80 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have no trustworthy evidence of what our Lord taught and 

 believed. 



But Prof. Huxley seems to have been apprehensive that M. 

 Renan would fail him, for he proceeds, in the passage I have 

 quoted, to throw him over and to take refuge behind " the main 

 results of biblical criticism, as they are set forth in the works of 

 Strauss, Baur, Reuss, and Volkmar, for example." It is scarcely 

 comprehensible how a writer, who has acquaintance enough with 

 this subject to venture on Prof. Huxley's sweeping assertions, 

 can have ventured to couple together those four names for such a 

 purpose. " Strauss, Baur, Reuss, and Volkmar " ! Why, they 

 are absolutely destructive of one another ! Baur rejected Strauss's 

 theory and set up one of his own ; while Reuss and Volkmar in 

 their turn have each dealt fatal blows at Baur's. As to Strauss, I 

 need not spend more time on him than to quote the sentence in 

 which Baur himself puts him out of court on this particular con- 

 troversy. He says,* " The chief peculiarity of Strauss's work is, 

 that it is a criticism of the Gospel history without a criticism of 

 the Gospels." Strauss, in fact, explained the miraculous stories in 

 the Gospels by resolving them into myths, and it was of no im- 

 portance to his theory how the documents originated. But Baur 

 endeavored, by a minute criticism of the Gospels themselves, to 

 investigate the historical circumstances of their origin ; and he 

 maintained that they were Tendenz-Schriften, compiled in the 

 second century, with polemical purposes. Volkmar, however, is 

 in direct conflict with Baur on this point, and in the very work 

 to which Prof. Huxley refers, f he enumerates (p. 18) among " the 

 written testimonies of the first century" — besides St. Paul's epistles 

 to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, and the apocalypse of 

 St. John — " the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, according 

 to John Mark of Jerusalem, written a few years after the destruc- 

 tion of Jerusalem, between the years 70 and 80 of our reckoning — 

 about 75, probably ; to be precise, about 73," and he proceeds to 

 give a detailed account of it, " according to the oldest text, and 

 particularly the Vatican text," as indispensable to his account of 

 Jesus of Nazareth. He treats it as written (p. 172) either by 

 John Mark of Jerusalem himself, or by a younger friend of his. 

 Baur, therefore, having upset Strauss, Volkmar proceeds to upset 

 Baur ; and what does Reuss do ? I quote again from that splen- 

 did French edition of the Bible, on which Prof. Huxley so much 

 relies. On page 88 of Reuss's introduction to the synoptic Gos- 

 pels, he sums up " the results he believes to have been obtained 

 by critical analysis," under thirteen heads ; and the following are 

 some of them : 



* " Kritische Untersuchungen iiber die kanonischen Evangelien," 1847, p. 41. 

 f " Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit," 1882. 



