The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

...them by eyewitnesses—the apostles Matthew and John. On this assumption, the occurrence in the Gospels of unhistorical elements or religious legends—the kind that might be allowed in the Old Testament without hesitation—could not even be considered. Or, if the admissibility of this perspective was granted in the case of the birth stories in the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke (as De Wette did), objection was felt against applying it to the miracles of Jesus's public life. Thus, on the question of the historicity of the Gospel narratives, theologians held views that were confused, undecided, contradictory, and lacking in thoroughness. This state of things could not last; simple faith had lost its security at every point, and doubt attached itself to the miraculous narratives of the New Testament no less than to those of the Old. John But before Strauss, no one had the courage to explain all these narratives of both Testaments alike by the logical application of one and the same principle. This was mainly because the critics were all under the bondage of the assumption that the Gospels of Matthew and John were written by apostles. Yet even this assumption had received various shocks prior to Strauss. Critics had been unable to close their eyes to the fact that there are differences between these two Gospels in particular, which are of such a fundamental nature that they preclude the possibility of both being correct, and therefore of both having been written by eyewitnesses and apostles. Under the influence of dogmatic and sentimental motives, Schleiermacher and his disciples accepted it as an a priori Latin: "from the former," meaning a deduction made before experience or observation. certainty that John is to be preferred to Matthew. From this secure position, as they imagined, these theologians assailed the narrative of Matthew at all points and undermined the tradition.