# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1886_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1886. 19

historical document of the original religious consciousness of God's Word." (Dogm. § 199.)

According to Lipsius (p. 154) there is altogether "no immediately divine doctrine, infallible in form and content, but always only a Word of God clothed in a fallible human word"; for him Holy Scripture is the "collection of authentic documents of its original spirit, selected by the historical judgment of the Christian Church." (Dogm. § 193.)

Schenkel already divided the theologians into two armies; he writes: "To this day two views stand sharply opposed with respect to the four canonical Gospels. The first is the ecclesiastically prejudiced one, which proceeds from the presupposition that they contain thoroughly reliable reports and that in respect of their historical credibility they are in themselves already beyond every doubt. This presupposition itself rests on the assumption that the authors of the Gospels (like the authors of Holy Scripture generally) were preserved from all error, in writing down their works, by an altogether supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit. . . . The other view, opposed to this, is the scholarly unprejudiced one. It regards the Gospels as living products of their authors and of their time; it seeks to comprehend them from the peculiarity of their writers and their content, from their literary character, from their probable purpose, from the presumable intention in which they were composed. It examines the credibility, the authenticity, the probability, the inner coherence of their communications. . . . Nothing is more obvious than that these two standpoints cannot be reconciled with each other. . . . That the scholarly unprejudiced view just described brings with it no small inconveniences also for the portrayer of the character-picture of Jesus cannot, to be sure, be denied. Even unprejudiced research has arrived at essentially different results concerning the historical value and the literary credibility of the evangelical documents; indeed, there has been no lack of researchers who have denied them almost all credibility. Were we to share the latter view, then the attempt to sketch a character-picture of Jesus would be from the outset lost labor. Of such an unreliability of those documents we have by no means been able to convince ourselves. They are, like all original source reports on events which have passionately aroused the one-sided and gripping participation of a narrower circle of contemporaries and kindled fierce partisanship, variously personally coloured; their communications are of unequal historical value." (Das Charakterbild Jesu [The Character-Picture of Jesus], 2nd ed., p. 14 f.)

He examines what in the Gospels is credible, and sets there-