the
facts must be natural. They had the appearance of being supernatural
only through the erroneous judgment of the narrators. It was for the
interpreter to reduce everything which is related to its simple, natural
cause. The water at Cana was certainly not turned into wine. It must
have been brought by Jesus as a present and opened thus in jest. Jesus
was, of course, begotten in the natural manner. A simple maiden must
have been deceived. The execution of this task of the rationalising of
the narratives by one Dr. Paulus, was the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
claim. The most spiritual of the narratives, the finest flower of
religious poetry, was thus turned into the meanest and most trivial
incident without any religious significance whatsoever. The obtuseness
of the procedure was exceeded only by its vulgarity.

STRAUSS

On the other hand, as Pfleiderer has said, we must remember the
difficulty which beset the men of that age. Their general culture made
it difficult for them to accept the miraculous element in the gospel
narrative as it stood. Yet their theory of Scripture gave them no notion
as to any other way in which the narratives might be understood. The men
had never asked themselves how the narratives arose. In the preface to
his _Leben Jesu_, Strauss said: 'Orthodox and rationalists alike
proceed from the false assumption that we have always in the Gospels
testimony, sometimes even that of eye-witnesses, to fact. They are,
therefore, reduced to asking themselves what can have been the real and
natural fact which is here witnessed to in such extraordinary way. We
have to realise,' Strauss proceeds, 'that the narrators testify
sometimes, not to outward facts, but to ideas, often most poetical and
beautiful ideas, constructions which even eye-witnesses had
unconsciously put upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions
upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time
and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not
falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naive,
and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within
the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in
narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of
spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic
statement could achieve.' Before Strauss men had appreciated that
particular episodes, like the virgin birth and the bodil