Note 178 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

He left behind him, however, an important fragment, which constituted one of his most important services to national culture—his “New Hypothesis concerning the evangelists as merely human writers.” He himself thought that he had done nothing “more important or ingenious”178 of the kind; and though his results were in part unsound and impermanent, he is justly to be credited with the first scientific attempt to deduce the process of composition of the gospels179 from primary writings by the first Christians. Holding as he did to the authenticity and historicity of the fourth gospel, he cannot be said to have gone very deep; but two generations were to pass before the specialists got any further. Lessing had shown more science and more courage than any other pro-Christian scholar of the time, and, as the orthodox historian of rationalism has it, “Though he did not array himself as a champion of rationalism, he proved himself one of the strongest promoters of its reign.”180