Note 2 — Chapter XIX · THE HISTORY OF THE DISCUSSION

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who for almost the first time, after Schmiedel, has brought the note of amenity into the argument for historicity as against the negative, remarks that the greatest Lives of Jesus are those which have been written with hate—to wit, those by Reimarus and Strauss. Reimarus, whom Dr. Schweitzer genially overrates, was indeed given to invective against mythological personages, from Moses downward; but “hate” is a strange term to apply to the calm and judicial procedure of Strauss. As well ascribe to hate the rise of Unitarianism. If hate is to be the term for Strauss’s mood, what epithet is left for that of his opponents, who, as Dr. Schweitzer relates, circled him with unsleeping malignity to the end, and sought to ostracize the clerical friend of his youth who delivered an address over his grave? It is only historic religion that can foster and sustain such hates as these. It is true that Bruno Bauer, who so suddenly advanced upon Strauss’s position, detecting new elements of mythic construction in the Gospels, and arriving ten years later at the definite doctrine of non-historicity, exhibited a play of storm and stress in the earlier part of his inquiry. He reviled at that stage, not the Jesus whose “life” he was investigating, but the theologians who had so confounded confusion. “These outbreaks of bitterness,” Dr. Schweitzer admits, “are to be explained by the feeling of repulsion which German apologetic theology inspired in every genuinely honest and thoughtful man by the methods which it adopted in opposing Strauss.”2 Add that the same methods were being employed towards Bauer, and the case is perhaps simplified.