forth into the light. There was no reason why it should feel itself a stranger at this period, and it had no need to be ashamed of itself. Its rationalistic birth-marks were concealed by its brilliant dialectic.[1] And the only real advance in the meantime was the general recognition that the Life of Jesus was not to be interpreted on rationalistic, but on historical lines. All other, more definite, historical results had proved more or less illusory; there is no vitality in them. The works of Renan, Strauss Schenkel, Weizsacker, and Keim are in essence only different ways of carrying out a single ground-plan. To read them one after another is to be simply appalled at the stereotyped uniformity of the world of thought in which they move. You feel that you have read exactly the same thing in the others, almost in identical phrases. To obtain the works of Schenkel and Weizsacker you only need to weaken down in Strauss the sharp discrimination between John and the Synoptists so far as to allow of the Fourth Gospel being used to some extent as an historical source "in the higher sense," and to put the hypothesis of the priority of Mark in place of the Tubingen view adopted by Strauss. The latter is an external operation and does not essentially modify the view of the Life of Jesus, since by admitting the Johannine scheme the Marcan plan is again disturbed, and Strauss's arbitrary spiritualisation of the Synoptics comes to something not very different from the acceptance of that "in a higher sense historical Gospel" alongside of them. The whole discussion regarding the sources is only loosely connected with the process of arriving at the portrait of Jesus, since this portrait is fixed from the first, being determined by the mental atmosphere and religious horizon of the 'sixties. They all portray the Jesus of liberal theology; the only difference is that one is a little more conscientious in his colouring than another, and one perhaps has a little more taste than another, or is less concerned about the consequences.
The desire to escape in some way from the alternative between the Synoptists and John was native to the Marcan hypothesis. Weisse had endeavored to effect this by distinguishing between the sources in the Fourth Gospel.[2] Schenkel and Weizsacker are
- ↑ The lines of Schleiermacher's work were followed by Bunsen. His Life of Jesus forms vol. ix. of his Bibelwerk. (Edited by Holtzmann, 1865.) He accepts the Fourth Gospel as an historical source and treats the question of miracle as not yet settled. Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen, born in 1791 at Korbach in Waldeck, was Prussian ambassador at Rome, Berne, and London, and settled later in Heidelberg. He was well read in theology and philology, and gradually came, in spite of his friendly relations with Friedrich Wilhelm IV., to entertain more liberal views on religion. The issue of his Bibelwerk fur die Gemeinde was begun in 1858. He died in 1860. (Best known in England as the Chevalier Bunsen.)
- ↑ Ch. H. Weisse, Die evangelische Geschichte, Leipzig, 1838. Die Evangelienfrage in ihrem gegenwartigen Stadium. (The Present Position of the Problem of the Gospels.) Leipzig, 1856. He regarded the discourses as historical the narrative portions as of secondary origin. Alexander Schweizer, again, wished to distinguish a Jerusalem source and a Galilaean source, the latter being unreliable. Das Evangelium Johannis nach seinem inneren Werte und seiner Bedeutung fur das Leben Jesu, 1841. (The Gospel of John considered in Relation to its Intrinsic Value the its Importance as a Source for the Life of Jesus.) See p. 127 f. Renan takes narrative portions as authentic and the discourses as secondary.
