The merciless thoroughness and unreserved honesty with which criticism did its negative work in this book, by exposing the baselessness of the supposed knowledge of the gospel history, produced a profound shock amongst theologians and laymen. It was not merely the untaught multitude who believed that the foundations of Christianity must perish with the miraculous stories of the Bible; learned theologians were distressed as the daring critic so rudely, and without any regard to consequences, roused them from the illusions of their sentimental or speculative dogmatism and their precipitate treaty of peace between faith and knowledge. “Strauss was hated,” as Baur truly said, “because the spirit of the time was unable to look upon its own portrait, which he held up before it in faithful, clearly drawn lines. The spirit of this age resists with all its power the proof of its ignorance on a matter about which it has long thought itself certain. Instead of acknowledging what had to be acknowledged, if any progress was to be made, all possible attempts were instituted to create fresh illusions as to the true state of the case, by reviving obsolete hypotheses and by theological charlatanism. But a higher certainty as to the truth of the gospel history can be attained in no other way than by acknowledging, on the basis of Strauss’s criticism, that our previous knowledge is no knowledge at all.” But here we come upon the limits of the criticism of Strauss: it brought home to men the fact of their want of knowledge, but it did not conduct to the required new and positive knowledge. This Strauss was unable to do, because he offered a critique of the gospel history only, without a critique of the documents which form the sources of this history.