The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

or, regarding them as containing the actual history of perfectly natural events, they ascribed the miraculous appearance and form they bear simply to the mistaken judgment of the narrators, or in other cases, to the erroneous view of the interpreters. The latter method was employed especially by Dr. Paulus in his commentary on the Gospels, in which he seeks, with great learning and ingenuity, to explain all the miracles of the New Testament. The theologian Schleiermacher also made frequent use of it in his Lectures on the Life of Jesus; traces of it are even met with in the commentaries of theologians of the supernaturalist school, such as Olshausen. The inexcusable violence this did to the Biblical narratives—forcing them to say something quite different from what the unsophisticated narrators intended according to the plain sense of their words—went unnoticed. Nor were these interpreters conscious of how much the Gospels are deprived of their choicest treasures of ideal truth and poetic beauty by this method, all for the sake of securing miserable, commonplace stories as the final outcome of critical examination.

The favor with which this radically false rationalistic interpretation of the Gospels was received by many German theologians at the beginning of this century finds its sole explanation and excuse in the prevailing view of the time: that our Gospels were written very soon after the death of Jesus, during the first generation of Christians, and two of