Note 137 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

As he himself noted, the German New Testament criticism of the previous twenty years had “run to seed”137 in a multitude of treatises on the sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations of the Synoptics, as if these were the final issues. They had settled nothing; and after a lapse of fifty years the same problems are being endlessly discussed. The scientific course for Strauss would have been to develop more radically the method of his first Life: failing to do this, he made no new contribution to the problem, though he deftly enough indicated how little difference there was, save in formula, between Baur’s negations and his own.