The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

...symbolical illustrations of spiritual truths. Rather, the religious imagination gave birth to these illustrations like unconscious poetry—that is, without distinguishing between the poetic form and the essential truth of the idea. Because the religious imagination believed in the ideal content of the narratives, and was at the same time unable to give vivid and sensible expression to it in any way other than the material form of outward miracles, it involuntarily came to believe also in the reality of the symbolical form of the narrative it had created. It conceived the idea and the history together in such an inseparable combination that it conferred equal truth and certainty on both.

In the production of such ideal narratives, the same process is observable today in the experience of simple religious believers: feeling the ideal truth of the content of the stories, they come to believe also in the reality of the outward history in which the idea has been incorporated for them. But the critical understanding of the historical inquirer is permitted—and indeed bound—to distinguish clearly and definitely, as the simple-minded believer cannot, between the spiritual idea and the outward form of its representation, and to find in the former both the productive power and the permanent kernel within the outward husk. Vertical line marking the remainder of the text. This explanation of the miraculous legends of the Bible is not only more correct and profound than Strauss’s from the point of view of historical science, but for the religious consciousness, it is far less objectionable, as Weisse observes with truth. In this case, the legends do not appear as the worthless product of the idle play of the imagination, but as the normal expression—rationally and psychologically intelligible—of a...