The Historical Actuality of Revelation

§ IV. Attacks Upon the Authenticity and Credibility of the Gospels

Among the writings of antiquity none are so well attested as the four Gospels. The Christian Church has always believed in the Apostolic origin of these documents and found therein the surest guarantee of their historic trust-worthiness. The heretics, too, never doubted the genuineness of the Gospels, but appealed to them and took from them the arguments with which they tried to justify their own divergent views of Christian doctrine.

The first pagan writers to attack the reliability of the Gospels were Celsus and Lucian. Their example was followed later by Porphyry and the Emperor Julian in the fourth, and by the Talmudists in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The attack was renewed with fresh vigor by the Rationalists of the eighteenth century. Thus there arose in course of time a number of theories about the Gospels, denying either their authenticity or their credibility or both.

1. The Theory that the Gospels are the Product of Fraud and Deception.—This theory originated with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (d. 1768), portions of whose Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes were edited by G. E. Lessing under the title Wolfenbütteler Fragmente (Braunschweig, 1774–1778). Reimarus asserts that Jesus originally intended to establish a political kingdom and to free the Jews from the Roman yoke, but this plan was frustrated by His enemies and Jesus Himself executed as a revolutionist. The Apostles were left alone after His death and, not desiring to return to their previous occupations, but eager to fulfil the mission which their Master had imposed on them, they attributed to Him the false motive of wanting to found a spiritual kingdom, and wrote the Gospels to prove this claim.

This arbitrary hypothesis, resting as it does upon an utterly one-sided interpretation and arbitrary distortion of the facts, found so little favor that Semler, a fellow-Rationalist and contemporary of Reimarus, undertook to refute it. Pfleiderer calls the example of Reimarus characteristic of that want of historical sense and that lack of psychological understanding in religious questions displayed by the older Rationalist school.²²⁵225O. Pfleiderer, Die Entstehung des Christentums, 2nd ed., Munich, 1907, p. 4. On Reimarus and the “Wolfenbüttel Fragments” see C. Bertheau in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. XII, pp. 402 f. There is an English translation of a part, Fragments from Reimarus, ed. by C. Voysey, London, 1879; cfr. J. Sawyer, A Criticism of … C. Voysey’s Fragments from Reimarus, London, 1880; J. A. H. Reimari … de Vita sua Commentarius. Addita sunt de Vita H. S. Reimari Narrationes J. G. Büschii et C. A. Klotzii, Hamburg, 1815.

2. The first attempt to explain the gospel story in a purely natural way was made by Professor Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus of Heidelberg (d. 1851). Paulus did not deny the truth of the Gospels, but maintained that what seems to us miraculous and supernatural in them can be traced to perfectly natural causes. The Evangelists, he said, on account of their ignorance of the powers of nature, sometimes failed to mention certain accompanying circumstances or mediate causes in reporting miracles. All that is necessary is to supply these missing links, and the seeming miracles forthwith appear in their true light as perfectly natural events. Jesus, according to Paulus, was not the Son of God, but a wise and virtuous philosopher, who wrought no miracles, but performed many extraordinary works of mercy and charity, for which he was qualified by his medical skill and in which He was aided by accident and good luck.²²⁶226On Paulus see P. Tschackert in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. VIII, pp. 426 sq. Paulus was characterized by a colleague as “a man who thinks what he believes and believes what he thinks.” He was refuted on the Catholic side by the famous exegete Hug.

Criticism. The miracles of Christ cannot be explained naturally except by dint of arbitrary changes and a complete misinterpretation of the Gospels, and therefore the Rationalist critic David Friedrich Strauss found it an easy thing to shatter Paulus’ hypothesis soon after its publication.

3. Strauss substituted for the natural explanation of Paulus the theory that the supernatural events, and more especially the miracles recorded in the Gospels, were the product of a myth-forming process, which drew its materials from the Old Testament prophecies. The Evangelists simply attributed the traditional traits of the Messias to Jesus of Nazareth. Strauss arrived at this interpretation because he regarded miracles as impossible and did not relish the Rationalistic theories that had been devised to empty the Gospels of their supernatural content. In his opinion, myths are at the beginning of all religion, and the New Testament myth has its centre and point of support in the historic person of Jesus of Nazareth. Its sources are: “the expectation of the Messias which existed among the Jews before and independently of Jesus,” and “the peculiar impression which Jesus made by virtue of his personality, His works, and His fate, and by means of which He modified the Messianic idea of His people.”²²⁷227D. F. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, Vol. I, 13th ed., Tübingen, 1904, pp. 97 sq. This writer employs the terms Mythus (myth) in a peculiar sense, differing from that which is ordinarily connected with the term. He calls Mythus whatever has become part and parcel of a religion in an unhistorical way. An Evangelical Mythus he defines as “a tale of this kind which has reference directly to Jesus, which is not, and is not regarded by us as the reflection of a fact, but as the precipitation of an idea conceived by his earliest adherents.” (Leben Jesu, Vol. I, p. 97).

Strauss’s myth theory is untenable for a threefold reason.

a) It is based upon the assumption that miracles are impossible. It was because Strauss denied the possibility of miracles and was dissatisfied with the natural explanation of the phenomena recorded in the Gospels, that he represented all reports of miracles as myths. “There is,” he says, “no purely historical consciousness without the conviction that the chain of finite causes cannot be broken and that miracles are impossible.” In this light he judges the Gospels. “If the Gospels are true historical records,” he declares, “then the miraculous element cannot be eliminated from the life of Christ; if, on the contrary, miracles are irreconcilable with history, the Gospels cannot be historical sources.”²²⁸228Das Leben Jesu, Vol. I, 13th ed., p. 73; Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, Leipsic, 1864, p. 18. To establish this theory it would have been necessary to demonstrate that miracles are impossible, but Strauss made no attempt to do so.

b) The myth theory is based on the further and equally gratuitous assumption that the Gospels are not genuine historical documents. For the formation of such a large circle of myths as Strauss pretends to find in the Gospels, a few decades are not sufficient; it would require centuries. Strauss himself perceived this inconsistency, and to avoid it, dated the Gospels from the second century,²²⁹229Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, p. 61. On D. F. Strauss see Catholic Encyclopedia, references in index volume; A. Meyenberg, Leben Jesu Werk, Vol. III, 1928, pp. 1 sqq.; F. Hettinger, D. F. Strauss, Freiburg, 1875. an assumption which, as we have seen on a previous page, is incompatible with their contents and opposed to the testimony of Christian antiquity. To-day even the most radical critics admit that the Synoptic Gospels at least were written in the first century of the Christian era, more definitely between 70 and 90 A.D.²³⁰230Cfr. A. von Harnack, Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur, Vol. I, Leipsic, 1897, pp. 651 sqq.

c) If the Gospels were merely a bundle of myths, the extraordinarily rapid expansion of the Christian religion soon after the death of Jesus would be inexplicable. As early as the first century, the Christians were cruelly persecuted both by Jews and pagans, and to accept their teaching was forbidden under threat of the severest penalties. That Christianity under such untoward conditions spread so rapidly to all parts of the then known world, is a sure proof that its doctrines, as laid down definitely in the Gospels and Apostolic Epistles, were not a collection of myths and sagas, but objectively certain truths. For myths and sagas which have no influence upon his fate either in this world or in the next, the average man would not have been ready to suffer persecution, still less to sacrifice his life, as so many of the early Christians did.

To-day the myth theory, invented by Strauss and popularized by Renan, has been discarded by the majority of Rationalist Bible critics. Dr. Harnack says of it: “Strauss’ contention that the Gospels contain a very great deal that is mythical, has not been borne out, even if the very indefinite and defective conception of what mythical means in Strauss’ application of the word be allowed to pass.”²³¹231Das Wesen des Christentums, Leipsic, 1920, p. 16. (English transl. by T. B. Saunders, What Is Christianity? 4th ed., London, 1923, p. 21.) Houston Stuart Chamberlain expresses himself even more sharply as follows: “At the beginning of the [nineteenth] century it was the fashion to explain everything as ‘mythical.’ In 1835, David Strauss followed the example given on every side and offered ‘the idea of myth’ as a ‘key’ to the Gospels. To-day everybody knows that this alleged key was nothing but a new, nebulous circumscription of an unsolved problem and that it is not some ‘idea,’ but solely a being which actually existed, the incomparable impression of a personality such as the world had never seen before, that can explain the origin of Christianity.”²³²232Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Vol. I, 14th ed., Munich, 1922, pp. 194 sq. Chamberlain adds that modern historical research has rendered the mythological theory of Strauss so hopelessly obsolete that “one cannot read the writings of this honest man without yawning.”

4. Ferdinand Christian Baur (d. 1860), the founder of the later Protestant Tübingen school, attempted to explain the Gospels by saying they were thesis-books, written by partisans of Peter and Paul, respectively, to uphold their opposing views in the dissensions that ensued after the death of Christ. St. Paul’s divergent views of the teaching of the Master gave rise to deep-seated differences of opinion, which were defended by two opposing schools, the Petrine and the Pauline. About the middle of the second century the controversy between these two parties gave rise to a third, which tried to reconcile the existing differences and ultimately developed into the Catholic Church. This group fused the teaching of SS. Peter and Paul into one dogmatic system and represented these two Apostles as the co-founders of the Roman Church. This conflict between Petrinism and Paulinism gave birth to the four Gospels, as we know them, and to most of the other New Testament writings, which, according to Baur, were composed with the obvious purpose of reconciling the existing differences and reuniting the quarrelling factions. Only a few of these writings, to wit, the Epistle to the Romans, those to the Corinthians, that to the Galatians, and the Apocalypse of St. John are of directly Apostolic provenience.

F. C. Baur’s theory is disproved by two facts: first, that the Gospels, as we have already emphasized against Strauss, were composed in the second half of the first century, and, secondly, that the opposition which Baur construes between SS. Peter and Paul never actually existed.

At the present time Baur’s theory no longer has any prominent adherents among Protestant exegetes. “The whole critical apparatus with which Baur attacked the ancient tradition,” says Harnack, “is now justly regarded as worthless.”²³³233Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur, Vol. I, p. 244. “The critical presuppositions of the school of Baur,” says the same Rationalist critic in another place, “are, one may almost say, generally relinquished. The only vestige that remains of them in New Testament criticism is an indefinite distrust, a procedure like that employed by a malicious state’s attorney, or at least a narrow-gauged method which clings to all sorts of details and, taking them for a basis, seeks to argue against plain and decisive observations. Instead of criticizing the Gospels as tendentious pamphlets, an attempt is made to ferret out all manner of tendencies and to prove the existence of interpolations on a large scale, or a scepticism which places the probable and the improbable on the same footing.”²³⁴234Ibid., Preface, p. IX. On F. C. Baur and his theory see J. Haussleiter in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. II, pp. 7–11. Cfr. A. B. Bruce, F. C. Baur and his Theory of the Origin of Christianity, New York, 1886; R. W. Mackay, The Tübingen School and its Antecedents, London, 1863; S. Berger, F. C. Baur, Les Origines de l’École de Tubingue et ses Principes, Strasbourg, 1867.

5. The most advanced Rationalist critics are not content with trying to eliminate supernatural revelation and miracles entirely from the life of Christ, but they go so far as to deny His very existence.

In the middle of the nineteenth century Bruno Bauer (d. 1882), a Hegelian of the most extreme type, asserted that Jesus is a figment of an anonymous “proto-Evangelist,” out of whose writings the three other Gospels developed by the same process that gave birth to the first. Thus, what was originally fiction, under the influence of theology and faith grew to be history. He regarded Philo, Seneca, and the Gnostics as the real creative forces in the evolution of Christianity, which arose as late as the reign of Marcus Aurelius, after which “clever men were busy for some forty years in the composition of the so-called Pauline Epistles. Only the framework of the new religion was Jewish; its spirit came from farther west; Christianity is really Stoicism becoming dominant in a Jewish metamorphosis.”²³⁵235A. Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (2nd ed. of the work Von Reimarus zu Wrede), Tübingen, 1921, pp. 148, 155 (Engl. tr., The Quest of the Historical Jesus, London, 1927); J. Haussleiter in the New Schaff-Herzog Encycl. of Relig. Knowledge, Vol. II, p. 5.

This perverse theory, born of fanatical hatred and a boundless subjectivity, refutes itself; it aroused universal indignation and was forgotten even before the death of its author.²³⁶236Schweitzer, ibid., p. 160; Haussleiter, l. c.; E. Bauer, Bruno Bauer und seine Gegner, Berlin, 1842. However, towards the close of the nineteenth century it was revived by Loman, Edwin Johnson, Allard Pierson, Naber, Robertson, Bournouf, and Hochard, and by a German critic writing under the pseudonym of “Verus.” These writers, who drew part of their arguments from Strauss, traced the image of Christ as transmitted to us by the Evangelists to a mixture of mythological elements, derived partly from pagan and partly from Christian sources; but their theory fell flat by reason of its absurdity.

In the first decade of the twentieth century wide-spread attention was attracted by the teaching of A. Kalthoff,²³⁷237Das Christusproblem, 2nd ed., Jena, 1903; Die Entstehung des Christentums, Jena, 1904; Was wissen wir von Jesus? 2nd ed., Jena, 1912. a German Protestant minister who had become a Social Democrat. He denied the existence of Jesus Christ and represented Him as a personification of the social hopes and aspirations of the proletariat of His time. Christianity, according to this writer, was the product of a social upheaval, of which the world has seen quite a few.

The unscientific character of this hypothesis renders it worthy of being buried together with that of Bruno Bauer, from which it differs mainly in this respect that hypercriticism has ceded the field to an absolute lack of common sense.

In contradistinction to the Kalthoff theory the latest school of radical Bible critics attempt to be strictly scientific by utilizing the rich treasures of Oriental mythology and the results of the new science of comparative religion. The chief representatives of this school are: William Benjamin Smith,²³⁸238Der vorchristliche Christus, nebst weiteren Vorstudien zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Urchristentums, mit einem Vorwort von Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel, Giessen, 1906; 2nd ed., Jena, 1911. Smith was a professor of mathematics [sic!] in Tulane University, New Orleans, La., who had been led into the radical camp by the study of such German Rationalists as Baur, Kuenen, Wellhausen, Pfleiderer, Holstein, Volkmar, etc. (cfr. his preface to Der vorchristl. Christus, p. XIII). For some reason not apparent he published his work in German. Schmiedel in his “Vorwort” sums up Smith’s theory as follows: The Christian religion antedates Christ. It is the development of a mystery religion widely spread among the Jews, and especially the Hellenists, between 100 B.C. and 100 A.D. Jesus never existed, but is a pagan deity camouflaged as protector, liberator, and redeemer. He was called “Nazarene,” not from a city of that name, which never existed, but from a Hebrew word-stem which means protector. His “anastasis” originally meant “institution,” namely, as Messias, ruler of the world, judge of the living and the dead, but was changed into “resurrection” by the subsequent addition “from the dead.” Though Schmiedel expressed his disagreement with Smith’s theory in the preface he wrote for Der vorchristliche Christus, he was sharply censured even by radical critics for having assisted in publishing such an amateurish and unscientific book. The whole structure was reared on a passage in Epiphanius, where it is stated that the sect of the Nazareans, which was identical with the Christian Church, existed before the Christian era. Schwen showed that Smith’s interpretation of Epiphanius was untenable and Joh. Weiss (Jesus von Nazareth Mythus oder Geschichte? p. 16) declared: “In spite of the great respect I bear for Dr. Schmiedel, I must say that he could have done something better than support this book by his prestige.” (Cfr. Schmiedel’s preface to the 2nd ed. of Smith’s work, pp. viii sqq.) A. Jeremias,²³⁹239Babylonisches im Neuen Testament, Leipsic, 1905. P. Jensen,²⁴⁰240Das Gilgamesch-Epos in der Weltliteratur, Strasbourg, 1906. K. Vollers,²⁴¹241Die Weltreligionen in ihrem geschichtlichen Zusammenhange, Jena, 1921. and A. Drews. The latter’s book, Die Christusmythe (The Christ Myth), is a collection of the results of Rationalist Bible criticism during the last quarter of a century.

Fr. Wm. Foerster, a Protestant writer, aptly characterizes Drews’ book as follows: “It is the work of a critical theoretician, who by sheer philosophical speculation and critical purposiveness has lost the power to perceive the living signs of personal reality. He strays far afield, yet fails to see what lies immediately before his eyes. He works with the details of mythological research, with the concepts of Oriental cults, puts the results together, combines them with the mind of a learned professor, picks out what fits into his perspective, consciously or unconsciously eliminates whatever might disturb his argument, and cuts the whole fabric into shape with the scissors of an apathetic logician, who would like to show himself absolutely free from preconceptions, but in matter of fact is full of prejudice, since he is completely governed by the dissolving tendency of our radical age. He decrees that the figure of Christ should appear as a mere myth, a fantastic invention of the religious instinct; he decrees that Jesus never existed, and thus his will is the father of the whole argument. This is the only way in which we can explain the incredible artificiality of his combinations and exegetical stunts.”²⁴²242Fr. Wm. Foerster, Autorität und Freiheit, 19th to 21st ed., Kempten, 1922, p. 89.

The same judgment, though perhaps in a somewhat milder form, may be pronounced on the whole school of Drews and his immediate predecessors.

The authenticity and credibility of the New Testament is not disproved by the radical negations which we have been considering, but, on the contrary, all who have eyes to read can see that not only the four Gospels, but also the Epistles of St. Paul and the other New Testament writings loudly protest against the misuse of historical documents practiced by the critics whose works we have just reviewed.²⁴³243An able refutation of this school in F. C. Conybeare (Prot.), The Historical Christ, London, 1914.

6. The modern evolutionary hypothesis was applied to the Gospels by Albrecht Benjamin Ritschl (d. 1889), who may be regarded as the father of the dominant “Liberal” school in Protestant theology and exegesis, of which Adolf von Harnack is the acknowledged leader, and which has infected even a few Catholic Modernists. This school upholds the authenticity of the Synoptic Gospels and admits their credibility, though with certain limitations.²⁴⁴244A. von Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, Leipsic, 1920, p. 14 (English tr., What is Christianity? p. 16). On A. B. Ritschl, his life and teaching, see the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. X, pp. 43–46; A. E. Garvie, The Ritschlian Theology, Edinburgh, 1899; A. T. Swing, The Theology of Albert Ritschl, New York, 1901; J. Arr, Ritschlianism: Exposition and Critical Essays, London, 1903; E. A. Edghill, Faith and Fact: A Study of Ritschlianism, London and New York, 1910. According to the leaders of this school (Harnack, Weizsäcker, Bousset, Jülicher) the Gospels deal not with the Jesus of history, but with the Christ of dogma, in whom His followers believed at the time these documents were written. They describe the belief of the first Christians and echo their thoughts about Jesus and His teaching. Hence, they do not give us an account of the original facts, but are the product of a historical development, strongly influenced by dogmatic speculation, Messianic hopes, rabbinic doctrines, Oriental mysticism, and Greek philosophy. “The Gospels,” writes, e.g., A. Jülicher, “are not historical records, but doctrinal treatises, composed for purposes of propaganda. To expect their authors to pay due attention to the historical nexus of events, would be unfair. It would be still more unfair to demand of them an objective historical understanding of the religion of Jesus. What the Evangelists are interested in, is to emphasize the supernatural, the incomparable, and incomprehensible; what is of the greatest importance to them is not that which is well authenticated in the sense in which we understand the term, but that which seems best calculated to remove doubts in the divinity of Christ and to strengthen confidence in Him and His cause, as, for example, the story of the transfiguration, of the open tomb, of the raising of dead men to life, etc.”²⁴⁵245Die Religion Jesu und die Anfänge des Christentums bis zum Nizänum, in Die Kultur der Gegenwart, ed. by Hinneberg, Teil I, Abtlg. IV, 1², Berlin and Leipsic, 1904, p. 44; C. Weizsäcker, Das apostolische Zeitalter, 3rd ed., Tübingen, 1902, pp. 369–401, 513–538; W. Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 2nd ed. by G. Krüger, Göttingen, 1921, pp. 33–77, 154–183. “In spite of all these deficiencies,” he continues, “the three [Synoptic] Gospels are a valuable source, not only for the history of the community which has enshrined its ideal Christ in them, but also, and in an even higher degree, for the history of Jesus. … While the Johannine Jesus might be taken for the hero of a religious epic, the Synoptics grapple too arduously with materials which they do not understand and which frequently resist their efforts. The real Jesus, whom they have received, stands so far above the one whose image they construe from the Old Testament or the Babylonian mythology, from Jewish literature and folklore, from primitive Christian theology and poetry, that the suggestion that we have here only different strata of the same myths or ideas of personified activity, is worse than absurd.”²⁴⁶246Op. cit., p. 46.

As professed adherents of the so-called historico-critical school, the adherents of this theory consider it their mission to substitute for the Christ of faith the Jesus of history, to discover “the Gospel within the Gospel,”²⁴⁷247Harnack, What Is Christianity, pp. 16 sqq. to shell the historical kernel out of its legendary hull. In doing so they follow the rule that facts and doctrines which presuppose a divine revelation and supernatural power cannot be accepted as historical, but must be attributed to the belief of the Christian community about 70–100 A.D.

a) The evolutionary hypothesis as applied by these men to the Gospels is admittedly based on purely internal criteria, and, hence, to carry its point, would have to demonstrate the historical inaccuracy of the Gospels by internal evidence and disprove the arguments alleged in favor of their credibility. This it has not even made an attempt to do. The Gospels contain no contradictions, and the different manner in which the same facts are reported by the four Evangelists does not prove their unreliability, but rather their independence, and can be satisfactorily explained by their personal peculiarities, the special purpose for which each one wrote, and the diverse requirements of the prospective readers.

b) The contents of the Gospels make it evident that they were written to present the life and teaching of Christ in its historical reality, and not as transformed and sublimated by the belief of the early Christians. This can be seen plainly in the idea of the Messias, His aims and activities, which, according to the testimony of the Gospels, prevailed among the disciples of Jesus up to the day of His Ascension. This idea was diametrically opposed to that which governed the Apostles after the Descent of the Holy Ghost. Instead of the secular kingdom expected in the Gospels, we now have the spiritual kingdom of the Church; the Messias is no longer an earthly monarch, but the glorified Son of God, the invisible head of the Church. Such was the belief of the followers of Christ at the time the Gospels were composed. If the evolutionary theory were correct, the Gospels, reflecting the belief of the Christian Church about 70–100, could not record the unrealized Messianic expectations of the disciples about the year 30.

In matter of fact the New Testament writings, composed from about 40 to 100 A.D., are a faithful mirror both of the imperfect faith of the disciples during the life-time of Jesus and of the clarified religious consciousness of the early Christian community in the Apostolic age. That both accounts were received and circulated at the same time without provoking contradiction, is the most convincing evidence that both are based on truth, in other words, that the belief of the Apostolic Church was preceded by the somewhat one-sided belief of the first disciples, which, however, embraced faith in the divinity of Christ.

The evolutionary hypothesis, which rejects a large portion of the Gospels as legendary, can be entertained only by those who hold that the supernatural is impossible and must therefore be eliminated as unhistorical wherever it occurs in the records of the human race. But this is not enlightened historical criticism, it is prejudiced naturalism.²⁴⁸248An able discussion and refutation of all these theories is contained in Lagrange’s Les Sens du Christianisme, Paris, 1918; Eng. transl., The Meaning of Christianity, by W. S. Reith, New York, 1920.

The Other New Testament Books and the Old Testament.—The other books of the New Testament, as well as those of the Old Testament, are dealt with in the same arbitrary fashion by the Rationalist critics. In the last analysis the motive which induces them to deny the authenticity and credibility of these writings is unwillingness to admit the supernatural. Consequently the same method of demonstration must be applied against all of them, and there is no need of going into the matter at greater length here.

For further reading, see page 343.