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Updated: June 9, 2025
The distinguished English traveller and writer on biblical subjects points out, however, that in detail many of Harnack's objections to the Lukan narratives are due to insufficient consideration of the circumstances in which they were written and the comparative significance of the details criticised.
Pondering over Alison's note, he suddenly recalled and verified some phrases which had struck him that summer on reading Harnack's celebrated History of Dogma, and around these he framed his reply.
That history has a right to its say on so-called historical events never seems to have occurred to this gentleman; still less that there is a mystical and sacred element in all truth, all the advancing knowledge of mankind, including historical knowledge, and that therefore his responsibility, his moral and spiritual risk even, in disbelieving Harnack, is probably infinitely greater than Harnack's in dealing historically with the Birth Stories.
Harnack's History of Doctrine has indeed done something, but many of the details of his work require to be worked out, and some of his statements need revision.
Perhaps it is worth recalling that Harnack's great history of dogma ends with this significant sentence from Zwingli: 'It is not the part of a Christian man to be for ever talking grandly about dogma, but always to be attempting big things in fellowship with God. This represents as well as anything our Western insistence on the worth of effort.
Such a statement is only tenable if it is made in the sense of Harnack's words, that 'what Gentile Christianity did was to carry out a process which had in fact commenced long before in Judaism itself, viz. the process by which the Jewish religion was inwardly emancipated and turned into a religion for the world. But the true account would be that Judaism, like other great ideas, had to 'die to live, It died in its old form, in giving birth to the religion of civilised humanity, as the Greek nation perished in giving birth to Hellenism, and the Roman in creating the Mediterranean empire of the Caesars and the Catholic Church of the Popes.
Luke having been a physician, but this has all been undone, and Harnack's recent book, "Luke the Physician," makes it very clear that not only the Third Gospel, but also the Acts, could only have been written by a man thoroughly familiar with the Greek medical terms of his time, and who had surely had the advantage of a training in the medical sciences at Alexandria.
He was called to the chair of church history in Giessen in 1879. In 1886 he removed to Marburg and in 1889 to Berlin. Harnack's earlier published work was almost entirely in the field of the study of the sources and materials of early church history. His first book, published in 1873, was an inquiry as to the sources for the history of Gnosticism.
Professor Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was exactly like Professor Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Professor Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an Englishman is like, he simply photographs the same German over again. In both cases there is probably sincerity as well as simplicity.
The great efforts to liberalize and rationalize the Church which the last century witnessed, up to Professor Harnack's recent attempt to sum up "Das Wesen des Christenthums," what are all these but endeavors to free it from foreign accretions and envelopments and to bring its Semitic character into greater prominence?
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