Theological Explanation of the Gospels

Die theologische Erklärung der Evangelien

by

Bruno Bauer

1852

 

I.

The theological explanation of the fourth Gospel.

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For the German Protestant Church, the Johannine age of disintegration and instability began, if we leave Fichte’s declamations to the past as a prophecy of this completion of the indeterminacy that is inherent in religious consciousness in general, when, in the second decade of our century, religiosity, which had still proved powerful even in the rational cult of the Revolution, turned again to Christian forms and, at the same time, rationalism accomplished one of its most significant deeds in Brettschneider’s Probabilia *).

If this new religiosity was already a broken figure from the outset, since as a mere reaction against Enlightenment it could only repeat the flabby opposites of deism and at most transpose them into Christian formulas, its attitude had to become even more unhappy and sad, since it had to defend its corresponding gospel against Brettschneider’s “two” fels about the origin of the same from an apostle.

*) 1820

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Fichte had already correctly sensed that the fourth Gospel corresponded to the new religiosity of which he was the prophet, and had based his edifying speeches on eternal and blessed life on it – the new theology had found its Christian-modified deistic highest essence in the formlessness of the messianic figure that this Gospel sets up, and in its contrast to the world, it had found its Christian-modified deistic highest essence – and now it, the unfortunate one, whose decrepit bones still trembled from the struggles of the Enlightenment, had to enter its career in the wake of doubt – it had to struggle to win back that melting figure from doubt!

With Brettschneider, with the exception of a few counter-writes, no real battle took place. He himself did not pursue his attack, but rather withdrew later with a few unifying remarks. As correct as most of his antitheses of the synoptic and Johannine portrayal of the Messiah were, they still lacked the solid foundation on which they could have developed their strength and become established. He gave the synoptic representation the preference – attributed to it the glory of greater historicity – but time had long since lost real faith in the truth of the synoptic massiveness, had almost lost the memory of the synoptic sculpture – from Ratio nalism and its representative Brettschneider one could not seriously assume that his preference for the synoptic figure would be followed by a real living into it, What, then, was the time to do with a work that wanted to command faith in a figure that no longer had any real life in any of those who were seized by the new religiosity and brought about the new theology?

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Brettschneider’s work was a premature attempt which, after the appearance of the independent counter-writings, was only mentioned in the historical textbooks, as well as in the introductions to the Commentaries on the Fourth Gospel, and was rejected as an erroneous hypothesis – its effect was, to all appearances, just as superficial and soon obliterated, as that which the Superintendent Vogel had been able to achieve twenty years earlier with his ״Juvenal Judgement’ on the Evangelist John and his commentators – but it was only so easy for the theologians to come to terms with Vrettschneider’s twists and turns and to ignore them because they themselves carried doubt within them.

They had all fallen prey to unbelief – they wanted to get out of the power of negation, and the whole movement which occupied the German world for twenty years until Straussen’s resignation is nothing more than this last struggle of faith with unbelief, the last attempt of faith to assert itself before unbelief – but how would it have been possible to escape unbelief by a mere turning away from faith and to render harmless a power which had dominated the world for centuries? *

With the same justification with which one calls this turn to faith, one can call it the last, decisive penetration of unbelief into faith.

No! With a much greater right.

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This, the complete conversion of unbelief into faith, is the historical reality, the real meaning and fact of the period.

I called the movement of this period a reactionary one – well! just as every historically significant reaction is only the organisation of the revolution against which it is directed and which, in its opinion, it puts an end to, so the theology and apologetics of this period is the Christian organisation of unbelief – an organisation which has received its proper conclusion in Strauss. .

When the hermaphroditism of the newer Christianity and theology suddenly saw this conclusion before it, it could be startled and protest in a multitude that it had nothing in common with this work, which came solely from the spirit of negation – but how much this work, as the consummate marriage of faith and negation, belonged to it, even for those to whom this connection seems incredible, the success must testify, the fact must prove, that theology, after it had not produced a new turn in those protests and had only assured the solidity of its preceding twenty years of work, had to go into eternal retirement and had nothing more to do. Strauss had done all she could in the end.

It is certain that the work of that twenty-year period was the work of unbelieving faith and believing unbelief.

The preference for the fourth Gospel was the result of unbelief that could no longer bear the strict and firm figure of the synoptic Jesus and hoped to be able to assert itself as faith in the melting world of that Gospel.

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Weak – vain hope! How can a being that fled from the plastic form and is doubt from the outset, even face the blurring form with certainty and composure? How can it, the unbelieving, uncertain being, grasp and acknowledge the deformity for what it is, as a deformity? It seeks support and salvation against its inner restlessness and insecurity in the dissolving deformity; therefore it must forcibly intervene in the uncertain lines, in the untenable contrasts, in the exaggerated movements of its ideal and try to bring support into the contrasts, moderation into the movements.

So this unhappy being must disfigure the deformity even more, i.e. completely destroy his own ideal, give the lie to his faith in the fourth gospel.

And from where do the apologists, who in the course of that period defended and explained the Gospel of the heart, get the standard which is to bring form, support and measure into its untenability?

From the very Synoptic Gospels which their unbelief had already abandoned.

At the beginning of this period *) Gieseler had for the first time brought the hitherto isolated impulses of the tradition hypothesis to unity and to a kind of consistency, thus providing his contemporaries with what they needed for their explanation and defence of the fourth Gospel. It is true that he still left open the possibility that the traditional view of the origin of the Synoptic Gospels could be reconciled with the assumption of a gradually ordered Gospel tradition; indeed, he even believed that he could not recommend his version of the Tradition hypothesis any better than by asserting that it corresponded to the view of the origin of the Fourth Gospel, that it only provides the most certain support for the view of the origin of the Synoptic Gospels – only the power of faith was lacking in time, which also made it quite clear from Gieseler’s statement that he was not entirely serious about this recommendation of his hypothesis, and appropriated from the latter what corresponded to its love of indeterminacy and could be of real service to it in its treatment of the Fourth Gospel – i.e. the presupposition that it was not possible to find the origin of the Synoptic Gospels. I. e. the presupposition that in the Synoptic Gospels the oral tradition of the Gospel material had received its written fixation.

*) 1818.

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If it was now necessary to defend the individual features of the fourth Gospel, its embarrassing detail and its deviating premises against the Synoptic Gospels, the more chimerical, groundless and crude it was at the same time, the more the definiteness of the fourth was a proof of its eye-witnessnessness and it was self-evident that the Synoptic Gospels, as documents of oral tradition, had to take a back seat to its work.

The tradition, however, especially since it had received its basic form from the apostles, nevertheless also led back to the real facts – thus the process of theological explanation and the decision was not as easy as it seemed at first in view of the simplicity of the contrast between eyewitness and oral tradition – in other words: the faith which was preferably due to the fourth gospel was also claimed by the synoptic gospels and penetrated the unbelief with which theology regarded the latter, whereas the unbelief which had affected the synoptics was turned against the fourth.

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That is to say, one sought to harmonistically balance the opposing presuppositions, to blur the contradiction, and if for this purpose the presuppositions of the Fourth were forced upon the synoptic view, the theo-logical busyness was at the same time so unpartheistic in its anxiety that it muffled the most glaring detailed determinations of the latter to the benefit of the synoptic view or let them become completely blurred in the latter.

The common work of this unbelieving faith and believing unbelief now consists in those theological acts of violence against the clearest and firmest determinations of the evangelical text, which I had to present in detail as such in the first elaboration of my critique and of which I have proved that they are just as atrocious as they are silly and purposeless – atrocious, inasmuch as they are evangelical views and determinations, which the supposed faith of the theologians venerates as God’s word and threatens to oppose the unbelief of the world, to maltreatment which otherwise only characterises the most brutal struggle to the death – silly and pointless, insofar as they are perpetrated against the clearest text and insurmountable laws of language – futile, since the scriptural word which the theologian wanted to strangle survives all his efforts and in the end only stands there as his accuser.

After this struggle of united faith and unbelief has reached its end in the freedom that criticism has given to the Word of Scripture, – its end at least within the context of historical development, to which theology will no longer add any significant achievement, even if it maintains its status quo for so long with the reminiscence of its painful work – I was able to refrain from any interference in the present implementation of my critique.

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The Gospels now belong to themselves, to history, and to that free and happy outlook which has already enriched itself with the bit- world of fetishism and the art world of polytheism, and which, in the bright space of its memory above the tumult of images of the Orient and the ideals of Greek lands, now also sets up the monotheistic image of the One, who, as man — in faith and in the new power that signify the rise of Christianity — has dreamed the dream of dominion over the whole universe and — again as the ideal man of faith — has for the first time grasped the thought of a complete break with the past.

If the ideal is saved and no longer needs to be defended against modern Jewishness, then the battle that the Jewish unbelief of theological faith waged with the evangelical witness also belongs to historical memory. It no longer provokes a counter-struggle, for the object against which it was waged is securely established; – it only needs to be presented and described in its most important turns, just as the criticism of the Gospels has become a pure presentation of their contradictions and of the original form to which these contradictions lead back.

But before I go on to describe the crudeness and cowardice of this struggle of the last 

theologians against the Gospels, I must first remark that it is but the consummation of the ambiguous conduct which the chiefs of Christian science have always shown, and indeed could only show, against the Scriptures. If the greatest organisations of Christianity, such as, for example, the mediæval If the greatest organisations of Christianity, such as the medieval division of spiritual and temporal power or even the Protestant creation of the state church, after a short flowering, only disintegrated again and again very soon, more quickly than the organisations of antiquity, because the vagueness and indeterminacy of their theological basis made it considerably easier for the offended to fight against them and provided the most dangerous weapons, the theoretical elaboration and substantiation of the doctrine was even worse off, since it had to rely on a disjointed collection of writings whose statements all claimed absolute validity and yet pushed their contradiction to the point of serious mutual exclusion. Even the most important organisers, an Augustine, *) Calvin, were therefore already forced to deal with these contradictions and to kill them in the same way as the moderns did, such as a Lücke, a Neander and de Wette, who were determined to drag the end of the tragedy down into the record with their personal anguish.

*) With the exception of Luther, whose plastic and solid nature kept him the furthest away from these theological miseries, which in the end had to bring about the downfall of the whole system.

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The inherent power of development which the Christian world of thought contained up to the time of the Neformation did not allow those men of the organisational period to fall so low that they dared to trust the biblical testimonies only after the agonising struggle with those contradictions. But when the power of organisation was exhausted, when the system was complete, when new dogmas were no longer possible, and when doubt and clarification had shaken the world of thought and made it so untenable that the Protestant principle, according to which the Holy Scriptures are the judicial authority, the norm and guide for all teaching, was no longer valid, The theological struggle with the contradictions of the Gospels became serious, ghastly, convulsive and feverish.

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And yet only one step beyond this consequence of the pro testant formal principle and the struggle was over, but this one step brought us into a new world in which the Gospels no longer serve personal need, but find themselves subject to personal power and yet at the same time belong to themselves for the first time.

As limited as the Protestant idea was that a form of life which, after the decay of its classical elaboration, already had to struggle with mortal doubt, could really be rejuvenated by the restoration of its historical beginning – as much as this return to the original Christianity was closed as an illusion by the Lutheran and Anglican creation of the state church, and in general by the Protestant submission of the church to the secular dictatorship, a substantial impulse was nevertheless expressed in it, the impulse of historical research.

As ugly and embarrassing as the fear was with which the theologians rummaged through the Gospels in order to find the real historical figure of their Saviour, the suspicion that the historical origin of their faith was different from the idea they had of its origin was nevertheless at work in them.

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No matter how violent and futile the theological struggle with the contradictions of the Gospels may be, the assiduity with which the theologians sought out these impulses and strove to eliminate them was nevertheless an expression of the modern striving for “exact knowledge” – research, criticism, exact knowledge were still held only by monotheistic fear and lualism, as they were in alchemy and astrology, before they were superseded by chemistry and astronomy, in the service of an alien interest, greed or curiosity about one’s own future.

In short, confusion was the immediate precursor of the order and freedom that research brought to the world whose explanation it was, and this its historical significance is eS what will justify the remembrance we devote to it in the following lines.

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The theologian and the fourth can still be called fortunate at the same time when the business of interpretation is so simple that a tautology suffices to bring it to an end – the former cannot go astray, for he need only render the text with a few more “general words”; the evangelist can be sure that his property is preserved unabridged and that his labour has not been in vain.

It is absolutely correct, for example, when de Wette remarks about the relationship between the questions of the priestly messengers and the answers of the Baptist (Jn. 1:19-27), that ״John does not always let the questions and answers correspond directly.

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It is very correct when the same commentator comments on the situation where the Baptist sees Jesus coming towards him and the latter’s coming is kept at a wonderful distance and remains standing so that the latter can point at him with his fingers and recite his testimony (C. 1, 29 – 34) – when de Wette remarks on this inconsequential coming, ״the attention of the evangelist is directed solely to the testimony of the Baptist.

Tholuck demonstrates his mastery of the art of interpretation when he calls the ״nobody’ in the Baptist’s lament (C. 3, 32), that no one accepts the testimony of the one who has escaped from heaven, a hyperbole.

It is a true tautology when Bengel explains the pompous turn of phrase with which Jesus refers the disciples, who asked him about his dwelling, to the mystery of it (״come and see’ C. 1, 29), to the effect that this dwelling bore witness to its messianic owner, that it was worthy of him, yes, of him alone.

It is true what Hemsen remarks, that the word ״woman’ in the abrupt answer with which Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana rejects the admonishing finger pointing of his mother to the lack of wine that had occurred. the very ordinary meaning of a form of address”.

The inner incongruity of the self-tearing lament of John’s disciples (E. 3, 26): ״He of whom thou hast begotten baptiseth,’ Tholuck renders with at least a fairly correct tautology, when, according to him, the disciples of the Baptist say: -He who had to be baptised by thee, and had a testimony״ issued, takes the liberty of baptising himself.”

Enough of these tautologies, which, as it were, form the clear spaces in the wild and confused undergrowth of theological interpretation or the resting places where the exegetes recover from their strenuous struggle with the difficulties and contradictions.

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And yet they can find no real peace and rest – the happiness of their tautologies is deceptive – they have well felt the difficulties that the Gospel text contains – with their tautologies they hoped to escape them – but in vain – the difficulties follow them on their heels.

Is the present difficulty not precisely that in that negotiation between the priests and the Anabaptist the questions and answers do not correspond? Is it explained if it is simply repeated, if the contradiction of the text is transformed into a general formula? Is the disproportion between means and ends not rather due to the nature of the end pursued by the Fourth, to its pragmatism, to its position in relation to the preceding evangelical historiography?

Is the hyperbole of the ״Nobody’ in that lamentation of the Täu Is the hyperbole of the ״Nobody’ in that lament of the deceiver not precisely the inadequacy that first demands its explanation? Or is the groundless jnconvenience eliminated when it is reduced to a grammatical formula? Does the meaningless hyperbole become a meaningful turn of phrase when it is only described as hyperbole – does its contradiction with the other presuppositions of the text cease when the theologian closes his eyes to it?

Is not the pomp with which Jesus presents his dwelling as the worthy tabernacle of the Most Reverend precisely the floating and unsubstantial exaggeration that is to be explained above all?

If the address ״Woman!’ is indeed an address, does it therefore cease to be harsh and abrupt towards the mother, and is it not first necessary to explain how the Lord comes to this extreme degree of alienation, which is certainly not motivated in the account of the Fourth and only finds its explanation in a completely different circle, in the synoptic account of events?

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In the misfortune of the theologians, therefore, that of the Fourth is also preserved – in that the theologians hope to eliminate or cover up its contradictions and dissonances with their tautologies, they do it an injustice and overturn its text. They misjudge its pragmatism if they want to take away its glaring and at the same time groundless contradictions.

The fourth, however, asserts its tearing dissonances – it scoffs at the means with which the exegetes want to come to its aid.

The congruence of the complaint of the disciples of John: ״He of whom thou hast begotten baptiseth,’ is not raised by Tholuck’s tautological paraphrase, but only becomes more confused, only shifted; — when the Baptist says C. 1, 34: ״I begat,’ that means: Jesus – when the Lord says (C. 5, 33) John begat the truth,” that means: the truth had to have a favourable testimony issued to it by״ John? In whose favour you have testified,” with these words de Wette renders the complaint of John’s disciples somewhat less glaringly than Tholuck – but was not rather the testimony of the Baptist of the kind that he placed the one testified to by it infinitely above himself? Does not the dissonance therefore remain – must not the dissonance remain – that the disciples of John complain about the presumption of him whom their Master himself had described to them as the very greatest?

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De Wette’s tautology about the inconsequentiality of Jesus’ coming, which gives the Baptist cause for his testimony that the evangelist’s attention is “solely” directed to the latter, is not yet pure and uninteresting enough; it does not merely reproduce the facts at hand, but at the same time follows its own theological purposes – it would like to persuade itself, it would like to persuade the people, that the fourth man knew quite well what happened afterwards between Jesus and the Baptist – but his attention is rather so exclusively directed to the testimony of the Baptist that he immediately forgets the marvellous scenery, which served only to bring about this testimony, when the latter has taken place – the scenery has vanished when the Baptist has spoken.

It has served its purpose.

If the tautology is really carried out purely and without any theological If the tautology is really pure and carried out without theological secondary intentions, then it is’ no longer tautology – then it is real explanation and understanding. Let the pragmatism of the fourth be recognised for what it is and it is explained – let justice be done to the fourth, let it be given what it deserves – let it have what is its own and it is seen through.

It is also still tautology, but a most impure, a slippery one, when Lücke remarks on the Baptist’s testimony to the Lamb of God that the disciples only understood his ״messianic relationship’.

So a saying whose ״messianic relationship’ is its only content contained more? contained other relationships? other meanings?

Theology does not want to say this, does not dare to assert it – but the whole scene, that the Baptist shows his disciples the Lamb of God in the Lord and the disciples are moved to follow Jesus, has the synoptic presupposition that the Lord only at the end of his ministry is the Lamb of God, that the Lord spoke of the necessity of his suffering and death only at the end of his Galilean activity, and that the disciples could not find themselves in these prayers, has a dangerous neighbour, which insists so firmly on the opposite that it does not tolerate the opposite presupposition of the fourth next to it.

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Only the peaceableness of the theologian cannot grasp the thought that the two presuppositions are absolutely mutually exclusive – only the theologian can trust his eloquence to be capable of reconciling the two mortal enemies with one another; – and what turn of his rhetoric inspires him with such tremendous confidence?

Again, the tautology! He repeats the contradiction in a limp phrase and believes that he has thus eliminated it, appeased it. That the disciples of the Baptist, the later disciples of the Lord, at first only understood the messianic relationship in that ״saying’ – with this sentence Lücke finds the fourth; with the addition: ״the inner understanding remained hidden from them,’ he reassures the Synoptics; – For the sake of the fourth, the disciples must hear the “messianic relationship” out of the saying – for the sake of the Synoptics, they do not really understand the saying itself, although the “messianic relationship” is its only content, and the disciples could not understand anything about the messianic relationship of the image of the “Lamb of God” if they did not know to which part of the messianic business it referred.

The theologian wants to do justice to both the Synoptics and the Fourth, and he is wrong against both parties – he impairs both.

As far as the testimony of the Baptist himself is concerned, the apologist must of course weaken it for the sake of Luke, in whose Gospel the Baptist doubts when Jesus had long since proved himself through his miracles, e.g. Lücke must assert that the Baptist had ״not understood the full context of the Christian idea’, i.e. he must not acknowledge it. That is, he must not acknowledge that the image which the Anabaptist of the Fourth sets up as the highest and summarising expression for the destiny of the Messiah is the totality of the Christian idea summed up into a reflected unity.

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In the same way, the theologian cannot acknowledge the real historical basis of the definiteness with which this image, this religious category appears, for he would then have to admit that this basis was given to the Fourth in the already existing faith of the congregation in the redemptive death of the Lord. He must not admit that the Baptist of the Fourth proceeds from the assumption that the image of the Lamb of God is fixed as dogma for the listeners – (the readers) – and Lücke, like Bengel, must help himself with the excuse that the Baptist had grasped the image of the Lamb in a ״prophetic’ spirit or as a result of divine inspiration.

Just as Bengel did not feel reassured in his assumption of a sudden divine inspiration and hoped to find a natural cause for the image in the influence of the festive atmosphere, in the proximity of the Passover *), so too Lücke does not dare to attribute the creation of the image to the prophetic spirit alone and he also looks around for a given point of contact. Only he is no longer capable of the naiveté with which the older commentators used the dangerous beistan of the Feast of the Passover – he knows the danger – he fears the unbelief that traces the image of the Lamb of God back to the Passover Lamb and would only have considered its creation possible in that time in which the Redeemer was worshipped as the true Passover Lamb, and now hopes for salvation in the image of the Tolerator, which the second part of Zesaias (C. 53) sketches out. 53), he hopes to find salvation from unbelief and an occasion for the image of the deceiver.

*) Similar to Lampe, who makes the Baptist fall for this image through the circumstance that a herd of sheep lambs was being driven over the Jordan for the upcoming feast.

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Unfortunate deception! In order that ״the Lamb of God’ might become the lamb of that prophetic passage which appears only as the image of meekness and patience, he must now assert that in the Gospel saying ״the addition: which bears the sin of the world, does not refer both to the figurative concept of the lamb and to the mesfian subject depicted in it’ – in vain! Rather, through the image of the lamb, the subject of the Messiah is to be united with the bearing of sin, i.e. the bearing of sin belongs to the essence of the lamb – the lamb is the Passover lamb and it could only become the symbol of the Messiah at that time, when he had wrought redemption from sin in the faith of the world through his death.

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The theologians, e.g. Lücke, hope to eliminate the contradiction that the first disciples in the synoptic account were called in Galilee, and after the fourth in Judea, by claiming that in the Gospel of the latter Jesus’ word to Philip (C. 1, 43): ״Follow me’ could only be understood by the outer company.

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So again a double injustice! In order to unite the two accounts, the thorough researchers have to unnerve them both – they take away from the synoptic account the presupposition that Jesus immediately won over the disciples whom he met for the first time in Galilee by the magic power of his word – from the fourth, which only owes this magic word to the synoptic account: ״Follow me’, they impose the presupposition that the same invitation, which in Galilee emanates from Jesus so powerfully that it draws the disciples into the spiritual realm of his personality, in Judea only aims at their external bondage to his person.

The fourth reports that Jesus also baptised – albeit through his disciples.

While a right feeling prevented the evangelist from carrying out this glaring idea in detail and asserting it for more than a moment, the theologian must take it more seriously and raise the awkward question, ״Why do we not hear more about the baptism of Christ in the Gospels?’ He will certainly know how to give a reason, but since he insists on the presupposition that Jesus baptized, but the difficulty that besets this presupposition is insurmountable, the reason he sets up will at the same time infallibly betray the inner impossibility of the Johannine construction.

“The definite faith in Jesus the Christ, as it was included in baptism, answers Lücke, came forth much less frequently during the lifetime of Jesus.”

Indeed! The original designer of evangelical history, however, is not content with this ״much seltner’ and demands a never – a decisive never, which excludes the precondition of the fourth par excellence. He knew that his Lord first had to open up the infinity of his self-consciousness to the Wett and that before he had accomplished this spiritual, ideal work, he could not think of imbedding his activity in a positive statute like baptism – he knew that a positive statute could only serve as a means of grace when the new Wett was really founded and only required the invitation to enter it – he knew, He knew that the Lord could only institute the gracious statute at the moment when he had completed his work and empowered the disciples as its administrators – he knew, finally, that as long as Jesus was still fighting the battle of the kingdom of heaven with the law, faith could only be an emerging one, bursting forth in instantaneous enthusiasm, but not the positive and determined one that baptism presupposes.

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Of course, the theologians could not see the origin of the untenable nature of the two passages in which Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman face the Lord; – that the inclination of Nicodemus and his infinite dullness only stem from the fact that the Fourth could not better reproduce the synoptic narrative of the rich man, and that the synoptic sculpture had to succumb to his love of untenable contrasts – that the Samaritan woman, that the Samaritan woman, the copy of the synoptic Canaanite woman, only proves herself unworthy of the Lord’s participation with every word, because the Fourth has formed her according to the same pattern according to which Nicodemns is created, the theologians must not admit even now, after I have proved it.

Nevertheless, they must explain how it is that the Lord surprises people with the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven who do not know how to use the simplest figurative expression.

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But how? How are they to help themselves if they do not seek the explanation where it alone can be found – if they are not allowed to think of the original – of the real desire of the rich man for the bliss of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the heroic conquering power of the Canaanite woman?

False, therefore also impotent means of violence must help.

Nicodemus is the chosen protégé of the apologists, the Samaritan woman their favourite: – For the love of both, the theologian does everything, dares everything.

Even when the ״Master of Zsrael’ raises the first senseless objection as to how a man, who is also an old man, can return to the womb of his mother and be born again, Lücke wants to ״equitably divide the understanding and the lack of understanding of Nicodemus’, i.e. he wants to surpass the evangelist in equitableness, who presents the Pharisee purely as lacking understanding. Afterwards, Lücke tries this form of division by letting Nicodemus understand the ״words’ but not ״the inner meaning’, without making it comprehensible how anyone can understand words whose meaning he does not grasp.

Under Tholuck’s discipline, the old Pharisee becomes even more leacious – only the apologist still finds fault with the strength of his will. At the same moment that the Lord, astonished at the Pharisee’s weakness of understanding, exclaims: -You, the Master of Israel, do not understand this? Tholuck secretly hisses to us that the matter is quite different: -Nicodemus understands more and more clearly what the Lord means״ but he does not feel the strength in himself to make the required change. He also knows Nicodemus better than Nicodemus knows himself – while Nicodemus doubts theoretically or rather does not know what to think of Jesus’ statement, Tholuck explains to us that the Pharisee only felt no inclination to let himself be transformed in the way the Lord demanded.

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Afterwards, when Jesus assaults the man who did not understand the first laws of the kingdom of heaven with the highest heavenly mysteries, and when the apologists, despite their initial denial, are brought to admit the Pharisee’s incapacity, de Wette explains the new turn, de Wette explains the new turn from the Lord’s intention, according to which he wanted to ״make an impression by higher revelations’ – and yet de Wette himself says that the Lord had ״abandoned the attempt to make Nicode- mus understand beforehand. “

Lücke even wants to establish a kind of law for this new turn of events: it is also otherwise the procedure of Jesus, ״that he, although he knows that he will not be understood, nevertheless also expresses the more difficult in order to spur the spirits on’ – only then he would really have had to have a spirit before him, which is not the case according to the presupposition of the fourth – then he would have had to be certain, then he would have had to be sure that something definite would stick in the soul of the listeners – then, in order to really seize the soul, he would not have been allowed to get confused into an unclear typology, he would have had to present the matter in its striking simplicity. – – – – – – –

But I break off. That is enough. The purpose which this reminder of the theological attempts at explanation alone could serve has been achieved.

I must break off, for the examples given have amply demonstrated the utter worthlessness of the supposed treasure which the theologians have heaped up with their interpretations – they prove that the whole world to which they belong can no longer be fought, but only forgotten.

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If a more detailed recollection of the work which has been 67 If a more detailed recollection of the work involved in founding and establishing this chimerical world can still find an excuse and have an interest, then cS only that of the finisher of this work – Strauss.

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