Pfleiderer, who had personal acquaintance with Strauss and held him in regard, once wrote:  ‘Strauss’ error did not lie in his regarding some of the gospel stories as legends, and some of the narratives of the miraculous as symbols of ideal truths.  So far Strauss was right.  The contribution which he made is one which we have all appropriated and built upon.  His error lay in his looking for those religious truths which are thus symbolised, outside of religion itself, in adventurous metaphysical speculations.  He did not seek them in the facts of the devout heart and moral will, as these are illustrated in the actual life of Jesus.’  If Strauss, after the disintegration in criticism of certain elements in the biography of Jesus, had given us a positive picture of Jesus as the ideal of religious character and ethical force, his work would indeed have been attacked.  But it would have outlived the attack and conferred a very great benefit.  It conferred a great benefit as it was, although not the benefit which Strauss supposed.  The benefit which it really conferred was in its critical method, and not at all in its results.

Of the mass of polemic and apologetic literature which Strauss’ Leben Jesu called forth, little is at this distance worth the mentioning.  Ullmann, who was far more appreciative than most of his adversaries, points out the real weakness of Strauss’ work.  That weakness lay in the failure to draw any distinction between the historical and the mythical.  He threatened to dissolve the whole history into myth.  He had no sense for the ethical element in the personality and teaching of Jesus nor of the creative force which this must have exerted.  Ullmann says with cogency that, according to Strauss, the Church created its Christ virtually out of pure imagination.  But we are then left with the query:  What created the Church?  To this query Strauss has absolutely no answer to give.  The answer is, says Ullmann, that the ethical personality of Jesus created the Church.  This ethical personality is thus a supreme historic fact and a sublime historic cause, to which we must endeavour to penetrate, if need be through the veil of legend.  The old rationalists had made themselves ridiculous by their effort to explain everything in some natural way.  Strauss and his followers often appeared frivolous, since, according to them, there was little left to be explained.  If a portion of the narrative presented a difficulty, it was declared mythical.  What was needed was such a discrimination between the legendary and historical elements in the Gospels as could be reached only by patient, painstaking study of the actual historical quality and standing of the documents.  No adequate study of this kind had ever been undertaken.  Strauss did not undertake it, nor even perceive that it was to be undertaken.  There had been many men of vast learning in textual and philological criticism.  Here, however, a new sort of critique was applied