Much myth in the Gospels, Strauss argued, stemmed from the Evangelists’ desire to make Jesus’ words and deeds echo, but surpass, heroes of the Hebrew Bible such as Moses and Elijah. Strauss sharply rebuked theologians (especially Schleiermacher) who divorced Jesus from his Jewish milieu.74 The miracle stories, for example, should be understood as the Gospel writers’ need to depict Jesus as conforming to Old Testament types. Jesus himself, Strauss argued, did not give much weight to miracles: did he not declare, “no sign is to be given to this generation”? This claim, when coupled with the silence regarding Jesus’ miracles in Acts and Paul’s epistles, should cast doubt on the historicity of the miracle stories.75
Likewise, Strauss argued against both the miraculous explanation of Jesus’ resurrection and the Rationalist claim that Jesus had not died, but merely returned after a few days’ disappearance. On Strauss’s reading, the story was devised to fulfill Isaiah’s notion of the Suffering Servant and such Old Testament verses as “God will not leave his soul in Hell [Sheol].” By “resurrection,” Jesus meant that his cause would continue after his death, but his disciples misunderstood his words to imply a corporeal resuscitation.76 Although Strauss attributed a messianic consciousness to Jesus from the time of his baptism, he also claimed that divinity is instantiated in the human race as a whole, not in Jesus alone.77
Horton Harris, historian of the Tübingen School, argues that Strauss’s Leben Jesu made possible that School’s development: the book changed Tübingen overnight “from a centre of orthodoxy into a centre of heresy.”78 Tübingen, we shall see, stood as a blight on American piety.
FERDINAND CHRISTIAN BAUR AND THE TÜBINGEN SCHOOL
If Strauss’s mythical (and later, Renan’s novelistic) approach could be dismissed as deeply unhistorical, the arguments of Ferdinand Christian Baur and his followers more seriously disturbed American scholars. Tübingen studies of early Christianity were centered in Baur. The Tübingen School, Harris claims, was “the most important theological event in the whole history of theology from the Reformation to the present day,” in two decades changing the entire course of critical study of the New Testament. All nineteenth-century theologians, regardless of which stripe, lived under its shadow.79
Baur posed an even more ominous threat than Strauss or Renan, given his more detailed scheme for relating the New Testament to the emerging Christian church. Already in 1831, Baur had startled readers with his initial investigations into the parties that had warred in the Corinthian church, their slide into opposing Pauline and “Jewish” factions, and their reconciliation in the developing Catholic church of the late second and early third centuries.80 In the next years, Baur continued to ruffle traditional Christian scholars with his claims regarding the “tendencies” that divided the early Christian communities and his insistence that Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles.81 He investigated Gnosticism and Manicheanism, as well as the New Testament books (most of which he dated later than did traditional scholars) and developments in post-biblical Christian history.82 Baur shattered Christians’ assumptions regarding the harmony of the early Christian church and its narrators.
Although Baur’s Church History of the First Three Centuries (1853) was translated into English only in 1878, the American professors here considered were familiar with his writings on the New Testament and early Christianity long before.83 Despite their denunciations, Baur set their agenda: in reaction, they defended traditional views of the dating and authorship of the New Testament books and the development of second-century Christianity. In fact, Schaff’s History of the Apostolic Church has been called “a conservative rebuttal to the Tübingen School’s rival interpretation of apostolic Christianity.”84
Baur’s working assumptions were anathema to American evangelicals. In effect, he broke down the protective barrier cordoning off the study of church history from general history85—and the New Testament from other early Christian literature. He assumed that for scholarly purposes, the New Testament and second-century literature should be examined together as a source for understanding Christianity’s early development. He explicitly contested the claim that second-century Christian texts differed qualitatively from the canonical books: the only people who could think this, he remarked, are “those who hold the most extravagant view of the inspiration of the whole canonical collection.”86 (“Those,” it would appear, include the evangelical church historians here considered.) On Baur’s reading, the New Testament, from an academic perspective, was simply a source for the historical study of primitive Christianity.
A second assumption that disturbed the American professors was Baur’s insistence that a historical interpretation of the Bible should exclude all supernatural or miraculous elements.87 To take Jesus’ birth and incarnation as miracle, Baur argued, is to step “outside all historical connection”: “miracle” is not a historical category. Jesus’ resurrection thus “lies outside the sphere of historical inquiry”—although Baur conceded that the disciples’ belief in his return was necessary for Christianity’s development.88
Third, Baur posited a strong element of conflict in primitive Christianity. The earliest Jewish followers of Jesus, he argued, soon engaged in battle with Paulinists; only through concessions on each side were the two approaches reconciled in the Catholic Church in the late second century.89 The Jewish element, in Baur’s view, remained dominant for a long time. Although the “mythico-historical” tradition from Acts through the first Christian centuries portrayed Peter and Paul as inseparable even in death, its picture was unconvincing, given the strong evidence for conflict between their respective parties.90 Baur’s scheme of conflict and belated resolution read early Christianity through the lens of the Hegelian dialectic: thesis and antithesis were resolved in a higher synthesis.91
Baur’s narration of early Christian development played havoc with the traditional dating of New Testament books: aside from the four Pauline epistles that he considered genuine, the only other New Testament book composed before 70 c.e., he argued, was the Apocalypse.92 (Baur held that only Romans [minus the last two chapters], Galatians, and I and II Corinthians were genuinely Pauline,93 exhibiting the signs of Jewish-Gentile conflict that he considered hallmarks of the earliest Christian communities.94) Baur dated the Pastoral Epistles—which most Christians then ascribed to Paul—to the late second century, when Gnosticism and Marcionism were present dangers and church offices more fully developed.95
The Gospels, Baur claimed, reflect the (later) period in which they were written, not the time of Jesus. Their “tendencies” assist in their dating.96 Among the four canonical Gospels, Baur granted priority and general trustworthiness to Matthew, whose original Jewish version he placed at the end of the first century.97 Mark is indebted to Matthew; Luke, imbued with Paulinism, cannot be regarded as an independent source.98
Furthermore, Baur stood against the Protestant predilection for making the Gospel of John the key to the other three. Attempting to harmonize the Synoptics’ depiction of Jesus with John’s exalted representation requires abandoning “all historical treatment of gospel history.” John, he argued, is not historical even in the “limited sense in which the Synoptics can be called historical.” As for authorship, Baur held that the “John” of Revelation was a Jewish-oriented follower of Jesus, a “pillar-apostle” who opposed Paul and became influential in Asia Minor. The Gospel of John, by contrast, written in the later second century, shows evidences of Gnosticism, Montanism, Greek thought (e.g., in the Logos doctrine), and the controversy over Passover—and is “conciliatory” in the dispute between Pauline and Jewish Christianity.99 This Gospel, in Baur’s