Jakobi writes “for thoughtful and sympathetic readers.” He recognises that much of the miraculous is a later addition to the facts, but he has a rooted distrust of thoroughgoing rationalism, “whose would‐be helpful explanations are often stranger than the miracles themselves.” A certain amount of miracle must be maintained, but not for the purpose of founding belief upon it: “the miracles were not intended to authenticate the teaching of Jesus, but to surround His life with a guard of honour.”(20) ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Whether Herder, in his two Lives of Jesus, is to be classed with the older rationalists is a question to which the answer must be “Yes, and No,” as in the case of every attempt to classify those men of lonely greatness who stand apart from their contemporaries, but who nevertheless are not in all points in advance of them. Properly speaking, he has really nothing to do with the rationalists, since he is distinguished from them by the depth of his insight and his power of artistic apprehension, and he is far from sharing their lack of taste. Further, his horizon embraces problems of which rationalism, even in its developed form, never came in sight. He recognises that all attempts to harmonise the Synoptists with John are unavailing; a conclusion which he had avowed earlier in his “Letters referring to the Study of Theology.”(21) He grasps this incompatibility, it is true, rather by the aid of poetic, than of critical insight. “Since they cannot be united,” he writes in his “Life of Jesus according to John,” “they must be left standing independently, each evangelist with his own special merit. Man, Ox, Lion, and Eagle, they advance together, supporting the throne of glory, but they refuse to coalesce into a single form, to unite into a Diatessaron.” But to him belongs the honour of being the first and the only scholar, prior to Strauss, to recognise that the life of Jesus can be construed either according to the Synoptists, or according to John, but that a Life of Jesus based on the four Gospels is a monstrosity. In view of this intuitive historical grasp, it is not surprising that the commentaries of the theologians were an abomination to him. The fourth Gospel is, in his view, not a primitive historical source, but a protest against the narrowness of the “Palestinian Gospels.” It gives free play, as the circumstances of the time demanded, to Greek ideas. “There was need, in addition to those earlier, purely historical Gospels, of a Gospel at once theological and historical, like that of John,” in which Jesus should be presented, not as the Jewish Messiah, “but as the Saviour of the World.”