Justified True Belief

(●) The young theologian who told Europe that the Gospels are myth, and set the question every later defense of them has had to answer. + In the summer of 1835 a twenty-seven-year-old tutor at the theological college in Tübingen published the first volume of a book on the life of Jesus, and the second followed in 1836. He was unknown when the first volume went on sale. Within months he was the most talked-about theologian in Germany and had lost his job, and he never taught in a university again, for the remaining thirty-nine years of his life. What David Friedrich Strauss said was simpler than the fifteen hundred pages he took to say it. The Gospel stories, he argued, are neither reports of miracles that happened nor garbled memories of ordinary events. They are myth: stories the first Christian communities produced out of what they already believed, without meaning to deceive anyone. Nobody lied. Nobody was fooled. The faith came first, and the narrative grew up around it, the way a pearl grows around a grain of sand. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has nothing to do with agreeing with him. Before Strauss, a defender of the Gospels could argue about how to interpret the miracle stories. After him, the prior question could not be dodged: are these documents historical reports at all, and if so, how do we know? Much of what the last two centuries have produced on the reliability of the Gospels, the dating of the manuscripts, the behavior of eyewitness testimony, the speed at which legends actually form, belongs to the argument he forced into the open. Albert Schweitzer, who had no sympathy with Strauss’s conclusions, opened his chapter on him with a sentence worth keeping in mind through everything that follows: "In order to understand Strauss one must love him."

(●) 1808 AD: Born at Ludwigsburg to a failing merchant and a practical, believing mother. + David Friedrich Strauss was born on 27 January 1808 at Ludwigsburg, a garrison and palace town a few miles north of Stuttgart, in the Protestant kingdom of Württemberg. His father was a small tradesman who cared more for books and ideas than for the shop, and the business slid quietly downhill through the boy’s childhood. Schweitzer, who knew the family papers, judged that the son took his ability from his mother, a steady and sensible woman whose piety showed itself in what she did rather than in what she said. Long after he had become notorious, Strauss wrote a memorial of her for his daughter to be given to her on the day she was confirmed. Württemberg had a pipeline for clever boys, and it ran into the ministry. At thirteen he was sent to the lower seminary at Blaubeuren, near Ulm, to be prepared for theology, and four years later, in 1825, he went up to the university of Tübingen and the Stift, the state-funded theological college where Württemberg trained its pastors. One of his masters at Blaubeuren followed him there: Ferdinand Christian Baur, who would go on to found the Tübingen school of New Testament criticism and who taught his pupils, above everything else, to read ancient documents as documents. The philosophy lectures bored him, so he and his friends did their own reading: Schelling, the romantics, Jacob Böhme, and, for a while, the sleepwalkers and spirit-seers who fascinated southern Germany in those years. He made repeated journeys to Weinsberg to visit the poet and physician Justinus Kerner and the famous "Prophetess of Prevorst," a young woman who went into trances and reported visions, and he had to work deliberately to get free of that dream-world. Then came Schleiermacher, and then Hegel, and the last year at Tübingen was spent reading Hegel’s Phenomenology with his friend Christian Märklin. He passed his examinations brilliantly in 1830, spent nine happy months as assistant to a country pastor at Klein-Ingersheim, where the parish loved him, and then went to teach Latin, Hebrew and history at the seminary at Maulbronn.

(●) 1831 AD: He went to Berlin to sit at Hegel’s feet, and Hegel was dead within weeks of his arrival. + In October 1831 Strauss gave up the Maulbronn post and travelled to Berlin, where the two most famous teachers in Germany were both lecturing: Friedrich Schleiermacher, the theologian who had taught a generation to locate religion in feeling and dependence rather than in doctrine, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the philosopher whose system Strauss had adopted as his own. He called on Hegel not long after arriving, and on 14 November cholera carried the old man off. Strauss heard the news in Schleiermacher’s own house, from Schleiermacher himself, and is said to have blurted out, with a tactlessness made worse by who was telling him, "And it was to hear him that I came to Berlin!" He stayed anyway, and got hold of a copy of a student’s notebook of Schleiermacher’s lectures on the life of Jesus. Reading it, he said afterwards, stirred him to opposition. Schleiermacher was trying to hold together a Jesus who could be studied as a man in history and a Christ who could be worshipped, and to Strauss the join was visible and dishonest. Berlin gave him something else as well. He fell in with the junior men who had taken up Hegel’s philosophy and were pressing it far harder against church doctrine than their master ever had, the group that would later be called the young Hegelians, and above all with Wilhelm Vatke, who was turning the same method on the Old Testament. Out of those conversations came a plan. He would write a history of how Christian ideas came to be, on the principle that once you can show where a doctrine came from you have the measure by which to judge whether it deserves to stand. The life of Jesus was to be the prologue to it. In the spring of 1832 he came back to Tübingen as a Repetent, a junior tutor in the Stift with the right to lecture. He lectured on logic, on Plato, on the history of philosophy, and on Hegel above all, and he was a sensation: Eduard Zeller, who sat in those rooms as a student, never forgot them. Three happy semesters later it was taken away from him. The philosophical faculty moved to strip the tutors of the right to teach philosophy at all, Strauss was told to suspend his lectures, and he found himself pushed back onto theology. In the autumn of 1833 he gave up lecturing altogether, kept his place in the Stift, and sat down at the window of the tutors’ room, looking out over the gateway arch, to write.

(●) 1835 AD: Das Leben Jesu made him famous in a month and unemployable for life. + He finished the manuscript in about eighteen months. The preface to the first volume is signed at Tübingen on 24 May 1835, and promises that the second volume, which would take on the miracles, was already written and would follow at once; it appeared the next year. The title was flat and academic, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, the life of Jesus critically examined, and the book inside was flatter still: section after section in which the supernatural reading of a Gospel story is stated and answered, then the rationalist reading, which keeps the event and explains it by natural causes, is stated and answered, and then the mythical reading is offered as the only one left standing. The effect was immediate and enormous. Nothing quite like it had been published in Germany, and the replies came from every direction at once: from Tholuck and Neander and Ullmann on one side, and from the young Bruno Bauer, who reviewed the book for the Hegelian right, the wing of Hegel’s followers who held that the master’s philosophy propped the church’s doctrines up rather than dissolving them, and who only years later swung round to the view that Strauss had not gone nearly far enough. Baur, his own old teacher, made the criticism that stung most, because it was a criticism of method: Strauss had put the Gospel history on trial without first putting the Gospels on trial, and you cannot judge what a narrative is worth until you know who wrote it, when, and why. The price was paid at once. Johann Christian Friedrich Steudel, a member of the theological faculty and head of the Stift, went to the ministry in Stuttgart, and Strauss was removed from his tutorship. A man who had been lecturing to packed rooms on Hegel was transferred to a teaching post at the lyceum, the classical high school, in his home town of Ludwigsburg. He gave that up too, and settled in Stuttgart as a private scholar, living off his pen and answering his attackers in the three parts of his Streitschriften (literally "quarrel-writings"), which appeared in 1837. He had turned twenty-nine.

(●) 1839 AD: Zurich gave him a professor’s chair and pensioned him off before he could teach from it. + For a moment it looked as though he might be allowed back in. By the end of the 1830s the attacks had worn on him, and he was in a conciliatory mood: the third edition of the Life of Jesus, which came out in 1838 and 1839, walked back a string of his hardest positions, conceding that the fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, might be more nearly what it claimed to be than he had allowed, and that a recognizable human figure might be recoverable after all. He wrote a gentle little essay in the same season, Transient and Permanent Elements in Christianity. In January 1839 the canton of Zurich appointed him to its vacant chair of dogmatics, the professorship in Christian doctrine itself. Zurich erupted. Orthodox opinion in the canton, and with it the pietists, the movement of heart religion whose people met in small groups for Bible reading and prayer and who were thick on the ground in the Swiss countryside, treated the appointment as an insult aimed at every parish in the canton. Petitions came down from those country parishes, and the government retreated and pensioned Strauss off, with a thousand francs a year, before he had given a single lecture. The retreat did not save them. In September an armed column of country people marched on the city, the government fell, and the affair passed into Swiss history as the Züriputsch. Strauss, in Stuttgart, had become a political event without leaving his desk. He drew the obvious conclusion and stopped conciliating. The fourth edition of the Life of Jesus, in 1840, took the concessions back, with a preface saying that he could not think how he had come to make them. This is the edition that George Eliot would translate. Alongside it he published the work he had planned first of all, Die christliche Glaubenslehre, the Christian doctrine of faith, in two volumes in 1840 and 1841. Its governing idea is one sentence long: the history of a doctrine is the criticism of it. Trace how the church came to teach something, he argued, and you will have explained it away.

(●) 1842 AD: A marriage and a seat in parliament both failed him, and he left theology for twenty years of writing other men’s lives. + In August 1842, secure for the first time after the settlement of his father’s estate, Strauss married Agnese Schebest, a celebrated opera singer. It went wrong quickly, and not for any single reason. She could take no interest in the work that was his whole life, he was pedantic and difficult at close quarters, money was short, and the house was not a happy one. They moved out to Sontheim, near Heilbronn, on the theory that the country would help, and the country did nothing of the kind. After some four years and two children they separated. The children stayed with their father, and Strauss paid her an allowance until her death in 1870. He wrote almost nothing for years. The one flash of the old fire is a satire of 1847, The Romantic on the Throne of the Caesars, in which Julian the Apostate is drawn so as to be unmistakably King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Then came 1848, the year Europe rose. The citizens of Ludwigsburg wanted Strauss for the Frankfurt parliament, and the pietist villages around the town voted him down. His own town sent him to the Württemberg chamber of deputies instead, where he disappointed nearly everyone who had elected him. He found the revolutionary speeches empty, voted with the right, and refused to join in honoring Robert Blum, a radical shot by court martial in Vienna, on the ground that being shot does not make a man a hero. His constituents censured him. He resigned his seat before the year was out, and, as he put it himself, jumped out of the boat. What followed was twenty years of restless travel and other people’s biographies: the poet Schubart, his own friend Christian Märklin, the Renaissance scholar Nicodemus Frischlin, and above all the three volumes on Ulrich von Hutten, the knight and pamphleteer of Luther’s generation. They are still readable, and they made him a figure in German literature quite apart from theology. In 1862 he wrote on Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the eighteenth-century Hamburg professor whose secret manuscript attacking the Gospels had been published after his death, and in doing so rediscovered for his countrymen the man who had begun the whole line of inquiry Strauss himself stood in.

(●) 1864 AD: He rewrote the book for ordinary readers, and then argued Germany’s case in the war in open letters to Renan. + The French scholar Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, his own life of Jesus, had appeared in Paris in 1863 and sold in numbers no work of German scholarship ever had, which seems to have stung Strauss into coming back to his own subject after twenty years away. Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, the life of Jesus prepared for the German people, came out in 1864: the same case, but written for readers without Greek, with a sketch of the Jesus he thought could still be recovered and a preface generous about Renan. It sold well and changed nothing. The following year he published a short, sharp book against Schleiermacher’s lectures on the life of Jesus, printed at last in 1864, more than thirty years after Strauss had read them in a borrowed notebook: The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History. The title has outlived the book, and the distinction it names is still argued over. From 1865 he lived at Darmstadt, and there he acquired, of all things, a royal audience. Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s second daughter and by then a Hessian princess, asked him to lecture to her on Voltaire; the lectures were published in 1870. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out that summer, Strauss wrote to Renan about it in two open letters, of 12 August and 29 September, setting out Germany’s reasons for the war and its claim on Alsace; Renan answered the first in the Paris press, denying that language or descent can decide what nation a people belongs to. The letters were read everywhere and made him, briefly and improbably, the voice of his nation. For a man who had spent thirty-five years being told he was the enemy of everything his neighbours believed, the applause must have been strange to hear.

(●) 1872 AD: His last book asked whether he was still a Christian and answered no, and he was dead within eighteen months. + Der alte und der neue Glaube, the old faith and the new, came out in 1872 and is built around four questions: Are we still Christians? Have we still a religion? What is our conception of the world? How are we to order our lives? To the first he answered no. To the second he answered yes, if a feeling of dependence on the whole of things may be called religion. For the third and fourth he handed the work over to Darwin and to the physical sciences, which he had come to late and admired uncritically. It sold through edition after edition and pleased almost nobody. His old opponents announced that he had gone bankrupt at last, which was what they had been waiting the better part of forty years to say, while his old allies were dismayed by the flatness of what he had put in the creed’s place. The hardest blow came from a quarter he can hardly have expected. Friedrich Nietzsche, then twenty-eight and a professor at Basel, used the book as the target of the first of his Untimely Meditations in 1873, "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer," a demolition aimed less at the arguments than at the comfortable, self-satisfied tone of a man who thought he had settled things. Schweitzer, reviewing the quarrel a generation later, thought the theologians had congratulated themselves too easily on not having been ruined by what he called Strauss’s unimaginative honesty. Before the year was out Strauss knew he was ill; the trouble was an internal ulcer, and it killed him slowly. He bore it, by every account, with composure, and wrote a set of verses at the end of December 1873 about a light going dim and a sound dying away in the air. Eduard Zeller, his friend and literary executor, who wrote the memoir of him in the year he died, reported that he read Plato’s Phaedo in the Greek in his last days, and that his friends said goodbye to him with the feelings Plato describes at the close of that dialogue. He died at Ludwigsburg, the town he was born in, on 8 February 1874, and was buried as his own instructions required, without a minister and without the tolling of the bells.

What He Taught

(T1) The Gospels are neither supernatural history nor ordinary events misreported. They are myth. + Picture a village where a much-loved teacher died forty years ago, and where the story now told about him is that the river stopped rising on the night he prayed. Three explanations are available. The river really did stop, because God stopped it. The river happened to crest that night, and the coincidence grew in the retelling. Or the village believed from the start that he was the kind of man God listens to, and the story about the river is what that belief looks like once it has been made into a story. Those three positions map exactly onto the argument Strauss was making. The first was the supernaturalist reading held by the orthodox theology of his day. The second was rationalism, above all the enormous commentaries of Heinrich Paulus, who explained the feeding of the five thousand by a hidden store of bread and the walking on water by a sandbar. Strauss thought rationalism was worse than orthodoxy, because at least orthodoxy took the text to mean what it says, while rationalism kept the shell of the narrative and hollowed it out. His third option needs its term taught, because he was not using "myth" the way it gets used in an argument today. A myth, in the sense Strauss took over from the classical scholars of his generation, is not a lie and not a fairy tale. It is a narrative that a community produces out of an idea it already holds, in order to picture the idea as an event. Nobody sits down to compose it and nobody is deceived by it. It is the form belief takes when a community tells itself where it came from. Applied to the Gospels, that meant the evangelists were not fraudsters, which was Reimarus’s charge, and not muddled reporters, which was Paulus’s. They were the voice of a believing community that had already concluded Jesus was the Messiah, and was now saying so in story.

(Q) "The exegesis of the ancient church set out from the double presupposition: first, that the gospels contained a history, and secondly, that this history was a supernatural one. Rationalism rejected the latter of these presuppositions, but only to cling the more tenaciously to the former." + Source: Strauss, Life of Jesus Critically Examined, Preface to the first German edition (George Eliot’s translation, 1846). Exegesis is simply the careful reading of a text to find out what it says. Strauss is laying out his ground plan on the opening pages of the book: the church assumed the Gospels were history and that the history was supernatural, the rationalists dropped the second assumption and held the first all the harder, and he proposed to drop both and ask whether these documents are historical at all. The sentence that follows in the preface is the one that made him famous and unemployable: science, he says, cannot rest satisfied with this half-measure (T1).

(T2) No miracle can be historical, because God does not interrupt the chain of causes. + Strauss did not reach this by examining miracle stories and finding them weak. He laid it down in the introduction, before a single Gospel narrative had been opened, as one of the tests by which the unhistorical is to be recognized. The philosophy came first, and it came from Hegel: God, the "absolute cause" in the vocabulary Strauss uses, is not a being alongside other beings who may reach in and rearrange things. God is the whole, working itself out through the ordinary causes that make up the world. A God like that does not perform interventions, because there is nothing outside for him to intervene from. Two consequences follow at once, and Strauss draws both without flinching. Any narrative that reports something done immediately by God, a voice from heaven or a healing at a word, is on that ground alone not history, whatever else can be said for it. And any narrative in which angels or demons act in human affairs goes out for the same reason, before anyone asks who wrote it down or how soon. It matters a great deal what kind of claim this is. It is not a conclusion of the historical work; it is a rule brought to the historical work. Given the rule, the evidence for a miracle cannot count, however good it is, because no amount of testimony can establish something the rule has already ruled out. That is the pressure point in the whole system, and Christian critics found it early. David Hume had argued a century before that testimony can never be strong enough to establish a miracle, which at least leaves the question open in principle; Strauss simply closed it. The difference matters, and it is why so much twentieth-century apologetic effort went into the prior question of whether a universe with a personal Creator in it is one where miracles are antecedently improbable at all, which is to say improbable before you have looked at the evidence for any particular one.

(Q) "The absolute cause never disturbs the chain of secondary causes by single arbitrary acts of interposition, but rather manifests itself in the production of the aggregate of finite causalities, and of their reciprocal action." + Source: Strauss, Life of Jesus Critically Examined, Introduction, §16, "Criteria by which to distinguish the unhistorical in the gospel narrative" (George Eliot’s translation, 1846). "The absolute cause" is Strauss’s philosophical name for God, and "secondary causes" are the ordinary causes that make things happen: heat boils water, a virus makes a fever. The claim is that God works only as the whole system of those ordinary causes, never as a separate actor stepping into them. Strauss offers this as a settled result agreeing with "all just philosophical conceptions and all credible experience," and everything he says afterwards about the miracle stories runs on it (T2).

(T3) The Old Testament supplied the pattern, and the church wrote Jesus into it. + This is the engine of the book, and it is the part that still gets used. Strauss’s positive test for myth is a family resemblance: when a story about Jesus matches, point for point, something the Jewish community of the first century already expected its Messiah to do, the resemblance itself is the evidence that the expectation produced the story rather than the other way round. He runs it through the Gospels relentlessly, and once you have the trick of it you can see him do it on almost any page. The Jews liked to tell of great men born to parents long childless, and their own Scriptures are full of such births, so the birth of John the Baptist to an elderly and barren Elizabeth is suspect on sight. Moses fed Israel with manna and Elisha fed a hundred men from twenty loaves, so the feeding of the five thousand is the same expectation retold about a greater figure. Balaam had prophesied a star coming out of Jacob and Pharaoh had ordered the Hebrew boys killed, so the Magi and the massacre at Bethlehem are Moses told again about Jesus, with the silence of Josephus, the Jewish historian who wrote up Herod’s reign at length a century afterwards, about any such massacre as corroboration. The forty days in the wilderness are Israel’s forty years. And so on through the resurrection. Two things are worth holding on to here. The first is that the observation is often genuinely acute: the evangelists really are writing with the Old Testament open, and Matthew in particular wants you to see Moses behind Jesus. The second is that Strauss treats the resemblance as if it settled the direction of travel, and it does not. A man may be born in Bethlehem because Micah said the Messiah would be, or Micah’s line may be remembered because a man was in fact born there. Schweitzer, who admired Strauss enormously, made exactly this objection: pointing to the manna in the desert shows you where the shape of a story came from, and leaves the question of why there is a story at all untouched.

(Q) "Knowing also that the Jews saw predictions everywhere in the writings of their prophets and poets, and discovered types of the Messiah in all the lives of holy men recorded in their Scriptures; when we find details in the life of Jesus evidently sketched after the pattern of these prophecies and prototypes, we cannot but suspect that they are rather mythical than historical." + Source: Strauss, Life of Jesus Critically Examined, Introduction, §16 (George Eliot’s translation, 1846). A "type," in the older Christian vocabulary Strauss is borrowing, is a person or event in the Old Testament understood as a pattern of something later: Jonah three days in the fish as a type of the burial and rising of Christ. Strauss is turning the idea inside out. Where the church read the types as prepared in advance by God, he reads them as templates lying ready in the Jewish imagination, waiting to be filled by whichever figure a community came to believe in (T3).

(T4) What the church says of Christ is true of the human race, not of one man. + Strauss thought he was rescuing Christian doctrine, not abolishing it, and the closing dissertation of the Life of Jesus is where he says how. He is working with the Hegelian conviction that an idea is more real than any single thing that expresses it, and that an idea does not pour all its riches into one example and go stingy with the rest; it spreads itself across many, which complete each other. Apply that to the incarnation, the Christian teaching that in Jesus of Nazareth God became man. Strauss keeps the doctrine and changes its subject. The union of divine and human is real, he says, but its bearer is humanity itself, not a carpenter from Galilee: the race is the child of visible nature and invisible spirit, the race works miracles as it slowly masters the world around it, the race is sinless because sin clings to individuals and not to the whole, and it is the race that dies and rises and ascends, since every higher stage of its life comes out of the death of a lower one. It is easy to see why this satisfied nobody for long. The orthodox saw that a Christ who is the human race is not a Christ anyone can pray to, be forgiven by, or meet. Ludwig Feuerbach, four years his senior and reading the same Hegel, took the next step and said the plain thing. If the predicates belong to humanity, if everything said of God (that he is loving, that he is wise, that he is without limit) is really something said about what human beings are and may yet become, then theology is anthropology: talk about God turns out to be talk about man, and God is our own portrait hung on the sky. Strauss lived long enough to travel most of that road himself.

(Q) "In an individual, a God-man, the properties and functions which the church ascribes to Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the race, they perfectly agree." + Source: Strauss, Life of Jesus Critically Examined, Concluding Dissertation, §151, "Last dilemma" (George Eliot’s translation, 1846). The sentence just before this one is the hinge of his whole Christology, his account of who and what Christ is: as the subject of everything the church says about Christ, he writes, we put an idea in place of an individual, though an idea that exists in reality and not merely in the mind. "The race" is mankind as a whole. Strauss is claiming that the creed becomes coherent the moment you stop applying it to one man (T4).

(T5) At sixty-four he stopped saying the creed was still true as an idea, and said plainly that he had left it. + For nearly forty years Strauss had insisted that his criticism left the substance of Christianity standing, and that what he took away with one hand as history he handed back with the other as idea. The Old Faith and the New, written at sixty-four, drops the arrangement. He walks through the Apostles’ Creed clause by clause and lets each one go in turn: creation, the inspiration of Scripture, the fall, original sin, the promise of a Messiah, the atonement (the cross understood as the remedy for sin), the church, the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the resurrection, eternal life. It is a long list, and he does not soften the going. Then he asks it straight out, whether men who have let all of that go can still call themselves Christians, and he refuses to dodge his own question. The honest answer, he says, is that we are no longer Christians. What he offered instead is the least impressive part of the book, and he seems to have half known it. The universe is to be understood through Darwin and the physicists; the moral life is to be regulated by an appeal to reason and good order; and religion survives as a feeling of dependence on the whole of things, which he recommends warming with concerts and with Goethe. It reads like a man tidying a house he no longer lives in. Nietzsche, who had no interest at all in defending the creed Strauss had abandoned, went after him for precisely that: not for unbelief but for the contentment of it, for supposing that the death of a faith is an occasion for a comfortable evening.

(Q) "My conviction, therefore, is, if we would not evade difficulties or put forced constructions upon them ... if we would speak as honest, upright men, we must acknowledge we are no longer Christians." + Source: Strauss, The Old Faith and the New, §31 (Mathilde Blind’s translation, 1873). The words left out are his own echo of the Sermon on the Mount, that we should have our yea yea and our nay nay, and the phrase that turns from it to the conclusion. The paragraph is the last of the book’s first part, and he prefaces it by saying that a plain statement is quite unnecessary but that he would not for anything appear to shirk even the most unpalatable word (T5).

(Q) "The supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts." + Source: Strauss, Life of Jesus Critically Examined, Preface to the first German edition (George Eliot’s translation, 1846). Written in 1835, nearly four decades before the renunciation, and meant sincerely: Strauss is assuring his readers that the essence of the Christian faith is independent of his criticism, and that this is what allows him to operate on the Gospels so calmly. Whether an eternal truth can survive the loss of the fact it was supposed to be about is the question his critics asked in 1836 and the question he finally answered himself in 1872.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He forced theology to defend the Gospels as history rather than only to interpret them. + The replies began within months and did not stop for a generation. August Tholuck of Halle answered on the credibility of the Gospel history; Johann August Wilhelm Neander, the great church historian of Berlin and a Jewish convert to Christianity, set aside the work he was doing to write a life of Jesus of his own in 1837; Karl Ullmann of Heidelberg put the whole question into two words for the title of his reply of 1838, Historisch oder Mythisch?, historical or mythical? By the middle of the century the literature answering Strauss was larger than Strauss. What changed permanently was the shape of the defense. Before 1835 a conservative theologian argued about how to read the miracle stories. Afterwards the argument had to start further back, with the documents themselves: who wrote them, how soon, with access to whom, and how such writings behave. That is why the nineteenth century became the century of the manuscript and the date. Everything turned on how much time there was, because myth of the kind Strauss described needs room to grow, and Baur’s Tübingen school accordingly dated most of the New Testament, and the earliest Christian letters that quote it, well down into the second century, keeping only Romans, the two letters to Corinth and Galatians as Paul’s own. Joseph Barber Lightfoot’s three volumes on Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp, which carried the case that the seven shorter letters of Ignatius are genuine and early, mattered to this argument far more than any direct rebuttal of Strauss, because they pulled that second-century chronology out from under the whole reconstruction. So did the steady accumulation of early manuscript evidence for the Gospels themselves. Ullmann had already put his finger on the pressure point, and it is the objection that has never gone away: did the community make this Christ, or did he make the community? A myth in Strauss’s sense needs time: a community has to forget, and the generation that could contradict the story has to die out. The interval the Gospels allow is not that interval. Paul is writing to Corinth around AD 55, within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion, and he does not argue for the resurrection as a doctrine but lists the people who saw Jesus and says that most of them are still alive and can be asked (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).

(†) Even his admirers concluded that the mythical explanation had been stretched past what it could carry. + The most damaging assessments came from people who were not defending orthodoxy. Baur, his own teacher, said from the start that criticism of the Gospel history has to be preceded by criticism of the Gospels, and Strauss eventually conceded the point by trying to supply the missing groundwork in the popular Life of 1864, where he largely borrowed Baur’s conclusions rather than doing the work himself. Albert Schweitzer’s verdict in The Quest of the Historical Jesus is the one worth having, because Schweitzer thought the first Life of Jesus was a great book and said so. He judged that Strauss had drawn the boundaries of the mythical far too wide, and that the reason was a confusion between two different questions. Show that the feeding of the multitude is told in language shaped by the manna in the wilderness and by Elisha feeding a hundred men, and you have explained the form of the story. You have not explained why there is a story. The Gospel narratives, Schweitzer wrote, have far too much individuality for that, and sit far too tightly inside the sequence of events around them. There is also the matter of the fourth Gospel. Strauss’s wavering over John, conceded in the third edition and taken back in the fourth, was the one moment when he let the evidence push him, and it is a moment his own later editions buried. A critic who finds that his rule keeps producing results he has to retract, and who responds by re-tightening the rule, has told you something about the rule. Schweitzer’s summing up of the man, rather than the theory, has held up best: not the greatest and not the deepest of theologians, but the most absolutely sincere, with the insight and the errors of a prophet and a prophet’s fate.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the rule against miracle, the eyewitnesses, and an idea that cannot survive its fact. + Three disagreements, and they are disagreements with what Strauss himself wrote rather than with anything done later in his name. - The rule was brought in, not found. That the absolute cause never interrupts the chain of secondary causes is not a discovery of the introduction to the Life of Jesus; it is the premise of it, laid down before the evidence is opened (T2). If God exists and is personal, the question of whether he has ever acted in a particular way is a question about what happened, to be settled by asking what happened. A rule that decides it in advance is not neutrality; it is a doctrine of God doing historical work in disguise. - The witnesses said they were witnesses. The mythical explanation needs a community writing out of its convictions. The documents claim to be doing the opposite. Luke opens by telling Theophilus that he has traced everything carefully from those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning, so that his reader may have certainty (Luke 1:1–4), and Peter’s letter names the alternative and refuses it: "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16). Those claims can be tested and they can be doubted. What they cannot be is quietly set aside, which is what the mythical reading requires. - The idea does not outlive the fact. Strauss promised in 1835 that the resurrection remains an eternal truth whatever happens to it as history. Paul had already refused that bargain on behalf of the whole church: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Christianity is not the idea that death is followed by life; it is the report that a particular man was dead on a Friday and alive on a Sunday, and everything else in it hangs on that. Strauss’s own last book is the best evidence that the compromise will not hold. Having spent his life saying the eternal truths survive the loss of the facts, he sat down at sixty-four and admitted that in his own case they had not. Schweitzer’s advice, that a man must love Strauss in order to understand him, is worth taking even here. Strauss asked his question in the open, took the consequences without complaint, and never pretended to believe anything for the sake of a post. The church owes more to opponents of that kind than to friends who will not look.