A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

though there were to be witnessed repetitions of the intellectual anomalies of the past, so-called rationalists losing the way while supernaturalists occasionally found it. It has been remarked by Reuss that Paulus, a clerical "rationalist," fought for the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the very year in which Tholuck, a reconverted evangelical, gave up the Pauline authorship as hopeless; that when Schleiermacher, ostensibly a believer in inspiration, denied the authenticity of the Epistle to Timothy, the [theological] rationalist Wegscheider opposed him; and that the rationalistic Eichhorn maintained the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch long after the supernaturalist Vater had disproved it. [1778] Still the general movement was inevitably and irrevocably rationalistic. Beginning with the Old Testament, criticism gradually saw more and more of mere myth where of old men had seen miracle, and where the first rationalists saw natural events misconceived. Soon the process reached the New Testament, every successive step being resisted in the old fashion; and much laborious work, now mostly forgotten, was done by a whole company of scholars, among whom Paulus, Eichhorn, De Wette, G. L. Bauer, Wegscheider, Bretschneider, and Gabler were prominent. [1779] The train as it were exploded on the world in the great Life of Jesus by Strauss (1835), a year after the death of Schleiermacher. This was in some respects the high-water mark of rational critical science for the century, inasmuch as it represented the fullest use of free judgment. The powerful and orderly mind of Strauss, working systematically on a large body of previous unsystematic criticism, produced something more massive and coherent than any previous writer had achieved. It was not that he applied any new principle. Criticism had long been slowly disengaging itself from the primary fallacy of taking all scriptural records as standing for facts, and explaining away the supernatural side. Step by step it was recognized that not misinterpretation of events but mythology underlay much of the sacred history. Already in 1799 an anonymous and almost unnoticed writer [1780] had argued that the entire gospel story was a pre-existent conception in the Jewish mind. In 1802 G. L. Bauer had produced a treatise on Hebrew Mythology, [1781] in which not only was the actuality of myth in Bible narrative insisted on, but the general principle of animism in savage thought was clearly formulated. Semler had seen that the stories of Samson and Esther were myths. Even Eichhorn--who reduced all the Old Testament stories to natural events misunderstood, accepted Noah and the patriarchs as historical personages, and followed Bahrdt in making Moses light a fire on Mount Sinai--changed his method on coming to the New Testament, and pointed out that only indemonstrable hypotheses could be reached by turning supernatural events into natural where there was no outside historical evidence. Other writers--as Krug, Gabler, Kaiser, Wegscheider, and Horst--ably pressed the mythical principle, some of them preceding Bauer. The so-called "natural" theory--which was not at all that of the "naturalists" but the specialty of the compromising "rationalists"--was thus effectively shaken by a whole series of critics. But the power of intellectual habit and environment was still strikingly illustrated in the inability of all of the critics to shake off completely the old fallacy. Bauer explained the divine promise to Abraham as standing for the patriarch's own prophetic anticipation, set up by a contemplation of the starry heavens. Another gave up the supernatural promise of the birth of the Baptist, but held to the dumbness of Zechariah. Krug similarly accepted the item of the childless marriage, and claimed to be applying the mythical principle in taking the Magi without the star, and calling them oriental merchants. Kaiser took the story of the fish with a coin in its mouth as fact, while complaining of other less absurd reductions of miracle to natural occurrences. The method of Paulus, [1782] the "Christian Evêmeros"--who loyally rejected all miracles, but got rid of them on the plan of explaining, e.g., that when Jesus was supposed to be walking on the water he was really walking on the bank--was still popular, a generation after Schleiermacher's Reden. The mythical theory as a whole went on hesitating among definitions and genera--saga and legend, historical myth, mythical history, philosophical myth, poetic myth--and the differences of the mythological school over method arrested the acceptance of their fundamental principle.