Renan styled the Gospels—which he considered in “flagrant contradiction” with each other—“legendary biographies.” Steeped in miracles and the supernatural, they resemble the “Legends of the Saints” or the “Life of Plotinus.”121 The discourses of Jesus in Matthew and Mark’s “collection of anecdotes and personal reminiscences” [of Peter] form the original core documents.122 Renan recognized the very different style of John, and bluntly wrote: “If Jesus spoke as Matthew represents, he could not have spoken as John relates.” And if the son of Zebedee did write Jesus’ speeches in the Fourth Gospel, he appears to have “forgotten the Lake of Gennesareth, and the charming discourses which he had heard upon its shores.”123 Yet John’s Gospel seems necessary for composing the story of Jesus’ life, especially in its last months.124 Despite proclaiming the four canonical Gospels, on the whole, “authentic,”125 Renan nevertheless remained skeptical about their factuality and wary of harmonizing the Synoptics with John—yet harmonization seemed necessary for the complete story of Jesus.
Renan aimed to write an historical account of the human Jesus. His seeming exclusion of Jesus’ divine nature, as pronounced by the Council of Chalcedon and later Christians, unsurprisingly, incurred the wrath of the pious. Renan styled Jesus a “noble initiator,” in the “first rank” of those who “felt the Divine within themselves.” Jesus is divine, he conceded, insofar as he enabled humans to advance toward their own divinity.126
Jesus, in Renan’s scheme, amid the beauties of the Galilean countryside (as well as of Nazarene females), grew up in happy “poetic ignorance” of the outside world—of Greek science, of the political events of his time.127 His religion, based on feeling, was devoid of priests and external observances; it brought devotees into direct relation with God the Father and promoted purity of heart and human brotherhood.128 In Renan’s anti-Jewish narrative, Jesus, representing a “rupture with the Jewish spirit,” recognized that the sway of Judaism was over, that the Law was to be abolished.129
Renan believed that some aspects of Jesus’ teaching and practice, not wearing well over time, were to be cast off. For example, Jesus had appealed to the lower classes with a gospel of “pure Ebionism”; “the poor” alone were his concern. This “exaggerated taste for poverty,” in Renan’s view, could not last, nor could the apocalyptic vision of the end-time. “Let us pardon him his hope,” Renan condescendingly wrote.130 In addition, the accounts of Jesus’ miracles—a violence perpetrated on him by the expectations of his era—were merely an accommodation to the masses’ avidity for spectacles: he either had to renounce his mission or become a thaumaturgus.131
As Jesus approached his end, his teaching grew darker; he forgot life’s pleasures and loves. (Renan suggested that Jesus’ mind might have become unbalanced.132) Convinced that his death would save the world, Jesus gave himself up to it. On the cross, after moments of doubt, he recalled his mission. The disciples believed in Jesus’ resurrection because they loved their Master so deeply.133 Albert Schweitzer pithily depicted Renan’s representation of the death scene:
He is dead. Renan, as though he stood in Pe`re Lachaise, commissioned to pronounce the final allocution over a member of the Academy, apostrophizes Him thus: “Rest now, amid Thy glory, noble pioneer. Thou conqueror of death, take the sceptre of Thy Kingdom, into which so many centuries of Thy worshippers shall follow Thee, by the highway which Thou hast opened up.”134
Renan tellingly confessed his own religious position: to write about a religion, one must first have believed it, and then, believe it no longer.135 That this claim expressed his own situation was patently clear to the evangelical professors—to whom “belief” was an all-important criterion for religious allegiance. Although some readers may have deemed Renan’s picture of Jesus as truly human more satisfactory than Strauss’s mythical Jesus, it hardly represented the divinely ordained Jesus of Christian belief.
American Professors and New Testament Scholarship
Without doubt, German criticism set much of the teaching and research agenda for the American professors. Although they appropriated some themes for their own narratives of early Christianity, their reactions remained largely negative.136 Not until this conservative approach to the Bible was quietly (or sometimes, not so quietly) abandoned could views of historical development—also imbibed from Germany—be allowed to stretch back to the earliest days of the “Jesus movement.” Only then (at least in the classroom) did professors abandon the supernaturalistic approach that precluded studying the Bible as an ancient text like others.
Here, I shall focus on Henry Smith and Philip Schaff of Union and George Fisher of Yale as examples of the professors’ strategy.137
HENRY SMITH
Henry Smith’s studies in Germany shaped his mental universe.138 He advised Americans to be tolerant of German philosophy and theology: “orthodoxy can afford to be just, to be generous.”139 He yearned for theology and church history to assimilate all that was good in German Wissenschaft.
In addition to his critique of Hegelian-inspired Pantheism, Smith attacked aspects of European biblical criticism.140 Scholarship should not lead Christians to doubt the “genuineness” and “authenticity” of the New Testament, or prompt skepticism about Christianity’s historical foundations, as (Smith warned) the theses of Baur and the Tübingen School did. Baur’s detachment of the “Christian system” from the person of Christ himself subverts its historical basis and finds Christianity’s truth only in abstract principles. He charged the Tübingen School in effect with reviving Gnosticism, with implying that Jesus was “the greatest of imposters.”141
Smith attacked more radical European biblical criticism in a variety of venues. In a sermon delivered in 1855, “The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures,” Smith claimed to eschew “Bibliolatry,” rather seeking the Bible’s “spirit.” Decrying “rationalistic infidelity,” he declared that Protestants’ according supreme authority to the Bible “stands or falls with the evidence for its infallibility.” To avoid Straussian skepticism and to acknowledge God’s omnipotence, Christians must admit “the possibility of inspiration.”142
In the first 1600 years of Christian history, Smith continued, even though no developed theory then existed, only a few—for example, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Abelard, and the fourth-century Anomoeans—rejected the plenary inspiration of Scripture. Now, however, German Rationalists’ claim that Scripture contains errors has “infected” modern German theology; even Neander and Tholuck admit there are mistakes (albeit limited to “trivial details”). Smith conceded that the Bible has “human elements,” but its truth is reinforced by modern archeology.143 The chief proof of the Old Testament’s veracity comes from Jesus and the Apostles, who refer to these writings as Scripture.144 What authority do Carlyle, Strauss, and Theodore Parker have compared to the heroes of the Bible, Smith pointedly asked?145 Smith rehearsed such views not only in sermons before laymen innocent of recent biblical criticism. He also, as retiring Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA in May 1864, cautioned Presbyterian clergy against the Materialism and Pantheism manifest in the Essays and Reviews (to be discussed below) and the Colenso controversy in England, in Renan’s Life of Jesus, and in Strauss’s recent popularized version of the Life of Jesus.146