Strictly speaking, however, the Strauss of the second Life of Jesus has no right to criticise the Fourth Gospel for sublimating the history, for he himself gives what is nothing else than a spiritualisation of the Jesus of the Synoptics. And he does it in such an arbitrary fashion that one is compelled to ask how far he does it with a good conscience. A typical case is the exposition of Jesus' answer to the Baptist's message. "Is it possible," Jesus means, "that you fail to find in Me the miracles which you expect from the Messiah? And yet I daily open the eyes of the spiritually blind and the ears of the spiritually deaf, make the lame walk erect and vigorous, and even give new life to those who are morally dead. Any one who understands how much greater these spiritual miracles are, will not be offended at the absence of bodily miracles; only such an one can receive, and is worthy of, the salvation which I am bringing to mankind."
Here the fundamental weakness of his method is clearly shown. The vaunted apparatus for the evaporation of the mythical does not work quite satisfactorily. The ultimate product of this process was expected to be a Jesus who should be essential man; the actual product, however, is Jesus the historical man, a being whose looks and sayings are strange and unfamiliar. Strauss is too purely a critic, too little of the creative historian, to recognise this strange being. That Jesus really lived in a world of Jewish ideas and held Himself to be Messiah in the Jewish sense is for the writer of the Life of Jesus an impossibility. The deposit which resists the chemical process for the elimination of myth, he must therefore break up with the hammer.
How different from the Strauss of 1835! He had then recognised eschatology as the most important element in Jesus' world of thought, and in some incidental remarks had made striking applications of it. He had, for example, proposed to regard the Last Supper not as the institution of a feast for coming generations, but as a Paschal meal, at which Jesus declared that He would next partake of the Paschal bread and Paschal wine along with His disciples in the heavenly kingdom. In the second Life of Jesus this view is given up; Jesus did found a feast. "In order to give a living centre of unity to the society which it was His purpose to found, Jesus desired to institute this distribution of bread and wine as a feast to be constantly repeated." One might be reading Renan. This change of attitude is typical of much else.