The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

Those who point out the lack in Strauss’s book of a more satisfactory critique of the sources, and who sought to supply this defect in his Evangelische Geschichte German: "Evangelical History." (1838), called attention at the same time to a defect in Strauss’s mythical theory. Weisse was in full agreement with Strauss that we must acknowledge the presence of religious myths in the miraculous narratives of the Bible, but he was not satisfied with the way in which Strauss had b. 65 explained their origin.

According to Strauss, the early Christians had simply transferred to Jesus—as the actual Messiah—the miraculous legends of the Old Testament, out of which the Jews were supposed to have composed the miraculous portrait of their expected Messiah. Strauss was correct in thinking that the miraculous stories of the Old Testament undoubtedly supply the motives and models for many narratives in the New Testament, but certainly not for all of them. Regarding the most significant miracles—the birth of Jesus, his baptism, transfiguration, resurrection, the changing of water into wine at Cana, the stilling of the storm, and walking on the sea—one must use violence to explain these miracles by reference to Old Testament types, and the Jewish idea of the Messiah offers no precedents corresponding to these.

At this point, therefore, we must look for another method of explanation. Weisse was undoubtedly right to point to the spontaneous productivity of the Christian spirit in the primitive Church as the source of these miraculous narratives, in which the Church gave expression to its ideal truth and the new inspired life of which it was conscious through symbolic and allegorical forms. This is not to say that these narratives were intended by the narrators themselves to be merely allegories, or...