The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

They attack the literal interpretation of miracles as ludicrous and offensive, and advocate an allegorical interpretation, treating them as figures and parables of spiritual truths. One can find in Woolston’s theory an anticipation of the mythical principle of interpretation that Strauss opposes to the rationalistic one. Reimarus, the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments—the publication of which caused Lessing to throw German theology into a ferment—occupies the same position as the English Deists and indeed owed much to their influence. However, a noteworthy difference is observable from the start between Lessing’s treatment of these questions and that of the earlier [ Free-thinkers. This difference is characteristic of the two schools. German rationalism bears the marks of its origin in the idealistic optimism of the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff, and it remains in sympathy with the ethical spirit of Biblical religion; meanwhile, the faintly religious naturalism of the English Deists leads them, in rejecting Biblical miracles, to attack the religion of the Bible itself and drag its representatives and heroes through the mud. The German Rationalists have no sympathy for this. They could not treat Biblical miracle narratives as historical events, but they were not prepared on that account to regard them as deceit or delusion by Biblical heroes, or as the inventions of the narrators. Their reverence for the Bible kept them from these conclusions. They tried to resolve the difficulty in two ways: either they viewed the miracle narratives (particularly those of the Old Testament) as popular religious legends or "myths," similar to those found in all pagan religions;