ABSTRACT
In 1909, the German philosopher Arthur Drews popularized the ideas of Bruno Bauer, whose book A Critique of the Evangelical History of the Synoptics had argued that religion was mythical and unreliable. Scholars have often announced that the miracles are metaphors, but this has not always inspired in them increased respect for their sacredness. Too many people decide religion is metaphorical and lose all sense of its importance. Modernity stood between two undesirables: a moribund religious orthodoxy that continued to assert the historicity of its beliefs, and political ideologies that were plunging the world into moral chaos because they had glimpsed the mythical nature of religion. German modernist Rudolf Bultmann recognized that the churches lived in a "bubble" of irreality, and scholars outside the bubble had long recognized that the main body of religious narrative was myth.
