Jesu is a great "advance in force" as compared with all preceding
work. Himself holding undoubtingly to the vital assumption of the
rationalizing school that the central story of Jesus and the disciples
and the crucifixion was history, he yet applied the mythical principle
systematically to nearly all the episodes, handling the case with
the calmness of a great judge and the skill of a great critic. Even
Strauss, indeed, paid the penalty which seems so generally to attach
to the academic discipline--the lack of ultimate hold on life. After
showing that much of the gospel narrative was mere myth, and leaving
utterly problematical all the rest, he saw fit to begin and end with
the announcement that nothing really mattered--that the ideal Jesus
was unaffected by historic analysis, and that it was the ideal that
counted. [1785] In a world in which nine honest believers out of ten
held that the facts mattered everything, there could be no speedy or
practical triumph for a demonstration which thus announced its own
inutility. Strauss had achieved for New Testament criticism what Kant
and Fichte and Hegel had compassed for rational philosophy in general,
ostensibly proffering together bane and antidote. As in their case,
however, so in his, the truly critical work had an effect in despite
of the theoretic surrender. Among instructed men, historical belief
in the gospels has never been the same since Strauss wrote; and he
lived to figure for his countrymen as one of the most thoroughgoing
freethinkers of his age.