This contempt of the historical and the personal is the key to Strauss'
work. The church, when it continued faithful, had always looked to the
Gospels as the Holy Sepulchre of its faith, and was ever ready to make a
crusade against the power which would wrest it from her grasp. But, amid
the conflicts occasioned by the growth of the destructive criticism, the
Gospels had received at its hands a treatment no less severe than had
been inflicted upon the history of the Old Testament. Many theories had
already been propounded by the Rationalists in order to account for
them, but there was no general harmony among these men either on this or
any subject of speculation. Wetstein, Michaelis, and Eichhorn were
agreed that the Gospels were more human than divine, and the fate to
which all the inspired records were consigned by those critics and their
sympathizers has its analogy in the treatment bestowed by vultures upon
the carcass of the exhausted beast that has fallen by the wayside. But,
after all, the accounts of the Evangelists had suffered less severely
than any other part of the Scriptures, and the injury they had sustained
was owing more to the attacks made on the historical and prophetical
portions of the Old Testament than to any immediate invasion.
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