the problem, Strauss restated his case in a Life of Jesus, adapted for
the German People. Here, accepting the contention of F. C. Baur that
the proper line of inquiry was to settle the order of composition of
the synoptic gospels, and agreeing in Baur's view that Matthew came
first, he undertook to offer more of positive result than was reached
in his earlier research, which simply dealt scientifically with the
abundant elements of dubiety in the records. The new procedure was
really much less valid than the old. Baur had quite unwarrantably
decided that the Sermon on the Mount was one of the most certainly
genuine of the discourses ascribed to Jesus; [1795] and Strauss,
while exhibiting a reserve of doubt [1796] as to all "such speeches,"
nonetheless committed himself to the "certain" genuineness alike of
the Sermon and of the seven parables in the thirteenth chapter of
Matthew. [1797] Many scholars who continue to hold by the historicity
of Jesus have since recognized that the Sermon is no real discourse,
but a compilation of gnomic sayings or maxims previously current in
Jewish literature. [1798] Thus the certainties of Baur and Strauss pass
into the category of the cruder certainties which Strauss impugned;
and the latter left the life of Jesus an unsolved enigma after all
his analysis.
As he himself noted, the German New Testament criticism of the
previous twenty years had "run to seed" [1799] in a multitude of
treatises on the sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations of
the Synoptics, as if these were the final issues. They had settled
nothing; and after a lapse of fifty years the same problems are
being endlessly discussed. The scientific course for Strauss would
have been to develop more radically the method of his first Life:
failing to do this, he made no new contribution to the problem,
though he deftly enough indicated how little difference there was,
save in formula, between Baur's negations and his own.
Something of the explanation is to be detected in the sub-title,
"Adapted for the German People." From his first entrance into the
arena he had met with endless odium theologicum; being at once
deprived of his post as a philosophical lecturer at Tübingen, and
virulently denounced on all hands. His proposed appointment to a
chair at Zürich in 1839, as we have seen, led there to something
approaching a revolution. Later, he found that acquaintance with him
was made a ground of damage to his friends; and though he had actually
been elected to the Wirtemberg Diet in 1848 by his fellow citizens
of Ludwigsburg town, after being defeated in his candidature for
the new parliament at Frankfort through the hostility of the rural
voters, he had abundant cause to regard himself as a banned person
in Germany. A craving for the goodwill of the people as against
the hatred of the priests was thus very naturally and justifiably
operative in the conception of his second work; and this none the
less because his fundamental political conservatism had soon cut
short his representation of radical Ludwigsburg. As he justly said,
the question of the true history of Christianity was not one for
theologians alone. But the emotional aim affected the intellectual
process. As previously in his Life of Ulrich von Hutten, he strove to
establish the proposition that the new Reformation he desired was akin
to the old; and that the Germans, as the "people of the Reformation,"
would show themselves true to their past by casting out the religion
of dogma and supernaturalism. Such an attempt to identify the spirit
of freethought with the old spirit of Bibliolatry was in itself
fantastic, and could not create a genuine movement, though the book
had a wide audience. The Glaubenslehre, in which he made good his
maxim that "the true criticism of dogma is its history," is a sounder
performance. Strauss's avowed desire to write a book as suitable to
Germans as was Renan's Vie de Jésus to Frenchmen was something less
than scientific. The right book would be written for all nations.
Like most other Germans, Strauss exulted immensely over the war of