THE publication by Paul W. Schmiedel in 1901 of the article “Gospels” in the “Encyclopaedia Biblica” marks (we do not say, creates) something very much like an epoch in the history of the criticism of the Gospel-narratives. For more than a century—“from Reimarus to Wrede”—“the quest of the historical Jesus” has been pursued with unflagging industry. That is to say, the energies of a long line of brilliantly endowed scholars, equipped with the instrument of the most extensive and exact erudition, have been exhausted in the effort to discover some historical basis for the “natural” Jesus which their philosophical presuppositions compelled them to assume behind the supernatural Jesus presented in the Gospel-narratives. “Exhausted” is the right word to use here. For precisely what Schmiedel’s article advises us of, is the failure of this long-continued and diligently prosecuted labor to reach the results expected of it. After a half-century of somewhat unmethodical investigation, Ferdinand Christian Baur, in the middle of the last century, laid down the reasonable rule by which subsequent research has been governed: “criticism of documents must precede criticism of material.” But the subsequent half-century of criticism of documents has issued in certainly nothing to the purpose, and, Schmiedel seems half-inclined to declare, nothing solid at all. The Synoptic problem, he tells us, remains as vexed at the end of it as it was at the beginning. Certain immediate sources of the Synoptics’ material it is, of course, easy enough to discern lying behind them, and these are very generally recognized. But behind them in turn stretches a vista of sources, traveling down which the eye becomes weary; and the complications which result when an attempt is made to take these into consideration confound the most promising hypotheses. “The solution of the synoptical problem which appeared after so much toil to have been brought so near,” remarks Schmiedel, “seems suddenly to be removed again to an immeasurable distance.” “It cannot but seem unfortunate” therefore, he continues, “that the decision as to the credibility of the gospel narratives should be made to depend upon the determination of a problem so difficult and perhaps insoluble as the synoptical is.”4 Consequently he proposes a return to the pre-Tübingen position of criticism of the material independently of the criticism of the documents in which this material is presented. “It would accordingly be a very important gain,” he says, “if we could find some means of making” the decision as to the credibility of the Gospel-narratives “in some measure at least independent of” the determination of the Synoptical problem.
The procedure which Schmiedel here proposes is obviously revolutionary; so revolutionary that it marks, as we say, something very like an epoch in the history of the criticism of the Gospel-narratives. It is an express return to the methods of Strauss as opposed to the more scientific methods validated once for all by Baur as against Strauss; and in returning to Strauss’ methods it returns in a very curious way to Strauss’ exact standpoint of unreasoned scepticism with respect to the Gospel-narratives. What it particularly concerns us here to emphasize, however, is that it registers the failure of “literary criticism” of the Gospels as prosecuted during the last half-century, either, as Schmiedel intimates, to accomplish anything of importance, or, in any event, to accomplish anything to the purpose. There are many, no doubt, who will disown Schmiedel’s low estimate of the formal results of Synoptical criticism. But no well-informed person will care to deny that for the ultimate purpose for which this criticism has been invoked its failure has been complete. No stratum of tradition has been reached by it in which the portrait of Jesus differs in any essential respect from that presented in the Synoptic Gospels. If the writers of the Synoptic Gospels were (in Schmiedel’s phrase) “worshippers of Jesus,” no less were those who formed and transmitted to them the tradition on which they ultimately rest (also in Schmiedel’s phrase)7 “worshippers of Jesus.” As we go back, and ever farther back, to the very beginnings of any tradition to which literary criticism can penetrate, the purely human Jesus who is assumed to lie behind the Jesus of the Gospels still continually eludes us. Accordingly a Pfleiderer frankly despairs of ever recovering Him, and a Wellhausen leaves on his readers a strong impression that his drastic criticism must land us ultimately in the same desperation.9 Schmiedel’s counsel is, in these circumstances, to reverse the established method of the last half-century, and, abandoning the criticism of documents which no longer seems hopeful, to seek to break a way to the assumed purely human Jesus by means of immediate criticism of the historical material itself. And he thinks he can blaze out the road directly to the desired goal.
It ought to be noted in passing that Schmiedel sometimes speaks as if he were not prepared to admit that the attainment of the purely human Jesus, so long sought in vain by literary criticism, were the determining motive of the change of procedure which he suggests. He everywhere speaks, indeed, as if the critical principle which he invokes were quite indifferent to this issue. He even asserts explicitly: “In reality, my foundation-texts were in no sense sought out by me for any purpose whatever; they thrust themselves upon me in virtue of one feature, and one feature only: the impossibility of their having been invented, and their consequent credibility.”11 Except in a purely formal sense, however, this is manifestly absurd. It is its superhuman Jesus with His nimbus of the supernatural which is the sole skandalon of the Synoptic narrative, apart from which that narrative would be acknowledged by all as exceptionally trustworthy. “Precisely this,” remarks Albert Schweitzer justly, “is the characteristic of the literature of the Life of Jesus at the opening of the twentieth century,—that the purely historical, even in the productions of historical, scientific, professional theology, retires behind the interest in the world-view.” Schmiedel does not separate from his companions in this. He comes to the criticism of the Gospel-narratives with a definite world-view as the primary presupposition of his work; and this world-view is the current anti-supernaturalistic one. There is nothing of which he is surer than that Jesus was merely a man;13 unless it be that miracles in general do not happen. The only reason why he rejects out of hand the Jesus given him by the Synoptic narratives is that the Jesus given him by the Synoptic narratives is not a mere man. And the precise thing he sets himself to look for behind the Synoptic narratives is evidence of some kind that the real Jesus was, despite the constant testimony of the tradition, nevertheless merely man. “What,” he asks, “are the portions of the Gospels which are so persistently objected to?” And he replies: “We find that they are, to say all in a word, those in which Jesus appears as a Divine Being whether in virtue of what He says or in virtue of what He does.”15 There is no other reason why the portrait of Jesus given by the Synoptics should be “objected to.” And so firmly set is Schmiedel’s reluctance to the admission of the possibility of such a Jesus that he even goes the length of declaring that were this representation consistent and unbroken, he, for his part, might find it impossible to defend the actual existence of any Jesus at all. Either a purely human Jesus or no Jesus at all is the only alternative that he will admit, prior to entering into any critical inquiry into the evidence; and the sole object of his criticism is to discover some evidence of the existence of a purely human Jesus. The precise significance of his proposed revolution in critical procedure, therefore, is that it openly recognizes that literary criticism has failed to discover any evidence of the existence of a purely human Jesus behind the superhuman Jesus of the Synoptic narratives, and suggests that another and more direct way be therefore tried to reach the desired end.