Of the Synoptic question he does not, strictly speaking, take any account. That was partly due to the fact that when he wrote it was in a thoroughly unsatisfactory position. There was a confused welter of the most various hypotheses. The priority of Mark, which had had earlier champions in Koppe,(38) Storr,(39) Gratz,(40) and Herder,(41) was now maintained by Credner and Lachmann, who saw in Matthew a combination of the logia‐ document with Mark. The “primitive Gospel” hypothesis of Eichhorn, according to which the first three Gospels went back to a common source, not identical with any of them, had become somewhat discredited. There had been much discussion and various modifications of Griesbach’s “dependence theory,” according to which Mark was pieced together out of Matthew and Luke, and Schleiermacher’s _Diegesentheorie_,(42) which saw the primary material not in a gospel, but in unconnected notes; from these, collections of narrative passages were afterwards formed, which in the post‐apostolic period coalesced into continuous descriptions of the life of Jesus such as the three which have been preserved in our Synoptic Gospels. In this matter Strauss is a sceptical eclectic. In the main he may be said to combine Griesbach’s theory of the secondary origin of Mark with Schleiermacher’s _Diegesentheorie_, the latter answering to his method of treating the sections separately. But whereas Schleiermacher had used the plan of John’s Gospel as a framework into which to fit the independent narratives, Strauss’s rejection of the Fourth Gospel left him without any means of connecting the sections. He makes a point, indeed, of sharply emphasising this want of connexion; and it was just this that made his work appear so extreme.