Schaff, Fisher insisted that Jesus’ era was devoted to history, a devotion underscoring the Gospels’ credibility. Strauss’s theory, he charged, cannot explain the Apostles’ faith in Jesus’ resurrection, and hence the rise of Christianity.250
Unsurprisingly, Fisher also took aim at Renan’s Life of Jesus, which the reading public had devoured.251 The “infidel” Renan, Fisher charged, makes Jesus a deceiver: “When the light coating of French varnish is rubbed off, it is a picture of degrading duplicity that is left.”252 Renan treats the Gospel narratives as comparable to “the lives of Francis of Assisi and other mediaeval saints.” Conceding that Renan is “brilliant” and “not deficient in learning,” Fisher faulted his “imaginative” presentation, “torpidity” of moral feeling, and failure to sense “the holiness of the sacred authors and of the revealed system of religion.” Renan’s Saint Paul is similarly deemed “full of vivacity”—but abounds in “numerous unverified assertions and conjectures.”253
Renan, Fisher charged, skews the representation of Jesus and his teachings. He falsely claims that Jesus “enjoined”—not just “counseled”—poverty and celibacy. Fisher counter-argued: riches alone to do not condemn (Dives’s fault lay not in his wealth) and Matthew 19’s injunction to “become eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven” does not advise castration, but merely admits the lawfulness of celibacy when “spontaneously practiced” (Origen’s interpretation and alleged deed is a “revolting absurdity”). Like other nineteenth-century Protestant advocates of “domestic Christianity,” Fisher insisted that the Gospels uphold marriage and the family as “sacred.” To imagine Jesus commanding his disciples to forsake parents is “preposterous.”254 Renan, in Fisher’s eyes, has made Christianity’s message repugnant, not attractive.
Fisher on Baur and Tübingen. Against Baur and his followers, Fisher’s tone was sharp:
It is very doubtful whether the individuals of our Teutonic race who attack the Christian religion [presumably Strauss and Baur] would know their letters, or would be possessed of any vehicle for expressing their ideas except in an oral form, if it had not been for the heroic missionaries of that religion which is thought to be so deleterious in its influence.255
Against these “Teutons,” Fisher upheld traditional evangelical views on authorship and dating of New Testament books. The written accounts of Jesus’ life, Fisher claimed, existed within twenty or so years of his death.256 Downplaying differences among New Testament books and authors,257 he denied that James and Peter were steeped in Judaizing tendencies. He cited ancient historians’ (alleged) love of truth, the soul’s innate desire for God, and humans’ conviction of freedom and sin, as testimonies to the New Testament’s historical veracity.258
Fisher vigorously upheld Acts as a reliable historical source, rejecting Tübingen’s “strange, morbid suspicion” that discrepancies between Acts and other books reveal a conscious authorial design (“tendencies”). The strong moral spirit pervading the book of Acts, he claimed, supports the book’s historical accuracy.259 Tübingen scholars’ penchant for pitting Paul’s letters against Acts in order to question the latter’s veracity is “without foundation,” for Luke-Acts substantially accords with Galatians and other Pauline epistles. The Tübingen School’s appeal to “tendencies” and “theological bias,” Fisher declared, has now been rejected by critics of an “independent spirit,” who affirm the trustworthiness of Acts.260
Fisher also scored the Tübingen scholars for decoupling Jesus from a “universalizing” Paulinism. They represent Jesus’ teaching as so Jewish that it is scarcely distinguishable from Ebionitism.261 Fisher countered that “Judaic Christianity” had been outgrown even by the time of John’s Gospel and Epistles: “the teachings of Jesus had broken the chain of bondage to the Old Testament system.”262 Fisher also challenged Baur’s theory that the Judaizing party discredited Paul’s writings, which were rehabilitated only a century later. This scenario—derived, Fisher claimed, from an over-reliance on “the spurious Clementine Homilies”—could not have occurred without attracting the notice of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, all of whom appeal to an unbroken tradition of teaching.263
A third point of Fisher’s critique concerned Baur’s treatment of the Gospel of John. That Fisher deemed this topic worthy of special consideration is clear from his 1881 essay, “The Genuineness of the Gospel of John,” well over a hundred pages long.264 His interest in this Gospel is also exhibited in his later essay on the “obscure and insignificant” second-century sect, the Alogoi265—the only ancient group, he claimed, that rejected the Gospel of John.266 Fisher, like his Union colleagues, held that the apostle John wrote the book of Revelation twenty or thirty years earlier (68–70 a.d.) than he did the Gospel and First Epistle.267
Baur had dated the Gospel of John to the late second century and understood it as a testimony to the reconciliation of earlier Jewish and Gentile “tendencies.”268 Opposing this late dating that implied the Gospel’s “inauthenticity,” Fisher looked to patristic “witnesses” to assist his case. A key element is provided by Polycarp: if Polycarp knew John, and Irenaeus (“no dreamer”) knew Polycarp, then the chain of witnesses is assured.269 Even opponents of Christianity (Celsus, Marcion, Basilides, Valentinus270) testify to the Fourth Gospel, while the Gnostic Heracleon wrote a commentary on it. If they acknowledged the Gospel, how, Fisher rhetorically asked, can we doubt? If the Fourth Gospel was not written by John, it must be considered a “pious fraud.”271 But the “sound ethical feeling” of that Gospel stands against this explanation. No post-apostolic text, Fisher claimed, can match John’s Gospel, which “fills up the gaps in the Synoptical tradition.” Its vigor and power, entirely lacking in the “languor” of the Apostolic Fathers or the feebleness of I Clement, shows that it dates to the first century.272
Fisher devoted much of his scholarly writing to the Judaizing parties (Ebionites and Nazarenes) in second-century Christianity. Baur’s reliance on the Clementine literature had led him to imagine that a Judaic, anti-Pauline theology was then prevalent. In Fisher’s view, Ebionitism—“an obsolescent system” that was struggling to maintain itself—had to be overcome, since it robbed Christianity of its “universal character and worldwide destination.”273 Since God’s plan extends to all humans of every age,274 a Jewish orientation had to be discarded. Baur’s representation of early Christianity, Fisher charged, is no “historical divination,” but an “arbitrary, artificial construction.”275
Although Continental, largely German, scholarship on early Christianity received the professors’ largest consideration, they also noted the major controversy that marked British theological discussion of their day: the controversy over Essays and Reviews.
Essays and Reviews
It was not only Continental scholars who incurred the wrath of traditional Christians. In March 1860, the publication of a volume of essays by seven British (mainly Oxonian) writers unleashed what has been called “the greatest religious crisis of the Victorian era.”276 Entitled—innocuously—Essays and Reviews,277 the book provoked hostile rejoinders and occasioned two well-publicized trials. Of the American professors, Henry Smith of Union Seminary was the most invested in the dispute: he responded with a lengthy essay, “The New Latitudinarians of England,”278 and often noted the book in the journal he edited, then titled the American Theological Review.
Published less than a year after Darwin’s Origin of Species and in reaction to the Oxford Movement, Essays and Reviews raised troubling questions about the Genesis accounts of creation. Those to whom Darwin’s tome remained impenetrable
