The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

We have already remarked that Baur and his disciples, the so-called Tübingen school, took a leading part in this work, while other independent students cooperated with them, supplementing and correcting their labors. This, however, is not the place to follow these inquiries in detail; but we must glance at their result as regards the historical treatment of the life of Jesus.

For an entire generation the examination of the literary details of the Gospels had occupied theologians so exclusively that the interest in the supreme problems of the evangelical history seemed to have been almost lost sight of. But this interest was newly awakened, and made itself felt far beyond learned theological circles, by the nearly simultaneous publication of Renan's Vie de Jésus original: "Life of Jesus" and Strauss's second Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk original: "Life of Jesus for the German People" (1864). These two works, with all their dissimilarity, resemble each other in this, that they were both written by scholars of the highest eminence, not for the learned world, but for educated people generally, both throwing overboard, therefore, the ballast of learned detailed criticism, and presenting the results of their inquiries in a language intelligible to everybody, and attractive from its literary excellence. They are alike also in this, that both subordinate the criticism of the gospel traditions to a positive description of the personality of Jesus, of his essential religious tendency and genius, of his relation to the Messianic idea of his nation, to the law and the temple, the hierarchy, and religious and political parties of his time, both seeking an explanation of the reformatory success of the commencement, and also of the tragical issue Renan of his labors in these factors.