“the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ,” Fisher concluded, citing John 1:17.226
Jesus’ first Jewish followers, like their ancestors, went astray on several points. They misguidedly looked for the Second Coming of Jesus227 and his establishment of an earthly Kingdom. Jewish notions of the Kingdom encompassed an “externality” that later believers were “destined to outgrow, and finally to shuffle off.”228 Only later could the Kingdom be correctly conceived as a “community … bound together by a moral and spiritual bond of union,” rooted in the human heart.229 Fisher worried that the growing popularity enjoyed by the study of comparative religions might mistakenly lead his contemporaries to place Christianity on “the level of the Jewish or even the ethnic systems.”230 All in all, Fisher’s downplaying of the Old Testament and “Jewish systems” seems in accord with his anti-Jewish remarks that will be detailed in Chapter 5: his notion of early Christianity’s decline was strongly linked to factors he associated with Jewishness. The negative characteristics he ascribed to ancient Jews remained stamped on their descendants in his own day.
Fisher on the New Testament. The Gospels for Fisher are truthful but incomplete “memoirs,” not “formal histories.”231 Fisher’s approach to Jesus—one that seemingly owes much to Schleiermacher—appeals strongly to the subjective impression that Jesus made on believers over the centuries. The unity and harmony of his character convinces them that the Gospels’ image is “substantially faithful.”232 That Jesus exhibited no consciousness of guilt, for example, prompts Christians to affirm that he was sinless, that he stood in a singular relationship to God.233 Fisher, unlike Schaff, did not here appeal so much to biblical “facts” as to the subjective impression that the Gospel accounts made, and still make, on the minds of receptive readers and hearers.
Like Smith, Fisher rested his case regarding the “genuineness” of the Gospels (especially the Synoptics) on their reception history: they were accorded exclusive authority in the church by the later second century, accepted as ancient and “genuine” by Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Papias, and the author of the Muratorian Canon.234 The similarities in the first three Gospels can be attributed to the Evangelists’ “interdependence,” and by acknowledging the priority of Mark. “German” views such as these are gaining ground even among the more conservative English, Fisher assured his readers.235 Hence some German scholarship does not obstruct the faith of Christians.
Of particular interest to Fisher are the New Testament miracles. This subject had commanded considerable attention in college courses on “Christian Evidences”: Jesus’ miracles supplied (so it was thought) proof of his divinity and of Christianity’s supernatural origin. Yet, as the treatment of miracles by Hume, later skeptics, and Rationalist New Testament critics became more widely registered, a more sophisticated defense was needed. Here, although Fisher joined his German-educated colleagues in calling for better “weapons,” he appealed more readily to strands of German theology influenced by Schleiermacher.
As a student in Germany, Fisher had translated for publication an article by August Neander, prefaced by his own introduction, conceived as “a contribution to Christian evidences.”236 Reflecting Schleiermacher’s more liberal approach to Jesus’ miracles,237 Fisher here posited that their chief value lies in calling attention to “the system of truth of which they are the heralds … confirming a belief which has been established by other sources of truth”: miracles, in other words, do not in themselves establish the truth of Christianity, but support other “evidences.” Indeed, Fisher claimed, few believers in any age were converted primarily on the basis of miracles; rather, they were first—and even now—won by the “person of Christ and the irresistible power of his presence.” Jesus’ miracles, “the natural and appropriate symbols” of his majestic doctrine, confirm belief arrived at by other means.238
Decades later, ensconced in his professorial chair at Yale, Fisher wrote several essays on this theme, including a four-part series for the Princeton Review on “The Historical Proofs of Christianity.”239 Fisher apparently wished to reformulate the teaching of “Christian Evidences,” still a curricular staple in many American colleges. Although now espousing more traditional views on miracles, and critiquing the disbelief of Renan, Strauss, and some of their predecessors,240 he continued to endorse themes from liberal German theology. The miracles, he here claimed, are of one piece with Jesus’ teaching; although not standing as proofs on their own, they complement the “internal evidence” for Christianity’s supernatural origin, namely, the consciousness of early believers.241 The disciples’ trust in Jesus’ resurrection, he argued, cannot be explained in any other way than by an appeal to miracle: out of “the depths of despondency” they were transformed into “courageous heralds,” willing to risk their lives to proclaim what they had witnessed.242
In addition, Fisher continued to emphasize that historians of Christianity study not the events “as they actually happened,” but rather the subjective consciousness of the believer. Here, unlike Smith and Schaff, Fisher rejected attempts to argue for Christianity’s historicity by appeal to the “genuineness and credibility of the Gospels.” Rather, he claimed, whoever wrote the Gospels, we should look first to the effects of Jesus and his message, and second, to the internal cohesion of the details presented.243
Fisher acknowledged that although these arguments would not convince determined atheists, they might convince less implacable skeptics.244 On this point, at least, he had gone some way toward “Germany.” Yet he stalled in his treatment of European biblical criticism. Here, he appears as conservative as Smith, Schaff, and other colleagues.
Fisher and Modern Biblical Criticism. That Fisher was well schooled in what is now called “lower [i.e., textual] criticism” is evident from his 1881 essay, “How the New Testament Came Down to Us,” a popular piece published in Scribner’s Monthly. “Textual criticism has become a science,” he wrote. In the last three centuries, scholarship in this area has advanced as much as in astronomy and botany.245 With the forthcoming publication of the Authorized Revision of the New Testament in mind, Fisher explained to lay readers how the biblical text was assembled. He assured them that few textual changes—although some errors in transcription—entered after the late second century. Textual criticism leaves intact, indeed, supports, all the doctrines and precepts of Christianity. Fisher described Tischendorf’s contribution, passing over any discrediting explanation of how that scholar managed “to carry away the precious discovery [the Codex Sinaiticus] as a present to the Czar Alexander.”246 In this popular essay, Fisher apparently chose not to instruct his readers on the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible, as developed by 1881.
Fisher on Strauss and Renan. Seventeen years earlier, in four long articles in the New Englander (1864) grouped under the general title, “The Conflict with Skepticism and Unbelief,” Fisher had addressed the “Higher Criticism.” The date of 1864 for these essays is no accident: that year, the first English translation of Renan’s Life of Jesus appeared, as well as [in German] Strauss’s Life of Jesus for the German People, a popular account that was published in English in 1865. Fisher’s articles provided a basis for his book, Essays on the Supernatural Origin of Christianity, with Special Reference to the Theories of Renan, Strauss, and the Tübingen School (1866). He also rehearsed these themes in popular lectures at the Lowell Institute in 1876 that appeared the next year as The Beginnings of Christianity.247 Thus in both scholarly and popular formats, he drew attention to the dangers of European biblical criticism.
Like Smith and Schaff, Fisher defended the “genuineness” of the canonical Gospels against Strauss.248 Responding to Strauss’s claim that stories of Jesus’ miracles were myths arising from Jewish Messianic expectations, Fisher
