evidence with the rubbish thrown out from another portion of the excavations.
Again, he sometimes rules out statements by assuming their impossibility on purely dialectical grounds, or by playing off the narratives one against another. The Baptist's message to Jesus is a case in point. This is connected with the fact that he often fails to realise the strong conarmation which the narratives derive from their connexion with the preceding and following context.
That, however, was only to be expected. Who ever discovered a true principle without pressing its application too far?
What really alarmed his contemporaries was not so much the comprehensive application of the mythical theory, as the general mining and sapping operations which they were obliged to see brought to bear upon the Gospels.
In section after section Strauss cross-examines the reports on every point, down to the minutest detail, and then pronounces in what proportion an alloy of myth enters into each of them. In every case the decision is unfavourable to the Gospel of John. Strauss was the first to take this view. It is true that, at the end of the eighteenth century, many doubts as to the authenticity of this Gospel had been expressed, and Bretschneider, the famous General Superintendent at Gotha (1776-1848), had made a tentative collection of them in his Probabilia.[1] The essay made some stir at the time. But Schleiermacher threw the aegis of his authority over the authenticity of the Gospel, and it was the favourite Gospel of the rationalists because it contained fewer miracles than the others. Bretschneider himself declared that he had been brought to a better opinion through the controversy.
After this episode the Johannine question had been shelved for fifteen years. The excitement was, therefore, all the greater when Strauss re-opened the discussion. He was opposing a dogma of critical theology, which, even at the present day, is wont to defend its dogmas with a tenacity beyond that of the Church itself.
The luminous haze of apparent circumstantiality which had hitherto prevented men from recognising the true character of this Gospel is completely dissipated. Strauss shows that the Johannine representation of the life of Jesus is dominated by a theory, and that its portraiture shows the further development of the tendencies which are perceptible even in the Synoptists. He shows this, for example, in the case of the Johannine narrative of the baptism of Jesus, in which critics had hitherto seen the most credible account of what occurred, pointing out that it is just in this pseudo-simplicity that the process of bringing Jesus and the Baptist into the closest possible relations reaches its limit.
- ↑ Probabilia de evangelii et epistolarum loannis Apostoli indole et origine cruditorum iudiciis modeste subjecit C. Th. Bretschneider. Leipzig, 1820.
