The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

...of the human race. By this approach, the special historical importance of the originator of the Christian community, and of the first model of its religious and moral life, is not only left without explanation, but is lost altogether. This result does violence not merely to the religious consciousness, but is unsatisfactory to historical science, which is concerned to understand Jesus as the originating source of Christianity.

It is quite true that we can go with Strauss in his answer to the alternative proposed by Ullmann—whether the church created the Christ of the Gospels, or he the church—by declaring the alternative false. The two things are both tenable: the Christ of the Gospels is a creation of the faith of the church, but this faith is an effect of the person of the historical Jesus. We find this answer to Ullmann just, but cannot free Strauss from the charge of having worked out in his book only the first of these two positions, while having passed over the second.

"He has shown no more than that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah." He, not others, is at the original in [this]. But how did the church come by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah? This sentence is underlined in the original manuscript. To this question—which is the main question of a Life of Jesus—Strauss gave his readers no answer. Undoubtedly it can be urged in his defense that the criticism of the sources was at that time still in a state of too great confusion and uncertainty to permit any successful answer to that problem of the historical kernel of the life of Jesus. Nevertheless, the difficulty of the matter could not relieve the historian of the duty of at least making an attempt to trace from the materials left to him, as the residue of his critical analysis of the deeds and words of Jesus, the...