Note 118 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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 writer118 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,119 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.