KEIM'S HISTORY OF JESUS.* Tars is the first volume of
the "Theological Translation Fund Library," of which the object is to publish by subscription some of the less conservative and dogmatical modern theological literature of Germany and Holland. The probable character of the successive publications may be inferred from the names of the- signataries of the original prospectus,—John Tulloch, D.D., H.
B. Wilson, J. Jowett, A. P. Stanley, W. G-. Clark, S. Davidson, James Martineau, John Caird, Edward Caird, James Donaldson, H. J. S. Smith, H. Sidgwick, James Heywood, C. Kagan Paul, J. Allanson Picton, Robert Wallace, Lewis Campbell, Russell Martineau, T. K. Cheyne, J. Muir ; and from the authors—Baur, Zeller, Ewald, Keim, and Knenen—selected for the first trans- lations. That now before us is the first, or introductory,
volume of Keim's Life of Jesus. The work of the translator and the editor has been done so indifferently, that we can only hope
that the prospects of so important and promising a scheme may not be seriously damaged by the manner in which this first. instalment of it has been produced. Translation is an art which cannot be acquired without study and practice; still it can be acquired, and there are translations, such as those of Thirlwall and Hare, which represent the original exactly, yet in thoroughly good English. But in the volume before us, and especially in the earlier part of it, there are long, involved sentences, which are not English in structure or sense, and which the reader must re- translate for himself, if he cannot refer to the German, by a tenta- tive process something like that of deciphering a cuneiform in.. scription. The blame of this must rest on the editor, as well as the translator : the former might sometimes have given intelligi- bility to a passage by changing the order of the words, or even by altering their stops, but has neglected even to do so much.
NVe are disposed to think, too, that the publication of the mere introduction of Keim's book—since followed by a volume of Baur- is not so judicious as it would have been to give the English reader the whole at once, or at least in immediate succession of the parts.
For even the student who is prepared to go thoroughly with the author into his exhaustive examination of all the sources of the- history contained in this volume, can yet hardly do so to much profit until he has the history itself in the light of which to. study those sources. The materials for the building are all stacked
on the ground, but for the architect's plan we have yet to wait indefinitely. We have only a slight sketch, very interesting indeed, but very obscure, of what Dr. Keim proposes. He says "In the the life of Jesus we undertake a biography which resembles none other in a long and important national history, nor, indeed, in a.. history of the world. It describes an individual life, but it is the life of a Man who is, in the first place, in his lofty consciousness of self, and in his spiritual power, a symptom of the world's history, and indeed a. step in the development of the spirit of man ; and who, in the second place, became, after little more than a year of active life, tie creator of a new and higher order of things, of which the duration is to be reckoned by thousands of years, and measured by the circumference of the earth. It is, in every point of view, a heavy task which is under- taken in a history of the life .of Jesus. It is its fair privilege to diffuse the wealth of the several facts of his life lovingly and without grudging, a privilege which would be exercised with a lighter heart if so many perplexing questions were less doubtful or unanswered for lack of • The History of Jesus of Nazar°, considered in its Connection with the National Life of Israel, and related in Detail. By Dr. Theodore Heim. Translated from the , German. Vol. I. London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate. 1878.
witnesses : when a few stable facts are to be found, the story goes on in joyful security upon a golden ground. But History, if it is to be called so in any true sense, is not satisfied to glean the vague traditionary facts, and group them in a tolerable order of time or circumstances, in accord- ance with the earlier models ; it is constrained to search out the kernel of facts, which is not to be touched nor grasped by the senses, but may only be spiritually discerned, seized, and comprehended—namely, the nature of this Man, his consciousness of self, his will and work : then it must reach the ground of facts, and declare wherefore he became what he was to his time, to his people, and to history ; and again, why humanity, the inheritor, then and now, of all that is lost and won in the course of time, has irrevocably surrendered faith and love to this per- son The task of writing such a history is imposed by two classes. The Science of history is deeply interested on the one hand, the Church on the other, in the demand for a really historical life of Jesus. The necessity for a fresh starting-point for this life is the more pressing as a matter of historical science, since universal history cannot declare itself indifferent to such a development of the human intellect, as well as to revelations of that religious spirit which brings culture to whole peoples, especially since Christianity became a motive-power in the world's history. A universal history which should profess to exclude or be indifferent to the part taken by Christianity, and which would degrade it to be an appendage to the miserable scenes which closed the, Jewish era, or to the follies recorded of the Roman Emperors, would be a mockery of history. The Christian Church demands with yet greater urgency the most exact and truthful account of the original and actual nature of her Founder."
But if Science and the Church agree in their demand for a historical life of Jesus, they seem to be at issue as to the principles on which it should be written ; and how, then, can any common judgment and conclusion be arrived at ? Dr. Keim replies, that science is enlarging and elevating its conceptions of what humanity and the history of humanity are; and the Church is increasingly desirous to realise the divine character of the Son of God in, and through, his human life, and not as something mysteriously and arbitrarily separated from that life :—" In this manner conflicting principles begin to be reconciled, and since Science does not disdain the exalted, nor the Church the human, Jesus, both may be satisfied, with the exception indeed of those who are left behind in the two extremes." He says that not only has Hegel said that "individuals stand at the head of all actions, including those of universal history," but that "Hegel himself and possibly his disciple [Strauss], have thought it credible that in the person of Jesus the perception and certain consciousness of oneness with God which filled his whole life dawned upon the human race." And on the other hand, he considers that the Church has been led by the difficulties of the New Testament and the old doctrines "to a demand for a human Jesus of Nazara, which daily rises higher ;" and that "the human Jesus is the watchword of the age, to which the strongest advocates of the Son of God begin to appeal." And then, after some very obscure ex- pressions as to the possibility and impossibility of reconciling the divine and human characters, he concludes :—
"For ourselves, to sum up our thoughts in ono word, no. conviction has become more certain in the contemplation of this life than that there, where dwelt the truest and noblest humanity, not only a religious genius, but a miracle of God, and his presence on earth was at the same time revealed ; himself the person, and in no other sense the miracle, the human nature allied with the divine, the corporeal temple of God. [Then, in a foot-note.]—That the religions genius will not suffice is most clearly shown by this, that the manner in which Jesus is singled out and distinguished from all others as the Sinless One, does not belong to the conception of a genius, in which there is a relative, and no abso- lute greatness. With this sinlessness, not merely the dogmatic, but also the historical Jesus must stand or fall, and this indeed is overlooked by so many modern manufacturers of dogmatic and arbitrary history."
After this slight sketch of his plan, the author proceeds to an exhaustive account and examination of the sources and ground- work of his history. Under the head of Sources, he first sifts out every notice,—they are few, and of little value—in Jewish, Roman, and Greek writers; next those in Christian writers outside the New Testament ; and then, after an examination of the witness of Paul, he proceeds to an inquiry into the authorship and credibility of the Four Gospels. He comes to his work with that combination of qualifications and disqualifications which char- acterise the greatest German critics. On the one hand, profound learning, wide acquaintance with what others have thought and said from the earliest to the most recent times, a microscopic faculty for discerning minute and obscure objects, and great powers, both of analysis and generalisation ; but on the other hand, a certain want of practical common-sense in weighing evidence, which sometimes takes the form of scepticism, and at other times that of credulity,—of scepticism as to facts which an English critic would accept without difficulty, and of credulity in taking mere fancies as evidence of facts. For instance, Mark's simple and straightforward account of the walk through the corn-field is described as a "remarkable misconception where one scarcely knows which is more grotesque, the fact itself, the way to which it leads, or the justification from the example of David who
ate the shew-bread." And then we are asked to take as one of "the plainest signs" that Mark wrote after Matthew such an argument as this— "The critical incident at Ca3sarea, on which all depends, is intro- duced altogether without the keen and acute discernment of the first evangelist ; he does not say From henceforth Jesus began to show unto his disciplea that he must go unto Jerusalem, must suffer and be slain, and must rise again, but he connects it with careless ease : And he began to teach them that he must suffer."
The conclusions at which Dr. Keim arrives, after his elaborate ex- amination of all the modern German investigations—for he refers to no English critics, and to no French but Renan—are that the Gospel of Matthew is the earliest, and that it was written before the destruction of Jerusalem, though not by the Apostle of that name ; that next in order comes that of Luke, written by Paul's fellow-worker of that name, about the year 90; that the Gospel of Mark was written about the year 100, not by the Mark of the Acts, but by some Roman author, who had the Gospels of Matthew and Luke before him ; and the Fourth Gospel at the beginning of the second century, but not by the Apostle, nor the Presbyter, John. We believe his view as to Mark to be almost demonstrably wrong, and as to John quite unsound, but to go into the author's argu- ments in even the most cursory manner would be impossible within the limits of space atour command.
The remainder of the volume, under the heading of the Sacred Ground-Work—political and religious—of the history of Jesus, contains a sketch of the political condition of the Jews at the time of our Lord's appearance, and also of their religion, both in the philosophical form and tendencies which it was taking at Alexandria under the teaching of Philo, and also in its practical manifestations in Palestine. The accounts of Alexandrine philo- sophy and also of the Jewish hopes of the Messiah, and of the doctrines and practices of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essence, are given with a fullness which leaves nothing to desire. And though in the interest of the English reader we have thought it right to protest against the deficiencies of the translation, we must conclude by saying that the volume is a most important and valuable addition to the theological and Biblical resources of those to whom the original German literature is not accessible.
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