though there were to be witnessed repetitions of the intellectual
anomalies of the past, so-called rationalists losing the way while
supernaturalists occasionally found it. It has been remarked by
Reuss that Paulus, a clerical "rationalist," fought for the Pauline
authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the very year in which
Tholuck, a reconverted evangelical, gave up the Pauline authorship
as hopeless; that when Schleiermacher, ostensibly a believer in
inspiration, denied the authenticity of the Epistle to Timothy,
the [theological] rationalist Wegscheider opposed him; and that
the rationalistic Eichhorn maintained the Mosaic authorship of
the Pentateuch long after the supernaturalist Vater had disproved
it. [1778] Still the general movement was inevitably and irrevocably
rationalistic. Beginning with the Old Testament, criticism gradually
saw more and more of mere myth where of old men had seen miracle, and
where the first rationalists saw natural events misconceived. Soon the
process reached the New Testament, every successive step being resisted
in the old fashion; and much laborious work, now mostly forgotten,
was done by a whole company of scholars, among whom Paulus, Eichhorn,
De Wette, G. L. Bauer, Wegscheider, Bretschneider, and Gabler were
prominent. [1779] The train as it were exploded on the world in
the great Life of Jesus by Strauss (1835), a year after the death
of Schleiermacher.
This was in some respects the high-water mark of rational critical
science for the century, inasmuch as it represented the fullest use
of free judgment. The powerful and orderly mind of Strauss, working
systematically on a large body of previous unsystematic criticism,
produced something more massive and coherent than any previous writer
had achieved. It was not that he applied any new principle. Criticism
had long been slowly disengaging itself from the primary fallacy of
taking all scriptural records as standing for facts, and explaining
away the supernatural side. Step by step it was recognized that not
misinterpretation of events but mythology underlay much of the sacred
history. Already in 1799 an anonymous and almost unnoticed writer
[1780] had argued that the entire gospel story was a pre-existent
conception in the Jewish mind. In 1802 G. L. Bauer had produced
a treatise on Hebrew Mythology, [1781] in which not only was the
actuality of myth in Bible narrative insisted on, but the general
principle of animism in savage thought was clearly formulated. Semler
had seen that the stories of Samson and Esther were myths. Even
Eichhorn--who reduced all the Old Testament stories to natural
events misunderstood, accepted Noah and the patriarchs as historical
personages, and followed Bahrdt in making Moses light a fire on Mount
Sinai--changed his method on coming to the New Testament, and pointed
out that only indemonstrable hypotheses could be reached by turning
supernatural events into natural where there was no outside historical
evidence. Other writers--as Krug, Gabler, Kaiser, Wegscheider, and
Horst--ably pressed the mythical principle, some of them preceding
Bauer. The so-called "natural" theory--which was not at all that of the
"naturalists" but the specialty of the compromising "rationalists"--was
thus effectively shaken by a whole series of critics.
But the power of intellectual habit and environment was still
strikingly illustrated in the inability of all of the critics to shake
off completely the old fallacy. Bauer explained the divine promise to
Abraham as standing for the patriarch's own prophetic anticipation,
set up by a contemplation of the starry heavens. Another gave up
the supernatural promise of the birth of the Baptist, but held to
the dumbness of Zechariah. Krug similarly accepted the item of
the childless marriage, and claimed to be applying the mythical
principle in taking the Magi without the star, and calling them
oriental merchants. Kaiser took the story of the fish with a coin in
its mouth as fact, while complaining of other less absurd reductions
of miracle to natural occurrences. The method of Paulus, [1782] the
"Christian Evêmeros"--who loyally rejected all miracles, but got rid
of them on the plan of explaining, e.g., that when Jesus was supposed
to be walking on the water he was really walking on the bank--was
still popular, a generation after Schleiermacher's Reden. The mythical
theory as a whole went on hesitating among definitions and genera--saga
and legend, historical myth, mythical history, philosophical myth,
poetic myth--and the differences of the mythological school over
method arrested the acceptance of their fundamental principle.