The same scholar, Weisse, who was the first to point out the want in Strauss’s book of a more satisfactory critique of the sources, and who had sought to supply this defect in his Evangelische Geschichte (1838), called attention at the same time to a defect in the mythical theory of Strauss. Weisse was fully agreed with Strauss so far, that we must acknowledge the presence of religious myths in miraculous narratives of the Bible, but he was not satisfied with the way in which Strauss had explained their origin. According to Strauss, the early Christians had simply transferred to Jesus as the actual Messiah the miraculous legends of the Old Testament, out of which the Jews were supposed to have composed the miraculous portrait of their expected Messiah; and he was right in thinking that the miraculous stories of the Old Testament do undoubtedly supply the motives and models of no few narratives in the New Testament, but not, surely, of all. Precisely the chief miracles—the birth of Jesus, his baptism, transfiguration, resurrection, the change of water into wine at Cana, the stilling of the storm, and walking on the sea—violence must be used to explain these miracles by reference to Old Testament types, and the Jewish idea of the Messiah offers no lines corresponding to these. At this point therefore, at all events, we must look about us for another method of explanation. And Weisse was undoubtedly right in pointing to the spontaneous productivity of the Christian spirit in the primitive Church as the source of the miraculous narratives, in which it gave expression in symbolic and allegorical forms to its ideal truth and the new inspired life of which it was conscious. Not that these narratives were intended by the narrators themselves to be merely allegories, or symbolical illustrations of spiritual truths; but the religious imagination gave birth to these illustrations after the manner of unconscious poetry, that is, without distinguishing between the poetic form and the essential truth of the idea; believing, as the religious imagination did, in the ideal content of the narratives, and being at the same time unable to give vivid and sensible expression to it in any other than the material form of outward miracles, it involuntarily came to believe also in the reality of the symbolical form of the narrative to which it had itself given rise; it conceived idea and history both together in such inseparable combination as to confer on each equal truth and certainty.