testimony was reduced to traditional evidence.

This alteration in the critical attempt to shake the evidence of
independent authorship had been accompanied by a corresponding change in
the interpretation, as seen in the assaults made on the credibility of the
facts narrated. In the hands of the English deists and of Reimarus this
attack had been an allegation against the moral character of the writer.
In Eichhorn and Paulus the imputation of collusion had been superseded by
the rationalistic interpretation, which, without denying the historical
recital, denied the supernatural, and explained it away by reference to
the peculiarities of time at which the events were described. The next
step was to transfer the doubt to the recital itself, and to find, in the
absence of contemporary evidence for the events, the possibility for
legend, and, in the antecedent expectation of them, the possibility for
myth.

This was the state of the critical question with regard to the Gospels
when the work of Strauss appeared. The Hegelian philosophy gave him the
constructive side of his work, and criticism the destructive. Setting out
with the preconception which had lain at the basis of German philosophy
and theology since Kant, that the idea was more important than the
fact,(814) the mythical interpretation of history furnished to him the
medium for applying this conception as an engine of criticism.

The mythical system of interpretation, though slightly suggested by his
predecessors in criticism, was Strauss's great work. The difference
between allegory, legend, and myth, is well known. Our blessed Lord's
miracles would be allegories, if they were, as Woolston claimed, parables
intentionally invented for purposes of moral instruction, or facts which
had a mystical as well as literal meaning: they would be legends if, while
containing a basis of fact, they were exaggerated by tradition: they would
be myths if, without really occurring, they were the result of a general
preconception that the Messiah ought to do mighty works, which thus
gradually became translated into fact. A legend is a group of ideas round
a nucleus of fact: a myth is an idea translated by mental realism into
fact. A legend proceeds upwards into the past; a myth downwards into the
future.(815) Strauss's peculiarity consisted in trying to show that if a
small basis of fact, heightened by legend, be allowed in the gospel
history, the influence of myth is a psychologi