valuation of the sources that we can arrive at a just estimate of the different representations of the locality of the life of Jesus. “The contradictions,” Schleiermacher proceeds, “could not be explained if all our Gospels stood equally close to Jesus. But if John stands closer than the others, we may perhaps find the key in the fact that John, too, mentions it as a prevailing opinion in Jerusalem that Jesus was a Galilaean, and that Luke, when he has got to the end of the sections which show skilful arrangement and are united by similarity of subject, gathers all the rest into the framework of a journey to Jerusalem. Following this analogy, and not remembering that Jesus had occasion to go [pg 067] several times a year to Jerusalem, the other two gathered into one mass all that happened there on various occasions. This could only have been done by Hellenists.”26
Schleiermacher is quite insensible to the graphic realism of the description of the last days at Jerusalem in Mark and Matthew, and has no suspicion that if only a single one of the Jerusalem sayings in the Synoptists is true Jesus had never before spoken in Jerusalem.
The ground of Schleiermacher's antipathy to the Synoptists lies deeper than a mere critical view as to their composition. The fact is that their “picture of Christ” does not agree with that which he wishes to insert into the history. When it serves his purpose, he does not shrink from the most arbitrary violence. He abolishes the scene in Gethsemane because he infers from the silence of John that it cannot have taken place. “The other Evangelists,” he explains, “give us an account of a sudden depression and deep distress of spirit which fell upon Jesus, and which He admitted to His disciples, and they tell us how He sought relief from it in prayer, and afterwards recovered His serenity and resolution. John passes over this in silence, and his narrative of what immediately precedes is not consistent with it.” It is evidently a symbolical story, as the thrice-repeated petition shows. “If they speak of such a depression of spirit, they have given the story that form in order that the example of Christ might be the more applicable to others in similar circumstances.”
On these premises it is possible to write a Life of Christ; it is not possible to write a Life of Jesus. It is, therefore, not by accident that Schleiermacher regularly speaks, not of Jesus, but of Christ.