had seen the Hegelian philosophy fall from its high estate, and himself had found no way of reconciling history and idea, so that his present Life of Jesus was a mere objective presentment of the history. It was, therefore, not adapted to make any impression upon the popular mind.
In reality it is merely an exposition, in more or less popular form, of the writer's estimate of what had been done in the study of the subject during the past thirty years, and shows what he had learnt and what he had failed to learn.
As regards the Synoptic question he had learnt nothing. In his opinion the criticism of the Gospels has "run to seed." He treats with a pitying contempt both the earlier and the more recent defenders of the Marcan hypothesis. Weisse is a dilettante; Wilke had failed to make any impression on him; Holtzmann's work was as yet unknown to him. But in the following year he discharged the vials of his wrath upon the man who had both strengthened the foundations and put on the coping-stone of the new hypothesis. "Our lions of St. Mark, older and younger," he says in the appendix to his criticism of Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus, "may roar as loud as they like, so long as there are six solid reasons against the priority of Mark to set against every one of their flimsy arguments in its favour-and they themselves supply us with a store of counter-arguments in the shape of admissions of later editing and so forth. The whole theory appears to me a temporary aberration, like the 'music of the future' or the anti-vaccination movement; and I seriously believe that it is the same order of mind which, in different circumstances, falls a victim to the one delusion or the other." But he must not be supposed, he says, to take the critical mole-hills thrown up by Holtzmann for veritable mountains.
Against such opponents he does not scruple to seek aid from Schleiermacher, whose unbiased but decided opinion had ascribed a tertiary character to Mark. Even Gfrorer's view that Mark adapted his Gospel he needs of the Church by leaving out everything which was open to objection in Matthew and Luke, is good enough to be brought to bear against the bat-eyed partisans of Mark. F. C. Baur is reproached for having given too much weight to the "tendency" theory in his criticism of the Gospels; and also for having taken suggestions of Strauss's and worked them out, supposing that he was offering something new when he was really only amplifying. In the end he had only given a criticism of the Gospels, not of the Gospel history.
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But this irritation against his old teacher is immediately allayed when he comes to speak of the Fourth Gospel. Here the teacher has carried to a successful issue the campaign which the pupil had begun. Strauss feels compelled to "express his gratitude for the work done by the Tubingen school on the Johannine question."
