This logical consequence, which was at the time deemed an unheard-of innovation, notwithstanding the opinions of a few individual critics (Vogel, Bretschneider), Strauss had the courage to draw. By that act he cast off the fetters by which the examination of the Gospels had till then been bound, and secured a free field for a thorough-going criticism of them. Since the external evidence of the authorship of the Gospels is not of a kind or a date such as to compel us to consider the tradition of their apostolic origin established, and as the matter of all the Gospels alike is not free from historical improbability, there is nothing, Strauss argued, to prevent our complete abandonment of the historicity of their miraculous narratives, though the Rationalists continue to maintain it, or our treating them as religious legends or myths, similar to those which, as was admitted, the Old Testament contained. The novelty in the work of Strauss was not the application of the principle of “myth” to Biblical narratives; others had already made use of it in the case of the Old and to some extent in the case of the New Testament; the originality lay in the uncompromising thoroughness with which the principle was applied to every section of the gospel story; the originality lay in the merciless acumen and clearness with which the discrepancies between the Gospels and the difficulties presented to the critical understanding by their narratives were laid bare, and with which all the subterfuges of supernaturalist apologists, as well as all the forced and artificial interpretations of semi-critical Rationalists, were exposed, thereby cutting off all ways of escape from the final consequences of criticism.

The merciless thoroughness and unreserved honesty with which criticism did its negative work in this book, by exposing the baselessness of the supposed knowledge of the gospel history, produced a profound shock amongst theologians and laymen. It was not merely the untaught multitude who believed that the foundations of Christianity must perish with the miraculous stories of the Bible; learned theologians were distressed as the daring critic so rudely, and without any regard to consequences, roused them from the illusions of their sentimental or speculative dogmatism and their precipitate treaty of peace between faith and knowledge. “Strauss was hated,” as Baur truly said, “because the spirit of the time was unable to look upon its own portrait, which he held up before it in faithful, clearly drawn lines. The spirit of this age resists with all its power the proof of its ignorance on a matter about which it has long thought itself certain. Instead of acknowledging what had to be acknowledged, if any progress was to be made, all possible attempts were instituted to create fresh illusions as to the true state of the case, by reviving obsolete hypotheses and by theological charlatanism. But a higher certainty as to the truth of the gospel history can be attained in no other way than by acknowledging, on the basis of Strauss’s criticism, that our previous knowledge is no knowledge at all.” But here we come upon the limits of the criticism of Strauss: it brought home to men the fact of their want of knowledge, but it did not conduct to the required new and positive knowledge. This Strauss was unable to do, because he offered a critique of the gospel history only, without a critique of the documents which form the sources of this history.

In these words Baur has accurately described the main defect of Strauss’s book. When Strauss drew from the discrepancies and contradictions of the various narratives of the Gospels the conclusion that they have all alike little credibility, the conclusion was intelligible enough in reply to the ingenious artifices of the traditional harmonists, who maintained that in spite of the contradictions the evangelists were all alike worthy of credit; but really this line of procedure on the part of Strauss conformed as little as that of the harmonists to the principles of strict historical inquiry. These principles require us to examine the relative value of the various sources with reference to their age, to the situation, the character, the interests, and aims of their author; to assign accordingly to one account a higher measure of credibility than to another; and so, by distinguishing between what is better and what is not so well attested, to make out what is probable and reach the original matter of fact. It is true Strauss made some advance towards such a differentiation of the relative value of the gospel narratives; and particularly with reference to the inferior historical value of the Johannine in comparison with the Synoptic narrative, he has made acute observations, the worth of which ought to be estimated the higher as they boldly opposed the then dominant preference for the Gospel of John, and effectively prepared the way for the criticism of Baur. But it was not Strauss’s forte to prepare, as the foundation of the material critique of the gospel history, a thorough critique of the literary sources, nor, in the state of the general science of criticism at the time, could this be very well expected. When all deductions have been made, to Strauss belongs the honour of having given, by his criticism of the gospel narratives, the most effective impulse to a more penetrating examination of the sources of the gospel story, and of having prepared the way for this to no small extent, particularly as regards the Fourth Gospel. Baur’s classical critique of this Gospel completed in this direction the criticism of Strauss, and laid its foundations deeper. As regards the Synoptic Gospels, Weisse and Ewald, Holtzmann and Volkmar, did good work towards clearing up the relations of the Gospels to each other, especially in establishing the priority of Mark, by which a firmer basis was laid for the positive decision of the question as to the historical foundations of the gospel tradition. The fruit of this critique of the sources, carried on from various sides with painstaking industry, was the new literature dealing with the life of Jesus, which, just a generation after the first Leben Jesu of Strauss, took up again the problems it had raised, but in a new fashion, and with improved critical apparatus. We shall have further on to refer to Strauss’s new life of Jesus.

The same scholar, Weisse, who was the first to point out the want in Strauss’s book of a more satisfactory critique of the sources, and who had sought to supply this defect in his Evangelische Geschichte (1838), called attention at the same time to a defect in the mythical theory of Strauss. Weisse was fully agreed with Strauss so far, that we must acknowledge the presence of religious myths in miraculous narratives of the Bible, but he was not satisfied with the way in which Strauss had explained their origin. According to Strauss, the early Christians had simply transferred to Jesus as the actual Messiah the miraculous legends of the Old Testament, out of which the Jews were supposed to have composed the miraculous portrait of their expected Messiah; and he was right in thinking that the miraculous stories of the Old Testament do undoubtedly supply the motives and models of no few narratives in the New Testament, but not, surely, of all. Precisely the chief miracles—the birth of Jesus, his baptism, transfiguration, resurrection, the change of water into wine at Cana, the stilling of the storm, and walking on the sea—violence must be used to explain these miracles by reference to Old Testament types, and the Jewish idea of the Messiah offers no lines corresponding to these. At this point therefore, at all events, we must look about us for another method of explanation. And Weisse was undoubtedly right in pointing to the spontaneous productivity of the Christian spirit in the primitive Church as the source of the miraculous narratives, in which it gave expression in symbolic and allegorical forms to its ideal truth and the new inspired life of which it was conscious. Not that these narratives were intended by the narrators themselves to be merely allegories, or symbolical illustrations of spiritual truths; but the religious imagination gave birth to these illustrations after the manner of unconscious poetry, that is, without distinguishing between the poetic form and the essential truth of the idea; believing, as the religious imagination did, in the ideal content of the narratives, and being at the same time unable to give vivid and sensible expression to it in any other than the material form of outward miracles, it involuntarily came to believe also in the reality of the symbolical form of the narrative to which it had itself given rise; it conceived idea and history both together in such inseparable combination as to confer on each equal truth and certainty.

In the production of such ideal narratives the same process is observable to-day in the experience of simple religious believers: feeling the ideal truth of the content of the stories, they come to believe also in the reality of the outward history in which the idea has for them been incorporated. But the critical understanding of the historical inquirer is permitted, and indeed is bound, to distinguish clearly and definitely, as the simple-minded believer cannot do, between the spiritual idea and the outward form of its representation, and to find in the former both the productive power and the permanent kernel within the outward husk. This explanation of the miraculous legends of the Bible is not only more correct and profound than Strauss’s from the point of view of historical science, but for the religious consciousness it is far less objectionable, as Weisse observes with truth; inasmuch as in this case the legends do not appear as the worthless product of the idle play of the imagination, but as the normal expression, rationally and psychologically intelligible, of a creative religious spirit, which displays its treasures of ideal truth in this legendary and mythical poetry for the benefit of the originators and the wider world. Nor should it be left unnoticed that Strauss himself had already indicated in a few cases this more profound explanation of myths by means of the religious idea. At the close of his interpretation of the story of the Transfiguration (§ 107), for instance, he says, we may see from this example very plainly how the natural system of explanation, by insisting on the historical certainty of the narratives, lets go their ideal truth, sacrificing the content to the form of the story, whereas the mythical interpretation, by resigning the historical material body of such narratives, really rescues and preserves their idea, their soul and spirit. He might, however, have unfolded the idea of the Transfiguration with greater definiteness and fulness if he had not merely alluded to the dogmatic discussion of Paul in 2 Cor. iii. 7 sq., but had recognised it as the real theme of the gospel story, and had interpreted the latter accordingly. In the same way, in the case of the story of the birth of Jesus (Luke i. and ii.), Strauss laid great emphasis on the analogies and figures of the Old Testament, which, after all, could only contribute as secondary motives in the formation of this birth-story, while its real origin is to be sought in the Pauline Messianic idea of “the Son of God, according to the spirit of holiness” (Rom. i. 4; 1 Cor. xv. 45 sq.), a fact Strauss overlooked. This defect takes a really surprising form when he comes to explain the miracles of the Fourth Gospel, which, in complete independence of any suggestion from the Old Testament, are entirely based upon the dogmatic ideas of the Alexandrian theology, and simply supply their transparent symbolic vestment. How much more truthfully and profoundly can the miracle at Cana, or the raising of Lazarus, or the cure of the man born blind, be interpreted from this point of view than from that of Strauss! In this respect Baur’s interpretation of the Fourth Gospel was an immense advance beyond Strauss, as the latter himself acknowledged subsequently.