end of the Gospel history, and having, in consequence of the latter admission, felt obliged to give up the first three Gospels, retaining only the fourth, was now being besieged by Strauss in its last stronghold. "They withdrew," says the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, "into the Gospel of John as into a fortress, and boasted that they were safe there, though they could not suppress a secret consciousness that they only held it at the enemy's pleasure; now the enemy has appeared before it; he is using the same weapons with which he was formerly victorious; the Gospel of John is in as desperate case as formerly the Synoptists. The time has come to make a hold resolve, a decisive choice; either they must give up everything, or else they must successively re-occupy the more advanced positions which at an earlier date they had successively abandoned." It would be impossible to give a more accurate picture of the desperate position into which Hase and Schleiermacher had brought the mediating theology by their ingenious expedient of giving up the Synoptics in favour of the Gospel of John. Before any danger threatened, they had abandoned the outworks and withdrawn into the citadel, oblivious of the fact that they thereby exposed themselves to the danger of having their own guns turned upon them from the positions they had abandoned, and being obliged to surrender without striking a blow the position of which they had boasted as impregnable. It is impossible to emphasise strongly enough the fact that it was not Strauss, but Hase and Schleiermacher, who had brought the mediating theology into this hopeless position, in which the fall of the Fourth Gospel carried with it the surrender of the historical tradition as a whole.
But there is no position so desperate that theology cannot find a way out of it. The mediating theologians simply ignored the problem which Strauss had raised. As they had been accustomed to do before, so they continued to do after, taking the Gospel of John as the authentic framework, and fitting into it the sections of the Synoptic narrative wherever place could best be found for them. The difference between the Johan- nine and Synoptic representations of Jesus' method of teaching, says Neander, is only apparently irreconcilable, and he calls out in support of this assertion all the reserves of old worn-out expedients and artifices, among others the argument that the Pauline Christology is only ex- plicable as a combination of the Synoptic and Johannine views. Other writers who belong to the same apologetic school, such as Tholuck, Ebrard,[1]
- ↑ Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte. (Scientific Criticism of the Gospel History.) August Ebrard. Frankfort, 1842; 3rd ed., 1868. Johannes Heinrich Aug. Ebrard was born in 1818 at Eriangen, was, first, Pro- fessor of Reformed Theology at Zurich and Eriangen, afterwards (1853) went to Speyer as "Konsistorialrat," but was unable to cope with the Liberal opposition there, and returned in 1861 to Eriangen, where he died in 1888. A characteristic example of Ebrard's way of treating the subject is his method of meeting the objection that a fish with a piece of money in its jaws could not have taken the hook. "The fish might very well," he explains, "have thrown up the piece of money from its belly into the opening of the jaws in the moment in which Peter opened its mouth." Upon this Strauss remarks: "The inventor of this argument tosses it down before us as who should say, 'I know very well it is bad, but it is good enough for you, at any rate so long as the Church has livings to distribute and we Konsistorialrats have to examine the theological candidates.'" Strauss, therefore, characterises Ebrard's Life of Jesus as "Orthodoxy restored on a basis of impudence." The pettifogging character of this work made a bad impression even in Conservative quarters.
