disciples meet Him in Galilee because He could there enjoy greater privacy and freedom from observation in His intercourse with them. The difference between the present and the past was only that He no longer showed Himself to the world. "It was possible that a movement in favour of an earthly Messianic Kingdom might break out, and we need only take this possibility into account in order to explain completely why Jesus remained in such close retirement." "It was the premonition of the approaching end of this second life which led Him to return from Galilee to Jerusalem."
Of the ascension he says: "Here, therefore, something happened, but what was seen was incomplete, and has been conjecturally supplemented." The underlying rationalistic explanation shows through!
But if the condition in which Jesus lived on after His crucifixion was "a condition of reanimation," by what right does Schleiermacher constantly speak of it as a "resurrection," as if resurrection and reanimation were synonymous terms? Further, is it really true that faith has no interest whatever in the question whether it was as risen from the dead, or merely as recovered from a state of suspended animation, that Jesus showed Himself to His disciples? In regard to this, it might seem, the rationalists were more straight-forward.
The moment one tries to take hold of this dialectic it breaks in one's fingers. Schleiermacher would not indeed have ventured to play so risky a game if he had not had a second position to retire to, based on the distinction between the Synoptic and the Johannine miracle stories. In this respect he simplified matters for himself, as compared with the rationalists, even more than Hase. The miracle at the baptism is only intelligible in the narrative of the Fourth Gospel, where it is not a question of an external occurrence, but of a purely subjective experience of John, with which we have nothing to do. The Synoptic story of the temptation has no intelligible meaning. "To change stones into bread, if there were need for it, would not have been a sin." "A leap from the Temple could have had no attraction for any one."
The miracles of the birth and childhood are given up without hesitation; they do not belong to the story of the life of Jesus; and it is the same with the miracles at His death. One might fancy it was Strauss speaking when Schleiermacher says: "If we give due consideration to the fact that we have certainly found in these for the most part simple narratives of the last moments of Christ two incidents, such as the rending of the veil of the Temple and the opening of the graves, in reference to which we cannot possibly suppose that they are literal descriptions of actual facts, then we are bound to ask the question whether the same does not apply to many other points. Certainly the mention of
