the triumphal entry, because there it is quite evident that "Matthew, the chief authority among the Synoptists, adapts his narrative to his special Jewish-Messianic standpoint." According to Ammon's rationalistic view, the work of Jesus consisted precisely in the transformation of this Jewish-Messianic idea into the conception of a "Saviour of the world." In this lies the explanation of the fate of Jesus: "The mass of the Jewish people were not prepared to receive a Christ so spiritual as Jesus was, since they were not ripe for so lofty a view of religion."
Ammon here turns his Kantian philosophy to account. It serves especially to explain to him the consciousness of pre-existence avowed by the Jesus of the Johannine narrative as something purely human. We, too, he explains, can "after the spirit" claim an ideal existence prior to the spatial creation without indulging any delusion, and without, on the other hand, thinking of a real existence. In this way Jesus is for Himself a Biblical idea, with which He has become identified. "The purer and deeper a man's self-consciousness is, the keener may his consciousness of God become, until time disappears for him, and his partaking in the Divine nature fills his whole soul."
But Ammon's support of the authenticity of John's Gospel is, even from a purely literary point of view, not so unreserved as in the case of the other opponents of Strauss. In the background stands the hypothesis that our Gospel is only a working-over of the authentic John, a suggestion in regard to which Ammon can claim priority, since he had made it as early as 1811,[1] nine years before the appearance of Bretschneider's Probabilia. Were it not for the ingenuous fashion in which he works the Synoptic material into the Johannine plan, we might class him with Alexander Schweizer and Weisse, who in a similar way seek to meet the objections of Strauss by an elaborate theory of editing.[2]
The first stage of the discussion regarding the relation of John to the Synoptists passed without result. The mediating theology continued to hold its positions undisturbed�and, strangest of all, Strauss himself was eager for a suspension of hostilities.
It is as though history took the trouble to countersign the
- ↑ Ammon, Johannem evangelii auctorem ab editors huius libri fuisse diversum. Eriangen, 1811.
- ↑ No value whatever can be ascribed to the Life of Jesus by Werner Hahn, Berlin, 1844, 196 pp. The "didactic presentation of the history" which the author offers is not designed to meet the demands of historical criticism. He finds in the Gospels no bare history, but, above all, the inculcation of the principle of love. He casts to the winds all attempt to draw the portrait of Jesus as a true historian, being only concerned with its inner truth and "idealises artistically and scientifically" the actual course of the outward life of Jesus. "It is never the business of a history," he explains, "to relate only the bare truth. It belongs to a mere planless and aimless chronicle to relate everything that happened in such a way that if words are a mere slavish reflection of the outward course of events."
