With the above defects of Strauss’s method of interpretation is connected, in the last place, the fact that the outcome of his book in reference to the decisive question,—What, then, is the historical kernel of the evangelical tradition, what the real character of Jesus and of his work?—is meagre and unsatisfactory. In the closing essay at the end of his work, it is true, he endeavoured to restore dogmatically what he had destroyed critically, but he effected this in a way which amounted to the transformation of religious faith in Christ into a metaphysical allegory. The predications of faith with regard to Christ are to be regarded as containing predications as to the relations of the human race to the Absolute, as to the self-abasement of the Infinite to the Finite, and the return of the Infinite to itself, as to mind and its power over nature, and its dependence on it, and the like. In all this Strauss was led astray by the influence of the Hegelian philosophy, which looked for the truth of religion in logical and metaphysical categories instead of in the facts and experiences of moral feeling and volition. But as there is no essential relation between these metaphysical ideas and the person of Jesus, he is made arbitrarily, as any one else might have been, an illustration and example of absolute ideas to which he stands in no more intimate relation than the rest of the human race; whereby the special historical importance of the originator of the Christian community, and of the first model of its religious and moral life, is not only left without explanation, but is lost altogether, a result which does violence not merely to the religious consciousness, but is unsatisfactory to historical science, which is concerned to understand Jesus as the originating source of Christianity. It is quite true that we can go with Strauss in his answer to the alternative of Ullmann whether the church created the Christ of the Gospels or he the church, by declaring the alternative false, and the two things in so far both tenable as the Christ of the Gospels is a creation of the faith of the church, but this faith an effect of the person of the historical Jesus. We find this answer to Ullmann just, but cannot free Strauss from the charge of having worked out in his book the first only of these two positions, and of having passed over the second. He has shown no more than that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah. But how did the church come by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah? To this question—which is the main question of a Life of Jesus—Strauss gave his readers no answer. Undoubtedly it can be urged in his defence that the criticism of the sources was at that time still in a condition of too great confusion and uncertainty to permit any successful answer to that problem of the historical kernel of the life of Jesus. Nevertheless the difficulty of the matter could not relieve the historian of the duty of at least making an attempt to trace from the materials left to him, as the residue of his critical analysis of the deeds and words of Jesus, the main outlines of his character, to bring out the peculiarity and originality of his religious genius, and in this way to discover in the original personality and reforming activity of Jesus the originating cause of the rise of the community of his disciples and their faith in him as the Messiah and his divine mission. If in his closing essay Strauss had presented a religious and moral description of Jesus of this nature, instead of a metaphysical allegory as a substitute for the shattered mythological conception of tradition, though the objection of the church to his work would not have been wanting, it would then undoubtedly have taken a less passionately denunciatory form than was the case, in consequence of the purely negative character of the result, unrelieved by any modifying conclusion.

In proportion to the strength of the feeling of these defects, shared by readers of all parties, was the urgency of the duty laid upon scientific theologians of preparing, by a renewed and more thorough examination of the Gospels, the stones of a new edifice to be reared upon the site laid bare by Strauss’s critical labours. “In the darkness which criticism produces, by putting out all the lights hitherto thought to be historical, the eye has first to learn by gradual habit to again distinguish a few single objects,” as Strauss himself remarked in his third edition. But this difficult task was not accomplished by those apologists who endeavoured to make good the damage by the antiquated arts of the harmonists, with their petty concessions, mystifications, and evasions, but by those courageous inquirers who, undeterred by dogmatic considerations, sought by a strictly historical method to set in the true light the exact composition and the mutual relations of the evangelical documents. We have already remarked that Baur and his disciples, the so-called Tübingen school, took a leading part in this work, while other independent students co-operated with them, supplementing and correcting their labours. This, however, is not the place to follow these inquiries in detail; but we must glance at their result as regards the historical treatment of the life of Jesus.

For an entire generation the examination of the literary details of the Gospels had occupied theologians so exclusively that the interest in the supreme problems of the evangelical history seemed to have been almost lost sight of. But this interest was newly awakened, and made itself felt far beyond learned theological circles, by the nearly simultaneous publication of Renan’s Vie de Jésus and Strauss’s second Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk (1864). These two works, with all their dissimilarity, resemble each other in this, that they were both written by scholars of the highest eminence, not for the learned world, but for educated people generally, both throwing overboard, therefore, the ballast of learned detailed criticism, and presenting the results of their inquiries in a language intelligible to everybody, and attractive from its literary excellence. They are alike also in this, that both subordinate the criticism of the gospel traditions to a positive description of the personality of Jesus, of his essential religious tendency and genius, of his relation to the Messianic idea of his nation, to the law and the temple, to the hierarchy and religious and political parties of his time, both seeking an explanation of the reformatory success of the commencement, and also of the tragical issue of his labours in these factors. But inasmuch as Strauss confines himself to what he can deem the ascertained or probable facts, after a strict critique of the sources, the portrait delineated by him turns out naturally somewhat indistinct and defective in its outlines; the meagreness of the result answers to the caution of his historical conscience. Renan, on the other hand, feels no such scruples; in his criticism of the sources he goes to work with a much lighter heart, and claims for the biographer the right to help himself over the lacunæ and obscurities or contradictions of his authorities by calling in the aid of the creative imagination, with its powers of combination and inference. By this means he has succeeded in presenting a life of Jesus distinguished for its epic vividness and dramatic development, but its æsthetic charm has been purchased at the price of its historical solidity. This novelistic feature becomes most questionable when it wanders into the vagaries of the naturalistic explanation of the miracles (e.g. the raising of Lazarus), and in such cases casts reflections on the moral character of Jesus. On the other hand, for Renan must be claimed the merit of having emphasised the social aspects of the Messianic mission of Jesus, and of having attempted to sketch the development of his inner life, a change in the phases of his reformatory labours. As to Strauss’s second Life of Jesus, its strength lies, as in the first, not so much in the first part, which deals with the positive side of the history, as in the second part, where it comes to treat of the mythical side of the history. But in the second work, in the place of the analysis of the traditions given in the first, we get a synthetic presentation of the rise and gradual growth and elaboration, in more and more exalted forms, of the idea of the Christ of mythical tradition; the successive stages of the development of the Christian consciousness are set forth by reference to the genesis of the ideas of Christ’s person, power, and supernatural exaltation. Thus this genetic method of treatment, followed in the later work, supplants and confirms the result of the former one; while the latter had shown that the miraculous narratives in the Gospels are myth and not history, the new Life shows how in these myths, after all, history is reflected, namely, the history of the religious consciousness of the Christian community. The great advance of this new treatment upon that of the previous work was the fruit of the intervening studies of Baur and his disciples, to which Renan, to the detriment of the critical and historical value of his work, had not paid sufficient attention.