Review of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/1840)
David Strauss (writer).
Read in 2024.
Read in Marian Evans’s 1846 translation of the fourth German edition.
Internal discrepancies in the Gospels (ca. 110 CE) and later attempts to rectify these.
The reason why I like this book so much is not its conclusions, and not all its methods either. Strauss was a Christian and defended his religious faith even as he acknowledged, in great detail, that a large proportion of the Gospels were made up. Part of his argumentation against the text is based on his own conclusions: He wants the Christian gods to be morally upstanding, so he rejects those portions of The Bible (ca. 110 CE) where the gods are vulgar assholes. This is an error, which Strauss himself finds in Origen. The more reasonable conclusion is to reject the gods and question the historical existence of the characters.
Strauss also displays a vague antisemitism. The most important critic of The Bible with whom he engages is Hermann Samuel Reimarus, whom Strauss calls the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist. Reimarus, who had brought English skepticism to Germany, disliked the “national” aspect of the Old Testament (ca. 164 BCE) so much that he separated the teachings of Jesus’s apostles almost entirely from the Jewish Jesus. Strauss is more careful, and a better close reader, but like Reimarus, Strauss does sometimes beg the question, rejecting the Gospels because they don’t match the international assumptions of his own deism. His main objection to “the Rationalists” who rejected all miracles is that they did not “give adequate expression to the faith”; a backwards idea.
What makes Strauss so much fun is his honesty and his thoroughness, which are both well above the norm for a theologian. Section 71, about “Peter’s draught of fishes”, is a prime example. He rejects the charm of the picturesque and punctures hypocrisy. His arguments are often clever and extend to a rudimentary understanding of fantasy and of oral tradition versus literate culture. He doesn’t poke fun at more naïve critics, but he does let their arguments speak for themselves, as when he relates the suggestion that the dove descending from heaven at Jesus’s baptism may have been a trained animal. Sometimes, he entertains similarly poor arguments, as in this passage about Jesus curing a blind man with spit in John 9:
Whence did John know that Jesus took nothing more than spittle and dust to make his eye-salve? Was he himself present, or did he understand it merely from the narrative of the cured blind man? The latter could not, with his then weak glimmering of sight, correctly see what Jesus took: perhaps Jesus while he mixed a salve out of other ingredients accidentally spat upon the ground, and the patient fell into the error of supposing that the spittle made part of the salve.
Strauss more correctly surmises that Jesus incorrectly believed in demons. He knows that Jesus’s “demoniacs” in Judea actually suffered from epilepsy and other diseases. Neurology was primitive in Strauss’s own day too, but he didn’t let that stop him; he applied what he thought of as “the spirit of advanced science”, sometimes with comical assertiveness. This must have taken tremendous courage. In the 16th century, when Andreas Vesalius showed that men and women have the same amount of ribs, that was just a single fact that happened to contradict a myth in the Old Testament. Strauss published, in his own name, a detailed 800-page deconstruction of a hundred such myths and internal contradictions, all of them intimately connected to Europe’s favourite god. I would like to think that this book actually disrupted the religious faith of later generations, which would make it about as significant as the New Testament itself.
References here: Internal contradiction by omission, John (ca. 90–110 CE), The Quran (632/650).