IV
THE EARLIEST FICTITIOUS LIVES OF JESUS
Karl Friedrich Bahrdt. Briefe fiber die Bibel im Volkston. Eine 'Wochenschrift von einem Prediger auf dem Lande. (Popular Letters about the Bible. A weekly paper by a country clergyman.) J. Fr. Dost, Halle, 1782. 816 pp.
Ausfuhrung des Plans und Zwecks Jesu. In Briefen an Wahrheit suchende Leser. (An Explanation of the Plans and Aims of Jesus. In letters addressed to readers who seek the truth.) 11 vols., embracing 3000 pp. August Mylius, Berlin, 1784- 1792. This work is a sequel to the Popular Letters about the Bible.
Die samtlichen Reden Jesu aus den Evangelisten ausgezogen. (The Whole of the Discourses of Jesus, extracted from the Gospels.) Berlin, 1786,
Karl Heinrich Venturini. Natiirliche Geschichte des grossen Propheten von Naza- reth. (A Non-supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth.) Bethlehem (Copenhagen), 1st ed., 1800-1802; 2nd ed., 1806. 4 vols., embracing 2700 pp. The work appeared anonymously. The description given below is based on the 2nd ed., which shows dependence, in some of the exegetical details, upon the then recently published commentaries of Paulus.
IT IS STRANGE TO NOTICE HOW OFTEN IN THE HISTORY OF OUR SUBJECT a few imperfectly equipped free-lances have attacked and attempted to carry the decisive positions before the ordered ranks of professional theology have pushed their advance to these decisive points.
Thus, it was the fictitious "Lives" of Bahrdt and Venturini which, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, first attempted to apply, with logical consistency, a non-supernatural interpretation to the miracle stories of the Gospel. Further, these writers were the first who, instead of contenting themselves with the simple reproduction of the successive sections of the Gospel narrative, endeavoured to grasp the inner connexion of cause and effect in the events and experiences of the life of Jesus. Since they found no such connexion indicated in the Gospels, they had to supply it for themselves. The particular form which their explanation takes — the hypothesis of a secret society of which Jesus is the tool — is, it is true, rather a sorry makeshift. Yet, in a sense, these Lives of Jesus, for all their colouring of fiction, are the first which deserve the name. The rationalists, and even Paulus, confine themselves to describing the teaching of Jesus; Bahrdt and Venturini make a bold attempt to paint the portrait of Jesus Himself. It is
