Fisher vigorously upheld Acts as a reliable historical source, rejecting Tübingen’s “strange, morbid suspicion” that discrepancies between Acts and other books reveal a conscious authorial design (“tendencies”). The strong moral spirit pervading the book of Acts, he claimed, supports the book’s historical accuracy.259 Tübingen scholars’ penchant for pitting Paul’s letters against Acts in order to question the latter’s veracity is “without foundation,” for Luke-Acts substantially accords with Galatians and other Pauline epistles. The Tübingen School’s appeal to “tendencies” and “theological bias,” Fisher declared, has now been rejected by critics of an “independent spirit,” who affirm the trustworthiness of Acts.260
Fisher also scored the Tübingen scholars for decoupling Jesus from a “universalizing” Paulinism. They represent Jesus’ teaching as so Jewish that it is scarcely distinguishable from Ebionitism.261 Fisher countered that “Judaic Christianity” had been outgrown even by the time of John’s Gospel and Epistles: “the teachings of Jesus had broken the chain of bondage to the Old Testament system.”262 Fisher also challenged Baur’s theory that the Judaizing party discredited Paul’s writings, which were rehabilitated only a century later. This scenario—derived, Fisher claimed, from an over-reliance on “the spurious Clementine Homilies”—could not have occurred without attracting the notice of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, all of whom appeal to an unbroken tradition of teaching.263
A third point of Fisher’s critique concerned Baur’s treatment of the Gospel of John. That Fisher deemed this topic worthy of special consideration is clear from his 1881 essay, “The Genuineness of the Gospel of John,” well over a hundred pages long.264 His interest in this Gospel is also exhibited in his later essay on the “obscure and insignificant” second-century sect, the Alogoi265—the only ancient group, he claimed, that rejected the Gospel of John.266 Fisher, like his Union colleagues, held that the apostle John wrote the book of Revelation twenty or thirty years earlier (68–70 a.d.) than he did the Gospel and First Epistle.267
Baur had dated the Gospel of John to the late second century and understood it as a testimony to the reconciliation of earlier Jewish and Gentile “tendencies.”268 Opposing this late dating that implied the Gospel’s “inauthenticity,” Fisher looked to patristic “witnesses” to assist his case. A key element is provided by Polycarp: if Polycarp knew John, and Irenaeus (“no dreamer”) knew Polycarp, then the chain of witnesses is assured.269 Even opponents of Christianity (Celsus, Marcion, Basilides, Valentinus270) testify to the Fourth Gospel, while the Gnostic Heracleon wrote a commentary on it. If they acknowledged the Gospel, how, Fisher rhetorically asked, can we doubt? If the Fourth Gospel was not written by John, it must be considered a “pious fraud.”271 But the “sound ethical feeling” of that Gospel stands against this explanation. No post-apostolic text, Fisher claimed, can match John’s Gospel, which “fills up the gaps in the Synoptical tradition.” Its vigor and power, entirely lacking in the “languor” of the Apostolic Fathers or the feebleness of I Clement, shows that it dates to the first century.272
Fisher devoted much of his scholarly writing to the Judaizing parties (Ebionites and Nazarenes) in second-century Christianity. Baur’s reliance on the Clementine literature had led him to imagine that a Judaic, anti-Pauline theology was then prevalent. In Fisher’s view, Ebionitism—“an obsolescent system” that was struggling to maintain itself—had to be overcome, since it robbed Christianity of its “universal character and worldwide destination.”273 Since God’s plan extends to all humans of every age,274 a Jewish orientation had to be discarded. Baur’s representation of early Christianity, Fisher charged, is no “historical divination,” but an “arbitrary, artificial construction.”275
Although Continental, largely German, scholarship on early Christianity received the professors’ largest consideration, they also noted the major controversy that marked British theological discussion of their day: the controversy over Essays and Reviews.
Essays and Reviews
It was not only Continental scholars who incurred the wrath of traditional Christians. In March 1860, the publication of a volume of essays by seven British (mainly Oxonian) writers unleashed what has been called “the greatest religious crisis of the Victorian era.”276 Entitled—innocuously—Essays and Reviews,277 the book provoked hostile rejoinders and occasioned two well-publicized trials. Of the American professors, Henry Smith of Union Seminary was the most invested in the dispute: he responded with a lengthy essay, “The New Latitudinarians of England,”278 and often noted the book in the journal he edited, then titled the American Theological Review.
Published less than a year after Darwin’s Origin of Species and in reaction to the Oxford Movement, Essays and Reviews raised troubling questions about the Genesis accounts of creation. Those to whom Darwin’s tome remained impenetrable could understand the import of Essays and Reviews. The book also called for the established (i.e., Anglican) Church to loosen its grip on the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.279 Many readers of Essays and Reviews thought its authors had undermined the truth of Anglicanism from within its fold.280
The controversy was fueled in part by the prominent positions held by several essayists: Frederick Temple was Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen and Head Master of the Rugby School; Rowland Williams was Vice-Principal and Professor of Hebrew at St. David’s College, Lampeter; Baden Powell was Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford; Mark Pattison was Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford; and Benjamin Jowett was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. Six of the seven were clergymen of the Church of England. Although several bishops called to judge the work proclaimed their high regard for the book’s authors, the latter could not stand unchastised. Despite the writers’ claim that each was responsible only for his own essay,281 reviewers and bishops alike deemed the book part of an insidious cabal against Christianity’s basic tenets. By early 1862, with many thousand copies in print, more than 8500 clergy petitioned Lambeth against the book, and by 1864, 11,000 had signed the protest; the Upper and Lower Houses of the Anglican Church met to judge the work and hand down condemnations.282 The essayists, in the end, were saved by the Privy Council’s decision that there should be freedom of opinion on matters about which the Anglican Church had prescribed no rule. It was, in effect, the state that rescued the authors from the church.283
The essays were widely believed to introduce dangerous German ideas—near-atheism, Rationalism, and Hegelian Pantheism—into the bosom of English Christianity. In addition, the essayists also raised questions about the scientific and historical validity of Genesis, the doctrines of atonement and eternal punishment, and biblical infallibility more generally.284 Ieuan Ellis, historian of the controversy, argues that for many British readers, the novel aspect of the book was the centrality accorded to historical method: it was “a religious counterpart of those historically dominated studies (Buckle, Maine, etc.) which proposed to explain society and its institutions by their historical origins, an evolutionary process from lower to higher.” This historical treatment “put the traditional doctrine of revelation in a new and unflattering light.” Yet, Ellis notes, despite the essayists’ appeal to history and development, they remained curiously traditional in affirming notions of eternal, unchanging truths and a static human nature.285
Today, scholars of New Testament and early Christianity might deem the essays rather harmless and less “Germanizing.” For example, Temple claimed in his essay, “The Education of the World,” that since Christians had now reached “manhood,” they should decide for themselves the meaning and limits of biblical inspiration and the degree of authority to be ascribed to various books of the Bible. Temple also warned readers not to shy from the findings of geology, even if they implied that the opening chapters