fulfilment of Messianic prophecy, the universalistic traits and the predictions of the passion and the resurrection. Like Wrede, too he feels that the prescription of silence in the case of miracles of healing and of certain communications to the disciples constitutes a problem which demands solution.
Still more remarkable is his eye for exegetical detail. He has an unfailing instinct for pregnant passages like Matt. x. 23, xvi. 28, which are crucial for the interpretation of large masses of the history. The fact is there are some who are historians by the grace of God, who from their mother's womb have an instinctive feeling for the real. They follow through all the intricacy and confusion of reported fact the pathway of reality, like a stream which, despite the rocks that encumber its course and the windings of its valley, finds its way inevitably to the sea. No erudition can supply the place of this historical instinct, but erudition sometimes serves a useful purpose, inasmuch as it produces in its possessors the pleasing belief that they are historians, and thus secures their services for the cause of history. In truth they are at best merely doing the preliminary spade-work of history, collecting for a future historian the dry bones of fact, from which, with the aid of his natural gift, he can recall the past to life. More often, however, the way in which erudition seeks to serve history is by suppressing historical discoveries as long as possible, and leading out into the field to oppose the one true view an army of possibilities. By arraying these in support of one another it finally imagines that it has created out of possibilities a living reality.
This obstructive erudition is the special prerogative of theology, in which, even at the present day, a truly marvellous scholarship often serves only to blind the eyes to elementary truths, and to cause the artificial to be preferred to the natural. And this happens not only with those who deliberately shut their minds against new impressions, but also with those whose purpose is to go forward, and to whom their contemporaries look up as leaders. It was a typical illustration of this fact when Semler rose up and slew Reimarus in the name of scientific theology.[1]
Reimarus had discredited progressive theology. Students — so Semler tells us in his preface — became unsettled and sought other callings. The great Halle theologian — born in 1725 — the pioneer of the historical view of the Canon, the precursor of Baur in the reconstruction of primitive Christianity, was urged to do away with the offence. As Origen of yore with Celsus, so Semler takes Reimarus sentence by sentence, in such a way that if his work were lost it could be recovered from the refutation. The fact was that Semler had nothing in the nature of a complete or well-
- ↑ Doderlein also wrote a defence of Jesus against the Fragmentist: Fragments und Antifragmente. Nuremberg, 1778.
