Note 116 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

2. Gradually that had developed a greater precision of method, 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.116 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.117 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.