With these cases before him, and with the record to write of a hundred and thirty years of admittedly abortive discussion, Dr. Schweitzer could not forgo an exordium in praise of the "German temperament" which had so wonderfully kept the discussion going. Such a record seems a surprising ground for national pride; but it may be granted him that the German temperament will never lack material for self-panegyric, which appears to be the breath of its nostrils. To those, however, for whom science is independent of nationality, the lesson has a somewhat different aspect. What has been lacking is scientific thoroughness. Bruno Bauer's flaws of mood and method were such that his more radical penetration of the problem at certain points made no such impression as did the orderly and temperate procedure of Strauss. "One might suppose that between the work of Strauss and that of Bauer there lay not five but fifty years--the critical work of a whole generation." [212] "Bauer's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found." [213]
But his mood and his method not only made him fail to establish his mythical theory; they meant miscarriage in the very conception of it--a mere substitution of a subjective notion for the method of inductive science. Bauer's final way of putting the theory merely discredits it. He decides that the whole myth was the creation of one evangelist, whereby he shows that he is no mythologist. He never reached the true myth basis. After all, "the German temperament" seems to fall short, at some rather essential points, of the faculty for solving great historical problems; one feels it somewhat acutely when Dr. Schweitzer comes to the undertaking himself.
The great merit of Schweitzer's book is its manly and genial tone; though, as this is freely bestowed on the most extreme heretics, he may make another impression when he speaks of the "inconceivable stupidity" of the average Life of Jesus in the treatment of the connection of events. What his book mainly demonstrates is the laborious futility of the age-long discussion maintained by the professional theologians of Germany. When he comes to the latest developments, which are but extensions of the common-sense analyses of Bruno Bauer, he is full of admiration for criticisms which, I can testify, have occurred spontaneously to unpretending Freethinkers with no claim to special training. Some of the most important myth elements in the Gospels--for instance, the story of Barabbas--he does not even glance at, having apparently, like the other specialists, never realized that there is anything there to explain.