which had had earlier champions in Koppe,[1] Storr,[2] Gratz,[3] and Herder,[4] was now maintained by Credner and Lachmann, who saw in Matthew a combination of the logia-document with Mark. The "primitive Gospel" hypothesis of Eichhorn, according to which the first three Gospels went back to a common source, not identical with any of them, had become somewhat discredited. There had been much discussion and various modifications of Griesbach's "dependence theory," according to which Mark was pieced together out of Matthew and Luke, and Schleiermacher's Diegesentheorie,[5] which saw the primary material not in a gospel, but in unconnected notes; from these, collections of narrative passages were afterwards formed, which in the post-apostolic period coalesced into continuous descriptions of the life of Jesus such as the three which have been preserved in our Synoptic Gospels.
In this matter Strauss is a sceptical eclectic. In the main he may be said to combine Griesbach's theory of the secondary origin of Mark with Schleiermacher's Diegesentheorie, the latter answering to his method of treating the sections separately. But whereas Schleiermacher had used the plan of John's Gospel as a framework into which to fit the independent narratives, Strauss's rejection of the Fourth Gospel left him without any means of connecting the sections. He makes a point, indeed, of sharply emphasising this want of connexion; and it was just this that made his work appear so extreme.
The Synoptic discourses, like the Johannine, are composite structures, created by later tradition out of sayings which originally belonged to different times and circumstances, arranged under certain leading ideas so as to form connected discourses. The sermon on the mount, the discourse at the sending forth of the twelve, the great parable-discourse, the polemic against the Pharisees, have all been gradually formed like geological deposits. So far as the original juxtaposition may be supposed to have been here and there preserved, Matthew is doubtless the most trustworthy authority for it. "From the comparison which we have been making," says Strauss in one passage, "we can already see that the hard grit of these sayings of Jesus (die kornigen Reden Jesu) has not indeed been dissolved by the flood of oral tradition, but they have often been washed away from their original position and like rolling pebbles (Gerolle) have been deposited in places to which
- ↑ Koppe, Marcus non epitomator Matthai, 1782.
- ↑ Storr, De Fontibus Evangeliorum Mt. et Lc.; 1794.
- ↑ Gratz, Neuer Versuch, die Entstehung der drei ersten Evangelien zu erklaren, 1812.
- ↑ V. sup. p. 35 f. For the earlier history of the question see F. C. Baur, Krit. Untersuch, uber die kanonischen Evangelien, Tubingen, 1847, pp. 1-76.
- ↑ So called because largely based on the reference in Luke i. 1, to the "many" who had "taken in hand to draw up a narrative (dihghsiV)."�TRANSLATOR.
