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

Jesu is a great "advance in force" as compared with all preceding work. Himself holding undoubtingly to the vital assumption of the rationalizing school that the central story of Jesus and the disciples and the crucifixion was history, he yet applied the mythical principle systematically to nearly all the episodes, handling the case with the calmness of a great judge and the skill of a great critic. Even Strauss, indeed, paid the penalty which seems so generally to attach to the academic discipline--the lack of ultimate hold on life. After showing that much of the gospel narrative was mere myth, and leaving utterly problematical all the rest, he saw fit to begin and end with the announcement that nothing really mattered--that the ideal Jesus was unaffected by historic analysis, and that it was the ideal that counted. [1785] In a world in which nine honest believers out of ten held that the facts mattered everything, there could be no speedy or practical triumph for a demonstration which thus announced its own inutility. Strauss had achieved for New Testament criticism what Kant and Fichte and Hegel had compassed for rational philosophy in general, ostensibly proffering together bane and antidote. As in their case, however, so in his, the truly critical work had an effect in despite of the theoretic surrender. Among instructed men, historical belief in the gospels has never been the same since Strauss wrote; and he lived to figure for his countrymen as one of the most thoroughgoing freethinkers of his age.