Ammon here turns his Kantian philosophy to account. It serves especially to explain to him the consciousness of pre‐existence avowed by the Jesus of the Johannine narrative as something purely human. We, too, he explains, can “after the spirit” claim an ideal existence prior to the spatial creation without indulging any delusion, and without, on the other hand, thinking of a real existence. In this way Jesus is for Himself a Biblical idea, with which He has become identified. “The purer and deeper a man’s self‐consciousness is, the keener may his consciousness of God become, until time disappears for him, and his partaking in the Divine nature fills his whole soul.” But Ammon’s support of the authenticity of John’s Gospel is, even from a purely literary point of view, not so unreserved as in the case of the other opponents of Strauss. In the background stands the hypothesis that our Gospel is only a working‐over of the authentic John, a suggestion in regard to which Ammon can claim priority, since he had made it as early as 1811,(77) nine years before the appearance of Bretschneider’s _Probabilia_. Were it not for the ingenuous fashion in which he works the Synoptic material into the Johannine plan, we might class him with Alexander Schweizer and Weisse, who in a similar way seek to meet the objections of Strauss by an elaborate theory of editing.(78) The first stage of the discussion regarding the relation of John to the Synoptists passed without result. The mediating theology continued to hold its positions undisturbed—and, strangest of all, Strauss himself was eager for a suspension of hostilities. It is as though history took the trouble to countersign the genuineness of the great critical discoveries by letting the discoverers themselves attempt to cancel them. As Kant disfigures his critical idealism by making inconsistent additions in order to refute a reviewer who had put him in the same category with Berkeley, so Strauss inserts additions and retractations in the third edition of his Life of Jesus in deference to the uncritical works of Tholuck and Neander! Wilke, the only one of his critics from whom he might have learned something, he ignores. “From the lofty vantage ground of Tholuck’s many‐sided knowledge I have sometimes, in spite of a slight tendency to vertigo, gained a juster point of view from which to look at one matter or another,” is the avowal which he makes in the preface to this ill‐starred edition.