Note 3 — Chapter XIX · THE HISTORY OF THE DISCUSSION

With these cases before him, and with the record to write of a hundred and thirty years of admittedly abortive discussion, Dr. Schweitzer could not forgo an exordium in praise of the “German temperament” which had so wonderfully kept the discussion going. Such a record seems a surprising ground for national pride; but it may be granted him that the German temperament will never lack material for self-panegyric, which appears to be the breath of its nostrils. To those, however, for whom science is independent of nationality, the lesson has a somewhat different aspect. What has been lacking is scientific thoroughness. Bruno Bauer’s flaws of mood and method were such that his more radical penetration of the problem at certain points made no such impression as did the orderly and temperate procedure of Strauss. “One might suppose that between the work of Strauss and that of Bauer there lay not five but fifty years—the critical work of a whole generation.”3 “Bauer’s ‘Criticism of the Gospel History’ is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.”4