Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4.djvu/555

 CRITICISM

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CRITICISM

iif the seventeenth, had discarded the supernatural, til.' X. T. became the first object of a systematic at- t Ilk. Reimarus (1694-1768) assailed the motives of it - writers and cast aspersions on the honesty of Jesus Himself. J. S. Semler (1725-91) used the greatest l;iiituile in discussing the origin and credibility of the s irrod Scriptures, arguing that these subjects should 1" ilo;ilt with without regard to any Divine content. S. iiilfir was the first to question the authenticity of \ - r. books from a critical standpoint. His exegcti- ■ ■ 1 1 |irinciples, if admitted, would largely destroy the liihority of the Gospels. Paulus (1701-1851), pro- i -or at Jena and Heidelberg, granted the genuineness "I ihe Gospels, and their authors' honesty of purpose, Imt taught that in narrating the miraculous and super- II itiiral the Apostles and Evangelists recorded their li lusions, and that all the alleged superhuman occur- 1'^ are to be explained by merely natural causes, horn, the pioneer of modern German criticism, Mcl his inquiries into the field of the N. T. and, lining with 1794, proposed a theory to explain similarities and differences of the Synoptic i'cls, i. e. Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Some I'll ISPS of what is now known as "the Synoptic I'l'ihlem" were examined by Griesbach as early as )77(i. and again, in 1781, by a posthumous essay of Lessing treating of the Evangelists "considered simply as human historians". The problem was first clearly formulated by Lachraann in 1835. The dangerous tendencies of the rationalistic writers were ably combated by J. L. Hug, a Catholic exegete, whose "Introduction to the N. T." was completed in 1808. Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was the earliest of tho.se German theologians who acknowledge the religious force of the sacred writings, but imperil their authority by a free and independent treatment of their origin and historical contents; his view of the N. T. was influenced by Semler's criticisms. Some- what akin to Schleiermacher's attitude is that of De Wette, but his conclusions are often negative and doubtful. The Evangelistic school of Protestant German commentators, represented earliest by Gue- ricke, Olshausen, Neander, and Bleek, were in the main adherents to the genuineness and truthfulness of the Gospels, though influenced by the mediating or mystico-rationalistic tendencies of Schleiermacher. As N.-T. scholars they belong between 1823 and 1859.

The "Life of Jesus" by David Friedrich Strauss, which appeared in 1835, marked a new departure of view with regard to the N. T., and made a great sensation. Strauss was an Hegelian and one for whom the "idea'' obscured the objective facts, while it rested upon them. He held that the orthodox conception of Christ was the creature of the ardent Messianic hopes of the Jewish- Christians of the primitive Church, who imagined that Jesus fulfilled the O.-T. prophecies, and who, soon after His death, invested His personality and the whole tenor of His life with mythical qualities, in which there was nothing but a bare kernel of objective tnith, \'iz., the existence of a nibbi named Jesus, who was a man of extraordinarj- spiritual power and pene- tration, and who h.ad gathered about him a band of disciples. Echoes of these ideas are to be found in Ronan's "Vie de Jfeus". Strauss'a relatively refined philo.sophy of religion was more in the spirit of the age than the moribund, crude naturalism of Paulus, though it only substituted one form of rationalism for another. The " Life of .Tesus'' .soon called forth refu- tations, but in the advanced circles of German thought the finishing stroke was not given to it until Ferdinand Christian Haur, the founder of the Tiibingen, or "Ten- dency", scliool of exegesis and criticism, published the mature fruit of his .speculation under the title " Paulus der .\postel .Je.su Christi ", in IS45. Baur, like Strauss, w.as a disciple of Hegel, but had taken from that philos- opher a different key to the significance of the N. T., viz., the principle of the evolution of all truth through

the conciliation of contradictions. He taught that the N. T. is the outcome of an antagonism between Jewish, or Petrine, and Pauline tendencies in the primitive Church. The Pauline concept of Chris- tianity — one of a philosophic and universal order — is represented by the Epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians, which alone Baur ad- mitted as the certainly authentic works of St. Paul. The Apocalypse was comj^osed in direct op- position to the spirit of the Pauline writings. The above works were written before A. d. 70. Between 70 and 140 appeared St. Matthew's Gospel, Petrine in character; St. Luke's Gospel, Pauline, though re- touched in a conciliatory spirit; Acts, adapted simi- larly to St. Luke; and latest the Gospel of St. Mark, also of an irenic type. This second period is one of transition between antagonism and complete recon- ciliation. This latter is the note of the third period, reaching to about A. D. 170, which produced the Gos- pel and Epistles bearing the name of St. John, and the pastoral Epistles, which therefore cannot have come from St. Paul. The scheme excluded the authenticity of all the Gospels. Baur's theory has not survived except in the verj- mitigated form seen in the works of Hilgenfeld and Pfleiderer. Nevertheless, aside from his philosophic assumptions, the principles and methods of Baur have left a deep iinpress on later N.-T. criticism. He first practised on a consistent and developed plan the habit of scrutinizing the sacred dociunents themselves for evidences of the times which gave them birth, and led the way in the present critical trend towards a division of the N. T. into Judaistic, Pauline, and Johannine elements.

The Tubingen ideas evoked a reaction against their destructive and purely rationalistic conclusions. This movement has been twofold: on one side it is ortho- dox Protestant, though critical in its method; this section is the natural continuation of the earlier Evangelistic exegesis, and counts as its ablest repre- sentatives Zahn, B. Weiss, and Godet ; the other branch is partly the outgrowth of the Schleiermacher school and acknowledges as its founder Albert Ritschl, whose defection from the Tiibingen group (1857) proved a serious blow to Baur's system. The Ritschlian theol- ogy insists on the religious value of the N. T., espe- cially in the impression its picture of Christ makes on the individual soul, and on the other hand allows a free rein to the boldest and most searching criticism of the origin and historical worth of the N.-T. books, in a blind mystic confidence that nothing that criti- cism can do will impair their religious value. The indifference of the Ritschlians to the consequences of criticism is also shown towards the miraculous ele- ment in our Lord's life and in the N. T. in general. This tendency is very manifest among other contera- porarj' German critics, who, while influenced by Ritschlianism, belong rather to the "scientific" and evolutionarj' school. Holtzmann, Bousset, Jiilicher, Harnack, Schmiedel by critical procedure eliminate from the Gospels, or at least call into doubt, all the miraculous elements, and reduce the Divinity of Christ to a moral, pre-eminent sonship to God, and yet, by a strange inconsequence, exalt the saving and enlightening power of His personality. This latest school, however, admit dates which approach much nearer to the traditional ones than to those of Baur. Harnack, besides affirming the geiuiinencss of all the Pauline Epistles exce|)t the pastoral ones, and of Mark and I^uke, places the Synoptic Gospels between A. n. 05 and 93, and fixes the year 1 10 as f lie latest limit for the Gospel and ICpistles of St. John and the Apocalypse.

In Great Britain, N.-T. criticism with few excep- tions has been moderate and, on the whole, conserva- tive. Excellent service h.as been done in the defence of contested books by the British divines J. B. Light- foot, B. F. Westcott, W. H. Sanday, and others.