Gospels, in which he seeks, with a great display of learning and ingenuity, to explain all the miracles of the New Testament. The theologian Schleiermacher also made frequent use of it in his Lectures on the Life of Jesus; and traces of it are to be met with even in the commentaries of theologians of the supernaturalist school—as, for instance, Olshausen’s. The inexcusable violence which was thereby done to the Biblical narratives, by which they are forced to say something quite different from what the unsophisticated narrators intended them to say, according to the plain sense of their words, was not felt; nor were these interpreters conscious of how much the Gospels are deprived of their choicest treasures of ideal truth and poetic beauty by this method of treatment, and this only for the sake of securing instead miserable common-place stories as the final outcome of critical examination. The favour with which this radically false rationalistic interpretation of the Gospels was received by very many German theologians at the beginning of this century finds its sole explanation and excuse in the prevailing view of the time—that our Gospels were written very soon after the death of Jesus, during the first generation of Christians, and two of them by eye-witnesses—the apostles Matthew and John. On this supposition, the occurrence in the Gospels of unhistorical elements, of religious legends, such as might be without hesitation allowed in the Old Testament, could not be thought of. Or if the admissibility of this point of view was granted in the case of the birth-stories of the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke (as by De Wette), objection was felt against its application to the miracles of the public life of Jesus. Thus, on the question of the historicity of the gospel narratives, theologians held views which were confused, undecided, contradictory, and lacking thoroughness. This state of things could not last; simple faith had at every point lost its security; doubt attached to the miraculous narratives of the New no less than to those of the Old Testament. But before Strauss no one had had the courage to explain all these narratives of both Testaments alike by the logical application of one and the same principle; and mainly for the reason, that the critics were all under the bondage of the supposition of the apostolic authorship of the Gospels of Matthew and John. Yet even this supposition had received various shocks prior to Strauss. Critics had been unable to close their eyes to the fact that there are differences between these two Gospels particularly, of such a fundamental nature as to preclude the possibility of both being right, and therefore of both having been written by eye-witnesses and apostles. Under the influence of dogmatic and sentimental motives, Schleiermacher and his disciples accepted it as an a priori certainty that John is to be preferred to Matthew; and from this secure position, as was imagined, these