4: Nineteenth-Century Liberalism and Alternative Resurrection Theories

4

Nineteenth-Century Liberalism and Alternative Resurrection Theories

From approximately 1800 to 1930, German liberalism was the dominant expression of critical theology. While slightly different time frames are sometimes cited, the movement roughly began with the initially anonymous appearance of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s volume On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. This scholar became known as the “Father of German Liberalism” and is usually also recognized as the most influential thinker of the nineteenth century. As Richard R. Niebuhr declared in his opening sentence of a biographical essay on this theologian, “Religiously speaking, we must concede the nineteenth century to Schleiermacher. No other judgment is possible.” Even Karl Barth noted that among recent theologians, “Schleiermacher . . . has no rival.”

The movement is generally demarcated as having ended either with World War I or at the 1930 death of Adolf von Harnack, a major voice at the close of this era. German liberalism was preceded by some earlier initial forays into the almost uncharted waters of both biblical as well as theological criticism at the hands of the French and German rationalists, but particularly by the English deists. Few of these deistic participants were well-known or well-respected scholars, with the majority of them being neither philosophically nor theologically trained. They more frequently featured rather roughshod, rambling, and sometimes totally inept attempts and were often characterized as ranting authors who too frequently “shot from the hip” and were ill prepared for serious academic interaction. As a result, according to Peter Gay, the deists “produced a great debate, and a debate the deists were bound to lose: the opposing side engrossed most of the talent.” The rationalistic and deistic writers chiefly from the eighteenth century continued the even earlier trends in biblical criticism that were beginning to be developed by their predecessors.

But the German liberals were a new breed of critical scholars that differed in several respects from these earlier precursors. Though not always the case, the chief representatives during this period were usually credentialed German university professors of theology or philosophy who were best known for devoting much lengthier and more systematic efforts chiefly to studies of the historical Jesus. As a result, so many “Lives of Jesus” were published during this time by a plethora of different scholars that this movement as a whole was later named the “First Quest for the historical Jesus.” It was the first such distinctive historical search for Jesus to occur during the next two centuries as well as the longest-lived of the three quests that have emerged thus far. Also, unlike their predecessors, even when the liberal trends eventu­ally died out or changed direction, their development of such major ideas left an indelible imprint on subsequent movements in critical New Testament scholarship.

These German efforts included both new and creative interpretations of Jesus’s life as well as other huge developments, such as evolving theses regarding the literary and historical nature of the Gospels. Some of these theses stood the test of time, while others were quite unfounded and supplanted within a generation. Many of these scholars became the forerunners of crucial developments in critical theology long after their time, while others became infamous for particular research with which they have become associated.

More positively, some of the earliest major steps during this period were taken in the huge area of textual (lower) critical studies of the Greek New Testament text. While this is often taken for granted today, a critical Greek text of the New Testament was not really available during the first half of the liberal era. The twelve major developments in New Testament studies noted by Stephen Neill and Tom Wright from 1861 onward include such items as establishing substantially the original Greek text, with Mark increasingly thought to be the earliest Gospel written and with Paul steadily being considered the most crucial Christian witness. These advances, in turn, facilitated much more careful studies during the last few decades of liberalism.

There was a vast diversity of ideas during the reign of this movement, with scholars taking positions all the way along the philosophical and theological ­spectrum—from a few scholars who rejected the historical existence of Jesus to those who defended both his miracles as well as high Christology. Emerging during these years, then, was a rather steady stream of critical ideas pertaining to the historicity of the Gospel accounts and the establishment of the main groundwork for Jesus’s life. Doubts continued to emerge regarding some of the more dogmatic theological doctrines held in the early church, along with a serious questioning of Jesus’s miracles in particular. Foremost on this list were many responses to the resurrection appearances of Jesus.

Nineteenth-Century Liberals and Supernatural Events

Criticism of Jesus’s miracles, especially early in the liberal movement, usually took the form of rationalistic attempts to dismiss the supernatural portion of the Gospel narratives. Most frequently (and differing as well from many contemporary critical treatments), liberal interpreters took a Gospel account largely at face value except when it came to the miraculous portions. At that point, a natural alternative hypothesis was usually inserted instead, rendering the entire story as a quite normal episode.

Examples of such a rationalistic approach are supplied often in the famous overview of this liberal period by one of its own, Albert Schweitzer, the highly accomplished scholar with three earned doctor’s degrees (including one in medicine). His best-known work by far was The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), which remains unsurpassed in its reputation for its intricate survey and evaluations of the liberals and has been treated ever since as a primary source for the period, especially its descriptions of more obscure works that have become quite difficult to obtain.

One of the best known of the early liberal rationalists was Kantian scholar Heinrich Paulus, whose own lengthy Life of Jesus (almost 1,200 pages) was published in 1828. Its reputation notwithstanding, Schweitzer seems not to have held an overly high view of the work, stating that it was even “inferior to Venturini,” who had previously been categorized as one of the writers of a fictitious life of Jesus! As if that comment were not enough, Schweitzer remarks further that Paulus’s work was basically just a notated Gospel harmony based on the Fourth Gospel!

Schweitzer points out that, in the hands of a rationalist interpreter like Paulus, Jesus’s healing miracles were of central concern and were explained creatively. Jesus made good use of his spiritual power and influence as well as various medicines, sometimes described merely as “oil” in the Gospels, and sedatives. Even diet and “devotional exercises” were encouraged! Sometimes the Gospel writers actually knew the secrets of Jesus’s use of particular remedies, but their knowledge on these matters was not for public consumption.

Walking on the water during a storm could have been due to the tempest being so severe that the disciples in the boat simply failed to realize that Jesus was merely walking along the shoreline while the boat had blown too close to land. When Jesus was asleep in a boat during another storm, the disciples had perhaps been blown behind the cover of a hill, shielding them from the tempest. So, when Jesus awoke at approximately the same moment and made a comment regarding the storm, his disciples concluded that he had actually been responsible for calming the weather.

On the other hand, the feeding of the 5,000 people was possible because Jesus encouraged everyone who brought food with them (especially the rich who were in attendance) to share, thereby providing plenty of nourishment for everyone. The transfiguration was due to Jesus talking to two men who the three disciples in-correctly assumed were Moses and Elijah, and in the early-morning rays of the sun coming up over the mountaintop, they appeared to be shining. Raising people from the dead had more to do with the sick emerging from comas, or with Jesus noticing signs of life in them.

Less frequently employed and chiefly appearing a few decades after Schleier­macher, other liberal volumes touted much more radical methodologies that questioned large portions of the Gospel text altogether, including both miraculous and many nonmiraculous passages. In these latter cases, the Gospel accounts were often viewed largely as the later growth of mythical encrustation upon simpler stories that grew in the retelling, totally obscuring the original form.

Often missed is that this later developing mythical method questioned not only the more orthodox, supernatural approaches to the Christian faith regarding both its miraculous and dogmatic theological elements, but largely also eliminated cherished notions found in the earlier rational methodologies. In these cases, many of the nonmiraculous Gospel scenarios were typically viewed as lacking historical credentials, hence challenging many of the older views. This did not please the more dominant, rationalistically inclined German liberals, who were not so drastic in their treatment of the Gospel texts.

The best-known nineteenth-century scholar who employed this mythical approach (as well as the most attacked!) was undoubtedly David F. Strauss. Schweitzer reports that Strauss’s initial Life of Jesus, first published in two volumes in 1835–1836, created one of the greatest theological furors ever. In fact, in July 1835, not very long after its publication, Strauss was relieved of his teaching position at Tübingen University and “exiled.”

After losing his teaching position, Strauss’s example no doubt served to ensure that this mythological approach would remain the minority methodology during the dominance of the liberal period. Although of lesser reputation (and not to be confused with the earlier and much more influential New Testament scholar F. C. Baur, Strauss’s former teacher), Bruno Bauer also engaged in this mythical methodology and arrived at more radical conclusions than did Strauss, such as his view that Jesus never even lived! Schweitzer was also very critical of Bauer’s theses, viewing them as arbitrary, ungrounded, and self-refuting. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bauer was also forced to stop lecturing after his own crisis of faith. French scholar Ernest Renan is still another who followed this mythical methodology and was likewise removed from teaching in his own country of France as a reaction to his life of Jesus.

Regarding Strauss’s approach, Schweitzer remarked, “The distinction between Strauss and those who had preceded him upon this path consists only in this, that prior to him the conception of myth was neither truly grasped nor consistently applied.” So the ideas of Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Ernest Renan, and a few other scholars emerged on either side of the midpoint of the nineteenth century. Although they were too radical for the majority of their colleagues in their own day, their notions certainly served as forerunners for some highly influential concepts approximately a century later, championed particularly by Rudolf Bultmann along with certain others. Later, the Jesus Seminar also saluted Strauss’s efforts.

Naturalistic Theories regarding the Resurrection of Jesus

Still viewed as the central event in the Christian faith, Jesus’s resurrection in particular received much attention during the dominance of the German liberal ideas. This period of time served as the heyday for the development of many natural alternative responses. With the many lives of Jesus being penned during these years, responding to the cause of the resurrection experiences and the corresponding deep conviction of the early disciples played a central role in these discussions. The purpose here is to outline many of these naturalistic theses along with their supporters, with many critiques and other responses coming later.

The Swoon or Apparent Death Hypotheses

One of the earliest attempts to question the historicity of the resurrection appearances was to suppose that Jesus never really died by crucifixion in the first place. Up until Strauss’s multipronged critique against this view in his initial publication of The Life of Jesus, it was the most popular of the naturalistic theories against the resurrection. Somehow, Jesus avoided the intended outcome of his Roman death sentence. This initial and popular approach was that Jesus escaped death, either purposefully (as with an orchestrated setup) or accidentally (as in passing out and recovering later). Differing “plot” scenarios may have involved others who worked variously to ensure that Jesus would be rescued before the Romans’ intended outcome. The perpetrators in some of these volumes were often identified as the Essenes, involving narratives that Schweitzer rather derisively termed the “fictitious lives” of Jesus. The second alternative generally involved Jesus being injured seriously and considered dead by friends and enemies alike, though recovering sufficiently at a later time so that he could appear to his followers and live a more or less normal life after that, perhaps like Paul after being stoned and left for dead at Lystra. Some slightly different variations existed here as well.

One of the earliest to hold the second option of the swoon or apparent death position was English deist Peter Annet. He wrote several brief treatises against the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s resurrection, most of them directed to critics who had published against his views and often repeating his salient points time and again.

Written in the mid-eighteenth century, Annet’s works address many of the key areas that were most associated with skeptics who criticized Christianity. By today’s critical standards, these books read as antiquated and outdated tracts that address questions very few are asking today, though some are still relevant. Examples of the latter would include the more general criticisms of belief in the notion of miracles, asserting that such events are an “absurdity” to common sense and even “contrary to the attributes of God.” The last statement is probably due to Annet’s belief that God does not break his own created laws of nature. Further, presupposing the infamous words repeated by a large chorus of skeptics today, he writes, “I ought to have extra­ordinary evidence, to induce me to believe extraordinary things, that are supernatural.”

More specifically regarding Jesus’s resurrection, one of Annet’s most frequent claims is that the Gospel accounts in general and the resurrection stories in particular are filled with discrepancies and contradictions of various sorts, lacking harmony throughout. If we can judge from the amount of time he spent on two subjects in particular, a constant bother to Annet were apparently the Gospels’ claims that Jesus repeatedly predicted the event of his resurrection ahead of time, and Matthew’s lone account that guards were placed in front of his tomb after it had been sealed. In one volume, these two issues occupied approximately a quarter of his entire text. One can only surmise, but perhaps the reason for the concerted efforts at these two points (with his arguments often being repeated) was that to allow these issues to go uncontested would make his postulated natural hypotheses more difficult to establish and maintain.

While Annet was probably one of the first modern critics to suppose the possibility that Jesus avoided death by crucifixion, he mentions this option quite in-frequently in his works despite his many repetitions of his arguments elsewhere. It is also clear that this hypothesis was not the only natural suggestion he ventured as to what might have occurred. For example, asserting that reason is his only rule, he declared that “all Men die, and rise no more,” and since the notion of a resurrection is contrary to nature, resurrections “never” occur. As to potential natural causes in Jesus’s case, Annet mentions the possibility of apparitions, faulty imagination, confusion, credulity, or even deception (though apparently without questioning the disciples’ own sincerity).

Amazingly, regarding the sources of information that Paul was citing in 1 Cor 15:3, Annet states that these reports were hearsay accounts. Mentioning a couple of reasons for this conclusion, Annet states that since Paul was “born out of due time” (15:8 KJV), this indicated that Paul had not even been born yet. Therefore, these testimonies were from before his own time and thus provide no eyewitness data at all. If that is not enough, he takes Paul’s comment that some of the 500 witnesses to a resurrection appearance of Christ had fallen asleep (15:6) to mean that maybe they had been dreaming or just coming out of their sleep when Jesus appeared to them. It seems from the immediate context that Annet means these statements seriously.

Then we arrive at what Annet is best known for questioning. He addresses the time when Jesus was in the tomb, asking whether Jesus was dead or alive. If the latter, perhaps he broke the seals from inside the sepulcher. But if the Roman spear wound reported in the Gospel of John was doubted, then one could indeed also question Jesus’s death by crucifixion altogether. After all, John adds that Jesus’s legs were not broken (John 19:31–33) with all the complications that would entail. Further, Pilate himself wondered how Jesus had died by crucifixion so quickly, summoning the centurion to hear the report for himself (Mark 15:44–45). So perhaps Jesus was not dead when Joseph buried him.

Annet spends more time on the apparent death hypothesis than on the other suppositions, which may indeed indicate he holds it as the most likely view of what really happened to Jesus. But it cannot be concluded that this was his only option, for as we have seen, he raises a few other possibilities along the way. Nonetheless, it still may have been the best known of his responses, perhaps because it appeared to be quite a novel position at that time, just a couple of hundred years after the Protestant Reformation itself.

Not long after Annet’s series of small volumes on the resurrection of Jesus, Karl Friedrich Bahrdt and Karl Heinrich Venturini also supported the swoon or apparent death theory. Including their works in his chapter on the “fictitious lives of Jesus,” Schweitzer introduced this chapter with the unflattering comment that these and other authors consisted of “a few imperfectly equipped free-lances” who nonetheless “first attempted to apply, with logical consistency, a non-supernatural interpretation to the miracle stories of the Gospel.”

However, as Schweitzer commented further, since they were unable to pinpoint any causes in the Gospels to make the necessary connections for their story, these authors had to resort to inventing this backdrop for themselves. To do so, both writers resorted to hypothesizing a secret society, which was “rather a sorry makeshift.” Hence, this “colouring of fiction” is the reason for the moniker of the fictitious lives of Jesus.

The first of the two writers, Bahrdt, composed his work Ausführung des Plans und Zwecks Jesu: In Briefen an Wahrheit suchende Leser in eleven volumes over an eight-year period (1784–1792). He hypothesized that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were secret members of the Essene community. On the lookout for a good messianic figure, they adopted Jesus to fit their needs. These and other well-placed friends assisted Jesus, orchestrating many of the events during his life, among them his miracles.

For example, following the sort of rationalistic design agenda already described above, Luke the physician directed Jesus’s healing efforts. The crucifixion was a staged event that worked out exactly as planned in spite of a few close calls. Luke made drugs available that were capable of helping Jesus cope with the horrible pain and also resist death. These men also made sure that Jesus was only on the cross for a minimal amount of time. The Roman centurion was bribed so that Jesus’s ankles were not broken, and Joseph took Jesus down from the cross and placed him in the Essenes’ cave so that he could be nursed back to health.

Since Jesus was healthy, he healed quickly, incredibly being able to walk by just the third day even though the nail wounds remained open and unhealed by that time! He was able to appear numerous times to his followers, retreating to his cave after each visit. After the last appearance, Jesus encouraged his followers and then walked up the Mount of Olives into a low cloud as they watched, causing them to think that he had ascended to heaven. Only rarely was he seen again, such as when he appeared to Paul on the Damascus road. Still, though unseen, he could quietly direct the members of his enclave until he died.

Our second author, Karl Heinrich Venturini, developed another plot thesis in his text Natürliche Geschichte des grossen Propheten von Nazareth, published in four volumes from 1800–1802. His chief idea was that Jesus’s spiritual message had to be draped in material garb so as to appeal to the masses. So, Jesus’s miracles were performed with an ethical intent in mind—to hasten the acceptance of his message. But these events were not actually miraculous. For example, Jesus employed medicines in healing people and always carried around his medicine bag! The dead were raised from comas.

On the other hand, the nature miracles were performed more by the knowledge of the natural order along with good timing rather than by any sort of supernatural control on Jesus’s part. Changing the water to wine was “performed” with some jars of wine that Jesus had brought to the wedding as a gift.

The Essenes were also active in Venturini’s story. They watched over and guided the child Jesus even while he still lived in Egypt and trained both him and John the Baptist. Also, in true rationalistic fashion, the supernatural elements in stories such as Jesus’s baptism, the temptation, his paying taxes with the fish that Peter caught, and so on were all explained quite naturally in order to keep the basic story intact.

However, quite unlike Bahrdt and all the gyrations that he claimed occurred at the crucifixion, Jesus was really arrested and killed. Jesus expected to die and then meet his disciples later in eternity rather than being raised to life again. But Joseph of Arimathea acted quickly, procured permission from Pilate, bribed the centurion, and took down Jesus’s body. He and Nicodemus washed the body, with blood from the spear wound still flowing freely from Jesus’s side wound, and placed him in the tomb. The other “Essene Brethren” helped out as well, and those who were seen the next morning walking around the tomb area in their white garb were taken to be angels. But then Jesus actually revived and was nursed back to health. He came out of his hiding place on occasion to see his followers and got better with the assistance of the Essene brothers. After forty days, he left his disciples.

Early in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher was on his way to becoming the lead liberal voice of the nineteenth century. This is the real beginning of German liberalism. The pens of Annet, Bahrdt, and Venturini began popularizing the swoon hypothesis before the liberal voices. But while the English deists and the authors of the fictitious lives of Jesus were read and no doubt affected views, they did not present the sort of gravitas of many of the leading liberal scholars. With these more scholarly pacesetters, a much more influential critique could be articulated.

To say that Schleiermacher’s view of the death and resurrection of Jesus is not the easiest to discern is somewhat of an understatement, and for more than one reason. Different passages in Schleiermacher’s writings appear to conflict with each other, and at any rate seem to use imprecise language. That is why seasoned interpreters among other scholars frequently disagree regarding the final stance of this German theologian.

At least one background matter is relevant here as well. Like many intellectuals of his time, especially after the publications of David Hume, Schleiermacher thought that the concept of miracle was very difficult given what we know concerning the laws of nature. When and where miracles are embraced, there seems to be little knowledge of these laws, whereas when the laws are fully appreciated in scientific terms, there tends to be much less talk of miracles. But why would God disrupt the “original immutable course” of nature by suspending its laws? Actually, “every absolute miracle would destroy the whole system of nature.” Such events, if introduced, would “completely abrogate the conception of nature.” Hence, “we should abandon the idea of the absolutely supernatural.”

Along with views such as these, Schleiermacher concluded that some miracle accounts in the New Testament should not be taken literally but symbolically, while the supernatural portions of others could best be explained naturalistically. Nature miracles, in particular, are the most questioned variety.

From the outset, then, it might seem from these considerations that the likelihood does not favor Schleiermacher thinking that Jesus actually rose from the dead. But this is where the details tend to grow somewhat murky and are disputed by various commentators and are more difficult to unravel. For starters, Schleiermacher asserts that, for him, it is “a matter of complete indifference” whether or not Jesus actually died due to crucifixion, which he then repeats. Actually, he thinks it may even be easier to presume that Jesus had not yet died, due to the brief time that he spent on the cross. Regardless, there are no grounds to prove the issue either way, so the answer is simply unknown.

However this remark may be taken, some major theological commentators have judged that Schleiermacher actually held that Jesus was only “apparently” dead, from which he recovered. This of course would seem to necessitate some species of the swoon or apparent death theory. The operative terms in the conversation, used by both Schweitzer and Barth, seem to be “apparent death,” while Strauss simply stated that Schleiermacher and Paulus agreed that “Jesus was not quite dead,” which Strauss terms a “lame” position to hold (probably no pun intended).

However, Schleiermacher makes other statements on this topic that must be considered, however briefly, due to their relevance to our topic here. For example, following both Heinrich Paulus and Karl August von Hase, Schleiermacher asserts that the only sure way to know that someone is dead is by the presence of decomposition. But then Schleiermacher adds that the presence of the separated blood and water after the Roman spear entered his side may very well indicate that “chemical decomposition” had already begun, in that the act would seem to have been a test to indicate whether or not Jesus had already died. Even so, Schleiermacher adds, all we may be able to say is that the soldier “thought of Christ as really dead.” So even here, it appears that we cannot be sure, hence his stated doubts.

One other item should be mentioned here. In a comment quite reminiscent of Strauss’s famous critique of the swoon or apparent death thesis, Schleiermacher remarks:

If we think of Christ as bearing the external marks of his crucifixion . . . the journeying hither and yon seems quite improbable, but this improbable action took place as early as the first day. Then he appears as one quite healthy, who walks without difficulty to Emmaus and back again. . . . We cannot represent him as those do who maintain the hypothesis of an apparent death. We cannot think of him as spending this time with his life force at a low ebb.

This relevant comment would appear to end the question for many, but it really has not done so. Hence, editor Jack Verheyden chides Schweitzer and Strauss for not observing what he thinks are clear distinctions in the works of their fellow German theologian that Jesus had in fact truly died due to crucifixion.

In his own day, even Karl August von Hase complained that his view along with that of Schleiermacher needed to be distinguished much more clearly from the position of Paulus. But frankly, Hase’s own distinctions are quite confusing in themselves. It makes one wonder what the actual difference is between a more “obvious” apparent death where the body later revives (see below for Paulus’s position) and an actual death that can still receive life back into it again (Hase, Schleiermacher, and Venturini). Schleiermacher’s distinctions are very difficult to discern as well.

Candidly, of the two positions, it is the view held by Schleiermacher and Hase that requires the most explaining! But if Schleiermacher and Hase wanted to distinguish their understanding from a rather straightforward apparent death thesis, why would they argue so confusingly and tortuously for Jesus’s actual death on the cross that nonetheless left behind a body that could still receive life back into it?

Of course, the distinction just made from the statement of Hase’s own view above—as well as Schleiermacher’s—could also describe Jesus’s resurrection itself. But that would require a little “unpacking” since that does not seem to be the only possible meaning of their wording. So in spite of Schleiermacher’s strong comment above concerning Jesus’s seeming healthy appearances, as well as Hase’s attempted clarifications, these scholars could have helped themselves immensely in the understanding of their views. True, Hase helpfully states that Jesus was not rescued by any human means. But at the end of the day, why do both he and Schleiermacher insist that either an apparent death or a resurrection could be true, that neither position hurts Christianity, and that they basically seem not to care whether or not Jesus actually died by crucifixion? Arguably, no one should have to work this hard to figure out someone’s position and at such a crucial point as well.

Among the views of Annet, Bahrdt, Venturini, Hase, and Schleiermacher, then, Heinrich Paulus was probably the best-known proponent of the swoon or apparent death position during the heyday of liberal theology. In his life of Jesus published in 1828, Paulus proposed that when Jesus was on the cross, he fell into a death-imitating trance. The soldier’s lance thrust was simply a superficial wound, and Jesus revived after being placed in a cool tomb surrounded by pungent spices. The storm and the earthquake in particular caused the stone to roll away from the front of the tomb and Jesus was able to walk out. His severe crucifixion injuries explained why he was not always recognized, especially at first, but the nail wounds in his hands (though Paulus held that Jesus’s feet were not nailed to the cross) served most to identify him to his followers.

Thomas’s doubts and Jesus’s actual presence before his disciples served to indicate that he was not some sort of phantom but was genuinely present with them. Because he was still recovering, however, he was unable to remain with them for long periods of time or to overexert himself. After concluding that he was actually dying, Jesus appeared to his followers one last time on the Mount of Olives, blessed them, and then walked off into a low cloud. Nobody knew when or where he died.

Schweitzer lists three later “imaginative” or “fictitious” lives of Jesus that also embraced the swoon or apparent death hypothesis. These are the texts written by Charles Hennell, August Gfrörer, and Joseph Salvador—all appearing about the same time as Strauss’s volume Das Leben Jesu. Hennell was a London businessman who patterned his work on Venturini’s earlier “fictitious” text and similarly employed a plot thesis. For Hennell, Jesus was the son of an Essene and entered his ministry under their supervision. After his crucifixion, the Essenes removed him from the cross and resuscitated him.

Gfrörer was a church curate and lecturer at Tübingen University who had jetti­soned his Christian faith. He was at Tübingen while Strauss was still there. The second of his two volumes took a different methodological tact than the first, as he adapted Strauss’s mythical approach to the Gospels. Gfrörer considered Luke to be the most historically reliable of the Gospels, with John still being treated fairly positively. Matthew was written later, utilized worse sources, and invented some material. Mark is even dated in the first quarter of the second century.

When it came to the crucifixion and appearances of Jesus, Gfrörer’s plot thesis is also apparent. Since there is no historical basis for the conjuring act that he conceives, his scenario earned him the “imaginative” moniker bestowed by Schweitzer. Like so many of these interpretations, Joseph of Arimathea was an Essene, whose group made use of Jesus for their own purposes. The Roman guards were bribed. Jesus was removed from the cross before dying and taken to Joseph’s tomb nearby, where he was successfully resuscitated. Understood in this manner, Jesus’s appearances were historical events, even though they were definitely not postmortem miracles as in orthodox Christian teaching. Then the Essene community developed its own ideas into what became the church!

Joseph Salvador was a French Jew who postulated that Jesus stood in the long line of those who drew inspiration from the ancient tales of Middle Eastern gods and goddesses. In terms of Jesus’s “death” and later appearances, Salvador’s version of the plot thesis hypothesized the involvement of Pilate’s wife, the Roman centurion, and Joseph of Arimathea. The thrust of the Roman lance was simply a scratch that was not meant to kill Jesus. All of these items contributed to Pilate being surprised that Jesus had been pronounced dead so quickly. The result is that Jesus’s death was only apparent, and he was alive when he was taken down and buried. Secret disciples placed him in a garden tomb. Later, Jesus actually appeared to his followers.

This ends some of the major treatments of the well-known German liberal versions of the swoon or apparent death hypotheses. This general notion seems clearly to be the most popular of the naturalistic hypotheses pertaining to Jesus’s resurrection during the first third of the nineteenth century. These theses could come in the form of the ungrounded, plot-oriented, “fictitious” attempts of Bahrdt, Venturini, Hennell, Gfrörer, and Salvador, which usually feature Essenes affecting events from behind the scenes—facetiously, as if they were stationed even behind bushes and the like! Or they could concern the best-known, more serious example by Paulus. Or the disputed views of Schleiermacher and Hase could be the topic of discussion. But few liberal discussions are more intriguing than these versions. As we will observe in the next chapter, even these German liberal scholars themselves freely critiqued each other’s positions, and these apparent death views surely received their share of the criticisms and then some. Although being quite popular at the time, the apparent death scenarios were not the only brand of natural “resurrection” flavors.

Fraud Type 1: Jesus’s Disciples Stole Jesus’s Dead Body and Lied about His Appearances

Probably owing to the highly problematic issues raised by this alternative approach, this hypothesis was arguably not employed by any of the better-known German liberal scholars. Yet it still needs to be documented here briefly due to the role that certain of these ideas played in critical thinking during both this period as well as later times. Just as the English deist Peter Annet held the swoon or apparent death theory just before the beginning of the liberal era, another English deist, Thomas Woolston, employed a fraud thesis decades earlier than Annet. Woolston is usually thought to have been mentally ill and was imprisoned in 1730 for blasphemy. Since he could not pay the fine, he remained in prison until his death in 1733.

Woolston maintained that he was indeed a Christian, but one who disbelieved literal interpretations (which he said nauseated him) in favor of allegorical notions. He enumerated three major religious ideas that he stood for: restoring the place of allegorical interpretations, striving for a “universal and unbounded Toleration of Religion,” and abolishing a “hired and establish’d priesthood.” Altogether, he wanted “a spiritual Jesus” without the miracles and other physical manifestations.

In his sixth and last discourse on miracles, written particularly on Jesus’s resurrection, Woolston proposed that a physical resurrection would “be the most notorious and monstrous Imposture, that ever was put upon mankind.” Rather, Jesus’s disciples stole his dead body out of the burial tomb: “The Body was to be removed and a Resurrection pretended to the Delusion.” Again, the body was taken away and “a Resurrection talk’d of.” Yet again, the disciples stole the body “in order to pretend a Resurrection” and then they later spoke about Jesus’s appearances to them, including his giving them messages.

Woolston plainly and repeatedly refers to his naturalistic thesis as “Fraud” or even the “Argument of Fraud” or the “Proof of Fraud,” presumably because both stealing the body and the disciples’ proclamations of Jesus’s appearances (which were, of course, lies) were all perpetrated as duplicitous and deceitful actions. Further, Woolston calls Jesus a “Deceiver,” mentions the possibility of the disciples bribing the guards at the tomb, and points out conflicts in the texts. He even calls the entire ignominy “the most bare faced, and the most self evident Imposture that ever was put upon the World,” all of which also points to various species of fraud.

But why would the disciples be willing to die for a lie? Woolston declares that this is not an issue at all, because many “Cheats and Criminals . . . have asserted their Innocency” even to the point of death. Woolston thought this was the most successful farce in the universe, were it not for his taking the necessary steps to expose it.

A few decades after Woolston wrote, but still before the birth of liberalism, German rationalist and professor of oriental languages at the University of Ham­burg Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) also championed the fraud or stolen body thesis. He wrote a 4,000-page manuscript entitled An Apology for the Rational Worshippers of God. It was not penned for publication, though it circulated anony­mously among some individuals. Then, between 1774 and 1778, a librarian at Wolfenbüttal named Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published seven fragments from Reimarus’s larger work. One of the fragments was entitled “Concerning the Story of the Resurrection.”

Reimarus conjectured that after Jesus’s death, the disciples experienced a great amount of anxiety and fear, which lasted for a while. Still, they gathered their courage, reasoning that they could pretend to be brave and courageous even in the face of death. Further, they could preach the kingdom of God themselves, appearing to perform miracles, just as they had seen Jesus do repeatedly. So within a mere twenty-four hours, they stole Jesus’s body out of the tomb. When the empty tomb was discovered by others, the disciples feigned their actual surprise and ran to the tomb, only to discover it to be empty. The disciples hid Jesus’s body for fifty days so that it would be unrecognizable by that time, just in case anyone should challenge them. Then they could never be disproven.

Afterward, they began preaching and proclaimed boldly that they had actually seen Jesus alive again at several times and places, even in groups, as well as touched and walked with him and frequently even spoke with and ate with him. Later, he ascended to heaven, promising to return. To be sure, they accepted all the payments and gifts that they were offered. Of course, they had to agree unanimously in all of these aspects too, so as not to expose the plan.

The element of the disciples’ fraud, from which this hypothesis gets its name, is more than evident here, being observed many times over. Numerous of these “shady” items are quite apparent, such as the disciples stealing Jesus’s body in the first place, feigning their surprise at seeing the empty tomb, hiding the dead body of their master, preaching a message they knew to be false (at least in its most central claim), faking their bravery and life changes when they were not really true, and lying about all the details of Jesus’s appearances, including the ascension. Along the way, of course, they willingly accepted many gifts for their dishonest efforts. Of course, all of these false stories and actions had to be duplicated many times over and kept up consistently throughout their lives, with everyone in the group relating the same lies, even when it resulted in death for many of them.

What a wild scenario! It is hardly any wonder that the scholars of the nineteenth-­century German liberal establishment strictly avoided the hypotheses of Woolston and Reimarus with their many required idiosyncrasies, including features that demanded exact timing, personalities that revolved back and forth while always remaining uniform with regard to their central message and actions, and the ability to live with an untold number of contradictions, not to mention a host of other foibles. Still, the view remains a historical fixture of the resurrection landscape.

Fraud Type 2: Non-disciples Stole Jesus’s Dead Body and Other Tomb Theories

To proceed to another critical option, it is necessary to develop some background. It was evident to critical scholars from the start that the chief weaknesses with what we have termed the “Fraud Type 1” hypothesis was that the perpetrators, namely Jesus’s own disciples, most likely could not have been the culprits. They were the exact same individuals who basically turned their world upside down with their preaching and teaching, and who sometimes went quite willingly to their deaths for their message, all the while proclaiming the truth of another world beyond this one. They were also the ones who followed Jesus by being away from their families for long periods of time. Viewed from another angle, the theology, morality, and lives of the ones who preached Jesus’s resurrection so consistently, as well as their strict ethical actions toward others, contradicted these purported fraudulent actions.

Of course, we do have many examples of fraudulent teachings and deeds enacted by various persons throughout history, even diabolical examples by those who portray contradictory public personas. Some have even died for lies. But this charge cannot simply be stated in a vacuum, so we will return to this theme in much detail in another chapter. But as far as anyone knows in this present case, the apostles gave up their private careers and did so over a period of decades with ongoing consistency, without changing their message, and happily facing death rather than recanting. Further, their lifelong devotion to others cries out against such fraudulent actions.

A crucial indication sounding the death knell of “Fraud Type 1” is that the nineteenth-­century liberal critical scholars themselves, who largely already dis-believed the resurrection anyway and just wished to pick the best alternative thesis to oppose this event, consistently ignored this hypothesis. Critical scholars followed suit in the twentieth century with virtually no exceptions. So how do we explain the more than two centuries of virtual rejection of the idea that the disciples stole Jesus’s dead body, even by critics themselves? This utter lack of scholarly critical support is a stark testimony to its failure. And this conclusion is decidedly not due to the headcount of the authorities deciding against this option, but rather because the scholars making this move are following the facts of the situation. But as we will perceive in the next chapter, the critics did more than simply ignore this option.

Enter the next critical move, which is really an alternate burial view that could morph into a position of fraud: if the removal of Jesus’s dead body plausibly explains the empty tomb teaching, yet it looks like the apostles are exceptionally poor candidates for this task, then another option is to have someone else do the dirty work. This might involve a more “innocent” explanation, such as someone simply changing the initial burial plans and placing the body somewhere other than Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb from the beginning. Or perhaps Joseph or someone else simply reburied Jesus’s dead body elsewhere soon after the initial interment.

The notion that the disciples were uninvolved in the stashing of Jesus’s body removes several huge problems involved with the first scenario and potentially provides other benefits. Most of all, this approach leaves the disciples innocent of their “crimes against humanity” and allows them to preach their message in all sincerity, which clearly makes the most sense. It also has the potential of explaining a huge puzzle piece, namely the report of the empty tomb. If it were plausibly advanced that an unknown person was the one who actually performed the actions, it could also effectively remove the perpetrator from the watchful eyes of the critics who would like to interrogate the first-century perpetrators and issue countless countercharges right up through the present time.

It seems to be the case that the first culprits conjured by those advocating this approach may have been either the Roman soldiers or the Jewish leaders, perhaps due to the adversarial roles they played in the lives of Jesus and the early church. Further, we are told that representatives from both of these groups were present at the crucifixion, placing them in the immediate vicinity. One scholar who held some of the Jewish leaders responsible is French scholar Albert Réville, in whose estimation it was that the Jewish Sanhedrin in Jerusalem most likely planned for Jesus’s body to be stolen. Then the body was hidden where it was unlikely ever to be discovered.

But actually, these options almost never show up from the pens of any critical scholars due to many factors, beginning with the lack of a strong motive. Why should either the Jews or the Romans want the grave to appear empty? Further, any involvement from either of these two enemies would very likely be rectified quickly, whether it had happened purposely or inadvertently, since presumably none of them would want the Christian message of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead to gain momentum either, though for quite different reasons. So, it appears that the best option available here would be to implicate a unanimous person (or party) with innocent motives.

In spite of the wide range of possibilities included in the category we have termed “Fraud Type 2,” there still seem to be fewer examples here than one might think among the German liberal scholars. The specific charges that others stole Jesus’s body are surprisingly difficult to locate among this group of researchers.

Although his reasoning is a little dubious and his wording somewhat more diffi­cult to grasp than usual at this particular juncture, David Strauss thinks it is most likely that Jesus was not buried in Joseph’s tomb. At any rate, he still seemed to think that Jesus’s body was buried in a nearby tomb and was probably not moved. Though referring to the matter as a contradiction, Strauss still seems to allow some room for the traditional option and states that there is no way to know for sure from the narratives that we possess. Still, Strauss’s questions do not really change much of anything in the total picture, especially since there is no firm conclusion here and no real data to support his view.

However Strauss is interpreted, other liberal scholars did conclude that Jesus was not buried in Joseph’s tomb. Oskar Holtzmann in his Das Leben Jesu (1901) considers the possibility of Jesus’s disciples taking his dead body with them back to Galilee but rejects the idea. Instead, he supposes that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, but then moved his body after the Sabbath because he decided it was inappropriate to have a crucified man’s body buried in the same tomb as his other family members.

Arnold Meyer took a very similar position in that Joseph considered his tomb to be only a temporary burial place and always intended for Jesus’s body to be moved. Joseph only volunteered it because of his respect for Jewish burial laws, not because Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, which Meyer rejected. The distinguished Jewish critical scholar Joseph Klausner states the matter so similarly to Holtzmann that his statement may have been inspired by Holtzmann’s earlier work.

In some “out of the box” thinking for his time that certainly foreshadowed similar contemporary views several decades later, French liberal scholar Alfred Loisy held that Jesus died by crucifixion. However, the soldiers probably just tossed his dead body into a trench or common grave for those who did not deserve a decent burial, “perhaps after giving a finishing blow to the half-dead sufferer.” Loisy thus held that the story of Joseph of Arimathea’s burial was a “legend” and that the empty tomb teaching in the Gospels was similarly just “a fiction.” We will return below to Loisy’s additional thoughts on Jesus’s appearances.

Arguably the best known of the liberal hypotheses in this category is the celebrated “wrong tomb” thesis of Kirsopp Lake. Strangely enough, in his 1907 book Lake only speaks of it briefly and more than once specifies that it is only a “possibility” or a “suggestion.” For Lake, after Jesus’s arrest, his disciples either returned to their homes in Galilee or were in hiding in Jerusalem. The women in all likelihood watched the burial from a distance and were not in the proper position to have been good witnesses. So it is certainly plausible that when they returned on Sunday morning, they took the man they met near an open tomb to be an angel. When he simply tried to explain that Jesus’s body was not there because the women had come to the wrong location, the women rushed to conclusions and thought the man really meant that the empty tomb was due to Jesus having been raised from the dead! But as we will see later, this supposition does not mean that Lake doubts that Jesus actually appeared to his followers after his death. This suggested wrong tomb scenario actually plays another role for him.

For reasons that will become more obvious later, a disadvantage of the “Fraud Type 2” theses is that they attempted a less specific approach than the general direction favored by the “Fraud Type 1” perspective. However, “Fraud Type 2” does not implicate the disciples, thereby avoiding what the vast majority of scholars think is without much question the Achilles’ heel of the latter position. As with all these hypotheses, much more will be remarked later concerning all the responses in this chapter.

The Hallucination or Subjective Vision Theory and Similar Subjective Views

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, what would become the most popular German liberal hypothesis began to emerge. Just as David Strauss’s overall mythical approach largely trumped the earlier, rather piecemeal rationalistic sur­misals, so Strauss’s hallucination or subjective vision hypothesis convinced other scholars that it was the most likely alternative approach to account for the resurrection experiences.

Subjective Visions and the Disciples

One major reason that many of the German liberals accepted Strauss’s assessments is because the New Testament sources agree that the central component of the apostles’ experiences was visual in nature. The texts claimed that the disciples really saw something—appearances of the risen Jesus. Therefore, to explain how the witnesses could actually have thought that they had visual perceptions of the risen Jesus, even though they were still mistaken, gave Strauss’s explanation an advantage over the other theses.

Also, many of Strauss’s liberal peers were well known for natural responses that were sometimes only mere suggestions and were usually stated quite briefly. By comparison, rather remarkably, Strauss spent considerably more time explaining and detailing his alternative views along with the relevant data surrounding these events, spending approximately eighty pages on the subject in his earlier Das Leben Jesu. So what were the main points of Strauss’s subjective vision critique here? We may delineate a few layers.

According to Strauss, there is no doubt that the women were the first ones who saw these visions of Jesus. The disciples left town to return to their old haunts in Galilee somewhere around the time of the crucifixion. These men were definitely depressed and forlorn after Jesus’s seeming defeat. This required that more than just a short duration of time would be necessary to change the disciples’ powerfully negative mindsets to an elevated enthusiasm in order for them to imagine that Jesus was alive again.

Hence, the New Testament proclamation that the resurrection occurred just the third day after the crucifixion is simply too brief a time frame for these changes in the disciples to occur. Even the fifty days until Peter’s Pentecost sermon in Acts is not enough time for such occurrences. But in order for such a drastic change to occur in the disciples, an unspecified amount of time would have had to pass before these men would be revived in their outlook. Their conviction, courage, and enthusiasm had to be elevated significantly in order for them to begin proclaiming their message of hope with enthusiasm.

Only such a change could account “for the mental state of the disciples to become exalted in the degree necessary, before this or that individual amongst them could, purely as an operation of his own mind, make present to himself the risen Christ in a visionary manner.” Once entire assemblies could also develop such a similarly “highly wrought enthusiasm,” they “could believe that they heard him [Jesus] in every impressive sound, or saw him in every striking appearance.”

Obviously impressed with the performance of this German theologian, editor Peter Hodgson in his annotated notes in the 1972 edition of Strauss’s Life of Jesus even makes the rather bold pronouncement, “Strauss demonstrates with devastating effectiveness that it is no longer possible to regard the empty tomb and appearance traditions as factual historical reports.” However, even for the rationalists with whom Strauss was quite often sparring, Hodgson’s reason for this conclusion is definitely underwhelming: Strauss defeated the historicity of the Christian claims by pointing out the contradictions in the various Gospel accounts. From these contradictions, we arrive at this bottom line: “The unavoidable conclusion is that the resurrection stories cannot be regarded as historical reports but as theological interpretations.”

We will return later to the overall evaluations of each natural hypothesis, but it will just be noted here briefly that several items seem exceptionally puzzling regarding Hodgson’s comments above. How can he justify either this overall conclusion regarding Strauss or the chief details for thinking that this was the case?

Was Hodgson addressing Strauss’s critique of the rationalistic liberals here? However, nearly all of the German liberals agreed with Strauss and had long taken great relish in indicating and making assertions regarding Gospel contradictions, as we have pointed out quite regularly above. Since especially the more scholarly rationalists like Paulus agreed wholeheartedly, why would Strauss’s moves be considered at all devastating? Further, wherever there were historical agreements between the liberals regarding the Gospel data, the evidence for these particulars took precedent over problem texts located elsewhere. Hence, it is unclear where or how Hodgson thinks that Strauss scored his victory at this specific juncture, except perhaps only in the general sense that his mythical approach superseded their rationalistic method.

Of course, Hodgson also could have been referring to the effects of Strauss’s critiques on the conservative scholars at that time, though that does not seem as likely in the context. Still, Schweitzer describes the firestorm that arose after the publication of Strauss’s earlier Life of Jesus, noting that some forty or fifty responses appeared within just five years. Strauss even responded by penning a volume defending himself against these opponents. But if that was Hodgson’s intent here, there is no apparent indication of it. Further, in this case, the point is still quite unclear and will have to await our detailed treatment of the major conservative scholarly responses below.

French scholar Ernest Renan is another who held the subjective visionary hypothesis and utilized very strong words for the atmosphere that he thinks developed gradually among the disciples after their retreat to Galilee to get away from the scene of the crucifixion. Renan describes the evolving occasions as “s’enivrant” (intoxicating) and a “fievre intense” (intense fever) where “les visions se multipliaient sans cesse” (visions multiplied incessantly).

Moreover, on the matter mentioned earlier regarding having to stretch out the visions over a much lengthier time period to allow the disciples to have the necessary interval to upgrade their emotions from their discouragement, despondency, and forlornness after Jesus’s death into this excited state of mind, Renan holds that the apostles did not return from Galilee to Jerusalem until much later in the same year Jesus died, or perhaps not even until the next year at Passover. So, beyond the forty-day period mentioned in Acts 1:3, this would stretch the time of respite up to one full year.

Schweitzer reports that the success of Renan’s volume gave rise to a French tradition of “life of Jesus” works, beginning immediately afterward in the 1860s. One of the most influential scholars was Alfred Loisy, who published works such as his almost 1,000-page study of the Gospel of John in 1903, a two-volume work on the Synoptic Gospels the next year, and another study on ecclesiology in 1908.

Loisy’s prominent text The Birth of the Christian Religion was written later. He begins by mentioning the fourteen epistles of Paul in the New Testament, perhaps surprisingly counting Hebrews. However, he only decides positively in favor of the probable Pauline authorship of six of these texts: 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, and Philippians, which is a larger number than either Baur or Strauss allowed and comes much closer to the late-twentieth and twenty-first-century list of “undisputed” Pauline Epistles. Loisy dates both 2 Thessalonians and Colossians to the second century, terms Ephesians as “spurious,” and states the three Pastoral Epistles were written “much later than the apostolic age.”

Regarding his views on the last days of Jesus’s life, we already noted earlier in this chapter that Loisy actually foreshadowed some similar contemporary views by holding that Jesus died by crucifixion, but his executioners afterward probably flung his body, “perhaps after giving a finishing blow to the half-dead sufferer,” into a trench or common grave. The teaching of the honorable burial by Joseph of Arimathea along with the empty tomb are simply fictional developments.

Suffering a sense of overwhelming confusion, disillusionment, shock, and loss due to this absolutely jolting turn of events, Jesus’s disciples fled back to Galilee. Their faith was “awakened” while they recovered over a period of time there, actually having their belief “created anew” by experiencing “apparitions” or “visions.” These hallucinations were due to “an inward conviction” or “insight” that was created by faith and “objectified into outward occurrences.” Still, these were clearly subjective experiences and not resurrection appearances but simply “fictions which faith produced.” For the disciples, this served as the convincing indication that their faith had been justified. The resulting transformation propelled these followers into “a bolder affirmation” of Jesus’s message.

Before moving on to the visionary nature of Paul’s conversion experience, a related (and perhaps even derivative) alternative view should be noted, one that sometimes constitutes a different angle on the subjective vision scenario and in other cases is a bit more of a distinct approach, especially in its late twentieth-century versions. The first person to have “seen” the risen Jesus was sometimes supposed to have been either Mary Magdalene or Peter. They basically reported their own “appearance” to Jesus’s other followers and the contagion spread, as the others either then had their own visions or were simply satisfied to report that Jesus had risen and appeared to them.

So, it was possible that either at that time or later, the other followers also supposed that they had seen similar visions of their risen Lord, with or without any direct visionary stimulus of their own. In fact, it is sometimes implied that Mary Magdalene or Peter may have been the lone recipient of a subjective vision at first before the others also joined in and reported their own experiences or simply their personal convictions.

It was sometimes concluded by these German liberal scholars that it was Mary Magdalene who served as the initial conduit for faith. No one describes this hypothesis more ably than William Milligan of the University of Aberdeen, even though he does not take this position. Milligan nicely summarized the view like this: “That spark was applied by Mary Magdalene—a sensitive and nervous woman; and no sooner was it applied than the flame was kindled. Her story that she had seen the Lord was eagerly embraced; it spread with the rapidity and force of an epidemic.” This process happened on numerous occasions: “what she believed that she had seen others immediately believed that they too must see . . . the conviction seized all the members of the early Church that their Lord had really risen from the grave.”

Another scholar who held a position like this was Renan, who postulated that, through her excitement, enthusiasm, and especially her imagination, Mary Magdalene’s hallucination bequeathed a gift to the world: a resurrected God! The glory of Jesus’s resurrection is due to her reports. The events were contagious, and others caught the infection from her and experienced their own visions. Close to Renan’s view here is that of the French theologian Réville, mentioned earlier. Hysteria initially on the part of Mary Magdalene, followed by similar experiences from many others, accounted for the belief in Jesus’s resurrection.

On the other hand, H. J. Holtzmann postulated that Peter’s regret and penitence drove him to subjective visions of the risen Jesus. No doubt due to Peter being the apostolic leader, his experiences were central and served as a sufficient enough impetus to encourage Jesus’s other followers to hallucinate similarly.

As to how these visions spread, Renan is particularly graphic, not to mention exceptionally creative. Renan postulates that the atmosphere among Jesus’s followers after his death had reached such a sufficient crescendo that virtually anything could have served to initiate one of these hallucinations. It need not have taken any more than a wisp of air, a squeaking window, or a fortuitous murmur in the room to produce a vision in those who already believed! Such stimulants would be sufficient intoxicants to prove that Jesus was actually standing there among them.

Subjective Visions and Saul/Paul of Tarsus

But can the case of Saul—hereinafter called Paul—be approached as an extension of the subjective vision thesis? Or must he be treated differently? This will be addressed elsewhere in this study in much detail. Even a few hints above indicate enough issues involved with the disciples being the recipients of subjective visions of Jesus. But Paul’s case seems to be an especially thorny situation for the hallucination alternative, for how could this radical, self-proclaimed church persecutor be a real candidate for such subjective experiences as the catalyst for his resurrection belief?

Enter Ferdinand Christian Baur, David Strauss’s former professor and one of the most accomplished German liberal New Testament theologians. F. C. Baur’s published scholarship amounted to some 16,000 pages of academic work. As Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright attest, “Baur was a heroic figure, a representative of German scholarship at its best.” Baur was probably best known for his monumental work on Paul, a major study that has even been described as “perhaps the most influential book of nineteenth-century New Testament scholarship,” with ongoing influence even to this day.

Baur was the dominant figure in the tremendously influential Tübingen University school of thought, in spite of holding several major views that definitely would be eschewed by today’s scholars, such as dating much of the New Testament to later than AD 130, placing John in the latter half of the second century, and dating even Mark to about 150. Mark was further thought to be based upon the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and of these last two texts, Matthew was the one to be preferred. Even so, Matthew contained much mythical material, though it also included some authentic traditions.

For Baur, like recent scholarship, Paul was clearly the best source of information in the New Testament. But more skeptically than today’s average New Testament scholar, Baur only accepted four of Paul’s Epistles as undisputed: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. With the highest praise, Baur held that “there has never been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these four Epistles, on the contrary, they bear in themselves so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that it is not possible for critical doubt to be exercised upon them with any show of reason.”

Baur does not totally dismiss the other nine epistles that bear Paul’s name (which he terms “the shorter Pauline Epistles,” excepting only the authentic Galatians) and states some considerations in their favor. However, in the end, though leaving open a few possibilities, he still concludes that there are too many signs in these nine epistles of non-Pauline tendencies.

What happened during Paul’s conversion, then, as mentioned by the apostle in his authentic statements such as 1 Cor 9:1 and 15:8, where he testified that he had seen the risen Jesus? Baur disallowed some of the popular rationalistic options in his day, like Paul somehow witnessing an external flash of lightning while he was on his way to Damascus, leading to a change of perspective.

Rather, Baur’s approach was more refined—he preferred the internal route and advocated that Paul’s conversion was the result of a private, subjective experience that the apostle nonetheless expressed objectively. This occurrence was a natural consequence of Paul’s “downcast, introspective” personality arising from his growing conviction that he had sinned in the recent events in his life, presumably due to his persecuting the early Christians. A real experience resulted, one that Paul believed to be an appearance of the risen Jesus, just like what Jesus’s other disciples had witnessed. The result was that Paul’s life changed dramatically. Still, all of this happened without his actually having seen Jesus at all, since nothing had actually occurred in reality. Rather, it was the result of “an inward process which becomes an outward one, a transition from the subjective to the objective.”

Baur’s view, or one very close to it, became what was probably the predominant critical approach to Paul’s transformation. A drastic conversion was obviously required, one that was sufficient to account for the apostle’s 180-degree life change in spite of there seeming to be no apparent explanation for such an impetus. It was repeated widely that the foundation of Paul’s transformation resulted from the tremendous stress that had built up inside him over his own culpability regarding Stephen’s stoning and the Christian persecution that he had led. The result of this stress was Paul’s private, inward experience that he was convinced was nothing short of a resurrection appearance of the risen Jesus himself. The outward expression of this new conviction was manifested in the strong conviction that the early Christians were somehow correct in their beliefs.

David Strauss also held similar views to Baur’s. For example, at least later in his career, Strauss denied that any of the four traditional authors or anyone close to them actually wrote any of these Gospels. Like his former professor, Strauss also placed the writing of these books and Acts into the second century. Further, Strauss credits “Baur’s epoch-making investigation” with indicating that the Gospel of John does not date until “the middle of the same century.” He also agreed that the same four primary Pauline Epistles favored by his old professor Baur (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians) were foremost among the New Testament books and were “undisputed writings” by the apostle Paul.

Paul’s new convictions were actually quite similar to those of Jesus’s disciples, though for different reasons and in spite of Paul’s prior unbelief in the message and messiahship of Jesus. But like the majority of the older critical scholars, Strauss concluded that Paul experienced a spiritual crisis after witnessing Stephen’s stoning to death. His emotions after this event were depressed, but eventually the situation issued forth into “a decisive spiritual crisis, concerning which it need not surprise us that in an oriental it took the form of a Christophany.” When the feelings finally emerged, they rose “to a pitch of exaltation which issued in a Christophany, and a total change of sentiment.” Just as with the other disciples, this change of outlook resulted in “the experience of similar visions.” But these heightened experiences were manifested “in a purely subjective manner.”

Whether or not it was due at least in part to the virulent criticism that he received throughout his life, Strauss reached some very negative conclusions in the end. In his last published text, The Old Faith and the New, he proclaimed that we could know very little about the historical Jesus. Moreover, he declared “the conclusion that we can no longer either hold to the idea of a personal God, or of life after death.” Two pages later he stated that Ludwig Feurerbach was right and that religion was simply a wish. Last, we can no longer even call ourselves Christians! Two years after he published this last book in 1874, Schweitzer noted wistfully that “death set him free.”

Regarding Paul, Renan also makes some very similar moves to those of both Baur and Strauss. In his Vie de Jésus he mentions in sparse detail Paul’s report that he saw the risen Jesus, adding that he does not reject “la véracité de saint Paul.” But again, it is in Renan’s Les apôtres that the longer, more detailed discussion ensues. His ideas here are somewhat similar to the report above regarding Renan’s notion that Jesus’s disciples experienced a range of high emotions when they thought that they had seen the risen Jesus, even describing these passions as “intoxicating” and an “intense fever.” Similarly, Paul was also wildly excited: “Paul était sous le coup de la plus vive excitation,” a state described as some sort of “feverish delirium” or even a “sunstroke.”

We have provided some key examples of the many commentators who have ascribed to Paul a different mindset than the one found in Paul’s own writings as well as the book of Acts. But other scholars agreed that it was very difficult to account for these alternative responses as coming from the early church persecutor. Seeming to straddle the fence in some sense, Otto Pfleiderer is one scholar who seems to be torn between the two views, speaking both about Paul’s personal doubts and morbid introspection while sounding like what happened to Paul was a more independent work of God.

As noted by former Princeton Theological Seminary professor J. Gresham Machen with regard to the older German liberal endeavors in his day, there were many other attempts to explain Paul’s experience in less than supernatural terms. The apostle could have suffered from some variety of heat stroke. Or a violent thunderstorm with or without lightning could have played a crucial role in his conversion (to which Baur also responded critically, as we saw above). Likewise, nervous exhaustion, hallucinations, and even epilepsy were all posited at various times as potentially filling the need for a natural occurrence.

One of the options mentioned by Machen was defended by prominent Jewish critical scholar Joseph Klausner of the Hebrew University, who researched and penned his classic volume on Paul between the years 1929 and 1939. He postulated that while Paul was traveling on the road to Damascus, this devout, passionate, and zealous Pharisee was considering the major role that he played in Stephen’s martyrdom. Suddenly, Paul thought that Jesus was standing directly before him, although Jesus was not actually there in reality. This gripping experience was sufficient to cause Paul’s conversion.

Klausner concluded that this experience was due “clearly” to Paul suffering from a case of epilepsy. Just before his epileptic episode here, Paul was probably contemplating the new and revolutionary idea that Jesus could have been the suffering Messiah. Perhaps the Christians were correct about this. Paul’s disease could therefore account for the subjective experience of perceiving a “heavenly light” and would also align Paul with the “long list of epileptics” who have lived throughout history.

These approaches to Paul’s conversion tend to serve as instances of the rationalistic propensity among the older liberal scholars to work within the general New Testament framework while offering various sorts of natural explanations in place of the supernatural elements. While the contrast between the rational and mythical approaches described earlier is often more pronounced than this with regard to the disciples’ resurrection appearances, the approaches to Paul’s conversion seem not to differ quite so much from one another. In order to explain Paul’s conversion, even Baur and Strauss appear willing to work within this general rationalistic framework, even though they had strongly criticized the same context on other occasions.

The Objective Vision Theory

While still affirming that Jesus’s resurrection appearances were in some sense visionary events, a rival view to that of hallucinations and other subjective positions proposed the notion that although Jesus appeared in a nonbodily manner, there was an objective element as well. Jesus had actually been raised from the dead, was currently alive, and truly appeared to his disciples, though in a nonbodily manner. Hence, such a view acknowledges that the resurrection was an actual miracle.

We have already mentioned that Strauss criticized an early forerunner of this view, that of another German scholar, Christian Hermann Weisse, who began teaching philosophy and theology at the University of Leipzig just before the time that Strauss published his initial version of Das Leben Jesu. While writing about what happened to Jesus after his death and having rejected what he considered to be the myths of the empty tomb and Jesus’s bodily appearances in the process, Weisse proposed that the risen, glorified Christ actually did appear to his disciples in visions. How such events occurred is another matter, but it remains that for Weisse, the resurrection was a historical fact and Jesus actually did appear to his followers.

In spite of Weisse’s appreciation of Strauss’s work, he criticized Strauss for not offering solid ground between rational and supernatural approaches. Strauss, for his part, noted some of Weisse’s critical moves but did not appreciate Weisse retaining the position that Jesus’s appearances were “objective magical facts.” Interestingly, Strauss had already criticized the well-known Jewish philosopher Spinoza for holding a similar view—visions of the risen Jesus “produced by miraculous means” which, as with Weisse, Strauss referred to as “the magic circle of the supernatural”!

By far the best known liberal version of the objective vision theory was the lengthy Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara by Theodor Keim, a study of the historical Jesus published in three volumes (1867–1872). The English translation appeared eleven years later. Schweitzer identified these texts by Keim as “the most important Life of Jesus which appeared in a long period.”

Like many of the German liberal scholars of his day, Keim rejected the early dates and traditional authorship of the four Gospels. Even Matthew and Mark, for him the earliest Gospels, depict numerous contradictions and other legendary problems, especially the account of the guards at the tomb in Matt 27:62–28:4, 11–14. Further, Luke and John have even more issues, and Keim dates the Gospel of John to about AD 130. Further, not only was Keim inclined to reject miracles, but he also disallowed the likelihood of the women’s visit to Jesus’s sepulcher as well as the empty tomb itself as Gospel legends. Still, as with many of these other critical scholars, Keim is more than able to find a number of probable historical facts in these texts.

Along with Strauss, Renan, and almost all other scholars who take visionary positions of one sort or another, Keim also held that the disciples fled to Galilee about the time of the crucifixion, and that this was the location where Jesus appeared to his followers. This was especially necessary so that they were able to relax somewhat and overcome their initial shock and fear. In fact, like the other “visionary scholars,” being transformed from these adverse emotions was required as they waited until the transformations into moods of “religious enthusiasm and ecstasy” even reached a fevered pitch. Once they regrouped emotionally, they were able to be open to God’s revelation.

In order to ascertain if a strong case could be maintained in favor of the subjective vision theory, like the versions argued by Strauss, Renan, and others, Keim decided to build a case to actually argue in their favor. He agreed with many others that Peter was the first disciple to see Jesus after his crucifixion. He even went so far as to argue against bodily appearances and conceded the possibility of a contagious atmosphere giving rise to subjective visions. Quite remarkably, Keim did such an exemplary job of arguing for hallucinations that Sparrow-Simpson even thought that his case was stronger than that of Strauss!

But just when it seemed that he might be convinced of the overall Strauss-type argument, Keim declared that he could no longer argue the case, due to the failings of the subjective vision thesis. Having completed this process, Keim then turned around and critiqued the hallucination theory in a long treatment that involved a number of arguments, including some strong criticisms. In fact, Sparrow-Simpson argued of Keim’s finished product that “no more penetrating discussion of the theory of self-generated visions has since been given us . . . his was certainly the most learned work on the Resurrection.”

In place of the subjective vision hypothesis of Strauss and others, Keim argued for what came to be referred to more accurately as the objective vision theory, since the “originating source” of the early Christian experiences was none other than “God and the glorified Christ.” Keim famously referred to these visions as “telegrams from heaven,” from which they get their more popular name, since they were events inaugurated by God himself.

In other words, these resurrection experiences were subjective in the sense that Jesus did not appear in a normal, physical body that could be touched. However, these experiences were objective in the sense that they really did occur—by no means were they simply hallucinations or any other sort of self-generated occurrences that happened in someone’s mind but not in the real world. Moreover, these appearances could be seen by more than one person at a time, each witness could perceive the same message sent to the others, and so on. They were supernatural occasions because they were generated by God himself from heaven.

Most incredibly, Keim even concludes the matter by stating, “Though much has fallen away, the secure faith-fortress of the Resurrection remains.” Apparently Keim thinks that, though criticism has taken its toll on the Gospel texts, the fact of the resurrection still emerges from the critical research. Admittedly, this is not language heard very often from the nineteenth-century German liberal scholars!

Two additional scholars who held to objective resurrection visions also should be mentioned here, if only briefly. Influential German liberal scholar Johannes Weiss seems to follow Keim when he argues that after his death, the heavenly Jesus revealed himself: “It was in this state of heavenly glory that he manifested himself to his disci­ples.” Then Weiss adds, “The bold proclamation of the message of the resurrection by the first disciples would be simply inexplicable had they felt the slightest doubt of the objective reality of the Lord’s appearances.”

Though Kirsopp Lake is often considered to be a critic of Jesus’s resurrection due to his well-known wrong tomb thesis, he actually defended the event as an objective vision that really occurred. Of course, agreeing with many of the vision theorists both subjective and objective alike, such positions need to explain the empty tomb somehow, since it is basically a superfluous claim when less than bodily appearances are in view. Nonetheless, after dismissing the subjective vision thesis (i.e., hallucinations) as inadequate, Lake concluded, “The objective hypothesis is that the appearance was independent of the belief or feelings of the disciples . . . because there really was a spiritual being that had an existence independent of them and produced the appearance.”

As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the objective vision thesis of major scholars such as Keim, Weiss, and Lake was gaining in popularity, even to the point of being thought of as more sophisticated than the subjective vision view of Strauss, Renan, and others. The contrast between the two approaches is that, whereas the subjective version was probably beset by far more difficulties than any other naturalistic resurrection theory, the objective vision theory was growing in popularity partially because of the rise of psychical research especially in Britain but also in America, giving the latter view an aura of empirical support.

Legend or Myth Theories

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a potpourri of other alternative hypotheses began to grow in popularity, largely due to new interests in other cultures, philosophies, and religions. Buoyed by the interdisciplinary and still-fledgling undeveloped areas of cross-cultural anthropological studies, other seemingly parallel religious accounts of virgin births, demon possession, miracles, humans who were in some sense taken to be deities, and even resurrections were noised around, challenging the Christian message and its sense of uniqueness in areas that rivaled the gospel message. It might have seemed that there was no end to the number of accounts that seemed to appear rather suddenly. For example, one prominent variety contrasted Jewish with Hellenistic ideas in attempts to ascertain where particular notions like the deity of Jesus may have originated.

These natural alternative approaches based on myths and legends of some sort were manifested in different flavors. A few varieties will be mentioned here.

(1) These teachings could reflect much simpler forms where the main emphases were just on stories that grew with the retelling, where critical scholars thought this pathway might be traced across the Gospels, for instance, from earlier to later volumes. Comparisons might be made to storytelling, where details were often obscured while others were added as the stories grew. This was especially the case when the reports being spread were extraordinary accounts of gods, goddesses, and miracles.

The majority of critical scholars accepted, recognized, or employed some notion of this creeping legendary distortion just described. Yet it should be noted here carefully that simply to assume or even to embrace such a common position of general textual change is by no means the same as employing the full-blown naturalistic legend thesis regarding, say, Jesus’s resurrection.

The watershed question in these discussions is whether the necessary historical elements of whatever item is being discussed could still be maintained in spite of these legendary or mythical accretions. For example, many scholars readily accept literal resurrection appearances of Jesus in spite of also allowing some sorts of legendary textual issues. But as just mentioned, this is not the legend thesis as we are describing it here, because the essentials still remained. However, those who conclude that the resurrection appearances were actually nullified by the accumulation of such legendary considerations would be utilizing such a thesis as a naturalistic theory.

(2) Among the most common nineteenth-century mythical comparisons were those that presented more of a frontal challenge to the Gospel accounts. This version of the legend thesis compared the Christian gospel proclamation to ancient stories in various fictional settings. The best-known versions of these accounts frequently involved the tale of a wife or queen who descended into the underworld to rescue her captured husband or king. If successful, she brought him back to the land of the living—hence he experienced a sort of return to life. Often referred to as “vegetation myths” or “vegetation gods,” these stories arose in ancient agrarian societies and served to help commemorate the annually celebrated cyclical sequences of vegetation dying in the autumn, followed by its “rebirth” the next spring.

One immediately obvious issue here is that the majority of heroes in these accounts, such as Dumuzi, Inanna, Venus, Astarte, Isis, Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, were of course fictional characters, perhaps comparable in some respects to Snow White or Cinderella. Lacking historicity makes these cases much less comparable to Jesus’s life, however the stories developed, which they did as they spread from one ancient culture to another.

(3) But another sort of legendary thesis concerned the “tall tales” and exploits of historical persons such as Alexander the Great, Apollonius of Tyana, or Sabbatai Zevi. Cases involving any similarities between real individuals of the past and Jesus’s life would of course be a closer fit and more meaningfully compared than would the resemblances between Jesus and fictional personages. Unfortunately, the two very different kinds of stories were often mixed together, with readers not always knowing whether or not the characters were historical.

(4) As mentioned, one of the most influential works to appear during the entire liberal period was Kyrios Christos written by the German New Testament theologian and Göttingen professor Wilhelm Bousset. He was perhaps the best-known proponent of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While roughly championing a more sophisticated version of some aspects of similar legendary ideas, Bousset argued that the worship of Jesus in the early church would not have begun in the monotheistic Jewish church but must have come from the early Hellenistic atmosphere where the Gospel message had spread, since there was much more openness to the notions of divinized humans and similar sorts of ideas. Thus, the teaching of the deity of Jesus Christ did not represent the earliest, Palestinian version of the Christian proclamation but developed later in more fertile, Hellenistic areas.

Another influential scholar who was often associated with the history of religions movement was German theologian Ernst Troeltsch. Like Bousset, he also thought that the central question for scholarship was whether the ideas of Jesus’s divinity and the Christian notion of salvation were original to the apostolic community or whether they developed in a non-Jewish or even non-Christian atmosphere, such as that of the mystery religions with their interest in a “savior-god.” Yet, with the possi­bility of the latter origin, Troeltsch pointed out that no one has ever identified the non-Christian culprit, that the similarities raised were too superficial, and that there was no evidence that “such a grafting ever occurred.”

Sometimes it is difficult to draw hard and fast lines between these different sorts of myths and legends enumerated above. An influx of legend creeping into the text might look like the first category. But such could lead to utilizing examples of dying-and-rising gods or Hellenistic divine men to illustrate how Jesus’s incarnation could have been conceived in gentile circles. This is similar to the “watershed question” above and, since it morphs into a different position, it might best be considered as a version of the second type.

On the other hand, another influential and well-published German theologian, Otto Pfleiderer, also took the second and third options mentioned above. Pfleiderer recounted dozens of potential parallels to the Christian ideas of heroes being sons of God, demonic exorcisms, miracles such as virgin births and resurrections, along with notions that Jesus was the King of kings and Lord of lords.

For example, Pfleiderer states, “From the very beginning it was the belief of the Christian community that Jesus was the Son of God,” but he argues that this idea could mean different things. However, the orthodox view that Jesus was the Son of God as indicated by being virgin born, as taught in Matthew 1 and Luke 1, are second-century views. Further, the beliefs that Jesus was the Son of God and Son of Man could not have developed “in the circles of Judaism” but rather in pagan-influenced areas. Here Pfleiderer actually predated Bousset’s Kyrios Christos by several years. But exchanges of ideas had to take place. After all, the preaching of the gospel “was compelled to accommodate itself to the prevailing heathen ideas, in short to the myths.”

Unfortunately for Pfleiderer’s thesis, he far too uncritically cited many of his sources, in that many of them both arose long after the origin of Christianity and were written literally centuries after the person whose life and exploits they describe. It could even be the case that these later tales were drawn from and borrowed their messages from Christianity rather than the other way around, as has actually been shown to be the case since the early twentieth century!

Earlier in this chapter we briefly viewed another skeptical development that some may be inclined to list as another trend within the mythical or legendary camp. We are speaking here of Bruno Bauer’s notion that Jesus never actually lived. Though Bauer did widely employ some of these ideas discussed here, we will resist the idea that it was another specific trend within these legendary camps, strictly because it was held by hardly anyone and hence cannot properly be thought of as a movement in itself. Yet, there were similarities.

Bauer was not the only German liberal during this century who held that Jesus never lived or walked the earth. Decades after Bauer, lesser-known scholar Peter Jensen of the University of Marburg agreed with this general assessment, though for different reasons. He could be included largely alongside scholars like Pfleiderer. After a very lengthy study of what he considered to be a host of Jewish legends, Jensen postulated that Jesus’s life was an Israelite Gilgamesh legend. Like a patchwork quilt, the Gospel descriptions were taken and simply pieced together from Old Testament stories, as with its accounts of individuals being raised from the dead. Thus, the man described in the New Testament, Jesus, never lived.

Of course, there are many other trends that could be pursued in this context, both similar as well as dissimilar. These German liberal paths truly include a labyrinth of movements. However, we will have to be satisfied to leave the various theses here for now, awaiting critiques in the chapters to come.

Conclusion

We have discussed at length some of the major naturalistic hypotheses that were proposed among the German liberal scholars throughout the nineteenth century and for a couple of decades afterward in the twentieth century to account for Jesus’s death and resurrection. We have identified this movement that lasted more than a century as the heyday of these alternative theses. Whether using rationalistic explanations to replace primarily the miraculous portions of the Gospel accounts or treating the entire texts in a more wholesale manner as mythical compositions, the supernatural claims were systematically at least questioned if not totally rejected. But as will be seen in the next chapter, these liberal scholars were often merciless in their critiques of their colleagues’ formulations as well.

Many reasons have been given to explain why the age of German liberalism drew to a close after leading critical theological trends for over a century. Among the most popular suppositions are that the romantic, “rose-colored glasses” notion of liberal anthropology was thoroughly dashed from its moorings by the realistic jolt of a world at war in 1914, which signaled that a human “sin nature” might truly be evident in civilization after all, despite the denials. Arguing in a similar though theological direction was Karl Barth’s Römerbrief, which appeared in 1918 with its emphasis on the sovereignty of God and human sinfulness.

For Albert Schweitzer, one of the chief failures of liberalism was the debacle that the search for the historical Jesus had become. At the end of his historical masterpiece, Schweitzer states that liberalism “has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another.”

William Hordern adds a rather intriguing perspective. He states, “The Bible became a problem for liberals. . . . Why spend all the trouble in searching for the historical Jesus when he says nothing but love God and your neighbor, things which we can figure out for ourselves?” Then he adds, “Why do we spend more time dissecting the Bible than the Analects of Confucius if there is nothing unique about the Christian faith?”

Whatever reasons are correct regarding the fall of German liberalism, new ideas arose rather quickly. The first great Quest for the historical Jesus ended somewhat abruptly but was followed directly by a group of scholars who had studied under the last of the German liberals. Unlike their professors, this new group generally eschewed historical Jesus studies altogether. These emerging and highly influential individuals, such as pacesetters Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and others, generally came to be called the “No Quest” scholars, although these two hugely influential German researchers often exhibited more differences than similarities between one another.

Notes

The descriptive term “liberal” in this chapter is far from a derogatory label that one may use to call an opponent. Rather, it is a common name for this movement. For example, see the same title used to characterize this movement in Kirk R. MacGregor, Contemporary Theology, An Introduction: Classical, Evangelical, Philosophical, and Global Perspectives (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019), 23–33; and James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997); see chap. 11 in vol. 1, titled “The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century.”

Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958).

Richard R. Niebuhr, “Friedrich Schleiermacher,” in A Handbook of Christian Theologians, ed. Dean G. Peerman and Martin E. Marty (Cleveland: World, 1965), 17. In reporting this, Niebuhr cites the importance of both Schleiermacher’s On Religion as well as his theological “magnum opus,” The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). In his essay, Niebuhr adds that “Friedrich Schleiermacher may justifiably be called the Kant of modern Protestantism” (ix). Editors Mackintosh and Stewart go as far as to attest in their preface that The Christian Faith is, after Calvin’s Institutes, “the most important work” in the area of Protestant theology to appear up until this time (xxi)! These comments by noteworthy scholars are indeed high praise for the extent of Schleiermacher’s influence.

Karl Barth, “Schleiermacher,” in Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl, trans. H. H. Hartwell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), 306.

Representative examples of the latter authors include the primary sources found in Peter Gay, ed., Deism: An Anthology (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1968), as well as secondary analyses of deistic scholars and ideas, such as John Orr’s English Deism: Its Roots and Fruits (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1934), an older but valuable source.

Gay, Deism, 10.

Examples of the earlier biblical critics who preceded the English deists included more respected philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in his important work Leviathan (London: Penguin, 2017), along with the major Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) in his Theological–Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Spinoza deals with the subjects of prophecy in chaps. 1–2, miracles in chap. 6, and Scripture in chaps. 7–13 of this text. Better known as well as more nuanced and thoughtful were the slightly later critiques of biblical subjects by Scottish skeptical philosopher David Hume, such as his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith, 2nd ed. (New York: Social Science Publishers, 1948) or his The Natural History of Religion, in Hume on Religion, ed. Richard Wollheim (London: Collins, 1963), 31–98. An even earlier forerunner in biblical criticism was the Italian philosopher Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–1525).

Further, between the First and Second Quests, a few decades were dominated by Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann plus other scholars and often termed the “No Quest” period since, although these scholars were far different from one another, they agreed in opposing historical quests for Jesus.

See the highly informative discussion by Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament: 1861–1986, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 121–23, 360–67.

The other main target of the liberal aim was dogmatic theological pronouncements, where a roughly similar treatment was often applied in order to view more singular, original theological notions as actually being simply untrue for any of several reasons, such as being similar to teachings found in other religious systems.

The first German edition was entitled Von Reimarus zu Wrede.

Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus, Das Leben Jesu als Grundlage einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums, 3 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1828). See below for more specific details from this volume.

Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. William Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 50. On Venturini, see 44–47.

Schweitzer, 52.

Schweitzer, 52–53.

David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1972). Sorting out the early German editions of Das Leben Jesu can be a very tricky enterprise, especially given the differing titles and slightly different dates found in various publications. This volume was taken from the second English translation of the fourth German edition. Regarding Strauss, see chaps. 7–9 in Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, esp. 72, 95–97.

Peter C. Hodgson, “Editor’s Introduction: Strauss’s Theological Development from 1825–1840,” in Strauss, Life of Jesus, xxiv.

Bruno Bauer’s last theological work was his Christus und die Cäesaren: Der Ursprung des Christentums aus dem römischen Griechentum, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Grosser, 1879), where he spends an inordinate amount of space (seven of the eight total sections, and well over 300 pages) on the history of the Roman Caesars. Roman statesman Seneca receives special treatment, beginning with section 1 on Seneca’s “Religious Contributions.” Incredibly, Bauer charged that Seneca’s life and teachings were the basis for much of the Christian message, as Paul (whose epistles Bauer dates by fiat into the second century!) particularly drew out the more mystical components of Seneca’s message and adapted them accordingly in order to become Christianity. These last ideas, including the application to Christianity, are developed through the eight chapters of sec. 8 of Christus und die Cäesaren. The bottom line is that Jesus’s life was therefore invented and that he never actually lived at all.

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 157, 159.

In his indignation after being relieved of his position, Bauer wrote a treatise against Christianity, though its publication was canceled. See Schweitzer, 137–38.

Schweitzer, 180. Incidentally, a comparison of Ernest Renan’s French volume Vie de Jésus (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1864), particularly chap. 15 on “La légend de Jésus” (esp. 235–40) and chap. 16, “Miracles” (esp. 243–48, 251), indicates that his thinking is closer to that of Strauss and Bauer than to the rational gyrations of Paulus mentioned above, who tried to invent everyday substitutes for the supernatural portions of Jesus’s miracles without disturbing much of the remainder of the Gospel accounts. (We will return below to Renan’s treatment of the resurrection.)

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 78.

Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993); the authors dedicate this volume to Galileo Galilei, Thomas Jefferson, and David Strauss, whom these scholars view as contributors and pacesetters before the twentieth century (3).

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, chap. 4.

Peter Annet, The Sequel of the Resurrection of Jesus Considered (London: Rose, 1749), 4–5. Of Annet’s little volumes on the resurrection, this one in particular spends more space talking around issues while rarely addressing the most significant aspects that he poses himself.

Peter Annet, Supernaturals Examined: In Four Dissertations on Three Treatises (London: Page, n.d.), 20, 65, respectively. Other ideas against the belief in miracles are expressed in Annet’s The Resurrection Defenders Stript of All Defense (London: Printed by the Author, 1745), 21–27, including some thoughts on telling the difference between the Devil’s miracles and God’s miracles (25–26). The work is signed as “Moral Philosopher” at the end of the volume, 95.

Peter Annet, The Resurrection of Jesus Considered: In Answer to the Tryal of the Wit­nesses (London: Printed by the Author, 1744), 65. Here also the author is identified as a “Moral Philosopher.”

Annet’s works mention this recurring theme rather regularly, such as in Resurrection of Jesus Considered, 35–37, 50–52, 59–60, 70; Supernaturals Examined, 8, 22–23; and Resurrection Defenders, 4, 42–45, 50–53, 59–67, 86.

Annet, Resurrection of Jesus Considered, 20–49; cf. also Annet’s Resurrection Defenders, 4–6, 10–14, 27–31; Supernaturals Examined, 23.

Annet, Resurrection of Jesus Considered, 10, 91–92.

Annet, 63, 66, 85–86; Supernaturals Examined, 66.

Annet, Resurrection of Jesus Considered, 65–66.

Annet, 46–51. While this may seem like a difficult question to reconcile with his longer treatment in the immediate context where he is contesting Matthew’s account of the guards and seal being authentic in the first place (34–49), he is still raising a long string of questions. Beginning with the words “if sealed” (46) may indicate that he is simply making a hypothetical statement in the case that the tomb sealing did occur anyway.

Annet, 61–64.

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 38.

Schweitzer, 38–39.

Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, Ausführung des Plans und Zwecks Jesu: In Briefen an Wahrheit suchende Leser, 11 vols. (Berlin: Mylius, 1784–1792).

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 39–44.

Karl Heinrich Venturini, Natürliche Geschichte des grossen Propheten von Nazareth, 4 vols. (Copenhagen: Bethlehem, 1800–1802).

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 44–47.

All the quotations above were taken from Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 1:178–84. Some similar matters are also discussed in 2:448–50.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus, trans. S. Maclean Gilmour, ed. Jack C. Verheyden (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1975), 193, 196–98, 206–10, 226, 420–22, 441. Schweitzer explains that Schleiermacher’s response to the nature of miracles is why he should still be considered as a rationalist. See Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 58. A crucial matter should also be mentioned regarding Schleiermacher’s specific volume here. The text was reconstructed chiefly from the notes of his 1832 lectures on the historical Jesus and combined with the notes from five of his students. Hence, such a format is not necessarily as “tight” as one might wish. It may also serve to explain some of the questions regarding the contents of this volume, such as the issue of whether Schleiermacher thought that Jesus was truly dead before the conclusion of the crucifixion. The original editor of the volume, K. A. Rütnik, presented Schleiermacher’s notes first in the text, followed by the student’s notes, indicated by lecture numbers along with a date. The volume was published in 1864, thirty years after Schleiermacher’s death in 1834, which came two years after the original lectures were given. These editorial details are contained in Verheyden’s introduction (xvi, xix).

Though we will not in this context be able to sift through the pros and cons of the larger interpretation of Schleiermacher’s views, we will remark briefly on the most salient aspects of the direct discussion regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 415–17. Without in any sense making a similar suggestion regarding Schleiermacher, one may be reminded here of the comment made by Søren Kierkegaard at about this same time, who charged that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing affirmed his belief in certain major Christian doctrines even while raising some critical issues, since he was only agreeing by way of concession. See Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 88. But it must be asked, if Schleiermacher actually meant to defend Christianity (or at least to affirm it) at the absolute central point of the gospel message, how could it be simply “a matter of complete indifference” to him as to whether or not Jesus died by crucifixion? Even so, this question is not meant to make assertions regarding his position, but only to note that these may be some of the reasons why scholars have long missed or even questioned his comments.

Some of the influential scholars who make this assertion concerning Schleiermacher include David Friedrich Strauss, A New Life of Jesus, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1879), 24. This volume by Strauss (German: Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet) should not be confused with his 1835–1836 Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu). Other prominent critical scholars who agree with Strauss’s view of Schleiermacher on this point include German liberals Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 64; and Theodor Keim, The History of Jesus of Nazara: Considered in Its Connection with the National Life of Israel, and Related in Detail, trans. Arthur Ransom (London: Williams & Norgate, 1883), 6:328; as well as prominent twentieth-century scholar Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4.1, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, trans. G. W. Bromiley, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 340.

Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 415, 427–28. But strangely enough, Schleiermacher also makes the rather odd comment that “crucifixion was carried out by people who had no skill in execution” (419). It is rather difficult to decipher what his particular comment here may or may not reveal regarding the direction of his view. Is he allowing or making way for less than a full and complete death on the cross? Or is he simply mistaken, even though in his day the prowess of the Roman soldiers was certainly known? On the positions of Hase and Paulus regarding bodily decomposition, see Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 60 (Hase) and 64 (Paulus).

Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 455–56.

Jack Verheyden, “Introduction,” in Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 456n60.

Karl August von Hase, Geschichte Jesu: Nach akademischen Vorlesungen (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1876), see section 112 on the resurrection, esp. 600–603. Hase’s version of this thesis from almost fifty years earlier was published in his volume chiefly for the use of students: Das Leben Jesu zunächst für akademische Studien (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1829).

Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 431–32, 444, 447.

Hase, Geschichte Jesu, 602–3; Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 414–15.

Of course, the ambiguity in Schleiermacher’s position may be what keeps him from holding this dubious distinction.

Paulus, Das Leben Jesu, 1:265, 281–82. Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus’s later work, Exegetisches Handbuch über die drei ersten Evangelien, 3 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1830–1833), includes a very detailed discussion of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus in all four Gospels (in spite of the volume’s title). In the 1842 edition of this text, this material occupies pages 660–928 of vol. 3. Key pages pertaining to the discussion are 3:669–750, 785–86, 793–94, 834–35, 866, 881–83, 893.

In Paulus’s German text, Das Leben Jesu, the discussion of the burial occurs in 2:256–66 (sections 204–6), while the resurrection appearances are discussed in 2:266–344 (sections 207–15). Schweitzer’s earlier derogatory comment that Paulus’s Life of Jesus was even inferior to Venturini’s (one of the so-called “fictitious lives” authors) was because Paulus was said to have basically built a harmony of the Gospels with added notes. See Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 50, 54–55. Paulus’s Das Leben Jesu indicates that Schweitzer’s comment is quite accurate, where the Gospel texts are grouped by subject matter, juxtaposed and interspersed with Paulus’s own discussion following.

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 161–62; Charles Christian Hennell, Untersuchungen über den Ursprung des Christentums (Stuttgart: Hallberger, 1840).

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 163–64; August Friedrich Gfrörer, Kritische Geschichte des Urchristenthums, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Schweizerbart, 1831, 1838).

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 165–66.

Joseph Salvador, Jésus-Christ et sa doctrine: Histoire de la naissance de l’église (Paris: Guyot et Scribe, Libraires, 1838), esp. incl. his fairly lengthy list of mythological examples on 152n2. Other instances appear on 184–86, 563.

Salvador, 144–206, esp. 193–98. Other areas of interest in this volume include Salvador’s discussion of the importance of the resurrection message, especially in Paul (180–82), as well as his evaluating the issue of the Jewish leaders entreating Pilate for a guard for the tomb entrance (197). Like perhaps even the vast majority of critical scholars, Salvador also lists a lengthy number of proposed Gospel contradictions found in these same accounts (esp. 199–200n2).

Another of the more outlandish treatments singled out by Schleiermacher in Life of Jesus, 451, was that by “the notorious” Jacob Andreas Brennecke, Biblischer Beweis, dass Jesus nach seiner Auferstehung noch 27 Jahre leibhaftig auf Erden gelebt, und zum Wohle der Menschheit in der Stille fortgewirkt habe, 2nd ed. (Lüneburg: Gerold and Wahlstab, 1819). As his title indicates, Brennecke proposed that Jesus lived on earth for twenty-seven more years after his “resurrection,” appeared to Paul while he was still living in his earthly body, and also managed to direct other events in the early church. In Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 451–52n58, editor Verheyden mentions Brennecke’s proposal that Nicodemus used ointments and spices to rouse Jesus from his stupor in a manner slightly reminiscent of some of the questions raised above concerning Schleiermacher’s and Hase’s own treatments. However, much more clearly than in the latter two German scholars, Brennecke’s Jesus dies at sixty in either late AD 60 or early 61.

Thomas Woolston, A Defence of the Discourses on Miracles (London: Printed for the Author, 1729), edited and reproduced in editor Gay’s compilation, Deism, esp. 131–35, 138.

Thomas Woolston, A Sixth Discourse on the Miracles of our Saviour, In View of the Present Controversy between Infidels and Apostates (London: Printed for the Author, 1729), 5. Woolston begins this work on page 2 by pronouncing once again that he supports “the mystical Resurrection of Jesus . . . mystical Resurrection of our spiritual Jesus.”

Woolston, 16.

Woolston, 17.

Woolston, 29, also similarly, 20–21, 25.

Woolston, 15, 18, 20, 21, 28, 30, 32, 33.

Woolston, 5, 14, 19, 27, 47.

Woolston, 27.

Many relevant details are provided by Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 14–26. Also helpful is the information in Daniel P. Fuller’s account in Easter Faith and History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 31–35; and in Gregory W. Dawes, ed., The Historical Jesus Quest: Landmarks in the Search for the Jesus of History, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), esp. chap. 1, “The Gospels as Fraud.”

Some of the recent section demarcations in Reimarus’s text are rather confusing and actually differ with each other. The text utilized here is Charles Voysey, ed., Fragments from Reimarus (London: Williams & Norgate, 1879), see chap. 5, sections 54–57.

Albert Réville, Jésus de Nazareth: Études critiques sur les antécédents de l’histoire évangélique et la vie de Jésus, 2 vols. (Paris: Fischbacher, 1897), 2:250–52, 347, for the Sanhedrin’s role in Jerusalem.

Strauss, Life of Jesus, 704–5.

Oskar Holtzmann, The Life of Jesus, trans. J. T. Bealby and Maurice A. Canney (London: Black, 1904), 499. However, Holtzmann does not use Joseph’s name in this context, simply calling him “the distinguished member of the Synedrium” who had offered to bury Jesus in his own tomb.

Arnold Meyer, Die Auferstehung Christi: Die Berichte über Auferstehung, Himmelfahrt und Pfingsten (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,1905), 118.

Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Herbert Danby (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 357.

Alfred Loisy, The Birth of the Christian Religion, trans. L. P. Jacks (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948), 90. While being born just after the mid-nineteenth century, Loisy outlived many of his liberal colleagues, writing this volume in French in 1933 just a few years before his death.

Later, it was also adopted by P. Gardner-Smith, The Narratives of the Resurrection: A Critical Study (London: Methuen, 1926), 134–39.

Quotes taken from the reprinted edition of Kirsopp Lake, The Historical Evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (London: Williams & Norgate, 2012), 250, 252.

Lake, 237–38, 248–53. Like the other critical scholars, Lake also finds contradictions and discrepancies in the Gospel accounts (183–89, 203, 206–7, 219).

Many liberal and conservative scholars during and just after the German liberal period produced lists of those critical researchers who were thought to have held each of the naturalistic views during these times. On the lists of subjective vision theorists, Schweitzer in Quest of the Historical Jesus lists David Strauss (83), Ernest Renan (187), and Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany, who wrote under the name Richard von der Alm and favored the legend thesis (167). But Schweitzer also referred briefly to Ghillany’s notion of subjective visions (70). Liberal German theologian Theodor Keim in History of Jesus of Nazara lists Strauss, Renan, Albert Réville, Jan Hendrik Scholten, and C. Holsten as holding to hallucination of one sort or another (6:334). Scottish theologian James Orr mentions Strauss, Renan, Karl Heinrich Weizsäcker, Adolf von Harnack, Arnold Meyer, Oskar Holtzmann, and Alfred Loisy as preferring the hallucination explanation in The Resurrection of Jesus (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908; repr., Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1965), 219n1. Doremus A. Hayes lists Renan, Weizsäcker, Loisy, Harnack, Otto Schmiedel, and Otto Pfleiderer as proponents in The Resurrection Fact (Nashville: Cokesbury, 1932), 285. Former Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary professor John McNaugher lists Strauss, Renan, Harnack, Loisy, Pfleiderer, Schmiedel, and Oliver Lodge as taking this position in Jesus Christ: The Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever (New York: Revell, 1947), 150–51. Former Fuller Seminary professor Wilbur M. Smith adds Joseph Klausner to the lists in The Supernaturalness of Christ: Can We Still Believe in It? (Boston: Wilde, 1940), 216.

Besides the long lists of scholars above, for straightforward comments on this thesis being the most prominent one in nineteenth-century German thought (especially in the latter half of this period), see Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:334, 358. Smith also names the vision thesis as the most popular (Supernaturalness of Christ, 216).

In his earlier Life of Jesus, Strauss discusses the mythical approach as it addresses the details of Jesus’s crucifixion (677–701), his burial (701–9), the resurrection (709–44), and the ascension (745–56).

Besides Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, his last work, The Old Faith and the New: A Confession, trans. Mathilde Blind, 2 vols. (New York: Holt, 1874), likewise treats many of these same subjects (see 1:79–83).

See section 140 of Strauss, Life of Jesus, 739, 743–44 in particular.

Hodgson’s annotations in Strauss, 794–95n735. To provide a few details regarding these contradictions, Hodgson refers mostly to the three prior sections in Strauss (137–39), then notes that Strauss’s chief, devastating conclusion arrives in section 140, the same one that we referenced above.

For example, in the same note (140), Hodgson refers to Strauss’s criticisms of the resurrection views of both rationalist philosopher Benedict Spinoza as well as of fellow German liberal scholar and contemporary Christian Hermann Weisse, which makes it likely that he is responding chiefly to other liberals.

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 96–97.

David Friedrich Strauss, Streitschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schrift über das Leben-Jesu und zur Charakteristik der gegenwärtigen Theologie (Tübingen: Osiander, 1838).

Hence Ernest Renan, Les apôtres, histoire des origines du christianisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1880), 2:25.

Renan, 2:45–46. Strangely enough, Renan’s earlier volume Vie de Jésus was his most popular and frequently cited writing and hence is almost always the one that gets discussed predominantly. However, on our present subject of the death and resurrection of Jesus, Vie de Jésus actually (and surprisingly) discusses very little about the early Christians’ subjective visions. Renan develops his notion of hallucinations and their chiefly Galilean environment in much more detail in Les apôtres, esp. chaps 1–3 of vol. 2 (2:1–56).

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 296n2.

The French volume, La naissance du christianisme, was published in 1933. The English translation by L. P. Jacks was published several years later as Alfred Loisy, The Birth of the Christian Religion (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948).

See chapter 1 of Loisy, Birth of the Christian Religion.

Loisy, 89–90.

Loisy, esp. 92–99.

Examples of what I have termed the “Illumination Theory” are found in twentieth-century critical scholars such as Willi Marxsen, Thomas Sheehan, Donald Cupitt, and John Shelby Spong and will be considered and critiqued in a later chapter.

Plus, concluded by a French scholar in the case of Renan, and some other exceptions as well.

William Milligan, The Resurrection of Our Lord, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1899), 83. Strangely enough, Milligan quotes here from Ferdinand Christian Baur, The Church History of the First Three Centuries, trans. Allan Menzies, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1878–79), 1:42. It would seem, then, as if Baur’s own original context included such a reference to Mary Magdalene, though she is not mentioned by name in Baur’s section on Jesus’s death and resurrection (1:41–43). Milligan’s point was that this was a more general position among the liberal scholars of that day.

Renan’s examples can be found in Les apôtres, 2:11–17, with his especially pithy line above regarding the resurrected God from Vie de Jésus, 356, with related comments in the “Appendice” sections 40 (418) and 42 (419–20) as well as another similar description found in Les apôtres, 2:13.

Réville, Jésus de Nazareth, esp. 2:152, 422.

H. J. Holtzmann, Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Theologie, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1897), with relevant details being found esp. in 1:356–62, 430–31. It may be noted that for Renan, Peter was also one of the leaders who quickly got on board here after Mary Magdalene’s vision (Les apôtres, 2:12). Orr reports that such a view where Peter has the original subjective experience(s) and that the “contagion spreads” to the other disciples and even to the 500 at once was held by Harnack, Loisy, Weizsäcker, and A. Meyer. This unlikely scenario is especially what drew Orr’s criticism on the same page that such visional theories require that virtually all the many details in the Gospel reports must be changed to accommodate it. See Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 222.

Renan, Les apôtres, 2:22.

Neill and Wright, Interpretation of the New Testament, 21.

Ferdinand Christian Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Works, His Epistles and Teachings; A Contribution to a Critical History of Primitive Christianity, trans. A. Menzies, 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1873, 1875; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003). This comment was made by A. Andrew Das of Elmhurst College, on the back cover of the Hendrickson printing.

See Neill and Wright, Interpretation of the New Testament, esp. 20–29 for a helpful summary of these thoughts on the four Gospels.

See the second part of vol. 1 of Baur, Paul, esp. 1:255–59.

Baur, 2:1, 44–64, 79–80, 84–85, 96–97, 105–11.

Baur, 1:67–81, also 264.

Strauss, Old Faith, 1:45–46, plus 52 on John.

Strauss, Life of Jesus, 741.

Strauss, 742.

Strauss, Old Faith, 1:87, 90, 107, 140–46 (esp. 141–44), 153, 155.

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 73–76.

Renan, Vie de Jésus, 422.

See chap. 10 in Renan, Les apôtres, esp. 2:174–81.

Renan, 2:25.

“Qu’un délire fiévreux amené par un coup de soleil ou une opthalmie.” See Renan, 2:181–82.

As in Otto Pfleiderer, Das Urchristentum, seine Schriften und Lehren in geschichtlichem Zusammenhang beschrieben, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1902), esp. 1:43, 46.

J. Gresham Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1925), esp. 58–61, 65.

Joseph Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, trans. William F. Stinespring (New York: Macmillan, 1944), chap. 11, esp. 322–30.

Such as when Baur, in the same context and immediate discussion, is repeatedly very critical of the traditions found in the book of Acts, treating them as subpar reports (Paul, 1:5–8, 13, 34, 63–65, 79–80). However, Baur utilizes freely the same three descriptions of Paul’s trip to Damascus found in the same book he just criticized as not being accurate enough portrayals of the general historical circumstances that occurred. The compliments here seem to be due to their favoring the points that he is making (1:67–69, 73, 76–78)! True, all scholars need to be careful of this sort of inconsistency, but it is amazing how frequently critical scholars appear to make this sort of move when convenience is at stake. It seems that it simply takes less data when it is deemed helpful for one’s case.

Schweitzer in Quest of the Historical Jesus lists Christian Weisse as holding this position (130–31, cf. 136), though strangely enough he glosses over this aspect in his relevant discussions of the views of Theodor Keim (such as 211–14 and intermittently on 344–60) and Johannes Weiss (238–41, 267–69), possibly due to Schweitzer’s near obsession at this point in his volume with more clearly eschatological matters. Although the various scholars held different perspectives on some of the relevant issues, W. J. Sparrow-Simpson, The Resurrection and the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1968), 115, lists Theodor Keim, Hermann Fichte, Hermann Lotze, Fernand Ménégoz, and Eduard Riggenbach as holding this position. Orr mentions Keim, Weiss, and Kirsopp Lake as the chief proponents of this theory (Resurrection of Jesus, 227). McNaugher notes the views of Keim and Canon Streeter (Jesus Christ, 155) on this subject. Wilbur M. Smith also mentions Streeter in Smith’s book Therefore Stand: A Plea for a Vigorous Apologetic in the Present Crisis of Evangelical Christianity (Boston: Wilde, 1945), 397. Another similar position is advocated by Gardner-Smith, Narratives of the Resurrection, 133–39.

Christian Hermann Weisse, Die evangelische Geschichte: Kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel, 1838), 2:305–448.

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 121–31.

Strauss, Life of Jesus, where his critique of Weisse is found on 744 and his criticism of Spinoza is on 740.

Theodor Keim, Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, in ihrer Verhaltung mit dem Gesamtleben seines Volkes frei untersucht und ausführlich erzählt, 3 vols. (Zurich: Orell and Füssli, 1867–1872), esp. 3:506–621, on Jesus’s burial and resurrection. Like Strauss, Keim spent much more time on the events at the end of Jesus’s life than did many of the other German liberal scholars.

Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara.

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 211.

In the German edition, Keim, Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, 3:533–70. In the English edition, Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:281–323; cf. Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 211; Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 113–14, 215–19.

German: Keim, Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, 3:592–606; English: Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:345, 348–49, 364, quotation on 348.

Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:333, 339–41, 344–50.

Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 112–13.

Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:351.

Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 110. To gain the proper perspective here, Sparrow-Simpson’s comment would extend from approximately the final form of Strauss’s defense of the hallucination theory, perhaps in his A New Life of Jesus, which was published less than ten years before Keim’s critique in 1872, until the time of the first printing of Sparrow-Simpson’s volume some forty years later, in 1911, when this comment was made.

Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, esp. 6:361–65. Keim lists Hermann Fichte, Christian Weisse, and Rudolf Seydal as other liberal scholars who held his or a similar position (3:361). See also Keim, Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, 3:602–3.

However, Keim even seems to state that he does not deny that Jesus’s appearances could possibly have been corporeal in nature. See Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:362; Keim, Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, 3:603.

It is rather intriguing and perhaps even strange that Keim thinks that in his day, “even conservative circles do not seem averse to the vision theory” as long as there is the “proviso” that Jesus’s appearance be recognized as “not simply a human projection, but rather a divine objective manifestation in human form.” See Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:334. It would be intriguing to be able to ascertain if he were actually right on this comment.

Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:365; Keim, Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, 3:606. The German term “Glaubensburg” here could also intriguingly and graphically be translated as “faith-castle”!

Johannes Weiss, Earliest Christianity: A History of the Period A.D. 30–150, trans. Frederick C. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 1:27, 28. The German publication was first entitled Das Urchristentum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1917). This work was completed by Rudolf Knowles three years after Weiss’s death.

Lake, Historical Evidence, 267, esp. in the context of 266–79.

One point to note here is that Eduard Riggenbach, The Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1907), is sometimes mentioned as an objective vision theorist (as Sparrow-Simpson does in Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 115). Yet, while saying some positive things about this position (49–62), Riggenbach eventually decides against it (65–67) in favor of bodily resurrection appearances, in that the latter best explains all of the data that we possess.

As recognized by many scholars, including Lake, Historical Evidence, 272–73; Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 226–27; Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 436–42; and McNaugher, Jesus Christ, 181–82.

Regarding these second and third varieties of myth or legend in particular, Lake lists T. K. Cheyne, Hermann Gunkel, H. Winckler, P. Jensen, and Zimmern as “perhaps the best-known names.” See Lake, Historical Evidence, 197. Orr lists Gunkel, Cheyne, Jensen, Winckler, A. Jeremias, and others as holding what the old liberal scholars sometimes considered to be parallel or comparative events or teachings. See Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 21, 238. McNaugher also includes Gunkel, Jensen, Cheyne, along with Karl Weizsäcker and others; see McNaugher, Jesus Christ, 157. Influential thinkers Otto Pfleiderer and Wilhelm Bousset should be added to this list. The classic and influential collection of these sorts of stories, along with many other tales, is anthropologist James George Frazer’s well-known study, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1890). In a later edition, the subtitle was changed to A Study of Magic and Religion. The original research expanded from its initial two volumes in the first printing of 1890 to a dozen volumes by 1915. While Frazer was a scholar (he was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University) and included copious and detailed notes, his works still found a ready audience with readers of Thomas Bulfinch’s popular Mythology, which was composed of three earlier volumes by Bulfinch: The Age of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858), and the Legends of Charlemagne (1863), combined into a single volume only after Bulfinch’s death.

Note that the religionsgeschichtliche Schule is not synonymous with the legendary or mythical approach to Christianity. Rather, it is being treated here as one of the groups in this general category that approached some of these issues from an angle that exhibited certain relevant interests.

Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Begin­nings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans. John E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970), esp. chap. 4. This idea was developed further by the highly influential German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann, for example, in his Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1951, 1955), such as 1:82–83, 125–33, 293–303.

Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, ed. Gertrud von le Fort, trans. Garrett E. Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), esp. 87–88. Troeltsch’s original German volume was entitled Glaubenslehre, ed. Gertrud von le Fort (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1925).

These topics actually make up the various chapter headings for Otto Pfleiderer’s consecutive topics in his volume, The Early Christian Conception of Christ: Its Significance and Value in the History of Religion (London: Williams & Norgate, 1905).

Pfleiderer, 16–19.

Pfleiderer, 24–25, cf. 154–55, 161.

Pfleiderer, 166.

Peter Jensen, Das Gilgamesch-Epos in der Weltliteratur (Strasburg: Trübner, 1906), esp. 1026–28.

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). A helpful overview regarding the fall of liberalism can be found in William Hordern’s text, A Layman’s Guide to Protestant Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1956), particularly chap. 5. Concerning the World War I scenario alone, Hordern states that “somewhere between 1914 and 1918 liberalism died in Europe” (101).

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, esp. 398–403. The quotation is from 398.

Hordern, Layman’s Guide to Protestant Theology, 103–4.

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